Jewish Currents: “We Need New Jewish Institutions,” and “How Support for Palestine Became a Hate Crime”

On December 5th, 2023, a New York University junior and pro-Israel student activist named Bella Ingber took the podium at a House Republicans news briefing on campus antisemitism to describe her experience at school in the months since October 7th. At the peak of her three-minute testimony, Ingber, whose Star of David necklace hung below a sharply pressed white collar, told the gathered politicians in an impassioned voice that she had been “physically assaulted in NYU’s library” while “wearing an American/Israeli flag,” lamenting that her “attacker still roam[ed] freely throughout the campus.”

At that point, Ingber was already a plaintiff in a lawsuit against NYU, filed with two other students, claiming that the university had turned a blind eye to rampant antisemitism on campus and citing the library incident as one such example. The altercation, which took place during a pro-Israel sit-in on November 7th of that year, had also received a fair amount of media attention: Pro-Israel outlets The Algemeiner and Israel National News reported that a male student, later identified as senior Elias Lopez, was arrested after he slammed the library exit turnstile on Ingber’s thumb and punched another sit-in participant, 31-year-old Benjamin Castro, who was filming the incident on his iPhone. A supporter of Ingber had uploaded Castro’s footage to YouTube, the title announcing that it showed Lopez “Punch[ing] Jews at Peaceful Sit In.”

Yet the 90-second video—and other footage from that day—does not appear to feature an assault. It begins with Ingber standing in the foreground, her brown hair pulled neatly into a claw clip, her shoulders draped in a flag that is half American Stars and Stripes and half Israeli Magen David. As other students study in the background, Israeli flags hanging from their tables, Ingber is engaged in a back-and-forth with a tank top–clad Lopez, who stands a few feet away. He tells her he doesn’t care what she has to say, because she’s a “new Brooklyner,” and then turns to leave the library. “Whatever, Palestine will be free from you eventually,” he says in a singsong as he departs.

These comments agitate Ingber, who repeatedly demands, “What does that mean?” Conscious of the camera—during the argument, she faces the lens, asking, “You got that, right?”—she follows Lopez towards the exit, continuing to call after him. He passes through the security gates and turns around, offering one more barb: “If you’re indigenous, then go give yourself skin cancer,” he says, forcefully closing the gate’s turnstile behind him. She reacts: “Oh my god, he just slammed that on me.” Later, she would tell police officers that Lopez purposefully slammed the gate on her hand multiple times, but additional security camera footage from the library shows him firmly closing it just once. From the available footage, it’s not clear if the gate hit her body.

Ingber catches up with Lopez on the sidewalk, trailed by Castro, still filming. As she accuses Lopez of slamming the gate on her, he turns around, looking bewildered to find her behind him. “The turnstile?” he asks. He begins to tease Castro by pretending to punch the camera. Then he appears to grab the phone. A struggle ensues; the image dissolves into blur; a security guard shouts in the background. Security footage from nearby buildings shows Lopez trying to grab the phone out of Castro’s hand, but it doesn’t show him punching Castro. (Certainly, he doesn’t hold Castro in a headlock, as Castro—a photographer who had offered to support the pro-Israel students—would later claim in an interview with prosecutors.) Instead, as Lopez goes for the phone, Castro grabs him in a bear hug and slams him onto the ground. (Attorneys for Ingber did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. Castro could not be reached.)

NYU personnel appeared aware of these facts: An email NYU administrators sent to the school’s board of trustees, which later turned up in court files, said that while news reports gave “the impression of an unprovoked attack,” in reality, “Student 2 [Ingber] continued to follow and engage with Student 1 [Lopez] despite the attempts by Campus Safety to prevent a confrontation.” While Lopez had shut the gate “forcefully,” Ingber “was not ‘violently attacked.’” They also acknowledged that it wasn’t clear if Lopez had assaulted Castro, but said that Castro had “body-slammed” Lopez. Still, when police arrived, Lopez was the only one who was arrested. (NYU did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Twenty-three-year-old Lopez is still grappling with how that day changed the course of his life. “I’ve thought about it so many times—I almost didn’t go to the library that day,” he told me recently. But he did, and on his way out, he was struck by the mash-up of the Israeli and American flags and couldn’t resist asking about it. Lopez associates the American flag in part with the expulsion of his ancestors from Mexican Texas when the US annexed the territory in the 1840s. “We really have a mixed history with that flag,” he said.

