Trump’s Detention of Pro-Palestinian Protester Marks Dark Turning Point in U.S. Jewish History

Trump’s crackdown on dissent lands at the intersection of American Jewish history, civil liberties and the politics of fear.

Originally published in the Substack History Teaches…

Days before Purim, the Jewish “festival of the lots,” which begins this year on the evening of March 13 (the 14th of Adar on the lunar calendar), the Trump administration arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. green card holder whose spouse is a U.S. citizen, because of his role in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protest activity at Columbia University. Since then, a judge has ruled that the U.S. may not deport him without at least a legal review. While Khalil is held in Louisiana, hundreds have rallied on his behalf in New York City and elsewhere, and thousands have signed petitions calling for his release. 

Khalil’s arrest and detention is a breach of civil libertarian principles and university cultures of critique and dissent. Immigration and naturalization are being pulled back, it seems, into an early-20th-century mode, in which ambiguous standards of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable political speech become grounds for admission or deportation from the U.S. The treatment of the Jewish feminist leftist Emma Goldman comes to mind—one of those who gave us the movement for legal and safe contraception, deported with 248 others in 1919 for believing (or being thought to believe) in the then-little-understood-but-scary-sounding political philosophy known as anarchism.

Without denying or diminishing any of the other ways in which Khalil’s treatment by the U.S. government violates our better traditions and resuscitates our worst ones, I want to underline its particularly troubling resonances (beyond Goldman and other radicals with Jewish backgrounds who were targeted in prior waves of politically based immigration enforcement) in American Jewish history and Jewish studies. 

Ambiguous standards of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable political speech have become grounds for admission or deportation from the U.S.

This is a tale in three acts. 

Act I: Spiel

Purim is a festive festival, a Jewish carnivale, in which the high are made low and the low, high.

Jews, the story goes, in the biblical Book of Esther, an exiled and struggling minority, threatened with extinction by a clueless and easily manipulated king, turn the tables and end up vanquishing their enemies and finding a place of security and prosperity. The bad guys, including their notorious chief Haman, die, and the once-threatened minority makes merry. (A great contemporary translator of the Hebrew Bible is Robert Alter. Find Esther here.) 

The story is centrally about gender and the polarities between male and female that are also hierarchies of power and submission—as when Queen Vashti, in the opening sequence, refuses to dance for King Ahasverus and a round of courtiers express concern that all men will have their authority challenged if one queen is allowed to buck the system on one evening.

But it also pokes fun at those polarities, through its very gendered excesses. These have given rise—for hundreds, probably thousands, of years—to drag performance as part of the Purim spiel, or play, that tells the tale, campy engagement with the obviously frail male ego(s) at the center of power, the obvious truth that even under conditions of unequal access to money and political power, women (the feminine) still hold a bunch of cards. And the same is true, the tale suggests, for every subordinated group in every lopsided and unequal situation of power. 

Beyond the simple polarities of male and female, the Book of Esther also allows a big role in narrative—and, let’s say, in history as well—for in-between-gender figures and people. Thanks to the book Trans Talmud by Max Strassfeld, I became very aware this year of the way “eunuchs” operate in the story—working, we could say, alongside the polarized gender excesses to deflate the pumped-up power that usually goes with ascriptions of gender. Who are eunuchs? They are presumptively characters designated male at birth but feminized after a kind of medical intervention, such that they could safely be assigned guardianship of the women’s quarters in a polygamous household like the one enjoyed by the king in the story. In other words, eunuchs were those who transitioned or were transitioned from conventional, presumptively predatory, masculinity, to something lacking in the same testosterone-driven tendency toward violence. They were understood to be either uninterested in, or incapable of, posing a physical threat to the women in whose midst they lived. (See Esther, 1:10; 4:4-5, etc., on eunuchs as intermediaries, agents of communication between women’s quarters and royal court.) 

It’s almost too on the nose for the United States of 2025: the manipulable and capricious king, swinging wildly from excess to excess, target to target. The threatened masculinity lashing out. The swaggering (and anti-Jewish, “Roman-salute”-friendly) power behind the throne—Haman—becomes the owner of Tesla and Space X.

Some of these dynamics were intuited as far back as 2016, when Jay Michaels wrote for the Forward, that, like the Biblical Persian king, then-candidate Trump could be seen as “a violent demagogue concerned with his own aggrandizement and power.”

And then there’s gender: When we will deflate the gendered pretensions of today’s praetorians and those who employ them? When will we understand that their radical assertions of masculine power and protectiveness (whether we like it or not), their line-drawing between “male” and “female,” up and down, here and there, me and you, are no more real than the scribblings of Harold and his purple crayon? (And a lot less imaginative.)

When will we acknowledge in-between-ness, in gender and sex and and everything, the vitality and constant presence of borderlands, mestizaje, those with the ability to translate, transfer, transition from one apparently fixed and unitary realm to another? 

Act II: Revenge

The most unsettling aspects of the Purim story have to do with the ending: the revenge piece—a dish not served, in this case, cold but red-hot, with the emotional intensity of existential threat turned into an exercise of retributive and murderous power.

