Judge who blocked Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation is an observant Jew

JTA – The case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian protester arrested by ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers at Columbia University over the weekend, has divided Jewish groups. Right-wing pro-Israel voices are praising the arrest as a blow to a terrorist sympathiser, while a range of liberal and progressive Jewish groups are slamming it as authoritarian and unconstitutional.

On Monday, 10 March, one more Jewish voice said Khalil shouldn’t be deported, at least for the time being: Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York.

Furman, on the bench at a federal district court in Manhattan, issued an order on Monday blocking Khalil’s deportation. According to Politico, which posted a copy of Furman’s order online, Furman issued the order so that he would retain jurisdiction over the case. The text reads, “To preserve the court’s jurisdiction pending a ruling on the petition, Petitioner [Khalil] shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the court orders otherwise.”

Trump administration officials have contended that Khalil, who holds a green card, can be deported because his protest activity constitutes support for terrorism. Khalil’s lawyers submitted a writ of habeas corpus challenging the arrest. The parties to the case will meet on Wednesday.

Furman, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2012, is an observant Jew. According to a Forward article from 2022, he adjourned court at 16:00 on Fridays during the winter fraud trial of lawyer Michael Avenatti because he doesn’t work on Shabbat. At another point, he kept the court closed for Rosh Hashanah. (Both cases related to Trump.)

“He is not the first judge on this court by any means to have serious involvement in the Jewish community,” Senior US District Judge Jed Rakoff told the Forward at the time, “but those of us who are Jewish are very admiring of his involvement in that regard.”

Furman is married to Ariela Dubler, the head of school at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, a Jewish school in Manhattan. The couple has been involved in Ansche Chesed, a Conservative congregation on the Upper West Side. They have also donated to Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, a Conservative Jewish sleepaway camp.

Furman’s father, Jay, was a prominent real estate developer who died in 2015. His mother, Gail, who died in 2019, was a psychologist and philanthropist who donated to Democratic causes and headed the Furman Foundation, which gave to progressive groups including the Tides Foundation, a contemporary target of right-wing pro-Israel advocates because of its support for pro-Palestinian groups.

Furman’s brother, Jason, is a Harvard University economist who has had his own encounter with the current campus climate. His wife, Eve Gerber, apologised after being filmed telling a Harvard student wearing a keffiyeh, the scarf that symbolises Palestinian solidarity, that he was wearing a “terrorist scarf”.

Before becoming a judge, Jesse Furman was an attorney in the Southern District of New York, a high-profile posting where he prosecuted a number of prominent suspects, including employees of Bernie Madoff, who defrauded a long line of Jewish investors and institutions, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the September 11 attacks.

The district’s hierarchy was in the news recently when Danielle Sassoon, a Jewish school graduate and the acting US attorney there, resigned rather than dropping corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams. Adams, whose co-operation with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement was a goal of the administration’s bid to end the corruption case against him, declined to comment on Khalil’s arrest.

Furman’s confirmation as a federal judge followed a 65-34 vote in the Senate, where some Republicans objected to his work as an attorney decades earlier on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the historic Jewish civil rights group that at the time was supporting a public school’s right to bar a Christian student club. This week, the ADL applauded Khalil’s arrest, provided, it said in its statement, that immigration law would be followed appropriately.