Where the local Jewish community saw the site of a tragedy, others may have seen an opportunity to score political points.

The antisemitic Pearl Street Mall attack on June 1 led to intense heartache for Colorado’s Jewish community. They also watched as politicians and political groups jumped on an opportunity.

“Jews are not political footballs, Jews are not your political pawns,” said Stefanie Clarke, who is the co-founder and co-executive director of Stop Antisemitism Colorado and dealt with media requests for the Jewish Community Center in the attack aftermath. “We have seen it over and over. The Trump Administration is using us and dividing our community for his own political gain, for the own gain of his party.”

Thirteen people received physical injuries from the attack, which targeted a group of demonstrators parading Israeli and American flags, demonstrating for the release of hostages held by Hamas since an October 2023 attack in Israel. The Boulder District Attorney’s Office has identified 29 victims. One of them, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died.

President Donald Trump specifically cited the Pearl Street Mall attack as justification for his travel ban, which restricts immigrants and nonimmigrants from 12 countries from entering the U.S. and partially restricts entry for people from seven countries.

This reality is nothing new for people such as Brandon Rattiner. Judaism has guided him in his personal life (he met his wife at a Jewish young adult mixer) and his professional life. As the senior policy director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the public affairs arm of Jewish Colorado, he’s seen plenty of tragedies in which the Jewish community has been caught in the middle of politics.

“The game of political football did not start at or after Boulder,” Rattiner said. “I firmly believe one of the reasons that the Boulder attack happened is because the Jewish community has been a political football for as long as I honestly can remember, but certainly after (the) Oct. 7 (attacks).”

The Florida-based public relations firm Red Banyan helped promote what was billed as an “emergency” summit on antisemitism on the CU Boulder campus and how to combat it. Red Banyan is the same firm that mass emailed Colorado reporters last year, claiming that Denver-area communities were taken over by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and that CBZ Properties, whose location Edge of Lowry in Aurora was at the center of the controversy, “needed immediate political and public pressure to address this crisis,” according to reporting from The Denver Post. National Republican figures ran with the rumor when promoting anti-immigrant sentiments, and claimed that gangs had taken over the city. The antisemitism summit was hosted by the organization Combat Antisemitism Movement, or CAM, which is a part of the Kansas-based Combat Hate Foundation.

Clarke spoke at the summit and said she felt it, in some way, hijacked the tragedy with political slants.

At the summit, which coincided with the anti-Immigration Customs and Enforcement protests in Los Angeles, CAM promoted legislation that calls for prohibiting public protesters from wearing face coverings. One executive of CAM compared members of the LGBTQ+ community who support the people of Gaza to chickens supporting KFC. Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, who is President Trump’s nominee as U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, spoke at the CAM summit and praised the Trump Administration, saying that it’s dedicated to combating antisemitism.

“His travel ban that he enacted in our name right after the tragedy? Jews are immigrants; that’s not what we want. The majority — I’m not speaking for everyone — the overwhelming majority of Jews vote Democrat,” Clarke said. “He and the Republicans have done really well at exploiting fears and making Jews feel less safe, feeling like he’s coming to the rescue by doing all these things. But what that only does is create further division and stoke the flames of antisemitism.”

Clarke also pointed to a resolution from state Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Northglenn, that denounced the attack as politicizing the tragedy. While Evans’ district doesn’t include Boulder, the resolution focused on the immigration status of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the man charged in the attack, and praised ICE.

“This guy runs his resolution, which really has nothing to do with our pain or our grief, never says the word ‘Jewish,’ (and) mentions the attacker 13 times,” said Clarke, who once worked for Everytown for Gun Safety, which identifies itself as a “gun violence prevention organization.” “In gun violence, we have been really, really clear … you don’t want to glorify the perpetrator. You don’t want to glorify a shooter or an attacker. All they want is notoriety. You just put this guy’s name in there 13 times, never thanked the Boulder Police Department by name but did thank ICE, who wasn’t on the ground.”

