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Death of Iranian leader just before Purim revives Book of Esther parallels
(JTA) — In Jewish time, history often has a way of rhyming with the calendar. So when Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on the Shabbat before Purim — the holiday that commemorates the downfall of Haman, a Persian tyrant who sought to annihilate the Jews — it was perhaps inevitable that rabbis, politicians and social media commentators would reach for the Book of Esther.
Some did so reverently, others triumphantly, and a few with a wink. But as Jews prepared to don costumes and drown out Haman’s name with noisemakers, the ancient story of survival in Persia collided with a very modern war in what is now known as Iran.
The Orthodox Union, the Modern Orthodox umbrella group, put out a statement titled “Purim in Our Time: Standing Up to Iranian Tyranny.” “We will read the Bible story of Esther and Mordecai overcoming the genocidal plans of Haman, who sought to destroy the Jewish people. Today, in coordination with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF, President Trump and the U.S. armed forces took defensive action to silence a modern threat from the same ancestral land of Haman,” the statement read.
Such comparisons have proliferated since the killing of Khamenei.
In his first statement after the beginning of the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the connection to Purim explicit.
“Twenty-five hundred years ago, in ancient Persia, a tyrant rose against us with the very same goal, to utterly destroy our people,” Netanyahu said. “Today as well, on Purim, the lot has fallen, and in the end this evil regime will fall too.”
Known as Persia until 1935, Iran has been belligerent toward Israel at least since the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which brought clerics like Khamenei, with their frequent chant of “Death to Israel,” to power.
The holiday takes its cue from the Book of Esther, which describes how the Jewish queen to the Persian king Ahasuerus engineers the downfall of Haman, an advisor to the king who was plotting the murder of the kingdom’s Jews. Although Jewish tradition treats the book as historical — and Ahasuerus is often associated with the historical ruler Xerxes I — biblical scholars and historians tend to regard the story as what scholar Adele Berlin, author of “The JPS Bible Commentary: Esther,” called a “historical novella.”
Jews across the religious spectrum noted the comparison, often to different ends. Agudath Israel of America, the haredi Orthodox umbrella group, talked about prayer and salvation in its statement about the war.
“The upcoming Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the downfall of those who rose up against the Jewish People in ancient Persia nearly 2,400 years ago,” it read (the events described in Esther are thought to have taken place in the fifth or fourth century BCE). “We are reminded how the key to the miraculous salvation was the heartfelt prayers of men, women, and children. While prayer is always powerful, our sages have taught that it carries special power during the Purim holiday season. We call upon the Jewish community to unite in prayer and beseech the Almighty to protect all those on the front lines and in harm’s way in Israel and across the Middle East.”
Rabbi Nicole Guzik, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple, a Conservative congregation in Los Angeles, spoke about human agency in her hastily rewritten Saturday sermon.
“Right now we stand at a critical stage where the story shifts, where the final paragraph in the Megillah that we are reading right now, in real time, has yet to be written,” she said, using the Hebrew name for a scroll like the Book of Esther. “The U.S., Israel, our beloved nations are holding the pen, and they are declaring, with courage and conviction, that we will be the authors of our future in the same manner as Esther.”
Some of the comparisons have been offhanded, even flippant. The novelist Dara Horn, speaking Sunday night at a forum on combating antisemitism at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, said, “Tomorrow night is Purim, and I think it’s clear to all of us now that the best way to fight antisemitism is to take out Haman with an F-15.”
Comedian Yohay Sponder, an Israeli who often performs in North America, posted a video of a routine commenting on the death of Khamenei. Like the Purim hamantaschen cookies named after Haman, he predicted a time when Jews will eat a food named after the slain Iranian leader. He suggested khamin, the Shabbat stew also known as cholent.
Others have already adapted hamantaschen for the moment. Some have joked about baking “Khamentaschen,” combining the new nemesis’ name with the treat named for an ancient one. At least one bakery in Israel produced “Ayatollah-taschens” with a chocolate center resembling Khamenei’s trademark turban.
Evangelical Christians and Messianic Jews, for whom the Esther story has had increasing significance in recent years, also seized on the parallels. “It all made an amazing story back then, and we are praying for an equally miraculous outcome in our days that will lead to the salvation of many in Israel, Iran, and throughout the whole Middle East,” the One For Israel Ministry, a U.S.-based Messianic group, posted on Facebook..
