According to President Donald Trump, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish anymore.” Nor are Jewish Americans who vote for the Democratic Party. Nor are Jewish college students who oppose the Israeli government’s ongoing and intensifying genocide in Gaza. This rhetoric is not limited to the President. Leo Terrell, the head of the Department of Justice’s new Antisemitism Task Force, approvingly retweeted a neo-Nazi’s post on X which claimed that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” Republican Members of Congress—one of whom has affirmingly quoted Adolf Hitler—echoed these sentiments in committee hearings ostensibly focused on the well-being of Jews at American universities.
Much of the commentary on the right’s newfound concern for antisemitism has focused on its weaponization of the term to justify an authoritarian or a Christian nationalist agenda. For example, in early May the New York Times examined the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a program that, under the banner of combatting antisemitism, is designed to attack the Palestine solidarity movement with surveillance, deportation, and suppression. Similarly, many scholars have observed how the legal embrace of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which includes in its listed examples varied criticisms of Israel, allows it to be deployed as a sword to stifle speech in favor of Palestinian freedom.
In this post, however, I want to draw attention to a different aspect of this conservative crusade: how the administration is actively reshaping the contours of Jewish identity, claiming the power to determine who counts as a real Jew, and who does not. In this emerging framework, only those who are “real” Jews, or “good” Jews can define and experience antisemitism. By contrast, other Jews, especially anti-Zionist Jews, are “bad Jews.” Increasingly, law and economic power are being leveraged to materialize these distinctions. By virtue of understanding how Jewish identity is being constructed, we can more effectively confront the Trump administration’s broader white supremacist agenda, of which this “pro-Israel antisemitism” is a core part.
“Good Jews” and “Bad Jews”
Under the Christian right’s construction of Jewishness, “good” Jews are those who possess conservative political commitments—namely negative attitudes towards abortion rights, marriage equality, and immigration. They also embrace the right’s anti-Muslim politics and support President Trump electorally: “[w]ith your vote, I will be your defender, your protector,” Trump said in September 2024 at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Committee. They unequivocally support Israel and believe that the Republican Party is the only American political movement who embraces unbridled Zionism.
The construction of “good Jews” also relies on notions of religiosity. As David Schraub shows, Christian conservatives locate genuine Jewishness in the most religiously committed Jews, whose religiosity and political ideology models that of themselves. And unlike the “good” racialized Muslim identified in Neil Gotanda’s discussion of anti-Muslim racialization in American law, the “good” Jew maintains their religious commitments so long as they comport with white, Christian expectations.
Here, the Christian nationalist delineation of “good Jews” serves to immunize and insulate the right from accusations of antisemitism. Because politically conservative, deeply religious Jews are the embodiments of true Jewishness, they are the only subset of the American Jewish community with the authority to define antisemitism and capacity to experience it.
Opposite the “good” or “real” Jew is the Christian right’s construction of the “bad Jew.” Jews who vocally oppose Israel, hold leftist political commitments on issues of race, gender, and immigration, and/or embrace the label anti-Zionist are positioned as illegitimate Jews and thus not capable of experiencing antisemitism. As Israeli scholar Raz Segal notes, the Christian nationalist project proports that “Jews can only be Jews if they support Israel or do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment.” They are also depicted as hostile and treasonous to the West and white America.
The construction of “bad Jews” proceeds in two steps: first, anti- or non-Zionist Jews are pushed outside of Jewishness. Second, they are, in some sense, placed alongside racialized Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as anti-American supporters of terrorism.
In the first step, the Christian right—with help from some Jewish organizations—decouples anti-Zionist Jews from membership in the Jewish community. Anti-Zionist Jews are “Jew-hating Jews,” “traitors,” and “un-Jews.” Even liberal Zionist who publicly empathize with Palestinians, or criticize the President’s policy with regard to Israel, are deemed not Jewish. Take Chuck Shumer for example, whose support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza is well-documented but nonetheless was deemed “not Jewish” by Trump when he criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Predominately, though, the rhetorical removal of Jewish identity is reserved for those who reject Israel’s existence as an exclusivist, Jewish ethnostate.
In the second move, anti-Zionist Jews are depicted as supportive of Hamas and broadly oppositional to the United States. Consider, for instance, the Heritage Foundation’s treatment of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the leading Jewish anti-Zionist organization. In Project Esther, JVP is described as part of a “Hamas Support Network” that seeks “the destruction of capitalism and democracy.” They are a “Hamas Supporting Organization” that “poses a threat not simply to American Jewry, but to America itself.” Beyond JVP, the report traffics in the antisemitic language of conspiracy to frame the movement for Palestinian freedom as funded by a cabal of “masterminds,” some of whom, like Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, are Jewish.