Lopez wasn’t involved in campus activism, but he was a political science student in tune with current events, and in the month before entering the library that November day, he had come to see the US’s support for Israel’s unfolding military campaign in Gaza—at that point already classified by some scholars as a genocide—as a continuation of an insidious history of American colonialism that affected his Mexican ancestors. He wanted to know: What did it mean to combine the American and Israeli flags? Were the protesters aware that both countries were built on the dispossession of people whose presence preceded them? Was that, in fact, what they were cheering on?

At a tering 6’3”, with cascading dark curls, Lopez has a penchant for sarcastic humor and a confident manner that belies his relative youth. He’s considering a career in law, which seems fitting: When we first met in midtown Manhattan in January, he told me the story of the library incident and its aftermath in exacting detail, often stopping to provide careful, technical explanations of various legal procedures. As he will readily acknowledge, he likes to argue, and not always delicately. “I’m a little hotheaded, I’m a little loud,” he told me. But, he insisted, when he began talking with the students in the library that day, he was seeking genuine political engagement.

When the students reacted angrily to his questions, he began to lose his patience. The conversation turned tense, which is where the video starts, with his quip calling Ingber a “new Brooklyner.” (Lopez told me this comment was a nod to the fact that the state of Israel was founded by newcomers from the West, though it also echoes a common online talking point implying that all modern Israelis are Jewish American transplants.) But he was trying to disengage; that’s why he firmly closed the gate as Ingber was following him out of the library. He maintains that he never hit Castro and only grabbed his phone to stop the recording.

After police arrested Lopez that day, he spent the night in a cold cell; he hadn’t brought his coat to campus, as it had been unusually warm for November. In the morning, at his arraignment on multiple misdemeanor charges of assault and harassment, his public defender seemed confident that the prosecutors wouldn’t bother pressing minor charges against an NYU student with a clean record.

But Lopez, having watched a media firestorm erupt over anti-war protests and campus antisemitism in the past month, knew better. “It is not going to get dropped. They are going to try to push it,” he recalls telling the lawyer. He was right. In a few months’ time, despite having access to security footage that troubled Ingber’s and Castro’s account of the fight, Manhattan District Attorney (DA) Alvin Bragg’s office would charge Lopez with a hate crime—employing a statute intended to protect minorities from serious acts of racist violence as a means to escalate his case to a felony.

Lopez was arrested in the early days of an accelerating crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights. In the weeks and months after the October 7th attacks, universities disbanded student clubs and fired nontenured faculty, media outlets severed ties with journalists, and hotels canceled planned conferences, all in the name of fighting antisemitism. From the start, this repressive response also included a criminal crackdown, in which police and prosecutors sought to stick protestors with serious felonies rather than the misdemeanor charges typical for civil disobedience.

Last year, for example, 26 protestors who held up traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge were charged with a litany of offenses by the San Francisco District Attorney, including felony conspiracy. Lawyers in the Bay Area “definitely feel that folks on the side of Palestinian liberation get treated differently” by the justice system, said Jeff Wozniak, a criminal defense attorney who represents protestors as a member of the National Lawyers Guild. In places like New York City, where prosecutors’ offices are generally hesitant to bring criminal charges against protesters, local civil rights defense attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen described seeing a new “willingness on the part of prosecutors to treat garden-variety protest behavior as inherently dangerous, inherently antisemitic, inherently criminal.”

Palestine Legal, which supports pro-Palestine protestors facing repression, received 188 intake requests for help defending against criminal charges between October 2023 and October 2024. Before October 7th, the criminal intake numbers had been so negligible that the organization didn’t bother to track them, a spokesperson told me.

In a small but significant portion of these criminal cases, the defendant, like Lopez, has been charged with a hate crime—representing a relatively novel use of a statute that is widely understood as a civil rights protection. To charge someone with a hate crime, prosecutors must prove that the accused not only committed a crime—whether it be vandalism, assault, or murder—but did so due to an evident bias against the victim’s identity. (The types of crimes that are eligible, as well as the characteristics that are protected—such as race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion—vary by state.) A “hate crime enhancement” on a charge can bump a misdemeanor to a felony, increasing the potential sentence.

The use of these charges in relation to Israel/Palestine is not unprecedented: In September 2021, two men were charged with felony assault as a hate crime for allegedly attacking Jews at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles the previous May, during protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza—though criminal proceedings eventually revealed that the incident had been a two-way fight, potentially started by the pro-Israel diners. After October 7th, such charges have proliferated as protest activity has ramped up. “In the stories we’re hearing from jails, from the streets, from campuses, we can see that hate crime laws are now a favored tool of both the state and the Israel lobby,” said Liz Jackson, a lawyer at Palestine Legal.

