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In Chicago, politicians are comparing ICE to the Gestapo — are they right?
On Halloween afternoon in Evanston, Illinois— just a couple miles north of my home — masked, armed men went on a rampage: They deliberately caused a fender-bender accident, shoved women to the ground, repeatedly punched a young man in the head and dragged him across the pavement, and pointed pistols at and pepper-sprayed passersby. These masked men were agents of the United States Customs and Border Protection.
“As soon as I walked up,” local resident Jennifer Moriarty recalled in an online interview, “an agent grabbed me by my neck and threw me back and threw me to the ground and was on top of me.”
As horrifying as the assault was, it had sadly become the norm for our community: For the previous two months, the greater Chicago area was the target of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) crackdown on immigrants and, increasingly, those who came forward to protect their immigrant neighbors.
The following day, Daniel Biss, Evanston’s mayor, spoke to hundreds who gathered to protest the federal government’s campaign. “We in Evanston are on fire,” Biss said. “We know what is being done to our people… We know the violence and the emergency and the authoritarian nightmare that is coming at us.”
He then evoked the memory of his grandmother, who as a young woman in Europe in 1940 had not comprehended the dangers she faced. “By the time she knew the truth,” said Biss, “it was too late to protect herself, and she and her siblings and her parents were put on a cattle car, and the day they got off that cattle car was the last day her parents lived.”
The analogy is an extraordinary one, but Biss is not alone in evoking the specter of the Holocaust to describe the daily reality here — a reality that was subsequently visited upon Charlotte, North Carolina and is planned for New Orleans next. Several members of Chicago’s city council called out “the Gestapo tactics” of the twin DHS agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And as far back as February, JB Pritzker — the first Jewish governor of Illinois — publicly decried the Trump administration’s “authoritarian playbook,” warning “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
The very name of the DHS campaign — “Operation Midway Blitz” — served to conjure up the WWII bombing of London. And the daily itinerary of its agents called to mind aspects of 1930s Germany. Every morning, federal agents departed their local headquarters in the near-west suburb of Broadview in unmarked SUVs, wearing gator-style face-coverings and carrying semi-automatic weapons.
They cruised the streets of a rotating group of targeted neighborhoods or suburbs, looking for dark-skinned workers whom they deemed would be easy pickings: tamale vendors, landscape workers, day laborers at Home Depot, drivers in the ride-share lot at O’Hare. They made only cursory efforts to determine whether their targets were citizens, legal residents, or undocumented individuals. The DHS talking point that agents are only seizing the “worst of the worst” criminals is easily refuted by the data: When the Trump administration finally released names of people they arrested in the Chicago operation, 598 of the 614 had no criminal record at all.
The DHS arrestees were manhandled and taken to Broadview, where they were held in gruesome conditions and pressured to sign self-deportation agreements. Many detainees are so fearful of indefinitely staying at Broadview — or a similarly cruel detention facility — that they sign. They often leave behind families and shattered lives.
The federal agents made a point of flouting the law, as if celebrating their indifference to anything other than their own cruel mission. If an immigrant refused to leave their car, agents routinely smashed the window, dragged the person from the vehicle, and sped off, leaving their victim’s car unattended and unsecured. When agents found themselves surrounded by residents calling attention to their presence, they brandished guns, hurled epithets, fired pepper bombs, and lobbed teargas canisters.
An investigation by Block Club Chicago found that federal agents employed tear gas and other chemical weapons 49 times in the Chicago area from Oct. 3 through Nov. 8. Even an admonishment from U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sara Ellis did not stop them; after her temporary restraining order, federal agents used chemical weapons at least four more times.
