They were poster children for Jewish criticism of Donald Trump 8 years ago. Where are they now?
Catching up with Tal and Jacob Zlotnitsky, who protested against Trump’s “Muslim ban” at Dulles International Airport in 2017
Jacob, left, Miri and Tal Zlotnitsky hold up a poster welcoming Muslim arrivals at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, Jan. 28, 2017. (Ron Kampeas)
(JTA) — Days after Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Tal Zlotnitsky and his family joined the crowds at Dulles International Airport protesting the new president’s so-called “Muslim ban.”
“Our Jewish Family Stands With Muslim Refugees & Muslim Americans,” read one sign the family prepared. Another, held by his son Jacob, declared, “Those refugee kids are just like me, President Trump,” and ended with, “#NotAgain.”
The Zlotnitskys soon became the poster family for Jewish support for Muslim immigrants — and Tal said taking a stand was the obvious choice. An Israeli-American, he was an immigrant himself. And he was a staunch progressive, too, advocating for LGBTQ people and joining a coalition of fellow millionaires pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy.
“If we give up our core ideals, that’s how the terrorists win,” Zlotnitsky said at the time.
These days, Trump is back in power and immigrants and LGBTQ Americans are back in the crosshairs. But Zlotnitsky isn’t feeling up for a fight — especially one where he feels lonely as a Israeli American and Jew.
“Jews and antisemitism are [at] the water’s edge. I’m not willing to go much further than that with anyone if they’re not with me there,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“I struggle not to cry, to this moment, whenever I confront anything from Oct. 7,” he said. “It’s so visceral. And that’s what makes my allies turning away so f—ing painful. It’s hard to care about other groups when people who are in those groups don’t seem to care about us.”
He added, “I’m 51 years old. It’s been some of the most destabilizing moments of my life in terms of my identity, politically.”
In his pain, Zlotnitsky offers a case study for liberal American Jews who have felt unmoored politically since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hesitant to ally with progressives who have expressed antipathy to Israel, yet unwilling to ally with much of the pro-Israel movement because of its affinity for Trump, he voted for Democrat Kamala Harris but now finds himself staring down Trump 2.0 feeling more confused and hurt than ready to resist.
“The biggest champions for Israel now are on the other side of the aisle, and I have so, so much that I disagree with them on,” said Zlotnitsky, who has long donated to Democratic candidates. “And yet, on this issue, I hate to admit it, they’re closer, in my opinion, to the right side of history than our side. That’s destabilizing.”
The Zlotnitsky family has experienced many of the forces shaping contemporary U.S. politics. Tal, who came to the United States from Israel when he was 12, immigrated illegally but later, in an era when immigration reforms routinely included amnesties for people already in the country, became a legal resident and then a citizen.
Members of the family are LGBTQ and federal employees, two demographics that Trump is targeting. And Jacob, 14 when the family rallied at Dulles, is now a senior at Tufts University, where he has had a front-row seat to the tensions over Israel roiling college campuses that have unnerved many American Jews and become a winning political issue for Republicans.
“You feel separated from a lot of your peers on campus. Or you see people in different lights,” Jacob Zlotnitsky said. “Like, wow, this person has a pretty unhinged take where they’re essentially supporting Hamas. And I used to joke with them in lab.”
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Jacob remembers canvassing for Barack Obama with his dad when he was 9 years old. From their home in Maryland, they hit the trail just as strongly four years later.
“During Hillary Clinton’s campaign, my dad and I actually drove to Pennsylvania to canvas on Election Day,” Jacob recalled. He would also tag along when his dad would meet with U.S. senators. “Progressivism has been a large part of my upbringing. Social justice, things like that.”
Like his father, who attended Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, Jacob graduated from high school in Maryland before heading to Boston for college. Tal, meanwhile, moved in recent years to the Tampa, Florida, area to be near other members of his family.
After Oct. 7, Israel took center stage in the family’s politics. As progressives began mounting protests against Israel’s response in Gaza, his father affixed an Israeli flag to his car, Jacob recalled. Antisemitism became the primary topic at family gatherings. And Tal Zlotnitsky watched as some of his friends — “people,” he said, “that should know better” — joined in what he called a “vilification of Israel.”
In an Instagram post two weeks after the attack, he poured out his feelings. “To my non-Jewish friends, those who have stood with the Jewish community in this time of desperate need, I am forever indebted to you, forever grateful to you,” he wrote. “For others, many who are deeply good people, who are continuing to live their lives, as if nothing has changed, as if we didn’t just witnessed [sic] the worst massacre of Jews in 90 years: Know that it hurts.”
Sharing a picture from inside a protest for racial justice, he added, “It hurts to stand alone, or mostly alone at this time. I’ve stood with Muslims when Trump denied them refuge, and was banning them. I’ve stood with my fellow Americans of color in support of Black Lives Matter … I stood with minimum wage workers. I stood with the LGBTQ community for marriage equality. What about us?”
It’s not that the Zlotnitskys have no qualms about Israel’s response to being attacked, which included a steep death toll and widespread destruction in Gaza. “I’m not thrilled with Israel’s reaction,” Tal Zlotnitsky said.
But he had the sense that people on the left were furious with Israel for even having a reaction to begin with — a reaction to Hamas murdering roughly 1,200 Israelis, many in their own homes, and kidnapping about 250 others. He said, “I think any American in the same situation would expect their government to do everything necessary to free anyone who’s taken.”
