Demonstrators from Jewish Voice for Peace hold an emergency Passover Seder outside ICE headquarters. Photo by Getty Images

I wish I could tell you that I’ve found a productive way to channel my rage and frustration about the current state of the world. But I confess that, rather than enjoying the beautiful spring weather, I have spent an unhealthy portion of my spare time lately agitating on social media about the ongoing nightmare in the Middle East. As someone who finds Israel’s continued assault on Gaza and the West Bank both inhumane and short-sighted — and wishes the United States had ceased all U.S taxpayer funded shipments of weaponry to Netanyahu’s government yesterday — I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been called a “kapo” online by my fellow and sister Jews.

I might find the insult offensive, if I hadn’t already grown so accustomed to seeing it in print. It has become the go-to slur for the Israel-must-be-defended-at-all-costs crowd. These same folks seem to take particular umbrage at other Jews who don’t agree that killing 15,000 children and maiming countless others — never mind the thousands of adult civilians who have been killed, traumatized, terrorized, and made homeless over the last year and a half — is simply the unfortunate price for vanquishing the existential threat posed by Hamas. Hard to dismiss as antisemites, Jews like myself are instead seen as traitors.

Some part of me actually pities the justifiers, and wonders if the heartlessness of the Israeli response to Oct. 7 — the IDF has now killed 50 times the number of Israelis who died that terrible day — is some kind of inherited, epigenetic “trauma response” to the Holocaust. At the same time, I find myself experiencing similar levels of disgust towards those who seem utterly indifferent to the suffering of an entire population of trapped and hungry humans, if only because they derive from a different tribe which, through an accident of history, follows a different religion.

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To be fair, the schism in the Jewish community began under Biden, for whom unchecked support for Netanyahu’s out-of-control war machine was, to my mind, his greatest policy failure. But the wider division was tempered by the fact that, in the last election, 80% of us still supported Harris over Trump. With Trump now in charge, the clash has begun to seem cataclysmic — and possibly irreparable.

I admit to ongoing shock at the discovery that quite a few American Jews, even if they don’t support MAGA per se, applaud the new administration’s Gestapo-like disappearances and deportations of foreign students merely for speaking their minds about the dire situation in the Palestinian territories. To these folks, simply wearing a keffiyeh, waving a Palestinian flag, yelling “Free Palestine,” or writing an op-ed in a campus newspaper suggesting that Israel has lost its moral compass, is interpreted as antisemitic provocation. Seen through this lens, Ivy League universities are hotbeds of Jew hatred which need to be penalized, even at the cost of ignoring First Amendment protections and immigration law. Even Biden’s own antisemitism czar, the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, has found a way to justify Trump’s extra-judicial revocation of student visas in the name of fighting antisemitism.

Yet, finding a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh innately antisemitic makes no more sense than regarding an Israeli flag or Jewish star as innately Islamophobic. Never mind that arguing about politics is a time-honored Jewish tradition. The Campus Antisemitism Hysterics, as I like to call them, also seem to have forgotten that one of the first protest groups to get booted from Columbia University, at the end of 2023, was Jewish Voice for Peace — an anti-Zionist entity composed almost entirely of Jews. All of which suggests that Trump’s crackdown is not about what it purports to be about at all.

Indeed, for those of us who don’t regard Judaism and Zionism as interchangeable, it is ever clearer that Trump does not care an iota about antisemitism. Instead, his newly created “antisemitism task force” appears to be on the prowl not for those who persecute Jews but those who dare to criticize Israel. This distinction became even clearer when Trump recently accused Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of being “not Jewish anymore” and “a Palestinian.” Why? Senate Democrats had refused to sign on to the Republican budget plan.

Even more recently — and frighteningly — faculty members at Barnard College received a direct questionnaire in their in-boxes from the EEOC asking if they were Jewish — likely a fishing expedition in search of further “evidence” of anti-Israel sentiment with which to punish Columbia. For anyone with a sense of history, the idea of the federal government compiling a list of Jews should be a glaring Red Flag.

On that note, I can’t help but wonder how many days away we are from seeing a legal U.S. resident of the Jewish faith — whether green card holder, naturalized citizen, or citizen from birth — seized in the same terrifying manner as Columbia and Tufts grad students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk. If and when this happens, will Trump’s Jewish supporters continue to make excuses and find justifications? I fear the answer is “yes.”

To some in the Jewish community, we so-called “kapos” are nearly as evil as Hamas. And, new lines of attack have begun to appear. Earlier this week, in response to my suggestion that by conflating anti-zionism with antisemitism the ADL was no longer a reliable source of information, a Threads user replied to me: “This is why your books ended up in a little free library.” (Touché! When not ranting about Israel, I write fiction and memoir.)

“You bring shame,” she added.

I was tempted to say the same to her, but forced myself to close my laptop and get some fresh air.

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