On the first night of Passover, when Jews around the world reflect and celebrate the Jewish people’s passage from oppression to freedom, my mind was preoccupied with the fate of Rümeysa Öztürk. Öztürk is a Turkish Fullbright Scholar now pursuing a degree in Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, where I lecture. As I sat down for the Passover Seder, she sat in deplorable conditions in an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, awaiting a hearing brought by her defense team to get her released or at least returned to the Northeast.
Öztürk’s visa was recently revoked and she was later abducted by ICE, whisked out of Massachusetts and detained in Louisiana. Her offense was co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper The Tufts Daily calling for the university to divest from Israeli companies. She is a fifth-year doctoral student whose research and teaching centers on children’s development and how they use social media in prosocial ways.
I watched the surveillance footage of her abduction off a street in Somerville in abject horror. She was surrounded by masked officers who took away her phone, handcuffed her and loaded her into an unmarked vehicle.
This scene could have been out of Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa or any current authoritarian regime. Equally harrowing is the fact that Öztürk was doxxed by the far-right Zionist group Canary Mission, who have publicized her name and the names of other students like Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student recently detained during his citizenship interview in Vermont. Mahmoud Khalil, an activist who helped organize student protests at Columbia, was allegedly on the top of a list that the Zionist group Betar handed to officials of the administration of President Donald Trump, who revoked his visa and are now moving to deport him. Betar uses a facial recognition tool called NesherAI, which was created by a Jewish software engineer and has been used to identify masked student protestors. Many student protestors had their names, pictures and profiles posted on these websites. In Öztürk’s case, her teaching information, including course time and name, was posted on Canary Mission.
The group Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism provided the ICE tip line calling for Jewish university students to file complaints against any pro-Palestinian student protesting the war in Gaza.
It is disturbing that Jewish students are turning in their fellow students. Many Jews, myself included, had family members whose names were on a list before mass deportations to concentration camps occurred.
I grew up with rampant antisemitism under the Apartheid regime in South Africa. The image of Öztürk’s abduction is seared in my brain. It is an image from my childhood and early adulthood of a brutal fascist regime that disappeared people, detained people without trial and murdered people without consequence. The authoritarian Trump administration is using antisemitism as a pretext for our rapid slide into fascism and repression. Not in my name!
I have never been more fearful to be a Jew in America. It is never safe for Jews to be in the crosshairs of fascism. This month it is Black and brown students on visas; next month it could be any of us. We are all at risk of disappearing for what we write, what events we attend, what we stand up for or who we stand against.
I write in my name and in the name of my like-minded Israeli family members, who love their country and oppose the policies and practices of the current Likud government.
I write in my name and in the name of all who believe in basic human rights, civil liberties, freedom of speech, the rule of law and due process for all people.
Every Jewish person, every Jewish student, every Jewish faculty member, no matter their beliefs, politics or position, should condemn these violations of basic civil rights and due process and shout out, “Not in my name!”
