There Is No 'Anti-Zionist Exception' to Civil Rights Law — and Courts Must Stop Inventing One
When a federal judge rules that calling someone a "Jew-lover" proves nothing about anti-Jewish animus, American law has broken something it cannot afford to break.
Mariano Torres is a janitor. He is Latino. He is not Jewish. On the night of April 29, 2024, masked rioters — armed with hammers, knives and chains — seized Hamilton Hall at Columbia University and trapped him inside. When he refused to stand aside, they screamed at him: "What are you, a Jew-lover?" "Why are you defending them?" His co-worker Lester Wilson, also not Jewish, was told: "You work for the Jews." "You're a Zionist." Both men were physically assaulted and held against their will.
Read that again. Two non-Jewish workers were beaten, detained and pelted with slurs connecting them to Jews — and a federal judge still could not find evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination. Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed their civil rights claims, reasoning that the conspiracy's "only purpose" was to occupy a building until Columbia accepted the protesters' demands, and that anti-Zionist rhetoric constitutes "pure political speech." The slurs were "ugly," she conceded, but they did not, in her telling, prove that harming perceived Jews or their supporters was a goal of the mob.
With respect, that reasoning is a legal fiction dressed up as judicial restraint — and it will get people killed.
Two law professors have now put the problem in writing with the precision it demands. Jon Michaels of UCLA and Matthew Segal of Tufts, writing in a forthcoming Cardozo Law Review essay, argue that courts are manufacturing what they call an "anti-Zionist exception" to civil rights law — a doctrine under which behavior labelled anti-Zionist is presumed, by definition, not to be anti-Jewish. In their words, anti-Zionism has become "a sort of get-out-of-legal-liability-free card." Instead of examining the facts as alleged — the slurs, the weapons, the deliberate targeting of people because they were coded as Jewish allies — the court simply presumed that anti-Zionist rhetoric disproves anti-Jewish animus. That is not legal analysis. That is a conclusion masquerading as a syllogism.
I have spent decades in court on behalf of terror victims. I know what motivated reasoning looks like. And I know what happens when the law carves out an exception for one group's persecutors: the exception grows until the protection disappears entirely.
The judge's logic does not hold even on its own terms. She argued that anti-Zionism cannot establish anti-Jewish discrimination because Jews themselves hold "wildly differing opinions" on Israel's policies. By that reasoning, no slur rooted in a contested political identity could ever establish discriminatory intent. Did the rioters ask Torres which side of the Gaza debate he was on before they pinned him with furniture and called him a "Jew-lover"? Of course not. The slur did the work that slurs always do: it marked the target, coded him as one of them, and made the violence legible to the mob.
This is not a novel legal question. American courts have long understood that discrimination based on perceived membership in a protected group is still discrimination. You do not have to be Black to be targeted for associating with Black people. You do not have to be a woman to be targeted for defending women. The architecture of civil rights law was built precisely to close those gaps — and it worked, for everyone except, apparently, perceived supporters of Jews.
Michaels told JNS that existing civil rights laws are "more than sufficient to fully protect those plaintiffs," and that denying them that protection is "legally unsupportable and bad as a matter of public policy." He is right on both counts. The problem is not that the law is inadequate. The problem is that courts are refusing to apply it.
The Torres v. Carlson case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit must reverse. Not because I say so, and not as a favor to Jewish advocacy organizations. Because the alternative — a two-tiered civil rights regime in which "I was targeting Zionists, not Jews" operates as a complete defense — makes the whole edifice of American anti-discrimination law incoherent. If you can beat a janitor with a chair, call him a "Jew-worker," hold him hostage in a barricaded hall, and walk away without civil liability because your stated politics were anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic, then the law does not protect Jews. It protects everyone else.
Torres and Wilson stood their ground in Hamilton Hall when the mob demanded they step aside. American courts must now stand their ground too. The get-out-of-jail-free card must be torn up, and the Second Circuit has the chance to do it. Jewish blood — and the blood of those who stand with Jews — is not cheaper than anyone else's in this country. Not yet.