Meanwhile, some suggested that the timing of the attacks appeared to be more than a coincidence. Digital creator Evan Pickus noted in a Facebook post that, according to the Book of Esther, Haman was hanged on the gallows just days before the calendar date that became Purim. “The evil Persian Prime Minister [sic], who issued a promise to kill all the Jews, destroyed on the same day as his ancestor,” wrote Pickus. “I honestly believe our leaders planned it this way, and I love that.”
Although no Israeli or U.S. official has said they planned the attack with Purim in mind, the idea became a talking point over the weekend, especially after CNN posted a report by Israel correspondent Tal Shalev saying the comparisons had been widely shared in Israel.
Shalev also wrote of the significance of the attacks on the Iranian leaders’ compound falling on Shabbat Zachor, the “Sabbath of Remembrance” that precedes Purim on the Hebrew calendar. The day takes its name from a special Torah reading (Deuteronomy 25:17-19) commanding Jews never to forget how Amalek — said to be the ancestral nation of Haman — attacked the vulnerable Israelites after they left Egypt. The Israelites are given a somewhat contradictory command: “Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
A widely circulated image from Beit Shemesh, where an Iranian missile killed nine people in a bomb shelter that also functioned as a synagogue, showed a fragment of shrapnel puncturing a Torah right on the passage that had been read a day earlier.
The injunctions about “Amalek” are often applied, sometimes controversially, as an ongoing commandment for Jews to show no mercy toward those who might eradicate them. That, in turn, has led some Israeli politicians and Jewish observers to cite Amalek in justifying Israel’s war on Hamas and Iran, and others to criticize those same politicians as ruthless and even genocidal.
Shalev’s report inspired at least some commentators to criticize Israel, suggesting the attacks were inspired by religious or nationalist fanaticism.
Purim is itself a strange mixture of the deadly serious and the wildly playful: a story of a thwarted genocide celebrated with carnival antics, including costumes, a raucous reading of the Book of Esther interrupted by noisemakers, and even a tradition of getting drunk. For millennia, it was often a release for a beleaguered minority in strange and often hostile lands. But as Israel emerged as a military power, scrutiny from within and without the Jewish community has often focused on the real-life implications of the story’s purported lessons.
Yet despite the Israeli politicians who take the Bible as a guidebook for revenge or Jewish supremacy, there is a long tradition of commentary that sees books like Esther as intentionally nuanced, even ambiguous guides to ethical behavior, including the prosecution of just wars.
Chapter 9 in the Book of Esther details the reversal of fortune for the Jews on the 13th of the Hebrew month of Adar, when they were said to have killed 75,000 foes in the wake of Haman’s downfall. Many Jewish commentators have expressed discomfort about what can be read as a heartless response to Haman’s thwarted decree.
On Sunday, Rabbi Michelle Dardashti expanded on that theme in a letter sent to members of her Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn. She warned that the Purim story is not just a celebration of the Jews’ victory over a Persian despot, but a warning that “battles that begin in moral clarity do not necessarily remain that way.”
“Purim pushes us to contend with the gray — to recognize how quickly roles can flip; how, on a dime, individuals and nations can shift from victim to aggressor, from righteous to morally compromised, or into categories that resist easy labels altogether,” wrote Dardashti, whose father left Iran as a young man. “Anyone who tells you with certainty that this war with Iran will unquestionably be good for the Jews and good for the world, that it will surely end well or end quickly — I would be wary of heeding that voice.
“And anyone who speaks with absolute certainty about it being entirely disastrous, unquestionably wrong — I would be wary of heeding that voice as well.”
Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a popular lecturer from the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, discussed the parallels between the war and Purim in an installment of his video series, “MyLife: Chassidus Applied.” “The goal, of course, is to eradicate the enemy in every possible way, exactly as it happened in Persia, 2400 years ago in the story of Purim,” he said of the war.
But Jacobson also drew on two common themes not only of the Purim holiday but of much of Jewish tradition: salvation from an enemy, and the ultimate redemption of the Jews and humankind. He characterized the war in metaphysical terms, regretting “any type of bloodshed” but aspiring to “what happens afterwards: a stage, an era, a permanent era of Messianic, … total, solemn, permanent and sustainable peace for all people of this earth.”
