I’m an Arab and Jewish Attorney. I Quit DOJ When I Saw Who They Were Accusing of Antisemitism.

By Lily Sawyer-Kaplan

May 29, 20255:40 AM

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In April, I resigned from my position at the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division for a simple reason: The department’s leadership is directing attorneys to use antisemitism as a pretext to undermine free speech.

The Civil Rights Division was founded in the late 1950s to enforce the nation’s civil rights statutes and address discrimination in all aspects of American life. I joined the division in November 2024 with the goal of contributing to that mission. For decades, the division has been a critical tool in the fight for this country’s ideals of just and democratic government and for the protection of civil liberties for all. But from my perspective as both a Jewish American and an Arab American, the administration’s use of that power made it untenable to do that important work on behalf of the American people.

I am unusually situated in terms of my ethnicity and family background. My father’s side of the family immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in the early 20^th century to escape violent pogroms and the lack of opportunity for Jewish people. They settled in New York, living in predominantly Jewish communities in Queens and the Bronx. By my father’s generation, my family had attained middle-class status and moved to the Long Island suburbs. My grandfather spent his career as an accountant at MetLife. But throughout his career he was passed over for promotions in favor of Christian colleagues. My grandparents viewed the Civil Rights Movement struggles of the 1960s with solidarity and joined marches on Washington. On my mother’s side, my great-grandparents’ families left Syria as the first World War broke up the Ottoman Empire and European powers redrew borders and installed new colonial rule over the region. Some of my family stayed behind and were later forced to flee Palestine in 1948 in a later wave of colonial boundary reshaping.

The current leadership in this office purports to “protect” the Jewish side of my family from antisemitism. It is true that antisemitism is historically rooted and ongoing. Antisemitism has shaped my family’s path in this country and abroad. But that reality does not justify what this administration is doing in the name of countering antisemitism. Efforts to combat antisemitism cannot come at the expense of a functioning liberal democracy. The Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric will not keep Jews safe.

For one, the administration has adopted a controversial and contradictory definition of antisemitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism suggests that: 1) calling the state of Israel racist, 2) drawing parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany, and 3) holding Jewish people accountable for Israel’s actions are forms of antisemitism. This definition conflates Jewish people with the state of Israel while also maintaining that conflating Jewish people with the state of Israel is itself antisemitic. Ken Stern, one of the original authors of the IHRA, has spoken out about the misuse of the IHRA and its co-option by the far right.

With the adoption of this definition as the marker of discriminatory action, the administration equates critique of Israel with critique of Jewish people. Thus justified, DOJ and attorneys across the administration have been targeting universities, colleges, and medical schools for permitting, or not undermining, basic free speech and protest movements on their campuses. Since DOJ convened its Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in January, it has given notice to 60 universities that they are being monitored or investigated.

The administration is also targeting individuals for their speech, detaining Mahmoud Khalil and others for exercising their right to freedom of expression. The administration has conceded that Khalil has committed no crime. His detention will not keep Jewish people safe. To the contrary, Jewish students, like all students, need college campuses to be a safe environment where students can learn and speak out across lines of difference, without fear of punishment. Revoking federal funding or surveilling and deporting members of university communities for their political views will not build campuses free from bigotry. Instead, it will create campuses where more community members are exposed and vulnerable. Protections for civil rights and civil liberties are protections for Jews. So current efforts under Title VI and other federal enforcement statutes endanger Jews. That is true even when they are done in the name of keeping Jews safe.

It is thus no surprise that the leaders undertaking these actions have embraced white nationalism and antisemitic conspiracies. Both President Donald Trump and his DOGE-overseeing adviser, Elon Musk, have promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories, aligned with white nationalists, and elevated antisemitic appointees. They do this while touting support for Israel, the IHRA definition, and deportations of activists as key remedies to antisemitism. When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer defended Mahmoud Khalil in a tweet, Trump declared that Schumer is “no longer Jewish, now a Palestinian.” In Trump’s view, the term Palestinian is a slur instead of an ordinary signifier of a group of people. Trump is also claiming that Jewishness is something that does not belong to Jews, and is instead mutable by authority figures and contingent upon obedience to a certain set of ideological tests. Horrifyingly, Leo Terrell, the head of DOJ’s antisemitism task force, shared a tweet by a prominent white supremacist that lauded the president’s “ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.”

As historian Tim Snyder put it, “Jews in the United States are being instrumentalized in an effort to build a more authoritarian American system. The real and continuing history of the oppression of Jews is transformed into a bureaucratic tool called ‘antisemitism’ which is used to suppress education and human rights—and so, in the end, to harm Jews themselves.”

The Department of Justice is not currently tasked with doing the good and important work of countering antisemitism and discrimination in the United States. Rather, the machinery of this institution is being used by the Trump administration to undermine civil rights and civil liberties. For instance, Rumeysa Ozturk was detained for six weeks in Louisiana for expressing a political opinion—writing an op-ed in a student paper criticizing the Israeli government. Mohsen Mahdawi was detained for expressing support for peace in the Middle East.

In the name of protecting Jews, the administration has undermined critical academic freedom and support for lifesaving research. At Columbia, a new official will oversee faculty hiring and curriculum decisions in both Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies programs. Scientists and doctors have found their cancer, Parkinson’s, and infectious disease research projects terminated because of “unsafe antisemitic actions.”

These actions undermine the safety of Jewish Americans and Arab Americans like myself. They are antithetical to the mission of the Department of Justice that I was briefly so proud to serve.