Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh La’Zeh, goes the aphorism: All Jews are responsible for one another.

Well, now we’re about to find out if it’s true.

Even as American Jews celebrate the long-yearned-for release of Israeli hostages, some in our community are being threatened by the Trump
administration, which has promised to investigate and prosecute nine left-leaning organizations that, it says, have funded or encouraged protests that led to violence. Some are household names: George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, ActBlue, Indivisible. Others are lesser known, like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Two are Jewish: IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Per Reuters, the Trump administration is considering “IRS investigations to strip them of tax-exempt status; criminal probes by the Justice Department and FBI; surveillance by federal law enforcement agencies; the use of RICO statutes typically used for organized crime and financial investigations under anti-terror laws to identify donors and funders, according to people familiar with investigations and public statements by officials.”

Will the Jewish community rally to the defense of two relatively small Jewish-led organizations? I wonder.

To be sure, neither IfNotNow nor JVP has endeared itself to the majority of American Jews. Both have been extremely critical (to put it mildly) of Israel — not just the war in Gaza or the occupation in the West Bank but, often, of the Jewish state itself. Most JVPniks are anti-Zionist. Some of their leaders can be loud, obnoxious and arrogant. I have been verbally pilloried by their members many times, even as I have defended them in these pages.

But none of that should matter. These are Jewish-led political organizations doing political activism, and the apparatus of the state is being utilized to punish and immiserate them. (It’s notable that non-Jewish pro-Palestine groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, were not named in the Trump administration’s list.) Whether you want to use the ‘F’ word or not, this is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We’re not talking about some speaker being deplatformed at a college event. We’re talking about innocent people being investigated, thrown into jail, and even, as we have seen, deported.

Moreover, government actions are just the tip of the spear when it comes to reactionary populist violence. Unofficial harassment can be even worse, and it is already happening. Academics on Turning Point USA’s “Watchlist” have been doxxed and harassed. Some have fled their homes as a result. One, at Rutgers, just fled the country out of fear for his family members.

I know what this feels like. During the 2016 election, I was one of many Jews targeted online by anonymous right-wing trolls (we now suspect they were fake accounts being utilized by Russian operatives seeking to sow discord – a wildly successful strategy). The harassment I received was less than others like Bethany Frankel and Jonathan Weisman received. But it was enough to cause me to change my life. I no longer donate to political campaigns, because doing so puts my home address in the public record. I pay DeleteMe hundreds of dollars every month to scrub my information from online sources. I don’t post any pictures of my child.

This is what it is to be a liberal commentator or activist in Trump’s America — again, not just cancellation (which I have also experienced from the Right) but harassment, vandalism and worse.

Now imagine being a radical one.

For years, organizations like Canary Mission and Turning Point USA have been posting the names and pictures of people they deem to be anti-Israel or anti-America. There’s no due process in these campaigns, no way to get one’s listing taken down. (Ironically, while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “We will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organizations,” we still don’t know who is funding Canary Mission.)

And once you’re listed, the torrent of hate begins.

And now, that torrent is set to be accompanied by sham indictments, expensive tax proceedings, and intrusive financial investigations. The Open Society Foundation can afford to defend itself from these actions, but any one of them can bankrupt a random JVP activist.

Now, has the Far Left’s incendiary rhetoric encouraged criminal actions like the vandalism of the home of Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak? Undoubtedly. But does that justify the weaponization of the DOJ, IRS, and FBI against political dissidents? No, it doesn’t.

Jewish organizations, including those who have condemned JVP and IfNotNow, should speak out against Trump/Miller’s anti-democratic persecution of liberal organizations. (It’s not only radicals of course: ActBlue, which helps fundraise for Democrats, is hardly a radical antifa operation.) It doesn’t matter that Miller is Jewish or that JVP is anti-Israel. It matters that Jews are being disproportionately targeted by a radically anti-American crusade that would’ve made Joe McCarthy blush.

Moreover, given the extremely broad and fact-free ways in which these “enemies of the state” have been described, there are no bright lines dividing JVP from progressive organizations like T’ruah, Bend the Arc, and others. One needn’t be Pastor Niemoller to recognize that targets can easily be placed on many of our backs.

Indeed, the Jewish billionaires who have funded Trump should be wary of the monster they have created. Remember, at this moment, the MAGA movement is splintering over Israel. The majority still stand with Trump, who is deservedly riding the wave of his greatest foreign policy accomplishment. But a large minority, including Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlso and Candace Owens, are increasingly taking strong anti-Israel positions, including conspiracy theories that nefarious Israeli agents assassinated Charlie Kirk. Many of those are explicitly antisemitic.

Many Jewish institutions and leaders are standing by while the foundations of our democracy are being battered — as American citizens are pulled out of their homes and arrested by ICE, as media companies bend to the state’s ideology in order to stay in business, and now, as political foes of the regime are investigated and indicted. Where do we think this will lead? And, looking at the sweep of Jewish history, how could we possibly think this will end well for our community?

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