Ellis’s 233-page opinion in the use-of-force case, released on Thursday, is a compendium of immigration enforcement run amok. With access to aerial, bodycam, and cell phone footage, along with extensive testimony, the court found a consistent pattern of violence from government operatives, and an equally consistent pattern of lying about that violence from their superiors. In determining whether the government had violated the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights, Judge Ellis noted that “repeatedly shooting pepper balls or pepper spray at clergy members shocks the conscience… Tear gassing expectant mothers, children, and babies shocks the conscience… Tackling someone dressed in a duck costume to the ground and leaving him with a traumatic brain injury, and then refusing to provide any explanation for the action, shocks the conscience.”
When assessing the government’s truthfulness, Ellis wrote that “[CBP Commander Gregory] Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.”
The use of force, along with the targeting of individuals based on their ethnic identity and the government mandate to deport one million immigrants per year, brings to mind for me the Polenaktion, the mass arrest and deportation of 17,000 Polish Jews from Germany in 1938. At the same time, I ask myself, are such equivalences accurate and helpful? Holocaust scholar Daniel H. Magilow, in an astute discussion of ICE/Gestapo comparisons, reminds us that while “analogies can be useful for clarifying complex ideas… they risk oversimplifying and trivializing history.”
For my parents, who came of age as Brooklyn Jews as the Nazis were coming to power in Europe, the question had hovered over their lives: “Could it happen here?” After two months of brutal and lawless behavior, I was asking, “Is it happening here? Now?”
So I called my nonagenarian parents to ask them what they thought. My dad said Operation Midway Blitz did remind him of “Gestapo tactics, a Gestapo presence, the Gestapo’s impact on society.” My mom added a note of caution: “We should be careful talking about them like all individuals in ICE are the same. It takes a while to answer the question ‘who are they,” how Gestapo-ish all the people in ICE are.”
Who are the officers of ICE and CBP? It is a question that Illinois Senator Dick Durbin addressed in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Durbin pointed to loosened standards for ICE hiring and training, and to recruiting advertisements — targeted to white applicants — urging them to join up to “defend your culture.” (A recent article in Haaretz also raised alarms that imagery on DHS’s social media used antisemitic dog whistles and was intended to appeal to neo-Nazis.) Durbin asked Noem whether there was any vetting to check if applicants were January 6 rioters or members of white nationalist groups and, if so, whether those extremists were getting hired.
Such concerns go back many years. A ProPublica investigation in 2019 uncovered a secret Facebook group for current and former CBP personnel that revealed “a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants.” In 2022, twenty-seven civil rights organizations wrote the Justice Department to warn that CBP was collaborating with white supremacist paramilitary groups on the U.S. southern border.
Whether one accepts the “Gestapo” analogy or not, it is clear that Chicago residents are heeding the dire warnings coming from politicians and activists alike. When the “five-alarm fire” commenced, the response of thousands of residents was rapid and well-organized. Secure chat groups were launched; ICE-watch trainings were at capacity. In my neighborhood and beyond, during the worst days of the crackdown, one could see on every street-corner people on patrol with orange whistles around their necks, ready to document and peacefully confront the armed federal incursion.
During the Halloween incident in Evanston, CBP agents stuffed three people — including Jennifer Moriarty — in an SUV. They then drove erratically around Evanston and Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, attempting to goad other drivers into more traffic accidents. But wherever they went, the orange whistles were sounding. “When I was on the ground and when I was in the car,” Moriarty recalled, “looking out at all the people, all the faces of the community members… I never felt I was doing anything wrong. And all those people were also there, doing all the right things, as well.”
My experience when I joined a local patrol was the same as Moriarty’s. I had a sense of pride and wonder that so many neighbors were united in non-violent opposition to racist attacks. Whether DHS agents were akin to the Gestapo, in the end, did not matter to me. What mattered was that there was definitely a Resistance.
The post In Chicago, politicians are comparing ICE to the Gestapo — are they right? appeared first on The Forward.
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Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank
(JTA) — Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist known as one of the paper’s most consistent defenders of Israel, used his Tuesday column to take direct aim at the country’s handling of settler violence in the West Bank — warning that unchecked attacks now pose a threat to Israel’s security and to Zionism itself.
Stephens, who has spent years pushing back on what he sees as double standards applied to Israel, wrote that he decided to speak out against what he called “Jewish terrorists” despite his reluctance to feed the volume of global condemnation facing Israel.
“That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things,” he wrote. “It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.”
Stephens’s column drew heavily on a public letter sent Sunday to President Trump by Matan Vilnai, a retired IDF deputy chief of staff, on behalf of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an organization representing hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers. The letter cautioned that Israeli security services have been effective against Palestinian terror groups but hamstrung when it comes to curbing Jewish extremists. The letter warned about the consequences of Israeli inaction in curbing attacks on Palestinians.
“Unless arrested swiftly and decisively, escalating violence in the West Bank is poised to ignite the region and carries severe ramifications for both Israeli security and U.S. regional interests,” wrote Vilnai.
Stephens pointed to last week’s rampage by extremist settlers through several Palestinian villages — attacks that reportedly included arson at a home and two mosques and an assault on a stonecutting factory — as evidence the problem has become routine rather than exceptional. He cited Israeli military figures showing nationalistic and settler-related crimes climbed to 867 incidents in 2025, up from 682 the year before.
Stephens also cited Eran Shamir-Borer of the Israel Democracy Institute, a former IDF legal official, who told him the government has specifically declined to place suspected Jewish settlers under administrative detention. The practice, imprisoning individuals without formal charges, is regularly deployed against suspected Palestinian terrorists.
The columnist dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public framing of the violence as the work of roughly 150 “juvenile delinquents,” as he did in an interview with NBC earlier this month. Stephens argued that a government capable of eliminating a Hamas commander deep inside Iran cannot plausibly claim it’s unable to rein in a few hundred vigilantes.
Stephens is known, and widely admired within the pro-Israel community, for his robust defense of Israel, from refuting the charge of “genocide” directed at Israel to condemning what he has called the “hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country.” Editor of the conservative Jewish thought journal Sapir, Stephens was also chosen to give the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y earlier this year.
“I think it is really important that people like Bret Stephens are speaking up about settler violence, and I think that it also shows how terrible that it’s become,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, in an interview with JTA. “Even people who are pretty, let’s say, hesitant or who almost never criticize Israeli policy are speaking up.”
But she also suggested that the issue goes beyond a failure to enforce the law or hold settlers accountable, and instead reflects the priorities of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.
“This is actually government policy because this is violence that is designed to take more and more of the West Bank,” said Jacobs. “There’s already been not just violence, but expulsions, shoving Palestinians to smaller and smaller areas and, ultimately, annexing the West Bank or at least as much of it as possible.”
Liberal Jewish groups like T’ruah, including Torat Zedek and Bnei Avraham in Israel and the U.S-based groups Smol Emuni, J Street and New Israel Fund, regularly condemn the settler violence and call on Israeli security forces to hold the perpetrators accountable. They also take part in “protective presence” visits to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians threatened by Jewish settlers.
The largest Jewish organizations have been less vocal on the topic, although the American Jewish Committee and the Union for Reform Judaism have issued statements condemning settler violence.
Right-leaning groups have either downplayed the extent of the violence or say Jews living in the West Bank have been provoked by neighboring Palestinians. On the same day that Stephens’s column appeared, the media watchdog group HonestReporting ran an article saying that the major news outlets disproportionately focus on settler violence, and run many fewer articles about Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians. It also cited official Israeli data suggesting that violence by Jewish civilians in the West Bank had declined significantly since March.
Nevertheless, Stephens appeared to be echoing a growing sentiment even on the right that the settler violence is both wrong and a black eye for Israel at a time when its reputation is suffering around the world.
