April 4, 2025

SETH MANDEL: Rules for Jews.

Unlike most voters, American Jews apparently do not get to choose which policies or government actions they support based on political principles. There’s a list, you see, of Special Obligations. Jews must do this or that, because as Jews we have a special obligation to everyone except ourselves.

This Law of Special Obligations is on full display in a New York Times article on the pro-Hamas crackdowns on college campuses.

The Times article itself was inevitable. Any time a politician or government does something ostensibly “for the Jews,” the Times will assign a reporter to write a story on how “the Jewish community is divided” over that thing. If kosher Chinese food were to fall like manna from the heavens, the New York Times would write a story titled “U.S. Jews Are Divided Over Free Chinese Food.” If the Times were around during the Exodus from ancient Egypt, it would publish an article titled “Schism Within Jewish Community Over Freedom From Slavery.” If the Purim story were to happen today, we’d get “How Haman’s Humiliation Has Become Fraught For Many Jews.”

The current version is “Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews,” though another Times article about this topic used the “schism” framing, and a third used “divide” in the headline.

The point is not that it’s unusual for Jews to have varying opinions on the same issue—that’s the norm. Instead, what jumps out from the Times piece and others like it is the idea that Jews don’t get to choose. Like Hebrew National hot dogs, we answer to a higher authority apparently. Unlike Hebrew National hot dogs, the higher authority being referenced isn’t God.

It turns out that, like Judaism itself, Jewish political opinion-forming entails many rules. As far as I can tell, here are the main ones.

From the Times: “‘Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,’ wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday. ‘You’ll be looking awhile.’”

Related: Writing in the Boston Globe (which was owned by the Gray Lady from 1993 until 2013), the dean emeritus of Tufts University insists: Jewish community must stand up to Trump’s targeting of international students.

The image is seared into my mind: masked federal agents emerging from unmarked vehicles on a Somerville street, forcibly detaining a frightened young woman in broad daylight as she was walking to an interfaith center to break her Ramadan fast. The surveillance video of Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk’s detainment by Department of Homeland Security agents evokes images that should terrify every American who values democracy and the rule of law.

What happened next is equally chilling. Despite a federal court order requiring that Ozturk not be moved out of Massachusetts without advance notice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials transferred her to a detention facility in Louisiana. Her F-1 student visa had reportedly been terminated without notice or due process. Despite the fact that, according to her attorney, no criminal charges have been filed, Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar pursuing a PhD in child study and human development, has been branded without evidence or due process by the US government as a threat to our national security.

This is not an isolated incident. A University of Alabama doctoral student from Iran was detained March 25 without explanation, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently boasted, “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”

Well, good:

Related: There’s More Than One Way to Shape a Narrative™: “Networks Spend 10x More Time on Student Arrest Than Gang Leader Capture—That’s the liberal media for you.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll