If “a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel,” as Robert Frost put it, then a Jewish liberal must be someone who begs for his nation to take anti-Semitism seriously—and then condemns the president of the United States for obliging.
American Jews have sounded the alarm on rising anti-Semitism for years, and the case was made when the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks spurred terrorist sympathizers in the West to take their bigotry to the streets. Campuses revealed themselves as hotbeds of sympathy for the attackers. Universities did nothing to punish flagrant violations of civil rights laws committed by those sympathetic to Hamas, and the culprits remained undeterred. As reports from Harvard, Columbia, and other universities attest, faculty, students, and even administrators continued to bait Jews and Israel in class, on the quad, and everywhere in between. Student groups revealed themselves as unabashed collaborators with terrorist organizations, raising funds for them and promoting their propaganda.
Yet when the federal government finally took upon itself the cause of ridding our campuses (and, where possible, our nation) of these malignities, Jewish public figures rushed to condemn the deployment of state power on the Jews’ behalf. For perhaps the first time in history, a non-Jewish polity has decided that the fate of its Jews is intertwined with the fate of the nation as a whole and acts accordingly. And some Jews have chosen to stand athwart our defenders, yelling “Stop!”
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits universities from tolerating environments that are hostile to individuals because of their national origin. If schools do not do enough to crack down on discrimination against Jews and Israelis—both are considered “national origins” under federal law—they can lose their federal support. And under long-established immigration law, noncitizens who take up the cause of terrorist organizations may be deported.
These tributaries of antidiscrimination and immigration law have blended on elite campuses, where foreign students and faculty have spearheaded a campaign of discriminatory harassment in service of terrorist organizations. Joined by young American leftists, they have used bullhorns, cement, spray paint, and just about any other instrument at hand to turn campuses into platforms for radical views. They have repeatedly forced the cancellation of classes, disrupted study sessions, destroyed libraries, pulled fire alarms on guest speakers, and blocked off campus thorough-fares. As if to demonstrate the subordination of edu-cation to activism with crystalline precision, some professors held classes within encampments—those “Zionist-free zones”—or offered extra credit for participation in demonstrations.
Is this the system of higher education the American people want to support to the tune of billions per year? Clearly not. Enter the Trump 2 administration, which has made no secret of its antipathy toward higher education in its current state. “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education,” he tweeted in July 2020. “Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” Conservatives have long lamented the corruption of the university, manifesting in ideological uniformity, stifling speech codes, and the proliferation of thoughtless activism. It was a matter of time before a Republican administration would use its legal leverage and threaten to revoke universities’ federal funding and even tax-exempt status.
And pervasive anti-Semitism, which had exploded but met little pushback from the Biden administration, provided an opening. A newly formed federal task force nominally focused on anti-Semitism first targeted Columbia University, which had been wracked by building occupations, vandalism, and a vacuum of leadership. “We’re going to bankrupt these universities,” said its chair, Leo Terrell. “We’re going to take away every single federal dollar.” The task force first froze some discretionary grants while threatening that the worst was yet to come. Mimicking one part of the Title VI enforcement process—during which universities must be allowed to come into “voluntary compliance” with government-determined remedial measures—the administration made its demands. If Columbia did not expel or suspend students who had broken into and occupied Hamilton Hall, ban masks on campus, treat anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, place the Middle Eastern Studies Department under academic receivership, begin reforming admissions procedures, and more, it would lose billions in federal support. Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, agreed publicly to cooperate with the demands while privately vowing not to. She resigned a few weeks later. As of now, the extent of Columbia’s acquiescence remains unclear.
Meanwhile, a collateral Trump-administration effort to deport noncitizens who led openly pro-terrorist demonstrations began detaining Columbia graduate students. This generated considerable backlash among the general public—and discomfort among some Jews. “A growing number of Jewish groups are condemning Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest,” ran one Jewish Telegraphic Agency headline, referring to the detention of the leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-terrorist organization responsible for a slew of unlawful incidents in Morningside Heights. Even pro-Israel organizations like Zioness, which called Khalil’s views “vile, anti-Semitic, anti-American,” condemned his detention for reasons that would soon become orthodoxy among the administration’s critics: “Any extra-legal tools used ‘for us’ can be turned against us.”
Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY) added that deporting anti-Semites “will not make Jewish students safer on campus and will only feed the Trump Administration’s political war on education and hollow lip service on discrimination against minorities.” He had previously denounced “the anti-Semitic speech and protests taking place at and around Columbia” for “creating an environment that is unsafe for Jewish students” and called on the university to “do everything they can to protect students and ensure all feel safe on campus.”