Lopez is one of 17 individuals identified by Jewish Currents since October 7th—across federal and state courts, from the East Coast to the West—who have been charged with antisemitic or anti-Israel hate crimes on the basis of pro-Palestine activism or speech. In some of the cases, like Lopez’s, video footage or other evidence suggests that the defendant may not have committed any underlying crime, but police and prosecutors were still eager to book them on serious charges. In others, there is more substantial evidence that a crime was committed, like vandalism, but by designating it a “hate crime,” prosecutors have construed political actions against Zionism or the state of Israel as anti-Jewish.

As one judge acknowledged at a preliminary hearing for a case in Contra Costa County, California—in which a Palestinian man was charged with hate crimes for stealing and burning a Zionist counterprotestor’s Israeli flag—“the statute here, the way it was drafted, wasn’t designed to make the sort of fine distinction that people involved in this issue make . . . between Zionists and Jews and Israeli citizens.” As if to underscore his point, at least three of those charged with antisemitic hate crimes in the cases identified by Jewish Currents are themselves Jewish.

Such decisions are influenced by a well-funded ecosystem of Israel advocacy groups that amplify alleged antisemitic incidents in the media and appeal to institutions to punish the accused. “The immediate, default media framing is to give credence to the allegation that speech critical of Israel or critical of Zionism is antisemitism,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. “This has everybody on the defensive. Nobody wants to be accused of supporting or enabling antisemitism.”

DA offices have received significant pressure from local pro-Israel groups to apply hate crime charges to protest-related incidents—and police and prosecutors have expended significant resources on such cases, even when they involve relatively minor allegations.

Despite this, DAs have had trouble actually securing hate crimes convictions: Judges and grand juries have mostly tossed out charges, or juries have voted to acquit defendants. But by that point, those facing charges have already been significantly impacted. They have been identified as perpetrators of hate across multiple media sources—including, at times, in official DA or Department of Justice press releases—and have lost jobs, been suspended from school, or used significant resources to pay bail or legal fees.

“Part of the lawfare repression strategy is that the legal process itself is the punishment,” said Jackson. “A criminal defendant who’s totally innocent can still be dragged through a terrifying, miserable process that can ruin their life.”

To be sure, hate crime charges since October 7th have not been reserved for pro-Palestine protesters. A Chicago man who stabbed a six-year-old Palestinian American boy the week after the Hamas-led attacks was convicted of murder as a hate crime in February. And, as in the past, defendants continue to be charged with clearly antisemitic hate crimes unrelated to Palestine, like sending Nazi-coded threats to Jewish clergy or attacking congregants outside of synagogues. But the ease with which the laws have been mobilized to menace those associated with a popular anti-war movement raises questions about the value of hate crime statutes as a tool for justice.

Indeed, progressive critics have warned for decades that such statutes were at least as likely to be used against marginalized people as to protect them. This did not deter diverse coalitions of activists from enshrining criminal penalties for hate crimes in state law across the country—a push led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is responsible for drafting model hate crimes legislation that has been widely adopted. Though the organization originally pursued this work separately from its Israel advocacy, the statutes have now become useful in its current project of repressing anti-Zionism.

As the right increasingly cloaks its racist, authoritarian aims in anti-discrimination discourse—claiming that the dismantling of the liberal university and even the deportation of immigrants is necessary for the safety of a Jewish minority—it is becoming clear that the laws are an effective tool with which to throttle the left.

“There is a concerted movement to criminalize activism for Palestinian rights, and in that context hate crime charges are often a way of intensifying and escalating punishment,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University who has extensively studied hate crimes. With the Trump administration pledging in February to pursue more federal hate crime charges against pro-Palestine activists, and more states adopting a definition of antisemitism that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish animus, these recent prosecutions may mark the beginning of a chilling new legal paradigm.

In 1981, in response to a documented rise in anti-Jewish vandalism, the ADL drafted a model statute for what would come to be called hate crimes legislation. The law, designed for adoption in state legislatures, specified that perpetrators who targeted victims for “personal characteristics” like race, religion, or national origin, or who went after religious institutions or community centers, would face more serious charges and harsher penalties, in recognition of the way these crimes intimidated a broader community.