“I don’t think there are many supporters of Israel in the U.S. who are happy with how Israel has handled, or really mishandled, settler violence,” said David E. Bernstein, a professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School and a frequent commentator on Jewish affairs, in an email exchange with JTA. “To me, it’s anti-Zionist to allow settlers to flout the law and public policy, whether by violence or by setting up illegal outposts, because Zionism means accepting the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and radical settlers who don’t are no different than extremist Haredim [Orthodox] in not doing so.”
Last week, Israel’s Channel 13 reported that the government had approved a plan in March to tackle violence by extremist settlers but kept the plan secret due “to political considerations.” The report didn’t say whether the plan has been implemented.
The post Bret Stephens, a stalwart Israel defender, calls out ‘Jewish terrorists’ in West Bank appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism
For nearly two years, Zohran Mamdani has made Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a central political target. Now Netanyahu is making Mamdani part of his own reelection campaign.
The 50-second video released Wednesday on Netanyahu’s political social media channels builds on comments the Israeli leader made on Fox News this week, portraying Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. It intersperses footage of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and antisemitic incidents with recent clips of Mamdani condemning Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war after the mayor backed off a vow to have the Israeli prime minister arrested during an upcoming visit to New York. It also features Mamdani’s wife, artist Rama Duwaji, who liked social media posts that supported Palestinians immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. (Mamdani said his wife is a private citizen and does not work in his administration.)
The clip ends: “No one will stop me from fighting for the truth of Israel.”
The video comes as Netanyahu faces one of the toughest reelection campaigns of his political career, trailing his rivals ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election, which could determine not only his political future, but also his legacy and potentially his freedom as he faces a corruption trial.
The fight with Mamdani has become politically useful for Netanyahu. His main rivals — former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — are seen as more moderate leaders who could rebuild strained ties with Democrats and win back support for Israel among Americans.
Joel Rubin, a Democratic commentator and foreign policy expert, said in an interview that turning Mamdani into a symbol of today’s Democratic Party gives Netanyahu a way to challenge one of his rivals’ central arguments that they are better positioned to course-correct the U.S. political shift against Israel. “For Netanyahu, it’s very important to try to portray the Democrats as Mamdani and make the argument that only he can stand up to that,” Rubin said.
Mamdani has positioned himself as a prominent progressive critic of Israel amid the war in Gaza, a position that helped propel his rise and which has become increasingly part of national Democratic Party politics.
Mamdani’s high-profile confrontation with Netanyahu escalated when he announced a review of whether he had the legal power to arrest the Israeli prime minister when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Experts on Israeli politics warned of an unintended consequence: would allowing Netanyahu to cast himself once again as Israel’s defender against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
“Many Israelis are sick of him and hope to vote him out,” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro wrote on X on Saturday. “The only possible outcome of a fruitless attempt to arrest him in NYC would be to give him a political boost at home. That would be an own goal.”
Some political strategists argue that Mamdani and his allies have little reason to mind if Netanyahu remains in power. “I bet they’re rooting for Bibi, in a perverse way,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, in an interview with the Forward discussing how Israel is reshaping Democratic politics.
While still serving as a New York state Assembly member, Mamdani zeroed in on the Israeli prime minister as an enemy, leading chants of “Netanyahu, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” during a protest in Oct. 2023.
Throughout his mayoral campaign last year, Mamdani repeatedly injected Netanyahu into New York politics., Mamdani first pledged to arrest Netanyahu shortly after he launched his campaign. According to a report, members of Mamdani’s inner circle were pushing for him to make this arrest declaration. After his election, already knowing the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani proceeded with the review. When it concluded he did not have the power to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani used a mayoral address to declare him a war criminal and then encouraged New Yorkers to protest him on his UN visit. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him.
“There is a core principle amongst the left in American politics that having someone to organize against is crucial to growing numbers and persuasion, and for Mamdani, having the foil of Netanyahu is an incredibly valuable tool for motivating support,” said Rubin, who led Jewish outreach for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
Whether that principle translates into votes for Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel’s Oct. 27 election remains to be seen. At the moment, Mamdani and Netanyahu have become unlikely political assets for each other, each giving the other a powerful opponent to campaign against.
