By Alan Hirsch, Chair Social Justice Committee
As the Social Justice Committee of Davis’s Congregation Bet Haverim, we cannot be silent as we witness the cultural appropriation of antisemitism by voices in our country that pander to and promote bigotry, racism, and intolerance. We challenge Trump’s claim he is protecting Jews by slashing University scientific research, both at UC Davis and academic institutions throughout the country. $8 Billion in cuts in university grant funding from the National Institute of Health for cancer and other bio-medical research is not even plausibly related to fighting antisemitism.
We object to stripping students and faculty of the right to free speech and court hearings in the name of antisemitism, particularly as part of deportation and visa issuance/renewal processes. Students have been arrested at home and on the street with no transparency as to why they are being held or deported, and in certain cases with the implication that they are being punished for their constitutionally protected freedom of speech.
We affirm that as Jews we support diversity and the right to freedom of inquiry and dissent, as we ourselves so long dissented in Christian and Muslim religious-majority-societies where we have lived.
We affirm a core Jewish value is to welcome the stranger. Therefore, we challenge the mistreatment and extrajudicial deportations and family separation of refugees and those seeking asylum on our shores from repressive regimes in Asian, and Central and South America.
We remember that most of our ancestors would not have survived had they been denied entry into the U.S. when they sought refuge from the terror in their native lands during the great Jewish migration between 1880 and 1920. Today’s bipartisan American laws on asylum, which the Trump regime is not complying with, were created to avoid repeating what happened during World War II when Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany were turned away at our shores only to be returned to Europe to die in a concentration camp. The current laws saved over half a million Jews fleeing Communist Russiato the US from the 1960’s through the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union.
Therefore, Jewish history requires us to condemn the demonization, defamation, and denigration of immigrants in the strongest terms. The demands for racial and ethnic minorities “to go back where they came from” reeks of racism and xenophobia. Ethnonationalism was at the heart of the antisemitism experienced by our parents and generations of our ancestors.
Jews, like all minorities, thrive best in pluralistic democracies, where people are judged as individuals, “by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin,” or by their religion.
Antisemitism must be fought along with all other forms of intolerance, and we seek other minorities as allies to do this in a common struggle, as we have done since the Civil Rights movement. In addition, the battle against antisemitism must never be deceptively deployed to support discrimination against others, or as a wedge issue with other minorities.
It may seem to some non-Jews in the U.S. that Jews have the ear of a would-be king (Trump) who claims he will protect us via his Project Esther, instrumentalizing antisemitism as a later-day Red Scare tactic. But this strategy document was largely written by Christians and even criticizes liberal Jews for their tolerance. In fact, Judaism includes an actual biblical Book of Esther. It is the story of a similar fickle ruler whose mind was easily changed by a pretty girl. The Mishnah Talmud (Pirke Avoth 2.3) warns: Princes “approach a man only when they need him, but they don't stay for him in times of his trouble.”
Davisite 
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