While the issue of hate crimes would eventually became associated with shocking murders and brutal assaults—like the 1998 killing of Matthew Shephard, a gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming—the ADL’s initial goal was to draw attention to more modest incidents, like swastika graffiti or the desecration of Jewish tombstones, according to the scholar Clara Lewis, author of Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes. “None of the more serious crimes were in there,” David Raim, the ADL lawyer who drafted the model legislation, told Lewis. “The thought was those activities were punished enough by the law as is. This was trying to make low-level offenses, misdemeanors, into felonies.”

The ADL’s campaign against antisemitic vandalism emerged at a time when other communities were also seeking policy remedies for pervasive attacks and harassment. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, amid threats from increasingly organized white power groups, organizations like the NAACP, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium joined the hate crime legislation movement. (By the mid-’90s, the coalition added sexual orientation and gender to the list of protected characteristics they hoped to enshrine in the statutes.)

But the ADL remained the driving force, organizing the coalition and setting its top-line agenda. The effort quickly saw enormous success: By 1990, 23 states added hate crime statutes; today, all but two states have adopted them. The coalition also succeeded in passing significant legislation at the federal level, like the 2009 Matthew Shephard and James Byrd, Jr., Act, which allows the federal government to step in and prosecute an offense as a hate crime in any state.

The success of hate crimes legislation was especially striking in an era defined by right-wing backlash to social movements, and reflected the laws’ contradictory character. As legal scholar Terry Maroney wrote in a 1998 article, the hate crimes strategy relied on a fusion of two traditionally opposed political tendencies: the civil rights movement, which sought to expand the legal rights of minorities, and the crime victims’ advocacy movement, a conservative effort that sought to restrict the rights of defendants in court for the sake of victims—itself a reaction against expanded due process protections from the civil rights movement. “[Hate crime laws] allowed politicians to simultaneously appear tough on crime and pro-civil rights,” said Sinnar.

Today, the actual impact of the hate crime campaign is unclear. Changes in rates of bias-motivated violence aren’t easy to measure, in part due to police departments’ longtime reluctance to report data on the issue. But study after study has shown that imposing longer sentences for certain crimes has a negligible effect on deterrence. Indeed, a Movement Advancement Project (MAP) report co-released with the ADL and 15 other civil rights organizations in 2021 directly acknowledged this limitation: “There is little to no evidence that harsher sentencing reduces crime—meaning there is little to no evidence supporting the central tool of these policies.”

Still, the ADL has insisted on the symbolic power of its flagship legislation. “When you’re talking about murders, adding years to somebody who’s already going to be probably in jail for the rest of his life is not meaningful,” Steven Freeman, a longtime ADL civil rights lawyer, said on a New York Times podcast on hate crime laws in March 2021. “But talking about it as a hate crime, that message is an appropriate message for us to be sending.”

That message can come at a cost to those already most impacted by the criminal justice system. The 2021 MAP report found that “hate crimes reported by state law enforcement are disproportionately listed as having Black perpetrators,” even as national studies consistently show that most hate crimes are committed by white people.

“It’s not like the systemic biases within the police or prosecutors’ offices go away when it comes to hate crimes,” said Sinnar. The laws can also easily be appropriated by conservatives: In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, six states have passed laws that include “police officer” as a “protected class” in their hate crime statutes. (Two pro-Palestine protesters in Louisiana were arrested last year on “hate crime against law enforcement” charges.)

American Jews can hold a contradictory position within this system, given that the majority of them—unlike some of their partners in hate crimes coalitions—do not face increased risk of police violence or biased treatment by prosecutors, or live in neighborhoods disproportionality impacted by mass incarceration. Jews may also feel more comfortable reporting bias incidents to police, which can lead to better representation in hate crime data as compared to other groups. “There’s a tremendous discrepancy between the Jewish American community’s relationship with law enforcement and their comfort in reporting, and that of the Arab American community, which has a strained relationship with law enforcement due to historic targeting and profiling,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute.

This has sometimes made hate crimes against Jews a convenient rhetorical tool for those trying to temper criminal justice reforms. In New York, after a 2020 measure limited the court’s ability to require cash bail for most lower-level offenses—making it less likely that defendants would sit in jail simply because they were poor—conservative and centrist lawmakers, as well as prosecutors and police, seized on a series of high-profile antisemitic hate crimes committed by Black perpetrators as a pretext to roll back the reform. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told The Times of Israel that “there should be no bail” at all for anyone who commits a hate crime. Ultimately, the legislature went on to add more than 30 offenses to the law that would be exceptions to the “no cash bail” rule—including certain hate crimes.