No, not everything, it would seem.
The view that the Trump administration is using Jewish safety as a pretext for a “war on education” became ubiquitous once the president turned his attention to Harvard. The president accused the university of fostering a “climate of hate” by, among other things, feting a law student who assaulted an Israeli classmate and continuing to employ lecturers who lionize Hamas. The feds sent Harvard two letters with demands even more exacting than those made of Columbia. Harvard was directed to punish individuals and programs responsible for proliferating anti-Semitism—as well as “cease all preferences based on race, color, or national origin” in hiring and admissions (which simply requires compliance with existing federal law), close its DEI shops, and address the lack of “viewpoint diversity” among students and faculty. Harvard responded with a lawsuit and a PR campaign: It had no intention of complying with government “overreach” that threatened academic freedom.
And here, again, Jews fell in line—supporting the institutions that had caved to anti-Semitism rather than the victims of it. Trump was “weaponizing” anti-Semitism for his own aims, they said. Indeed, the word “weaponizing” has been ever-present in the discourse, so much so that one wonders whether there had been a Zoom call beforehand to set it as the word of choice with which to attack the Trump administration.
Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian, decried the Trump administration’s “weaponizing, politicizing of anti-Semitism.” Anti-Semitism was “being turned into a partisan issue,” she said—she, who had served in the prior administration as an anti-Semitism envoy and was notable for her craven silence in the face of the Biden White House’s pusillanimity on the subject. “It’s being used in certain cases…as a foil for other objectives.” While “some of the early steps [the government] took were right in terms of campus,” she added, “I’m afraid now that it’s gone way too far.” One might have thought that a Holocaust historian would worry about doing too little, not doing too much, but one would have been mistaken.
Lipstadt was echoed by Senator Chuck Schumer, who was shameless enough to publish a book about the dangers of anti-Semitism in 2025—after having done nothing to combat its rise in his own party. He demanded that Trump “stop disgracefully weaponizing anti-Semitism to attack universities.” In a letter, Schumer joined four fellow Jewish senators to charge the president with “using what is a real crisis as a pretext to attack people and institutions who do not agree with you.” And there came that word again: “Donald Trump has repeatedly weaponized anti-Semitism as a political tool to attack America’s preeminent universities like Harvard and Columbia in order to further a broader conservative agenda against high education.”
Then came the fear that the administration was actually inviting backlash against Jewish students by fighting the anti-Semitism targeting them. These students would be seen as the villains who got their classmates expelled or deported, so it would be in their interest for Trump to cool it. Kenneth Stern, a professor at Bard College and a lead drafter of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, worried that Trump’s actions put “pro-Israel Jewish students in a situation where they may be seen as trying to suppress speech rather than answer it.” In the Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg argued that “whatever the merits of this sweeping agenda” of deportations and crackdowns, “most American Jews did not vote for it.” Whatever the universities’ failings, the administration “has exploited [Jews] to justify the institutions’ decimation.”
One way or another, though, the critics agree: Trump is not helping the Jews the right way. And at best, that is a cure worse than the disease. The strange thing, though, is that they have offered no cure. They are attacking the doctor trying to fight the scourge with the tools he has at hand.
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The “weaponization” claim is a curious one. It is striking in light of Jewish communal leaders’ repeated entreaties to American non-Jews about why we all ought to worry about anti-Semitism. For anti-Semitism, we now hear routinely, is not about the Jews. It is everyone’s problem. Jews are “the canary in the coal mine,” as Schumer has claimed—“a five-alarm fire” that “threatens America’s national security” and leads to “hatred and bigotry against other marginalized groups” as well.
This analysis has gained broad acceptance even among the very individuals who lament the government’s supposed overreach. Representative Nadler co-sponsored a resolution in 2023 finding that “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories fuel other forms of hatred, discrimination, and bias and threaten the foundations of our democracy.… Combating anti-Semitism is essential to the broader fight against all forms of hatred and to the defense of our democracy.” Before former Harvard President Lawrence Summers accused the administration of “tyranny” for cracking down on his old employer, he called anti-Semitism on his beloved campus “a cancer.”
