Letter to the Editor: Not In Our Name

(This letter was written by Michelle Sterling of Brayton Road)
As a child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I’ve spent my life carrying the weight and wisdom of history. The lessons of the past are seared into my consciousness: where authoritarianism is tolerated, freedom is crushed; where justice is subverted, people suffer. And when hatred is weaponized—especially in the name of Jews—history teaches us to stand up and say no.

That is why I write today in profound distress. I am deeply alarmed by how the Trump movement is exploiting Jewish identity and concerns for Jewish safety to carry out grave injustices against freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law.

Trump—who has consistently trafficked in antisemitic tropes and courted the extreme right—now wraps himself in the Jewish flag. Not out of solidarity, but as a shield. If he truly cared about combating antisemitism, he would not have said that American Jews who vote for Democrats show “great disloyalty”—a remark rooted in the age-old slur that Jews are inherently more loyal to Israel than to their own country. Nor would he have tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton over a pile of cash and a Star of David—an image sourced from a white supremacist message board that evokes classic stereotypes of Jews as corrupt and money-obsessed.

He would not have appointed officials with documented histories of antisemitic views, dismantled civil rights teams tasked with addressing campus hatred, or pardoned January 6 rioters, including members of militia groups steeped in antisemitic and white nationalist ideologies.

American Jews have flourished in recent decades—in business, culture, politics, and education. But this success did not come from authoritarian protection. It was built on democracy, on civil liberties, on an America that strove—however imperfectly—to uphold the rule of law. Trumpism seeks to unravel all of that. And worse, it does so while claiming to speak for us.

As someone whose family witnessed the worst of what happens when law is trampled and hate is empowered, I am chilled to my core by this moment. We know what it looks like when leaders twist the language of protection into tools of control. We know what happens when silence enables injustice. And we know that “never again” means never again—for anyone.

To my fellow Jews: This is not what safety looks like. This is not what justice demands. We must stand up and say clearly and unequivocally: Not in our name.

Michelle Sterling
Brayton Road