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| WHAT’S DRIVING THE AMERICAN JEWISH CONVERSATION |
| | Good morning. Today: Senate Republican calls Chuck Schumer ‘fuhrer’ • Parsing Trump’s new 17% tariff on Israel • Trump administration plans to pause $510 million in funding for Brown University. |
| | | | | | | President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on April 3. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images) |
| Opinion | Trump’s new tariffs on Israel are a BDS dream come true. Amid the swath of tariffs President Donald Trump announced this week: a 17% fee slapped on Israeli goods. The irony, writes our columnist Dany Bahar: The kind of economic blow this move by Trump — whom many have hailed as the most pro-Israel president of all time — will inflict on Israel has been a longtime goal of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. “For Israeli companies that export to the U.S., this is more than a policy shift,” Dany writes. “It’s a gut punch.” Read his essay ➤
Opinion | In a time of tariffs and uncertainty, this is the Jewish word we need to soothe our minds and souls. “As tariffs conquer the news and tank the stock market, and as many of us wonder what they will mean for our wallets, our world and our sanity, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the etymology of it all,” writes our language columnist Aviya Kushner. “The noun tariff comes from the Italian tariffa and from the Arabic taʽrīf, which means ‘notification.’” And in those roots is a surprising, deep tie to a foundational Jewish text. Read her essay ➤ |
| | Former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images) |
| And ➤ Here’s a tidbit from our senior columnist Rob Eshman: In his first public statement on the matter, former Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff said Thursday that he disagreed with his law firm’s decision this week to reach a settlement with the Trump administration in order to avoid punitive action.
“I disagree with the decision that my firm made to settle,” Emhoff said at a fundraising banquet for Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, where Rob was in attendance. “I wanted them to fight this patently unconstitutional executive order. I believe we must continually ask ourselves whether accommodation strengthens or weakens the very foundations that we are sworn to protect.”
Elsewhere in politics… Trump fired several officials on the National Security Council after meeting with the far-right activist Laura Loomer, “a self-described Islamophobe, conspiracy-theory promoter and ‘feisty Jewess.’” (JTA, Forward)
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno referred to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as “Führer Schumer,” using the title historically applied to Adolf Hitler in Germany. (Reuters)
15 Senate Democrats voted in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal to stop U.S. military sales to Israel. Speaking out against the proposal, Sen. Adam Schiff said, “At a time when … Palestinians are taking to the streets of Gaza to protest against Hamas, these resolutions send the wrong message, complicate negotiations, undermine Israel’s security and embolden Iran.” (Axios, Bluesky)
The U.S. Naval Academy restored a display honoring Jewish women graduates after it was removed before a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, raising questions over whether the exhibit was taken down in response to a Trump administration campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. (CNN, JTA) |
| | | | ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks on March 3 in New York City. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League) |
| Opinion | The ADL reversed its support for Trump’s student deportations. You should too. After initially welcoming the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University activist and green card holder, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt has walked back his support for Trump’s campaign against students and university staff involved in pro-Palestinian protests. And thank God he did, writes Rob Eshman: “Now that the largest and most influential Jewish civil rights organization has reconsidered its unjustifiable initial support for the detentions, it’s time for others who may also have been seduced into believing such draconian measures are ‘good for the Jews’ to speak out against them.” Read his essay ➤
Opinion | As Zionist Jews, we must condemn Trump’s campaign to deport students. Among those who should speak out, suggests Amanda Berman, CEO of Zioness: Zionists who adamantly disagree with the way that Khalil and other detained students have spoken about Israel. “We can be enraged and repulsed by everything someone stands for, and still know that if their legal rights can be transgressed, so can ours,” she writes. Read her essay ➤
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| | Students at Brown University walk through the main campus on March 19. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) |
