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Jewish fears in August about increased threats to their security collided with their liberal ideology and beliefs about opposing any limits to immigration —legal or illegal —which many, if not most, American Jews still believe in. Unsurprisingly, progressives chose ideology, even if it placed their communities at risk.
Four months later, Americans are trying to process news about incidents that make plain the cost of policies that so many Jews have wrongly imagined to be intrinsic to their faith. The recent murder of a National Guardsman in Washington, D.C., by a refugee from Afghanistan, coupled with the massive fraud committed by many Somali immigrants in Minnesota that led to billions in federal funds being stolen and diverted to (among other things) an Islamist terror group, have made headlines not so much for the outrageous nature of those crimes but because of liberal outrage about the way President Donald Trump has spoken about them.
The madness of open borders
Both examples help illustrate the madness of open borders and misguided refugee-admission policies that were pursued by the Biden administration, as well as supported by Jewish groups like HIAS, and a laundry list of other liberal and left-wing organizations.
Still, it would appear that nothing will change their minds.
The belief that virtually anyone who wants to come to the United States should be let in, regardless of whether they have the legal right to do so or whether they support Islamist ideologies and antisemitism, isn't just wrongheaded and contrary to the rule of law. It's now incontrovertible that such policies are causing potential harm to Jews and the entire nation. Yet even that isn't enough to shake their convictions.
What happened in Washington, D.C., and Minnesota is just a symptom of a broader problem afflicting more than just liberal Jews.
A generation of leftist indoctrination of students from colleges all the way down to K-12 schools led to many people believing that the principal problem facing the country, if not the world, was American racism and xenophobia. It led to the moral panic about race that allowed the toxic myths of settler-colonialism, intersectionality and critical race theory to dominate the way they thought about the world.
The result was the imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that not only exacerbated racial divisions (while also helping to legitimize the mainstreaming of antisemitism) due to the way that the progressive doctrine falsely defined Jews and Israel as "white" oppressors.
Another consequence of this mindset was the way so many Americans, including the Biden administration, embraced the notion that any defense of American sovereignty against those who wished to erase the nation's borders was illegitimate.
This led to the entry into the country of millions of illegal immigrants —adding to the tens of millions who were already here —that helped drive down the wages of working-class Americans and raised housing prices. It also facilitated criminal efforts to smuggle massive amounts of drugs, like fentanyl, into the country by drug cartels. That has caused an opioid crisis that is killing more than 100,000 Americans a year and dooming countless others to lives of misery and despair.
Demonizing ICE
The ensuing frustration was a significant factor that fueled support for Trump's election victory in 2024. Nevertheless, Trump's willingness to keep his promise to do something about it by cracking down on illegal immigration, deporting those who arrived in the United States without permission and using whatever power necessary to halt the trafficking of illegal drugs is —at least, according to the president's opponents and their corporate media cheerleaders —deeply controversial. Liberal Jewish groups are among those who have not merely criticized Trump's policies but sought to demonize the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to enforce the law and arrest illegals.
And they are joining with the same crowd of usual suspects who are denouncing the administration's use of force to take out drug-running boats operated by cartel operatives that have been rightly designated as terrorist organizations. Mistakes, which are an inevitable part of any armed conflict with the narco-terrorist forces orchestrating this threat, may have been made. Yet Trump's opponents seem to think that the things he or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says or does in pursuing this necessary policy are of greater concern than the peril to the American people posed by the trafficking of deadly drugs or the negative impact of massive illegal immigration on communities and the lives of everyday citizens.
That the credentialed elites who dominate the political left are not experiencing that impact in the same way as those whose families are being destroyed by the consequences of open borders partly explains their indifference to the problem. But even if well-off Jewish liberals don't care about the plight of the working class anymore —albeit while still disingenuously declaring that a passion for "social justice" defines their political and religious faith —they should recognize that one aspect of this folly is the way it is fueling antisemitism, which does affect them.
For liberals it’s taboo to mention the fact that facilitating the entry into the United States of massive numbers of persons —whether designated as refugees, students, legal immigrants or illegals —from countries where Islamist beliefs dominate is creating a growing constituency for Jew-hatred in America. Indeed, anyone who does so is quickly labeled Islamophobic, though in recent years, that term, which is supposed to define prejudice against Muslims, has come to describe anyone who has the temerity to call out widespread antisemitism and support for Islamo-fascist ideas about governance and jihad against the West that is widespread in that community.
Even those Jews who despise Trump and/or are critical or unsupportive of Israel have been forced to realize that since Oct. 7, secular liberals are also being targeted by members of the bizarre red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists for intimidation and violence. After the murders this year of Jews in Boulder, Colo., and in Washington, D.C., and the attempted firebombing on Passover of the Harrisburg residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the need to ensure Jewish security is a priority for the entire community. Not to mention, of course, more than two years of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel activity on college campuses.