He thought Harris did a good job of navigating the complex issue during her Democratic National Convention speech, in which she reiterated the horrors of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack while also saying she was working for an outcome where “the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”
“I thought she took a principled position,” Zlotnitsky said. “She clearly stood on the side of truth about what had happened there, and also talked about the need for a different outcome in the region. I agree with her.” (Jacob, too, said he supported Palestinian statehood and opposed Israeli settlers: “I think I am, in the truest sense of the word, pro-Palestinian, because I do think Palestinians have a right to sovereignty.”)
But even as Harris got huge applause in the room, many progressives were furious that the DNC hadn’t permitted a Palestinian to speak at the convention. Unlike in previous election cycles, Zlotnitsky decided not to donate to downballot Democrats — unless they had explicitly stated a pro-Israel platform.
“I hated doing it,” he reflected. “It was a dark moment. … It’s been a lot of soul-searching and a lot of self-doubt and a lot of fear about what’s to come, what are we leaving here for our kids?”
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He had already experienced heartbreak after finding and supporting a rare candidate: one progressive enough to nab the endorsement of the local Democratic Socialists of America, a group known for its vociferous Israel criticism, but with a pro-Israel policy platform.
It felt natural for Tal to donate to and organize for Evan Minton, who was running for state senate in California and hoped to be the state’s first openly transgender state legislator. A policy manager and former legislative aide, Minton had made headlines in 2021 for taking a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital’s refusal to perform gender-affirming care to the Supreme Court.
“Pro Israel candidate in California who needs our support,” read one fundraising email Zlotnitsky sent his network. He feared that Minton’s support for Israel after Oct. 7 would make their candidacy an uphill battle in the modern progressive tent.
Those fears were borne out after the Sacramento-area district held its primary in March 2024. Minton finished dead last out of seven candidates, with 2.6% of the vote.
“His position on Israel overshadowed everything,” Zlotnitsky said. Looking back on it, he cites the race as “a pivotal moment” when he lost faith in the progressive coalition he’d devoted much of his adult life to supporting.
“I was so thrilled to have someone, from a community I care deeply about and want to champion, take our — I hate to say ‘our side’ — take a view that I thought was principled on this issue, knowing the certain opposition,” he said.
“And then to watch this person just get clobbered for it…” He trailed off. “I need to stop, because I don’t even know who my allies are anymore.”
On Election Day in November, Zlotnitsky posted a picture of himself on Instagram wearing his Obama/Biden ’08 T-shirt. “Hoping today above all else for peace, for brotherhood and sisterhood, for Americans to come together and recognize that what’s made us the shining city on the hill is that our system of electing our leaders, while imperfect, is fair, predictable, and temperate,” he wrote. “I hope today is not the end of that American era.”
By that night, it was clear that Trump had won. Zlotnitsky is more convinced than some other Democrats that Israel played a role in costing them the election. “I think our division cost us in November. I think — I know — I’m not alone,” he said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people who are Jews and activists who felt untethered.”
For now, has redirected his activism closer to home. Through the Israeli-American Council — a group that runs local cultural activities and has a national political arm that leans right — he works with Jewish high school students “to bring Jewish teens closer to Israel.”
And through the University of South Florida’s business school, which he sits on the board of, he talks to college students who are first-generation Americans.
With the first group, Tal hears “horrifying” stories about their experiences with antisemitism. “It feels like we’re whistling past the graveyard,” he said. “The only thing you can do with these kids is just hug them and tell them that we understand.”
But with the latter, he takes the opposite approach: “I have been avoiding the issue of Israel.” It feels wrong on some level, but at the end of the day he still believes in helping immigrant families. He’d rather not know “where their sympathies lie.”
Jacob, too, feels similarly about the communities he and his family used to advocate for under the first Trump administration.
“To this day I’m proud to stand up against the Muslim ban. I’ll stand up for it again,” he said. “The only thing that’s changed is that, in the back of your head, a lot of the people you were standing up for probably don’t want your family to exist as they do in Israel.”
Both father and son are occupied by the question of how, or whether, Jews could ever rejoin progressive coalitions. Tal figures there would need to be “some answer” in Gaza — “and it’s certainly not, ‘Gaza is the new French Riviera,’ whatever President Trump’s fantasies are.” (He was alluding to Trump’s proposal to turn Gaza into a “Riviera,” an idea captured in an AI-generated social media video imagining a gold-plated “Trump Gaza.”)
“Whatever happens, maybe then, there could be some restoration of partnership between Jews and Jewish groups and our natural allies,” Tal mused.
But, he added in the same breath, “maybe not.” He said he’d recently dined with “a dear friend” who was a “former very senior official in the Obama administration, who I consider an ally.” Tal found himself “deeply disappointed” by what he considered the former official’s interest in “blaming Israel.”
Zlotnitsky is deeply concerned about what the Trump administration is doing on almost all fronts.
“We’re seeing more actions that represent a fundamental lack of respect for basic democratic principles and bedrock American values such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and due process,” he said in an email this week. “It’s disheartening to say the least.”
But earlier, in a Zoom interview, he had held up the latest mailer he’d received from the Democratic Party, asking him to pledge donations. The envelope listed suggested dollar amounts in increments of thousands, based on his track record of handing out large sums to Democrats.
He won’t send it back, he says. He’s lost faith.
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