Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) warned that some on the left are focusing too heavily on individuals who have espoused antisemitic views and are being targeted by the Trump administration for deportation, and that Democrats should be directing more attention towards the Americans still held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.

“We are seeing, because of Donald Trump’s overreach, that people who have espoused antisemitism are becoming martyrs, and that scares me,” Goldman said at a Jewish Democratic Council of America conference in Washington on Thursday. “Because we should be talking about the five American hostages in Gaza who have been there for a year and a half, who were abducted by a terrorist group and are deceased in four of the cases, unfortunately, but one, Edan Alexander, remains alive.”

Goldman, a co-chair of the House antisemitism task force, continued, “We’re hearing so much about First Amendment issues, which I agree, people should not be detained, arrested, deported for expressing their views, no matter how much I disagree with them. But if we allow our party to focus so much on these detentions of people who have espoused antisemitism and we’re not talking about these hostages who have truly been treated as horribly as anybody and are American, in the five cases, we’re losing the forest for the trees.”

Jewish Democrats, Goldman argued, must lead the charge on that issue. Goldman was speaking on a panel alongside former Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC), Goldman’s predecessor as task force co-chair.

He also said that the “overreach by Donald Trump allows many to avoid discussing the real antisemitism that is out there on the left,” emphasizing that Democrats need to call out those on their own side of the political aisle even as they see major concerns with the administration hiring individuals who have espoused antisemitic and white supremacist views. Goldman alleged the administration is also promoting a “replacement theory, white supremacist, Christian nationalist view that generally is discriminatory against Jews.”

He said he’s been urging his Republican colleagues to call out antisemitism in their party as well.

Members of the task force met last week with Harmeet Dhillion, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, where Goldman urged her to “be careful.”

“I said, ‘I agree with you that antisemitism on campuses is a problem and it must be addressed, but please do not use antisemitism to achieve other political or policy goals because that is bad for the Jewish community,’” Goldman recounted.

The congressman said that he’d hoped for a “reset” after the election in which Republicans would stop “us[ing] antisemitism as a political weapon,” an issue he said he’s discussed repeatedly with GOP colleagues.

“But Donald Trump is making it very, very hard,” Goldman continued, adding that Trump’s “use of antisemitism as a pretext and abuse of the First Amendment” has made it more difficult to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which hit significant obstacles in the Senate yesterday as Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) added amendments designed to push back on some of the Trump administration’s policies and voice their opposition to the war in Gaza.

“The fact that Donald Trump is abusing his power in the name of antisemitism is very troubling and so it has become harder to find common ground for the task force,” Goldman continued.

At the same time, he said he has worked privately with Republican colleagues to push back on a reported effort to eliminate the role of special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism in the State Department. Trump recently announced he plans to nominate Yehuda Kaploun for the role, and it was preserved in a shakeup of the State Department organizational structure.

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who is running for a Michigan Senate seat and another co-chair of the antisemitism task force, also spoke at the event, emphasizing the need to call out antisemitism and explain to constituents why it is harmful. She received a strongly positive reception from the JDCA crowd.