For some congregations, the confluence of the war and the Purim holiday posed a challenge in tone — with rabbis asking how their communities might celebrate with bombs falling across the Middle East and Israelis taking cover in bomb shelters.
At B’nai Jeshurun, an independent synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the clergy offered a schedule of observance and celebration to match the ambivalent mood. On Monday, a traditional fast day in honor of Esther marking “moments of danger and uncertainty,” they urged congregants to turn “their hearts toward prayer and summoning strength before stepping into the unknown.”
At sundown, they wrote in a letter to congregants, when the fast “gives way to celebration, in a world shaken by violence and instability, we anchor ourselves in Purim’s four mitzvot”: hearing the Book of Esther, sharing gifts with friends, giving charity and sharing a meal with friends or family.
“We cannot resolve the uncertainty of this moment,” wrote the B’nai Jeshurun clergy. “But we can choose how we meet it — with prayer, with generosity, and with one another.”
Yoni Rosensweig, a rabbi in Beit Shemesh, wrote in a Facebook post that many of the comparisons between the Purim story and the war on Iran miss crucial distinctions.
“Yes, Haman wanted to destroy us, and so did Khamenei — but Khamenei was the ruler of Iran. Haman was not the ruler — he was nothing more than a schemer. This is not just a technical difference, it’s fundamental,” Rosensweig wrote in an email to JTA. “Esther and Mordechai are trying to survive, that is all, They are trying to maintain the status quo in someone else’s kingdom.”
While the events in Persia inspired a holiday, he argued, “there is nothing long-lasting about the Jewish future in Persia which comes from the story.” By contrast, the current war has the potential to profoundly shape the Jewish future, no less than the Exodus from Egypt celebrated at Passover.
“It is about creating something new (we hope) in the Middle East. It is part of a regional war against powers that want to obliterate us. We aren’t looking to maintain the status quo,” wrote Rosensweig. “We are standing up for our right to live free, as a sovereign nation. Much like the Jews who left Egypt weren’t looking to maintain the status quo but rather to embark on a new path and start a new journey, so too we are doing with this war.”
The post Death of Iranian leader just before Purim revives Book of Esther parallels appeared first on The Forward.
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During WWII, a heroic Jewish lawyer warned against the dangers of a dual state — is it coming true in Trump’s America?
For five years after Adolf Hitler came to power, attorney Ernst Fraenkel did something almost unimaginable: He stood in German courtrooms defending anti-Nazi dissidents and trade unionists — and sometimes even won. Even more remarkable, Fraenkel was Jewish. The Nazis tolerated him only because he had served in the German army during World War I, a temporary shield he knew would not last. In 1938, after learning from a sympathetic official that he was on a Gestapo arrest list, he fled to the United States.
Three years later, Fraenkel published a book: The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Many assume that Nazi rule instantly swept aside all “normal” legal standards. Fraenkel showed otherwise. In the early years of the Third Reich, he wrote, Germany lived under two systems at once — a functioning legal order and a parallel, lawless realm of political power.
Lately, a number of legal scholars have been warning that the American legal system under Trump shows troubling similarities to the “dual state” Fraenkel described. They point to federal agents using lethal force against protesters, arrests and detentions of immigrants based on appearance or perceived foreignness, the exclusion of state and local law enforcement from federal investigations, and the use of the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s perceived enemies.
Trump’s massive air assault on Iran has brought more accusations that he has put himself above the law. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, called the strikes “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.”
America in 2026 is not Nazi Germany. But Fraenkel’s observations confront us with a question for our times: Can a democracy like ours drift toward a dual system of its own — one legal, one ruled by authoritarian prerogative — without fully realizing it?
A young German Jew, wounded in World War I, returns from fighting for the Kaiser, earns his law degree, becomes a rising figure in the anti-Nazi Social Democratic Party, defends trade unionists as counsel for a metalworkers union, continues representing dissidents after Hitler’s rise, and escapes with his life as the Nazis purge Jewish lawyers and Germany marches toward the Holocaust. It sounds like the outline of an epic film. But it was Ernst Fraenkel’s life.
