For the past week, Northwestern students have marched daily to demand that the university abolish the Northwestern Police force, which in 2019 cited nonviolent student protestors for demonstrating outside of Jeff Sessions, and to cut ties with Evanston Police, which in 2015 violently arrested a Black NU PhD student for driving his own car (which they alleged was stolen). Petition signatures, social media call-outs, and fruitless meetings between Black student leaders and administration have done little to move the NU leadership towards meaningful action. Instead, after months of promising to release NUPD’s budget, the university has refused transparency and demonized student protestors.

President Morty Schapiro’s October 19 email to the student body, entitled “Weekend Protests in Evanston,” begins with a vague commitment to “peaceful protests” but quickly decries recent actions as “expressions that have been anything but peaceful or productive.” Instead of engaging with students’ demands, President Schapiro condemned organizers for defacing property, alleged several falsehoods about NU Community Not Cops, and flung a baseless and damaging accusation of antisemitism against student activists.

As Jewish students and alumni, we are particularly disturbed by Morty’s false accusation of antisemitism to personally condemn student activists’ slogans and chants. He claimed that students’ use of, among other epithets, “piggy Morty” was “dangerously close to a longstanding trope against observant Jews like myself. Whether it was done out of ignorance or out of anti-Semitism, it is completely unacceptable.” We are outraged at this mischaracterization. The Black Panthers and other Black-led groups popularized the use of “pig” to refer to police and police sympathizers in the mid 1960s; in this context, the term has never singled out Jews. As such, it is both confusing and troubling to read Morty’s focus on antisemitism at the end of a community wide email about demands to abolish a racist police force.

There is a long, sordid history of white Jewish leaders using anti-Semitism as a cudgel to denigrate Black radical protest and sow divisions among communities otherwise allied in the fight for liberation. Morty’s weaponization of his Jewish identity is no different, and is meant to distract us from the cries for justice currently being led by Black abolitionists at Northwestern and legitimize anti-Black sanctions against them. A world free of police and incarceration is a world that keeps us as Jews safer from the forces of antisemitism. We know that the very white nationalists who have infiltrated police departments across the country despise all Jews just as they disproportionately brutalize Jews of color and Black and brown communities more generally. We will not allow spurious, willfully ignorant accusations of anti-Semitism to divide us from the ultimate goals of abolishing a police force rooted in racism and white supremacy.

Antisemitism has no place in our movements for liberation. And while white Jews are certainly targets of antisemitism, most violently and troublingly seen in the uptick in antisemitic and far-right violence emboldened by the Trump administration, white Jews also benefit from white supremacy. This is an inseparable part of understanding the reality of antisemitism in the 21st century –– that despite rising antisemitism under Trump, those of us who identify as white Jews are largely still protected by our whiteness. Morty, as a white Jew, does not face the kind of systemic brutality at the hands of police that Black and brown students and Evanston residents do. Alleging antisemitism in order to discredit a movement to abolish a racist police force also erases and delegitimizes Black Jews, for whom fighting antisemitism and anti-Blackness are inseparable pursuits.

Finally, we refuse to let debates over Israel-Palestine derail the necessary work of student organizers demanding the abolition of NUPD. International solidarity between Black activists and Palestinians has a long history and while our Jewish community may hold a variety of opinions on the nature and future of Zionism, we reiterate that criticism of Israel, condemnation of the brutal Israeli occupation, as well as rejection of Zionism (which also has ample historical precedent among anti-Zionist Jews) are not anti-Semitic.

As Jewish students and alumni, we unequivocally reject President Schapiro’s accusations of anti-Semitism and stand in solidarity with the abolitionists leading NU Community Not Cops. We lift up the Jewish principle of pikuach nefesh, which states that the preservation of human life overrides virtually any law, and even demands violation of law when life is at stake. We see through President Schapiro’s attempts to distract from the holy work of abolition and ask that our Jewish community and allies continue to show up for daily actions until Northwestern abolishes its police.