The resolution was opposed by 113 Democrats, including Colorado Reps. Diana DeGette of Denver and Jason Crow of Aurora. DeGette’s concerns with the measure mirrored Clarke’s. Joe Neguse, Boulder’s 2nd District representative, supported the resolution. Neguse introduced his own resolution that does not mention the alleged attacker, but it has yet to receive a vote.

In response to concerns over Evans’ resolution, Evans spokesperson Delanie Bomar said:

“Democrats want to ignore the inconvenient fact that this terrorist was a dangerous illegal immigrant. The truth is this attack might have been prevented if sanctuary states like Colorado and cities like Boulder didn’t give safe haven to criminals,” Bomar said. “At the end of the day, Congressman Gabe Evans is focused on making Colorado safer, standing firmly against antisemitism, and delivering commonsense immigration reforms.”

A back-and-forth game?

Rattiner and Clarke both pointed to what the Jewish community has called a pedantic game of distinguishing anti-Zionism and antisemitism about Soliman’s motivation for attacking Run for Their Lives, which calls for the release of the now-50 remaining dead and alive hostages held by Hamas. The local chapter of Run for Their Lives peacefully demonstrates with a walk down the Pearl Street Mall every Sunday.

Whether there is a distinction is a conversation for another time, advocates said, not when discussing the impact of the tragedy.

Clarke said there’s a time and place to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government. Clarke explicitly didn’t condone their actions, which have led to the deaths of more than 54,000 people in Gaza since the Oct. 7 attacks. In Clark’s view, holding the Jewish diaspora responsible for the actions of a foreign government is an issue.

“That’s antisemitism,” she said.

Some, such as Rattiner, feel that conversations on language that Jews find hateful become too pedantic.

Rattiner pointed to Claudine Gay, who, then as the president of Harvard University, was asked by New York Republican Elise Stefanik if “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment. Gay responded, “The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.”

To Rattiner, that and Boulder City Councilmember Taishya Adams’ decision not to sign a statement condemning the attack for excluding anti-Zionism as a motivation in the attack exposed a double standard and was an example of how the left and the right wings of U.S. politics use Jews as a political football.

“Other communities don’t have to prove their suffering in that kind of way,” Rattiner said, later adding that “a key component of anti-racism is understanding impact on affected communities and not intent. So here you have folks from the left as well, not actually centering Jewish pain and just trying to co-opt what’s happening in our community to further their narratives.”

Broader context

Politicization and political polarization after tragedies might be a sign of the times. Thomas D. Beamish, a professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis, explored this concept in his 2024 book “After Tragedy Strikes” and a 2024 article on the academic news website The Conversation.

Beamish stressed in an interview with the Daily Camera that he is not familiar with the specifics of the Pearl Street Mall attack and was speaking generally of public tragedies that are politicized. His focus on these tragedies isn’t on what happened but rather how what happens is conveyed and the sense people gain from it.

“Ninety-nine percent of people who know what happened in Boulder, even those that were in Boulder, didn’t experience it directly, didn’t experience it in (any way) but a mediated source,” Beamish said. “So their understanding of that event is going to be a function of what they understand to have taken place given to them by sources that they interact with.”

Beamish argues that, in the past, Americans placed broad blame on tragedies, whether it be an act of God, bad luck, or what have you. Those were inherently more unifying than what he sees often blamed for today’s public tragedies — growing disillusionment with establishments and the government. Beamish calls it a “trauma script” that taps into what very well may be authentic grievances with a system but is essentially used by a person or group to stoke inauthentic claims.

“It’s become a dominant framework for understanding politics,” Beamish told the Camera. “It’s also, at the same moment, a very polarizing way of approaching and understanding because it always involves social blame.

“In other words, you’re not just getting hurt. You’re getting hurt by them — not a person, them. A category,” Beamish continued. “So you’ve been hurt by Palestinians or you’ve been hurt by Jews or you’ve been hurt by whites or you’ve been hurt by Blacks or you’ve been hurt by women or you’ve been hurt by men.”

Beamish added that this polarizes the public and views, even factual ones, because they’re weighted with a moral backing of bad versus good.

“That throws it back into the political domain as a conflict among groups, which then polarizes (society),” said Beamish, who added, “We’re humans and we are pitting ourselves against one another through the way we think about and make claims.”