It is striking that Fraenkel has not been recognized more widely for the hero he was. And it has taken his 1941 book on the legal structures of Nazi Germany — combined with Trump’s assaults on American democracy — for Fraenkel to receive the broader attention he deserves.
“When I first read about him, I thought it was astounding: Here was a Jewish Social Democratic lawyer representing political defendants effectively,” while at the same time anonymously writing anti-Hitler pamphlets, said Douglas G. Morris, a retired criminal defense lawyer for indigent clients and author of Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany.
After Hitler came to power, he quickly moved to purge the civil service of employees deemed disloyal or who were Jewish, including attorneys. But the Nazis granted exemptions for Jewish civil servants who had served in World War I — the Frontkämpferprivileg. Fraenkel hadn’t just served; he had been severely injured.
Even as the Nazis rounded up political opponents and sent them to early concentration camps like Dachau, pockets of resistance remained. As a Social Democrat and attorney, Fraenkel had contacts with dissidents and took many on as clients.
He understood something essential about the new regime: To protect his clients — and himself — he had to avoid provoking the Nazis or drawing the attention of the Gestapo. So he presented cases as if the normal legal system still existed — and in some ways it did. This required discipline, given his opposition to the regime. But the strategy worked. If he couldn’t win an acquittal, he could sometimes secure a light prison sentence.
At the same time, Fraenkel was secretly writing pamphlets for the anti-Nazi resistance. He wrote five in total, Morris told me in an interview, including “The Point of Illegal Work,” which argued that Germans should resist the regime through various means. He was also quietly drafting the manuscript that became The Dual State.
Fraenkel knew about the torture and punishments used in the camps. But as brutal as the Nazis were toward their enemies, the regime initially did not view attorneys — Jewish or otherwise — as a significant threat, according to Morris. That blind spot allowed Fraenkel not only to write anti-Nazi pamphlets but also to serve as a conduit for dissidents to exchange information.
From his courtroom experience, Fraenkel observed how the Nazis handled the pre-1933 legal system. They did not abolish it outright. Instead, they created a parallel system to dish out especially harsh punishments to those deemed in violation of the regime’s political edicts. Fraenkel called the pre-Nazi system the “normative state,” and the Nazi-controlled system the “prerogative state.” Thus, a dual state. The two systems were never equal, Morris notes: “The prerogative state — exercising its arbitrary power through intimidation and violence — always maintained control.”
On Sept. 20, 1938, Fraenkel received a warning that he was about to be arrested. He fled Germany, traveling to London, then New York, and finally Chicago. A French diplomat had smuggled his manuscript out of Germany. After arriving in the U.S., Fraenkel earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and published The Dual State. He returned to Germany in 1951, became a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, and died in 1975.
A growing number of legal analysts argue that the United States is developing its own version of a dual state — one that persecutes, demonizes or sidelines those who oppose MAGA ideology or threaten the fantasies of white-superiority advocates.
On his first day in office, Trump issued a mass pardon to some 1,500 insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to keep Trump in power despite his election loss. During the following months Trump granted clemency to 100 more convicted criminals, who included prominent business figures, high-profile MAGA supporters, and allies connected to Trump’s political and fundraising networks.
Masked and dressed for combat, ICE and CBP now act like the muscle for a parallel legal state — imprisoning foreigners whose only offense is entering the country illegally, dragging people from their homes in front of their children, and assaulting citizens who try to shield immigrants from unjustified arrest, killing two so far. The administration’s arbitrary decree that immigration agents no longer need judge-signed warrants to force their way into homes is another expression of what Fraenkel called the prerogative state.
Trump’s perceived and real political foes are being swept into a legal system built for his benefit, targeted by a Justice Department that now functions as an instrument of presidential power. In Trump’s America, Democrats, non-MAGA members of the press, and anyone who disagrees with him are denounced as mortal threats to the nation. Administration officials deemed insufficiently loyal are purged from their jobs.
This parallel system is colliding with legal traditions dating to the country’s founding, and courts have so far slowed the slide into full autocracy with rulings blocking Trump’s most aggressive edicts. Trump responds by attacking the judges who rule against him.
The Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to Trump’s parallel legal system when it struck down his tariffs. But this is the same court that nearly two years ago granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.