Meltzer-Cohen described today’s weaponization of hate crime statutes against pro-Palestine protesters as a predictable use of a type of law that was already inattentive to power dynamics—but still a perversion of their intention. “Hate crimes legislation rests upon the assumption that there are certain categories of people who require extra protection,” they said. But police and prosecutors are acting on the “fundamental misapprehension” that protestors opposing Israel’s war—people who have been shunned by most American institutions and faced relentless targeting and doxxing by well-funded Zionist groups—are the ones with the power, and must be punished for the protection of Jews.

Lopez spent the rest of the fall 2023 semester waiting to see whether the DA would pursue the charges against him. In the meantime, he also faced disciplinary proceedings at NYU: A week after the incident, an administrator informed him that he would be suspended for a full year, beginning the following semester. (Ingber also was called into a disciplinary meeting for following Lopez out of the library, even as security officers urged her to stop; there is no public record of her receiving a suspension.) Lopez did his best to prepare, securing a full-time job as an interpreter at a home care company for the time he would be out of school.

As the semester drew to a close, his family begged him to come home to Texas for Christmas, but he felt anxious about flying with criminal charges pending. So he spent Christmas alone, still awaiting news from the DA. Some of his friends stopped talking to him, because they feared reputational damage from hanging out with someone accused of an antisemitic crime, he said. It made for a lonely time. “My whole life was up in the air,” he said.

But when Lopez received no formal notice of suspension, he quit his job and registered for spring classes. As the semester wore on, he started to hope that no news was good news: Perhaps the DA would let his charges expire, and NYU would allow him to finish out the semester and graduate. Instead, within a few days at the end of February, he received an email from an NYU administrator asking him to come to a formal disciplinary meeting, and a call from his attorneys letting him know that his misdemeanor charges would be upgraded to felony hate crimes and presented to a grand jury for indictment. “It just hit me, one after the other,” he said. On February 28th, his 22nd birthday, the panic sent his heart rate so high that he went to the emergency room. “The nurses were all freaking out,” he said. “They thought I was on drugs.”

The DA’s decision to bring hate crime charges followed months of lobbying by Ingber and her legal representatives. At an interview with prosecutors on December 7th, 2023, Ingber apparently told the assistant district attorneys, according to their notes, that she wanted Lopez “to be charged to the fullest extent of the law because it’s a hate crime and anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitism.”

A few days later, a lawyer from the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, which was representing Ingber and other students in their antisemitism lawsuit against NYU, followed up by sending Manhattan Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Jaclyn Yoselevich a memo of the firm’s “research” on how Lopez’s comments to Ingber, calling her a “new Brooklyner” and referencing “skin cancer,” had shown antisemitic animus. (A significant portion of the memo consisted of screenshots of a Reddit forum called “ProIran,” in which users joked about Israelis of European descent being more susceptible to skin cancer than Palestinians.)

The firm appeared dissatisfied with the prosecutors’ pace and attention to the case: On January 25th, Marc E. Kasowitz, the head of the firm, personally wrote to Bragg, the DA, urging the office to treat the alleged assault as a hate crime.

For Sean Fabi, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who defended Lopez, these interactions suggested that the DA’s office was allowing a private firm to feed them a legal analysis, rather than making their own determination. While such lobbying is not unheard of, and ADAs are required to communicate with a victim through their attorneys if they have legal representation, Fabi said he was struck by the way the ADAs appeared to be parroting research from the Kasowitz memo in meetings, without being able to offer their own explanation for why Lopez’s comments qualified as hateful.

Since the firm had a vested financial and political interest in the case—a hate crime charge against Lopez would aid their lawsuit claiming that NYU permitted antisemitism on its campus—Fabi believes that the DA’s use of their work was “obviously unethical.” (Doug Cohen, a spokesperson for Alvin Bragg’s office, countered that the office has an “ethical obligation . . . to review all evidence” presented by “the lawyers representing victims and defendants,” but said the firm’s input “did not guide our decision making.” Because the case has now been sealed, he could not provide more specifics.)

Later that year, public pressure over alleged antisemitic incidents also appeared to influence Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office in its pursuit of a more high-profile case. On June 12th, 2024, activists vandalized the homes of four members of the Brooklyn Museum’s leadership, dousing doors and facades in red paint, writing the words “blood on your hands,” and drawing the circled A anarchism symbol and an inverted red triangle. (The latter is a symbol adopted by some Palestine solidarity activists, referencing Hamas propaganda videos from Gaza in which triangles identify invading Israeli tanks and soldiers as military targets.)

