By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post
In the aftermath of the fiery attack on a group of people in Boulder, Colo., who had gathered for a march calling for the release of hostages in Gaza, the brick plaza where they had stood was cordoned off with police tape. Men and women had essentially been fire bombed on a Sunday afternoon, so workmen washed the residue of mayhem from the ground in front of the county courthouse. In the distance, hanging over the courthouse’s double doors was a rainbow flag, a symbol of tolerance and inclusivity; more hope than fact.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the Egyptian man who was arrested for the violence, which the FBI has characterized as a “targeted terrorist attack,” was reported to have shouted, “Free Palestine,” before allegedly flinging molotov cocktails at the marchers. The story of Boulder calls to mind the tragedy in Washington just 11 days earlier, when two employees of the Israeli Embassy were killed in front of the Capitol Jewish Museum after attending a reception there. The man who was arrested at the scene confessed, according to the FBI, stating, “‘I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
The tragedy in the nation’s capital is a reminder of the terrifying moments in Harrisburg, Pa., when police officers pounded on the doors of the official residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro to alert him that the mansion was on fire. A man was arrested for climbing over security fencing and setting the house ablaze not long after Shapiro and his family, who are Jewish, had marked Passover with a seder. That suspected attacker also had Gaza on his mind.
In the bleak hours and days after these attacks, the sky fills with the lights of police cars glowing brightly. Officers wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and holding big guns, huddle around tactical vehicles. And all of those officers and weapons remind one of what has long been a familiar scene in front of synagogues across the country: Police cars parked out front as a visible deterrence to those who simply can’t tolerate the worshipers being themselves in fellowship.
The country has fought back with stern words and heartfelt prayers, deeply moving museums, congressional investigations, more and more security, and a death sentence in the federal trial of the man who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. But in Washington’s most recent battles in the war against intolerance, the choice of weapons has been … more intolerance. And what does that get us?
Statistics tell the story in its breadth. Incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assaults have risen significantly since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 200. Hatred was already on the rise before that deadly day, but it spiked dramatically afterward. The war in Gaza, with Israel’s stated aim being to destroy Hamas, gave rise to widespread death and suffering among Palestinians. More than 54,000 people have died, about a third of them children under 18, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for high-ranking members of both Hamas and the Israeli government, charging that they have committed crimes against humanity.
So much suffering stirred protests, most notably on college campuses, where students constructed tent encampments and barricaded themselves inside buildings. According to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, many campuses became rife with antisemitism. For 2024, the ADL recorded 9,354 examples of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assaults. Of those, 1,694 incidents occurred on college campuses.
The ADL does not consider “criticism of Israel or general anti-Israel activism” to be antisemitic. But often, the distinction was blurred.
The White House has offered its own blurry response. In social media posts, officials quickly labeled the Boulder attack as terrorism. They promised to seek swift justice. Then Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the suspect’s family into custody and pledged to deport them immediately. The family’s lawyer argued, among many points, that Soliman’s wife and children, who are also Egyptian and who had applied for asylum, are being punished for the alleged crimes of a relative, which is not how justice is supposed to work. A federal judge on Wednesday barred their deportation.
The administration has also vowed to stamp out antisemitism on college campuses, with much of its animus aimed at Harvard University and its academic freedom, research grants and international students.
In much the same way that careless and reckless protesters have conflated the Israeli government’s policies in Gaza with the Jewish people at large, the Trump administration has merged eradicating antisemitism with controlling how broad swaths of the population speak, think and exist. It can be seen as fighting prejudice with prejudice. Fear with more fear. Hostility with hostility. It’s a war on nuance and complexity, which is to say, it’s a war on what it means to exist as an individual.
This year, the ADL issued an updated campus report card assessing the actions that 135 colleges had taken in the prior year to root out antisemitism in their community. By the ADL’s measure, Harvard’s grade improved, from an F to a C. A significant number of institutions, however, received failing grades, among them the University of Illinois Chicago and nearby DePaul University, as well as the New School in New York and Haverford College in Pennsylvania. But they are not in the administration’s crosshairs the way that Harvard, with its $53.2 billion endowment and reputation for cultural elitism, has been.
About 10 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate population is Jewish. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, for example, Jewish students make up 13 percent of the undergraduate population and the school received a grade of D for dealing with antisemitism on campus. But a campaign against UC-Santa Barbara doesn’t have the same political resonance as one aimed at Harvard.
And that’s what so much of this devastation comes down to: People get conflated with politics and posturing. Their humanity can get lost in the fog of political one-upmanship.
There’s rarely a straight line between words uttered in one part of the culture and actions taken in another. A single deadly gesture typically springs from a perfect storm of fact and fiction, outrage and desperation, single-mindedness and isolation, mental illness and toxic social media where everything is written in all-caps and there’s no space for complications.
But this much is clear: Deporting immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, hasn’t erased antisemitism. Silencing foreign students raising their voices against Israeli or American foreign policy hasn’t made Jewish men and women safer on city streets. Putting ivy-covered institutions in the crosshairs of politicians doesn’t seem to be helping either.
Incidents of antisemitism have continued to grow since 2023’s dramatic spike. Prejudice is one of many fine fertilizers. And the White House has insured that an abundance of it is raining down.
Robin Givhan is senior critic at large for The Washington Post.
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