Fraenkel showed how a democracy can lose its bearings long before it loses its laws. As the United States nears its 250th year, the question is no longer whether a dual state can take root here. It is whether we will recognize it in time.
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Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC
When news arrived that Ronnie Eldridge had passed away at the age of 95, I thought back to the mid-1980’s when I made a number of visits to the apartment on Central Park West that she shared with the legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin and their blended family of six kids. At the time I was doing stories for NPR about Breslin and his passionated denunciation of municipal authorities for their neglect of city’s homeless. Sometimes I’d record Breslin at home.
I couldn’t help noticing that almost every time I was in that apartment, Eldridge was on the phone with an autistic Jewish man named Ralph. I tend to notice things like that because my brother Michael, olav ha sholom, was autistic.
According to Daniel Eldridge, the eldest of the three Eldridge “kids,” his mother met Ralph at a Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign event in 1968. Apparently, a campaign volunteer who was manning the door was giving Ralph a hard time.
Ronnie Eldridge intervened and declared that Ralph, who she had never met before, was her friend and he was to be allowed in. Daniel Eldridge told me his mother spoke with Ralph nearly every day after that.
Because my conversation with Daniel Eldridge was conducted on speakerphone, Eldridge’s granddaughter, Sophie Silberman, piped up.
“She looked after everybody with kindness and devotion,” Silberman said. “She knew that she was significant to Ralph and it didn’t take much to keep that part of his life alive and it meant the world to Ralph.”
Big shoes to fill
That kindness and devotion echoed in several recollections of Eldridge’s public life today.
Ruth Messinger, a former city council member who went on to lead the American Jewish World Service, told me that Eldridge “was very savvy.”
“She was a no-nonsense person,” Messinger said. “If there was an issue, if there was a problem, she would take it on. She was a seriously progressive presence for many, many years. She pursued the issues and stood up for justice.”
“She was just an institution all by herself,” said her successor in the New York City Council, Gale Brewer.
Eldridge represented an Upper West Side district in the Council for 12 years before being term-limited out of office. “Her shoes were very big shoes to fill,” Brewer said.
Eldridge was one of the sponsors of a 1992 law that required cameras be placed in facilities that house automated teller machines. She was motivated to win passage, having been held up using an ATM in her neighborhood.
Brewer is one of many public officials and activists who are remembering Eldridge’s advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society, including the LGBTQ community and women who have been abused by their spouses or boyfriends. She remembers Eldridge visiting incarcerated women who were doing time for crimes linked to their experience as battered women.
“She put that issue on the map,” Brewer told me.
The conscience of the Lindsay administration
Eldridge was one of the anti-war activists in the 1960’s who made mountains move on the national level. During the war in Vietnam she helped found the “Dump Johnson” movement, which in turn sparked President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forego re-election in 1968. That prompted Robert F. Kennedy to enter the race. Eldridge was keen on RFK. She was a young mother in 1964 when she volunteered his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
During the ’68 presidential campaign, RFK said of Eldridge, “Behind that sweet, motherly face, Ronnie Eldridge has one of the toughest political minds in the city, if not the country.” She used the quote on a campaign poster for her unsuccessful bid to become Manhattan Borough President in 1977.
Eldridge’s activism also paid dividends on the local level. She served as the coordinator of Democrats for Lindsay and helped the Republican mayor win re-election in 1969 on the Liberal Party line. She was a political strategist for Lindsay and was known as the conscience of the Lindsay administration.
Around that time, she was part of a group that included the singer Harry Belafonte challenging the license of television station WPIX. The challenge dragged on for nine years but in 1978 an out of court settlement put about $10 million into the entity that challenged the license. I learned about all this when I asked Eldridge how she came to possess that very valuable Central Park West apartment.
A tabloid life
A number of Eldridge’s close friends have remarked that being married to Jimmy Breslin may’ve come with some perks, it must’ve been a challenge as well. For those of us who read Breslin religiously in the New York Daily News and New York Newsday, some of the gruff newspaper columnist’s more entertaining columns chronicled the foibles of the interfaith family’s Upper West Side life together.
This shtick inspired a pilot for a 1989 CBS sitcom about a NYC newspaper columnist and a mayoral aide. American Nuclear was co-written by Breslin but the network ultimately decided not to pick up the series.
In a 2004 for a radio documentary interview about her husband, I asked Ronnie Eldridge about having her domestic life portrayed in a tabloid
“The first time it happened everybody was hysterical,” she said. “I had a daughter in Paris. She called from Paris and was in tears. A daughter at college, she was also in tears. And my son in California said, ‘What’s going on?’ And then Jimmy’s family said, ‘Oh, just don’t pay any attention to it.’”
“When I was in the city council, I would just pretend that I didn’t read the paper. He would write articles. condemning and attacking colleagues of mine. I’d have to go into the city council and, see somebody that he’d just called unmentionable names. So, I just learned to leave it alone.”
A memorial service will be held for Ronnie Eldridge on Wednesday, March 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan.
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New Analysis Questions Legality of Campus BDS Efforts Against Israel
Cornell’s divestment protests continued during the university’s commencement ceremony, May 25, 2024, during which students interrupted a speech by President Martha Pollack with chanting and canvas signs. Photo: Reuters Connect
A newly released research paper is raising fresh legal questions about the wave of campus and institutional campaigns calling for divestment from Israel, arguing that such efforts may violate anti-discrimination laws in the United States.
The report, published by Northwestern Law School professor Max M. Schanzenbach and Harvard Law School professor Robert H. Sitkoff, examines the growing push by activists affiliated with the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), which urges governments, universities, and companies to cut economic ties with Israel in the first step to the Jewish state’s eradication.
According to the paper, divestment campaigns that single out Israeli institutions or businesses could potentially run afoul of state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin.
BDS advocates argue that their campaign is a form of political protest designed to pressure Israel to change its policies. The movement, formally launched by anti-Israel activists in the mid-2000s, has called for boycotts of Israeli goods, divestment from companies linked to Israel, and government sanctions.
But the new analysis contends that when governments or public institutions adopt such policies, the underlying legality could be questionable. The authors argue that targeting Israel specifically for economic exclusion could conflict with existing anti-discrimination statutes or state laws aimed at preventing boycotts of Israel.
More than half of US states have enacted legislation limiting participation in BDS-related boycotts or requiring government contractors to certify that they are not boycotting Israel. In some states, including California, laws restrict the awarding of public contracts or funding to organizations that participate in boycotts targeting the country.
The paper also challenges the argument frequently made by BDS supporters that such boycotts are protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. While individuals may advocate for boycotts as political speech, the authors argue that institutional policies, particularly those adopted by government bodies or public universities, could still violate anti-discrimination or procurement laws depending on how they are implemented.
The paper raises potential anti-discrimination concerns surrounding divestment campaigns that target Israeli companies. The authors argue that some boycott or divestment proposals could expose universities or public institutions to legal vulnerability if investment decisions are based primarily on a company’s Israeli national origin rather than specific conduct. Under certain US civil rights laws and state policies governing public institutions, actions that single out individuals or entities because of national origin may trigger discrimination claims. The paper suggests that if divestment policies are framed broadly against Israeli businesses as a category, rather than tied to particular corporate activities, institutions implementing them could face legal challenges alleging unequal treatment.
The analysis argues that modern divestment campaigns targeting Israel differ significantly from the anti-apartheid divestment movement against South Africa. The paper contends that while many universities in the 1980s adopted selective restrictions on companies directly tied to South Africa’s apartheid system, often aligned with international sanctions and corporate conduct codes, the current iteration of the BDS campaign against Israel frequently calls for broader exclusions based on a company’s ties to Israel itself, potentially creating legal risks such as national-origin discrimination issues.
Divestment campaigns have become especially prominent in recent years on US college campuses, where student groups have pushed universities to withdraw endowment investments from companies tied to Israel or its military. Critics, however, argue the campaigns unfairly single out the world’s only Jewish state and risk creating discriminatory policies against Israeli businesses or academics.
In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, campus activists have intensified efforts to implement divestment policies on university campuses. While universities have mostly resisted these efforts, federal lawmakers have advanced legislation to truncate divestment initiatives before they gain traction. For instance, in 2024, Congress introduced “The Protect Economic Freedom Act,” which would render universities that participate in the BDS movement against Israel ineligible for federal funding under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, prohibiting them from receiving federal student aid. The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities submit evidence that they are not participating in commercial boycotts against the Jewish state.