A lot of people angst over this part of the tale. I generally let it go, on the principle that what happens in the spiel stays in the spiel: a fantasy of (even violent) retribution by and for people who were persecuted and relatively powerless I generally take as pretty innocent, because it’s fantasy. And the context is a farce, the topsy-turvy-land, so maybe we should think and do the opposite of what these characters think and do? 

This year, approaching Purim, we have this indelible image, a primary text in 21st-century American Jewish history that I’m eager to have in the rear view mirror so I can discuss it with students—and utterly nauseated to have as a companion in my here and now:

“Shalom,” of course, is Hebrew for hello/goodbye, but only because it first meant “peace”—very close kin to the Arabic salaam (the greetings, Shalom aleichem/Salaam alaykum, or as-salamu alaykum). This communication from the White House, appropriating the transliterated Hebrew word, with our government’s official symbolism, is kind of an anti-Palestinian/Islamaphobic/pro-Israeli-government version of the TV cliche, “bye, Felicia”—for which I admit a special antipathy. 

How did we get here? And what does it mean when—as the pro-Israel liberal Jewish group J Street puts it—a White House “that proudly empowers neo-Nazis is using Judaism as a cudgel” in their campaign against protest, critical inquiry, expert knowledge, and other things for which universities stand? 

It seems not incidental to these events that the Christian hard right has recently adopted a version of the Purim story as its own—as in the “Esther Call to the Mall” from shortly before the presidential election in 2024. See also the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a companion to the far-reaching Project 2025 that promised to punish what is perceived as anti-Israel or antisemitic speech/action. (It should be noted that not a single mainstream Jewish advocacy organization, or Jewish studies scholar, was involved in drafting the Project Esther plan, according to reporting in the Forward.)

Who is this right-wing, Christian, policy-making Esther? Apparently a kind of Marjorie-Taylor-Greene type figure of woman power—not a vulnerable Jewess, as in the ancient story, coming to know the perils of assimilation and the need for solidarity and collective action in the face of repression, so much as a repressing agent who accesses state power to silence her opponents. 

Act III: Mourning

Viewing what has happened in Israel, Gaza, and elsewhere in the Middle East in the past nearly 18 months, many have dwelled on the (re)traumatizing impact of the killings, thievings and kidnappings of Oct. 7 on the psyches of especially Jewish Israelis—and the further impact of this on war policy and political perspectives. Perhaps we haven’t paid enough attention to comparable watersheds in American Jewish history, which have not produced as much death, per capita, as Oct. 7 produced in Israel, but have been similarly overturning of assumptions from Jewish history. (None of this is to deny the violence, death and trauma of Gazans, or other groups in the Middle East or the U.S.) 

American Jewish history changed in the Trump era. The experiences of Jews in this country, and Jews and non-Jews around the world who had come to know the U.S. as the ultimate safe diaspora home for a once-existentially-threatened people, have produced disorientation and still-incomplete recalibration. It is as though many believed we were living in the final scene of the Purim story without having endured the nasty episodes that came before. But then it started to feel like the chapters of the book in which Haman is in charge. 

Trumpian flirtations with the hard, racialist, Christian nationalist, proudly “European” vigilante right wing have obviously and easily brought with them Europe’s proud, Christian, nationalist tradition of Jew hatred. For every wave at “globalists,” world-straddling bankers and communications magnates, the “them” making things hard for “us,” there’s a basement internet aficionado preparing for mischief against Christian Europe’s apparently timeless antagonist: the Jew. 

Someday, when I have the chance to teach this moment instead of living in it, I’ll ask students to juxtapose the image below with the one above: 

That was 2018, two years after Trump’s first election. It was another extraordinary use of a specifically Jewish lexicon—the Kaddish, the Aramaic-language prayer for mourning, heading the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the aftermath of the assassinations in the Tree of Life Synagogue building. What happened in the Tree of Life building was the worst instance of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history, unthinkable without the door Trump opened to the old conspiracy theorizing, the way he helped those basement dwellers locate the enemy of their striving within temple walls. 

After the Tree of Life massacre, which marked a new moment in American Jewish vulnerability, there was a new moment of embrace for the American Jewish minority—at least in Pittsburgh and according to some deeply humane newspaper editors. As terrible as the events of that time were, it promised a “we” on the other side of them, accompanied by a respect for Jewish difference represented by the use of a prayer only a few readers would have known. It’s quite a turn from that moment to this, with the vulgarly repurposed “Shalom” and pseudo-Most Wanted poster of Khalil a stomp of the boot against any opponent of Israel and the Gaza war. 

American Jewish history doesn’t stop here. The trauma doesn’t need to force Jews, or those who would act and speak in their name, to look away from “Roman salutes” or forget that Jews and other racially and religiously minorities groups have been stronger together than when pitted against one another. Part of this history is the work that 20th-century Jews, among others, did to respect civil rights and fight for social rights, to keep government at arm’s length from interpretations of religious traditions and sacred texts, and to expand universities as places of experimentation, inquiry and debate.