At museum director Anne Pasternak’s home, activists hung a banner calling her a “white-supremacist Zionist.” The anonymous activists said in a communiqué that they were responding to the brutal arrests of protesters two weeks before, as they occupied the museum’s lobby, demanding its divestment from Israel. (The Brooklyn Museum has denied that it called the police on protestors, while activists insist that they saw a museum security guard make the call to police.) The vandalism immediately drew condemnation from local and national politicians—including a denouncement on the Senate floor from majority leader Chuck Schumer—and media accounts reinforced the claim that the targets had been selected because they were Jewish.

Even after reporting in The Forward clarified that of the four officials, only Pasternak was Jewish, the three people arrested that fall—Taylor Pelton, Gabriel Schubiner, and Sam Seligson, the latter of whom says he had no involvement in the vandalism and was on the scene observing as a journalist—were charged with “criminal mischief as a hate crime.” (Both Seligson and Schubiner are Jewish.)

Gonzalez’s office and the New York Police Department proved willing to devote serious resources to the case. The prosecution presented testimony to the grand jury from 14 detectives and four other police officers detailing how they had tracked down suspects through surveillance video and home raids. Ron Kuby, a prominent civil rights lawyer who is representing Seligson, said these efforts represent “an incredible amount of investigatory time,” suggesting that Gonzalez’s office was treating this “glorified graffiti case” more like a murder case.

“Most homicides don’t get a quarter of this attention,” he said. Indeed, during the grand jury proceedings, the ADA assigned to the case introduced several additional charges, including “making a terroristic threat as a hate crime,” which carries mandatory prison time and which Kuby called “a huge stretch under the laws that presently exist.” (A spokesperson for Gonzalez’s office said that the DA cannot comment on open cases.)

Lawyers for the Brooklyn Museum defendants attri­bute the severity of the prosecution’s approach in part to the Brooklyn DA’s desire to appease a vocal pro-Israel constituency. Elsewhere, defense attorneys have reported that outsized media attention on alleged antisemitic incidents has affected their cases. In California’s Contra Costa County, in the East Bay, a man named Christopher Husary—the child of Palestinian immigrants to the US—was arrested at a January 2024 ceasefire protest and charged with robbery and arson for allegedly grabbing and burning a counterprotester’s Israeli flag.

According to Husary’s lawyer, Nathan Peterson, the Contra Costa DA’s office faced a “bombardment of pressure” from local pro-Israel activists. The woman who owned the flag told The Jewish News of Northern California that it had been an “heirloom,” formerly owned by a deceased local civil rights activist, and said she hoped Husary would be charged with a hate crime.

As part of the pretrial discovery process, the prosecution sent the defense a bevy of voicemails in which Jewish community members urged the DA’s office to “throw the book at this guy” because “they weren’t safe,” Peterson said. “That really did affect the tenor of the prosecution,” he told me.

Husary himself insisted in police interviews that he was not motivated by any anti-Jewish animus, according to the investigating officer’s testimony at a preliminary hearing in June. In fact, he told the officer about his grandparents in Bethlehem, who supported themselves by selling knitted yarmulkes to their Jewish neighbors, with whom they were close. He also explained that he understood Zionism to be an ideology, not a religion or ethnicity, and that this ideology was responsible for mass killing in Gaza. Still, Husary was given hate crime enhancements on both of his charges.

In certain districts, defense lawyers say, the effort put into prosecuting minor crimes by pro-Palestine protesters stands in sharp contrast to the lax approach taken to acts of violence against them. In May 2024, a local rabbi and real estate developer (and, notably, a relative of the late right-wing extremist Meir Kahane) was arrested in Manhattan for assault after allegedly bumping protestors with his car outside the home of a Columbia University trustee. But six months later, Bragg’s office allowed the charges to expire under speedy trial requirements, effectively declining to pursue the case. In Brooklyn, Gonzalez quickly downgraded the charges against a banking executive accused of punching a woman wearing a keffiyeh, from a felony to a misdemeanor.

In discussing this case and another from Brooklyn, in which a local attorney was not charged with a hate crime after allegedly assaulting and pepper-spraying a participant in a stoop sale raising money for families in Gaza, Kuby said he sees a double standard at work. “I’m not particularly comfortable calling for hate crimes prosecutions against anybody, but I do think that people need to be treated equally,” he told me.