But it is clear that, as JVP itself observes, “Project Esther [also] activates and thrives on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism,” alongside the marginalization of anti-Zionist Jews. As does the broader depiction of support for Palestine as violent. This imagery relies on a template of existing Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian racialization—including the specifically anti-Palestinian “terrorist” trope—that, as Noah Zatz illustrates, also often undergirds the conflation of calls for Palestinian freedom with antisemitism. Here, attacks on anti-Zionist Jews are integrated into the Christian right’s anti-Muslim program, and a “presumption of antisemitism” is levied primarily, but not exclusively, onto Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian advocates.
Formalizing the Good Jew/Bad Jew Binary
In recent years, the good/bad ideological construction of Jewish identity has increasingly been imposed with the force of law and bolstered by economic leverage in the United States—an approach that has been supercharged by the second Trump administration.
Take, for example, the landscape in American higher education. Through targeted investigations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and threats to research funding, the Trump administration has both imposed a narrow understanding of permissible Jewish identity, and used Jewish interests as pretext to attack universities. In response, campus leadership, in large part, have adopted a version the good Jew/bad Jew framework. University leadership has also embraced a narrative of last year’s encampment movement, and the student movement for Palestine writ large, that erases the significant participation of Jewish students. In its own defense, Harvard advanced the narrative that “protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza stem from prejudice against Jewish students.” Moreover, Harvard’s leadership pointed to its use of the IHRA definition and proscription of the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee as examples of protecting Jewish students. And just last week, in anticipation of a deal with the Department of Education, Columbia University adopted the IHRA definition and announced new collaborations with the Anti-Defamation League.
The Trump administration’s civil rights investigations into these universities also presuppose a singular Jewish experience on campus and define Jewish identity as oppositional to racial diversity and social justice. Indeed, in the Department of Justice’s letter to Harvard University on June 30, the institution’s past embrace of affirmative action was directly linked to its supposed tolerance of antisemitism.
Further, the suspiciously numbered Executive Order 14188, titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” reinvigorates the Trump administration’s reliance on the IHRA working definition used in a 2019 Order. As historian David Myers observed after Trump adopted the IRHA definition in his first term, these maneuvers may have the effect of removing some anti-discrimination protections from the sub-group of Jews deemed not validly Jewish.
The President’s mass deportation regime also relies upon this construction of Jewish identity. Recently, in a trial over the Trump administration’s attempted removal of pro-Palestine foreign students, a Department of Homeland Security lawyer revealed that the administration relied on the Canary Mission to target student. The Canary Mission, which holds itself out as an organization who seeks to prevent the “hatred” of Jews, has been criticized for doxxing and endangering Jewish students, as well as Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students, who participate in movements critical of Israel or Zionism.
While much of my analysis focuses on the Christian right’s structuring of Jewishness, the ideological construction of Jewish identity stretches beyond the work of the Trump administration. Major Jewish communal institutions—like the Anti-Defamation League—have marginalized and attacked the identity of anti-Zionist Jews, comparing them to far-right antisemites and framing them as not truly Jewish. These organizations have, in some cases, praised the Trump administration’s approach to antisemitism in higher education. Jewish institutional support for both the administration’s policies, and the division of Jews along ideological lines, has eased in the marketability and acceptability of the right’s construction of Jewish identity, as it provides the appearance of intra-communal endorsement.
Resisting the Weaponized Construction of Jewishness
Can the law reckon with this manipulative construction of Jewish identity? What are the implications of this project for the way civil rights law and other doctrines will defend or deny protection to American Jews? Can American Jews preempt the Christian right’s manipulation and division of Jewish identity into desirable and undesirable buckets—the “good Jew” and the “bad Jew”?
One possibility, suggested by Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, is to combat these harms through associational discrimination claims. Such claims, they argue, can be used to combat efforts to frame expressions of support for Palestine as anti-Jewish, thereby resisting the construction of anti-Zionist Jews as “bad Jews.” In the employment context, Jews who are fired or otherwise punished by employers for their association with Palestine might be able to frame such punishment as limiting Jewish expression.
Another intriguing possibility is to directly contest these constructions when they are embraced by institutions facing pressure from the Trump administration. In Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration, a collection of Jewish studies scholars authored an amicus brief compellingly rejecting the university’s reliance on a narrow understanding of valid Jewish identity. At the New School, Jewish students, faculty, and staff filed a Title VI complaint alleging that the university has discriminated against anti-Zionist Jewish students. In doing so, the complaint demonstrates how the New School drew ideological boundaries around which Jewish community members were deserving of institutional protection.
Lastly, the Jewish community can also stop its pursuit of definitional codifications in law, especially those that marginalize a large swath of American Jews. These measures advance the division of Jewish identity, empowering the Christian right’s redefinition of Jewishness and antisemitism.
