Adam Fefer and Sivahn Sapirstein, June 2026
The second Trump administration’s anti-constitutional project was on full display in Minneapolis, specifically its disregard for civil liberties, demonization of immigrants based on falsehoods, and readiness to use lethal force against American citizens it retroactively labels terrorists.
At the heart of this project is a narrow American nationalism, one that privileges a racialized, Christian identity and frames the political empowerment and demographic growth of minorities as existential threats. For its proponents, the perceived severity of this threat legitimates and may even require an assault on constitutional rights to “reclaim” the nation.
Despite the effective exclusion of American Jews from this project, the Trump administration has used their concerns to justify its authoritarian agenda. Informed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther—a blueprint for targeting civil society organizations (CSOs) under the guise of combating antisemitism—the administration has used opposition to the Gaza war to criminalize protest, detain lawful permanent residents, and militarize American streets. This parallels developments in Israel, where the Gaza war has been used to suppress speech and deepen the state’s militarized control over Palestine.
The capacity of American political institutions—Congress, the judiciary, executive agencies that have not been overtaken by MAGA loyalists—to check the Trump administration’s efforts is limited. Indeed, the most visible examples of official Minneapolis dissent involved resignations by federal prosecutors, perhaps less a check on abuse than an unwillingness to go along with it.
By contrast, ordinary Americans have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to disrupt and even reverse federal crackdowns on their states. It is difficult to explain the recent withdrawal of ICE agents from Minnesota without mentioning protests, general strikes, and the sharing of ICE locations, among other creative, peaceful responses.
These are tactics of civil resistance, the use of nonviolent collective action to challenge injustice. Civil resistance works because it draws in large groups of participants across partisan lines, as in Minnesota, where over 100,000 protested and hundreds of businesses closed. As resistance mounts, those who actively or tacitly support the government—religious groups, business leaders, media personalities, even police officers—will be persuaded to shift their loyalties and defect. In Minnesota, Republican politician and attorney Chris Madel, who previously represented the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, ended his gubernatorial bid, defecting from a party that “support[s] the retribution on the citizens of our state.”
Both the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, in laying great emphasis on justice (tzedek), provide an array of resources to resist authoritarian violence. In Exodus (1:8–22), the Egyptian king, fearing Israelites’ demographic expansion, ordered Israelite midwives to perform infanticides. Not only did their refusal to carry out this injustice lead to the birth of Moses, but it constituted a powerful, ancient example of noncooperation. The call for Jews to reject injustice remains equally important today. Following this tradition, hundreds of rabbis, cantors, and others recently chanted in Washington D.C. that “ICE is an affront to Torah.”
The twentieth century is replete with examples of American Jewish civil resistance. Alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched from Selma to Montgomery, famously saying “Our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.” Heschel was a colleague of the philosopher Martin Buber, who distinguished treating others as objects (a relationship of ‘I–It’) from treating them as sacred (‘I–Thou’). This sacredness is rooted in Genesis (1:26-27), where all humans are created in the image of God (b’tzelem Elohim).
Buber and Heschel saw politics as a realm where every member is a ‘Thou.’ This vision sharply contrasts with seeing immigrants or even one’s political opponents as things that must be disposed of to cleanse the nation. Speaking recently in Minnesota, the conservative Rabbi Amy Eilberg echoed this Jewish tradition of human dignity, saying “the Torah command[s] us 36 times to champion the needs of the stranger [ger], the marginalized and the oppressed.”
Jewish resistance to xenophobic immigration policies—whether principled or driven more by concerns over our own exclusion—is also not new. In the 1890s, as Congress passed immigration restrictions targeting Russian Jews and Italian Catholics, the philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff wrote letters and met with congressmen and presidents, urging them not to legislate out of bigotry. During World War II, when large majorities of Americans opposed German Jewish emigration—many seeing them as covert German or Soviet spies—Jewish and Christian CSOs provided financial, legal, and physical protection.
The first Trump administration’s immigration crackdown drew broad Jewish criticism, including from the Anti-Defamation League, whose priorities have shifted markedly in the post‑October 7 landscape. In 2019, then 86-year-old Rabbi Arthur Waskow was arrested for blocking the entrance to Philadelphia’s ICE building to protest the detention of migrant children. Waskow fought against racial authoritarianism for over half a century, famously holding a multireligious, multiracial “Freedom Seder” in 1969. He long held that “repairing the world” (tikkun olam) required “enacting the future in the present.”
Jewish activists and intellectuals have not only resisted the exclusionary nationalisms behind their own persecution. They have also criticized Jewish nationalisms that justify using state violence to enforce messianic territorial claims and dispossess Palestinians. Israeli and diasporic Jews have for decades worked with Palestinians to resist the occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, protecting Palestinians during olive harvests from state intimidation and settler violence, conscientiously objecting to military service, and theatrically reenacting occupation.
American Jews continue to courageously reject the Trump administration’s anti-constitutional project. In Florida, senior citizens, including Holocaust survivors, have sought to physically shelter their Haitian caregivers—whom they compare to Anne Frank—from deportation. Meanwhile, the Nexus Project advocates that undermining constitutional rights—for example, of those who criticize Israel—will, far from protecting Jews, only empower authoritarian movements such as MAGA that traffic in antisemitism.
Enacting a just future in the present will be difficult so long as American politics is guided by falsehoods, xenophobia, and police violence. But this does not excuse us from the biblical duty to advance justice. By drawing on a rich set of traditions, and by using our networks to organize resources for the vulnerable, American Jews will and must play a key role in reversing the authoritarian tide.