And still, those Jews who call themselves "progressives" seem to think that ensuring open borders and non-enforcement of immigration laws is a much more important issue.
Sacrificing security for ideology
However, in August, they were faced with a difficult choice. They wanted to apply for the federal funds made available by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that Jewish institutions need to pay for enhanced security measures made necessary by a surge of antisemitism. In order to receive those funds, they were going to have to agree to conditions that DHS had placed on the grants.
The conditions were far from unreasonable.
One involved forswearing the implementation of DEI policies, which were the foundation of the hate facing Jews on university campuses, in the streets of major American cities and elsewhere. Another forbade them from participating in the discriminatory, antisemitic BDS campaigns promoting the boycotting of Israel and Jews.
And they were also required to state that their facilities —synagogues, community centers, organizational offices, etc. —would not be used to shelter illegal immigrants, and that they would not bar federal officers from entering them while enforcing the law.
It wouldn't seem to be too much to ask that people applying for federal money promise not to violate federal law. But not according to these liberals.
They were outraged about the idea that to receive funds to help protect them against potential violence, they would be prevented from engaging in antisemitic boycotts or closing their doors to ICE agents seeking to arrest lawbreakers. So great was their outrage that many of them joined together in a letter to say they would not apply for such grants if those were the conditions.
While leading liberal groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and HIAS didn't join in the letter, they opposed the conditions and even advised groups to accept them only in the hope that, at some point, they would be reversed by the courts. The Jewish Democratic Council of America also opposed the provision about not closing the doors of synagogues to ICE agents. They all seem to have bought into the fraudulent claim that illegal immigrants trying to evade the laws of the United States are somehow analogous to Jews like Anne Frank hiding from Nazis trying to exterminate them.
HIAS once played an essential historic role in bringing Jews over from pogrom-ridden and war-torn Europe to join family members in America and, once there, helping immigrants adjust to life in the United States. Now it sees its job as assisting those who simply want to live in America, regardless of whether they are Islamists, other extremists or share the values of the democratic country.
Indeed, even after evidence of what happens when the floodgates are opened to allow in those hostile to America has become undeniable, they remain ideologically committed to open borders at all costs. For instance, they oppose common-sense efforts by Trump administration officials to rescreen hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who were admitted to the United States in the wake of former President Joe Biden's disastrous handover of that country to the Taliban. Many were never properly vetted.
Liberal Jewish attitudes toward open borders are, at least in part, understandable when placed in the context of history and the fact that most American Jews are only a few generations removed from immigrant forebears. That said, the conditions of the country then and the willingness of new arrivals to embrace America and its ideals are very different today.
Trump may be the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House and willing to use the government to fight antisemitism in a way none of his predecessors ever did. But the opposition to him from the majority of Jews who are politically liberal is instinctive, and as much a product of blind partisan allegiances and distaste for his often-vulgar manner and willingness to say things out loud that others only think, such as his disparagement of the Israel- and Jew-hating Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), herself from Mogadishu, as "garbage."
It's also true that the admission of huge numbers of Islamist populations —whether admitted from Somalia in the 1990s by former President Bill Clinton or the Afghans who were welcomed by Biden —were responses to genuine crises in those countries.
While still extolling America as a liberal mosaic where all are treated equally and which has been a uniquely welcoming place for Jews, support for unlimited immigration from nations where antisemitism is rife is undermining the foundation for Jewish acceptance, success, and, now, even security.
Choose Western civilization over Islamism
Jewish beliefs have always been a mix of factors that included particularist religious and ethnic-group identity with universalist principles. Modern Jewish liberalism has skewed the traditional balance between the two to the point where its adherents are even willing to oppose Jewish security or the rights of Jews to their ancient homeland to identify with the desires of supposedly downtrodden people who want to kill them.
The choice is clear.
The creation of large new constituencies of people who hate Jews —and who can influence elections to harm the U.S.-Israel alliance and elect antisemitic members of Congress like Omar or Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or even creating a situation where the largest funder of the Al-Shabaab branch of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group is American taxpayers, is contrary to Jewish interests. But avoiding these calamities means discarding outdated Jewish beliefs about immigration. If you like the version of America that sees itself as an expression of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western civilization, then don't repeat the mistake that Europeans made when they allowed massive immigration from Muslim and Arab populations who oppose those ideas. Doing so will only replicate what is happening there with respect to the national identity of those nations and the way Jews no longer feel safe there.
It's time for liberal Jews to stop opposing policies that defend the rule of law and would make it more difficult for antisemites to be allowed into the United States. It might also be a good idea to stop wrongly labeling those who want to defend American sovereignty and not see apologists of terrorism in the U.S. government as racists or Islamophobes. That's true even if one of them is named Donald Trump.
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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of Jewish News Syndicate. He's been a JWR contributor since 1998.