It’s rare for defendants to testify on their own behalf, but Lopez’s lawyers decided that it might be in his interest to give his own account, in his meticulous manner, before the grand jury tasked with deciding whether or not to indict him. NYU had officially informed him in March that he would, in fact, be retroactively suspended for the whole spring semester. (Unlike the earlier NYU communication to trustees, the disciplinary letter definitively accused him of hitting Castro.) Lopez, who relied on a near-full scholarship to attend NYU, had quit his home care job and taken out a federal loan to pay his housing costs. Now he was in debt for a semester that wouldn’t even count toward his degree. But he was too preoccupied by the criminal charges to push back on the school’s terms. His days that month consisted of preparing his testimony; he avoided socializing around NYU, fearful that he might run into Ingber or somehow get into trouble again.

Even as they worked with Lopez on his testimony, Fabi and other Legal Aid attorneys were still trying to get clarity on what had led the DA to pursue hate crime charges. What kind of hate crime was Lopez even being charged with: Anti-Jewish? Anti-Israeli, since “national origin” is a protected category under the New York statute? Anti-white, for the comment about susceptibility to skin cancer? But the prosecutors refused to talk details before the grand jury proceedings.

Lopez testified at the grand jury at the beginning of April. The case has since been sealed, so the DA’s office would not make a transcript available to me, but Lopez recalled intensive questioning from a male ADA who appeared to be trying to trap him into admitting anti-Jewish animus, asking questions like, “When you said ‘Palestine will be free from you,’ you meant free from Jews, right?” (Lopez’s answer, as he recounted it to me: “No, clearly not. Jewish people have lived in Palestine for a long time.”) At one point, the prosecutor asked Lopez, “What would a free Palestine look like to you?” which his lawyers considered an egregious attempt to make his political speech subject to criminal prosecution. Ultimately, the experience left Fabi with the impression that the prosecutors had “an enormous lack of clarity on these issues,” while having “all the power to decide how to wield the statute.”

That same lack of clarity characterized the proceedings against Husary, the protestor who had burned an Israeli flag in Contra Costa. The judge hearing the preliminary arguments had admitted that the statute wasn’t designed to capture the “fine distinctions” that activists on Israel/Palestine make between Zionists and Jews, but was still convinced that Husary’s actions could plausibly have targeted Israelis as a nationality; in an exchange with Peterson, he seemed skeptical that “Israeli” and “Zionist” were not equivalent terms.

Ultimately, he determined that Husary’s case met the low burden of proof required to advance beyond a preliminary hearing. Husary agreed to a plea deal, requiring him to serve six months in county jail and two years of probation. Peterson continues to believe the legal basis for calling this a “hate crime” is dubious: By the same logic, he said, burning an American flag would constitute a hate crime against Americans. “We know flag burning in and of itself is protected speech, and [American flag burning] would never be prosecuted like that,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Contra Costa DA’s office defended the office’s approach to the case and rejected the accusation that it was impacted by public pressure, writing in an email that Husary’s conviction showed that he had “committed a robbery that was motivated, either entirely or partially, by the victim’s ethnicity or religion.” (Just as the California case was resolved, Husary was separately charged with a hate crime in New York City for allegedly vandalizing a subway train door with a red triangle and threatening a Jewish passenger who took photos of it; his New York–based lawyer declined to comment in detail but said he planned to contest the hate crime charge in court.)

In a 2023 speech on the history of his organization’s hate crimes advocacy, ADL attorney Freeman emphasized that, “by design,” the notion that a defendant intentionally targeted someone due to a protected identity “should be hard to prove. And sometimes it can’t be proven.”

Yet in several cases since October 7th, prosecutors have relied on tenuous evidence to try to prove that defendants targeted victims for their Jewishness. In the Brooklyn Museum case, prosecutors are arguing that the defendants targeted the homes of four board members because they thought they were Jewish—even after it was revealed that only Pasternak was.

In grand jury proceedings, the ADA emphasized that two other victims, COO Kimberly Trueblood and board chairman Barbara Vogelstein, have Jewish husbands (with the latter having taken her husband’s last name). In a motion, the prosecutor characterized them, as well as treasurer Neil Simpkins, as people who are all “Jewish or follow Jewish religious practices (and have traditionally Jewish last names).”

