Partners for Progressive Israel’s Statement on Executive Order “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism”

Partners’ Statement Trump’s Executive Order “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” 

January 31st, 2025 –

In response to President Trump’s executive order this week entitled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” Partners for Progressive Israel issued the following statement:

Jewish life in the United States is generally safe, but this security has been marred by increasing incidents of antisemitic violence which cannot and must not be either downplayed or ignored. We are particularly concerned that the rise in antisemitism is connected with the legitimization of violence in both deed and word, against individuals and groups that appear to be vulnerable, and more generally in today’s political and social discourse.  

The struggle against antisemitism is a vitally important task which must be conducted effectively. Partners for Progressive Israel is very concerned that President Trump’s recent executive order is misdirected and will impede rather than help the struggle against antisemitism which, at its core, is a particular part of the larger struggle for civil rights and equal security for all who live and work in the USA.

The narrow scope of this order, with its laser-focus on campuses and institutions of higher learning, belies its stated intent to uplift the safety of Jewish students on campus. Instead, its effect would be to intimidate students and instructors amidst a larger backdrop of unconstitutional crackdowns on the civil and human rights of immigrants in the United States by this same administration.

 The order’s focus on “post-October 7th, 2023 campus anti-semitism,” in conjunction with the recent executive order banning comprehensive education about race and racism, religious discrimination, and American history flattens the experience of Jewish communities in the United States, and grossly appropriates our desire for safety and liberty in this country while obscuring essential educational conversations about how America has at times met the needs of some in the Jewish community while gravely failing others. Rather than embracing the complexity of the American Jewish experience, this administration is tokenizing the real fears and violence faced by our community to create a repressive environment on campuses across the country.

Additionally, the order’s use of the language “the people of Israel” as the target of the terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, 2023 further blurs the line between the identities of Jewish Americans and citizens of Israel, both erasing the experiences of non-Jewish Israelis victimized by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and also trafficking in antisemitic tropes that equate all Jewish people with the State of Israel and presume a “dual loyalty” to both the United States and Israel. 

We join the wider American Jewish community to express our deep concern at rising rates of antisemitic threats and violence across the United States. This order does not serve to adequately address the roots or flashpoints of antisemitic violence in this country, particularly when accompanied by President Trump’s other executive orders this week, which not only threatened the federal funding many Jewish communities receive to keep their community centers and houses of worship safe and secure, but has also placed Jewish immigrants and LGBTQIA+ Jewish youth and adults at particular risk. 

Partners’ Executive Director Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson said, “The Jewish community deserves a thoughtful, comprehensive approach to combating rising antisemitism and the violence it can bring to our schools, synagogues, and communities. This executive order does not meet the needs of the American Jewish community, and instead will only add additional fear and intensity to the environments of university campuses, as well as fueling Trump’s Islamophobic and anti-immigrant agenda. American Jews, like all minority groups in the United States, are entitled to elected officials that take seriously our needs for safety and the responsibility to combat historic and current structural biases and hatred. What this administration has done instead is to weaponize the experiences of Jewish students on campus while simultaneously promoting individuals who traffic in Nazi imagery and gestures or conspiracy theories about Jewish ethnic and cultural groups.”