The post Netanyahu drags Mamdani into his reelection campaign as face of antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families
(JTA) — As Conservative/Masorti rabbis, we see firsthand the joy of couples building a life together in the Jewish community, and the pain of those who feel shut out because one of them is not Jewish.
We think of the community member, though not Jewish, who developed a profound love for davening (prayer) and Torah study, and has supported his children’s and grandchildren’s Jewish education and observance of mitzvot. We think of another community member who faithfully drove her four children to Hebrew school for years and, after her youngest child’s bat mitzvah, chose to convert to Judaism herself.
It is time for our halacha, or Jewish law, to address issues facing intermarried couples and families robustly.
The two of us had the honor of joining colleagues in co-authoring a teshuvah — a rabbinic response to questions of Jewish law — that does just that. The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has approved a teshuvah that seeks to honor these couples and families and their commitment to Jewish life in our congregations and communities.
Since we are part of a movement that balances a commitment to halacha with the realities of modern life, our work is grounded in traditional Jewish texts, laws and principles while also reflecting the core belief that welcoming others and extending hospitality are essential Jewish values.
Based on halacha and Jewish tradition, the teshuvah affirms the longstanding standard of Conservative/Masorti rabbis that clergy may officiate only at weddings where both partners are Jewish. It emphasizes that while a wedding is a significant moment that often singularly drives these conversations, there are many other important life-cycle moments that rabbis can offer as occasions for Jewish celebration and reaffirmations of commitment to mitzvot.
Through this teshuvah, we formalize a public mishebeirakh (blessing) before or after the wedding day for a couple committed to building an exclusively Jewish home, as well as a hanukkat habayit ceremony to dedicate their home.
We welcome non-Jewish parents on the bimah during their children’s b’nei mitzvah and offer “mazal tov” and other basic gestures of inclusion to intermarried couples, both of which were once considered unacceptable. Our goal in doing so is to inspire the couple and family to grow in Jewish living.
We affirm that synagogues may not hire intermarried individuals as clergy but may hire intermarried individuals for other roles, and that rabbis may officiate at funerals for non-Jewish family members and support a Jewish mourning process when a non-Jewish loved one dies.
It’s been about 40 years since the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which sets halachic policy for our movement internationally, broadly addressed questions around intermarried couples and families. We have learned over time that those intermarried couples who choose to embrace Jewish life are integral to the fabric of Conservative/Masorti communities.
We invite these couples to engage meaningfully in Jewish practice at home and in community, and, if they are having children, to raise them as Jews. Sometimes they may even choose to convert to Judaism at some point.
We do so because, as rabbis, we enjoy the privilege of being invited into people’s lives, and our role is both pastoral and educational. As people figure out their own identities and relationships, our role is to help them integrate Jewish tradition. As couples turn toward each other and seek to integrate Judaism into their lives, we are here to help them chart a course and to bring Torah into the conversation and observance of mitzvot into their lives.
We aim to inspire the couple to grow in Jewish living, observing mitzvot, studying Torah and searching for God in daily life. To do so, we must create gateways so everyone can find a place to learn and find joy and inspiration in our traditions, within the boundaries of halachic standards and principles.
Many of the practices in the teshuvah are already in place in some communities. Some offer solutions that speak most directly to realities in North America, and we call on local rabbis to interpret them in light of the circumstances in their local communities.
In the days of the Mishnah and the Talmud, when faced with new and challenging circumstances, our rabbis found creative and often beautiful solutions to embody the Torah as they understood it. As we follow in their footsteps, we use the wisdom we have inherited to both uphold and transform those values and honor the halachic principles that are central to our rabbinates and communities.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
The post As Conservative rabbis, we’re rethinking our communities’ policies toward interfaith families appeared first on The Forward.