| Also on campus… The Trump administration plans to freeze $510 million in federal grants and loans to Brown University, claiming the university has allowed the spread of rampant antisemitism on campus, following similar actions targeting Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and more. Reporting from pro-Palestinian protests at Brown last spring, our Mira Fox wrote: “Chants were focused on the activists’ demands — divestment not from Israel as a whole, but from companies involved in the oppression of Palestinians — and not on broader statements about Zionism or Israel’s existence.” (New York Times, Forward)
Hillel International’s CEO warned that Trump’s plans to deport pro-Palestinian students and cut school funding over campus antisemitism could backfire, urging due process and cautioning that Jewish students might be unfairly blamed. (JTA)
Tufts University filed a declaration asking a federal judge to order the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a detained Tufts graduate student, so that she can complete her degree. (Politico)
Öztürk’s lawyers demanded she be returned to Massachusetts from Louisiana, where she was relocated to a detention center following her arrest. In doing so, they follow a template set by the lawyers of Mahmoud Khalil, a detained Columbia graduate whose representatives argued for his case to be heard in New Jersey rather than Louisiana. (AP, NPR)
Plus: Two contrasting opinions, from The Harvard Crimson, about news that the Trump administration is reviewing $9 billion in federal funding to the Ivy League institution: “Trump’s funding threats are an affront to Jewish values,” writes senior Abigail Chachkes…
…while Harvard Divinity School graduate Shabbos Kestenbaum, who campaigned for Trump last fall, argues that “Harvard discriminated against me and other Jews,” so “Trump is right to threaten its funding.” |
| | | | | | Pankaj Mishra. (Courtesy of Pankajmishra.com) |
| So much to say about Israeli violence, so little to say about violence against Jews. A new book, titled The World After Gaza: A History, “is less historical than personal and often polemical,” writes our culture columnist Robert Zaretsky in a review, especially as author Pankaj Mishra offers a “puzzling treatment of the history of violence against Jews.” Mishra devotes many pages to the history of the Holocaust, but barely mentions the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023: He depicts multiple “scenes of maimed and massacred Palestinian civilians” from the war that followed, “but not one of the Israeli civilians who died in their homes on Oct. 7 or in Hamas tunnels since then.” Read the review ➤
Also in Israel… Zvika Klein, editor of The Jerusalem Post, was released from house arrest after being detained amid a broad Israeli police investigation into alleged government corruption involving Qatar. Israeli journalists across the political spectrum spoke out against his arrest. (JTA)
Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the communities most devastated by the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, reached an agreement with Israel’s government to have about $95 million invested in rebuilding. But in the months after the attack, our Arno Rosenfeld reported last October, Nir Oz’s residents were deeply divided over whether to return at all. (Times of Israel, Forward) |
| | WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
| | A vandalized Tesla Supercharger station on January 31 in San Diego, California. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images) |
| 🚗 One of the many new moral dilemmas created during Trump’s second term: Is painting a swastika on a Tesla because you think Elon Musk is a Nazi a hate crime? And if so, against whom? (New York Times)
👀 Mel Gibson’s gun rights will be restored by the Justice Department; they were stripped from the actor, infamous for his 2006 antisemitic tirade, after he pleaded “no contest” to a battery charge in 2011. (New York Times)
🇮🇱 A 3-year-old hiking with her parents in Israel made a surprising discovery: a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet. (New York Times)
🏠 A new Chicago museum will bring to life the apartments of families in public housing throughout the decades — including that of a Jewish family from the 1930s. (AP)
What else we’re reading ➤ “How Leonard Bernstein changed the canon” (Atlantic) “Christian Zionism hasn’t always been a conservative evangelical creed — churches’ views of Israel have evolved over decades” (Conversation) “My year of Jewish cooking” (Hey Alma) |
| | | | Actress Susan Hayward kissing Charlton Heston after he received an Oscar for Ben-Hur at the 32nd Academy Awards on April 4, 1960. (Archive Photos/Getty Images) |
| Happy 65 years since Ben-Hur won the Best Picture Oscar to those who celebrate! (All of us, right?) |
| Thanks to Benyamin Cohen for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Julie Moos for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com. |
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