A defense motion pointed out that there was no evidence that the defendants knew Trueblood’s or Vogelstein’s husbands were Jewish; that no evidence had been presented to show that Simpkins is Jewish or has Jewish family; and that the graffiti had not mentioned anything related to Jewishness. But before the grand jury, the Brooklyn DA called Justin Finkelstein, a researcher at the ADL Center on Extremism, who described the red triangle pictured in the graffiti as a symbol Hamas uses “to target Israeli people and Jewish people.”

“The claim being made is that an inverted red triangle is inherently a symbol of antisemitism, as opposed to what it actually is, which is a symbol of Palestinian resistance,” Meltzer-Cohen told me. They said it was fair to question whether Brooklyn Museum leaders were apt targets, but given “ample documentation” of a yearlong campaign pushing the museum to divest from weapons companies, “there is no reason to believe that this is targeted at Jews. There is no evidence whatsoever that what was animating these actions was anything other than, ‘Please stop investing in the war machine.’”

Still, the prosecutors’ arguments were enough to convince the grand jury to indict the three defendants on all charges; in February, a judge dismissed the most severe charges—those that carried mandatory prison time—but the charge of criminal mischief as a hate crime remains. Overall, Meltzer-Cohen said, the prosecution’s attempt to equate protesters’ actions with antisemitism here and in other cases suggests that the “propaganda machine has managed to convince everybody”—including police and district attorneys—“that we cannot criticize Zionism without being antisemitic.”

Even as various DAs have taken it upon themselves to prosecute anti-Zionism as hate, efforts are already underway to make sure it’s not only a matter of prosecutorial discretion. In recent years, six states have passed laws explicitly directing police, prosecutors, and judges to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism to enforce hate crime laws; five more states have given the same instructions in proclamations, resolutions, executive orders, or sentencing guidelines.

The IHRA definition has been rejected by various civil rights and free speech groups because it defines certain criticisms of Israel—like “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policies to that of the Nazis”—as antisemitism. Even where such statutes have not been passed into law, the ADL, as a frequent leader in community hate crimes task forces, is “effectively working to influence the way law enforcement is being trained” to recognize such crimes, said Berry of the Arab American Institute, which has for years advocated for recognition of hate crimes against Arab Americans.

At the federal level, meanwhile, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now under the control of an administration that has made clear its intention to punish pro-Palestine protesters using means far outside legal norms. In late February, Leo Terrell, head of the DOJ’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism—a new body created by the Trump administration—pledged to Israel’s Channel 12 news that the department would soon announce federal hate crime indictments against students involved in “disorderly demonstrations, supporting Hamas, and trying to intimidate Jews.” He promised the department would “put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years.”

Terrell was not impressed by the effort DAs have already put into prosecuting dubious cases like Lopez’s, castigating prosecutors in liberal cities for taking insufficient initiative. But civil rights attorneys argue that liberals—from the advocates who created hate crimes laws to the urban prosecutors who deploy them—have been the administration’s most important allies. “All the work that the ADL has done over decades—the narrative work framing advocates for Palestinian lives as hateful, and the legal work creating pathways to charge activists for what should be protected speech—has teed it up for Trump to come in and use this as a tool for widespread repression,” said Jackson.

Those who have faced hate crime charges can testify to the way this kind of repression upends people’s lives. Hannah Tucker, a 29-year-old daycare worker living in Boise, was arrested last summer and charged with felony “malicious harassment”—Idaho’s version of a hate crime statute—after a verbal altercation with a Jewish man who approached her when she was shouting pro-Palestine chants in a busy downtown area. Tucker’s lawyer, Mikela French, told me she believes the police escalated a minor disagreement to a hate crime arrest in an attempt to target Tucker for her participation in a Gaza solidarity encampment at the Idaho State Capitol. (The Boise Police Department declined to comment on Tucker’s arrest.)

The case was dismissed in December by a district court judge, who wrote in a succinct brief that the victim’s testimony did not provide sufficient evidence that Tucker “acted with the specific intent to intimidate or harass [him] because of his religion.” But the damage was done. Even before Tucker was released 24 hours after the arrest on $25,000 bail, a police press release went out accusing her of targeting a Jewish man.

The daycare where Tucker worked as the lead teacher for the infant room fired her that same day, emailing all the daycare families, some of whom Tucker also worked for as a babysitter, to inform them that she had committed a hate crime and would no longer be working there. “That hurt me the most,” Tucker told me. “I’d raised the kids during the first year of their lives. I’d grown really attached to them and their families. All of that was ripped away.” Unable to pay rent and still in debt for her bail, she had to give up her apartment and has spent months crashing on friends’ couches.