Lipstadt told students at a Brandeis University graduation that “something that starts with the Jews never ends there.” She later explained to Columbia graduate students that they must “think of anti-Semitism as more than just—and I put ‘just’ in quotation marks—a threat to the welfare of Jews and the Jewish community.” Columbia’s website summarizes Lipstadt’s remarks as revolving around the idea that anti-Semitism is “an early warning sign of democratic backsliding.”
Anti-Semitism is “really bad for societies that buy into” it, wrote Yair Rosenberg in 2022, “because one thing that conspiracy theories do to societies is that they destroy them from within…[and that] has disastrous consequences for non-Jews as well.”
Well, which is it, Rosenberg? Nadler? Lipstadt? Is anti-Semitism a symptom of profound civilizational sickness, represented in microcosm on campus, a cancer that should be met with chemotherapy? Or is it being “weaponized” in 2025 and blown out of proportion?
If anti-Semitism really is a civilizational crisis, the argument that the federal government under Trump is using it pretextually to assault the centers of that crisis makes no sense. If our truth-pursuing institutions have fallen into paroxysms of unthinking conspiracism leading to rampant discrimination, drastic action isn’t only just, it’s necessary. Our government is responsible for enforcing civil rights and must root out the violations at their source.
Universities may claim that they don’t know what that source is, and that they have no idea how their quads and faculty lounges became overrun with radicals and bigots. Please. For years, universities have stacked their faculty, administrations, and student bodies with progressive ideologues who view group success as prima facie evidence of exploitation. Entire academic departments have been built not on producing useful knowledge, but on finding creative new ways to blame whites, capitalists, and Zionists for the world’s ills. Schools have cultivated Manichaean tastes in all those who want to seem sophisticated and thoughtful: The world’s losers have been victimized by the world’s winners. Bigotry against members of powerful groups is thus no vice. Discriminating against white men is virtuous. Letting Israeli students know they should be ashamed for benefitting from the exploitation of “indigenous” Arabs is more virtuous still. These are precisely the conspiracy theories Rosenberg and Nadler and Lipstadt warned about—three years ago. As Rosenberg predicted they would, they have displaced the pursuit of truth, and the universities that were founded to pursue truth, from within. Corruption runs deep at institutions that propagate conspiracy theories scapegoating certain groups for the world’s problems. Importing foreign troublemakers from nations where conspiracy theories about Jews are de rigueur compounds the problem.
Whether in enforcement of civil rights or immigration law, it’s not a coincidence that anti-Semitism is the thread that unravels the whole rotten enterprise. Glaring violations of law and principle are the natural outcomes and most visible symptoms of institutional corruption. Universities welcome, cultivate, and graduate rabid Jew-haters because they have gotten into the business of producing resentful revolutionaries and the ideas that animate them.
Deporting organizers of destructive demonstrations who also harass Jews is not some kind of false saviorism. Exploiting the opportunity to address the underlying causes of the collapse of higher education is not “weaponization,” pretext, or tokenization. It’s just the means of dealing with the problem. The fact that so many foreign students and young noncitizens are deportable for supporting terrorism against Jews is not an indictment of the Jews who blew the whistle or the administration that heeded the call. It’s an indictment of the universities that imported terrible people from overseas and the immigration system that failed to keep them out in the first place.
The claim that a far-reaching assault against foreign troublemakers and the universities that host them (often for more than a decade at a time without asking too many questions) is counterproductive for Jewish students is nothing more than a shoddy form of blackmail. Jews are being threatened with consequences for being seen as exercising undue influence over campus life. Don’t feed the conspiracy theorists, the critics warn. It might cause them to hate Jews even more than they already do.
That is not a good reason to abandon an otherwise righteous strategy. It gives bad actors a bigot’s veto over civil rights enforcement. Such an argument would be unacceptable if any other group were trying to enforce its rights. It also posits a “problem” that is easily dealt with: If a Jewish civil rights campaign smokes out yet more lowlifes who once enjoyed plausible deniability when merely fantasizing about “Zionist” control of the world, that is a good thing. We should know who the conspiratorial bigots among us are. If those bigots are moved to harass their classmates, they too should be expelled; and if they are here on visas, they should be deported with the full support of the institutions into which they have burrowed. Meantime, we should take note that those who are defending the campuses against Donald Trump’s assault seem simply to assume that universities are full of individuals susceptible to confusing enforcement of civil rights with nefarious Jewish control of the institution. With champions like these, universities hardly need adversaries.
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One cannot help but note the unusual parallel between condemnations of the federal response to anti-Semitism and the recurring “criticism” of Israel and its war efforts. Israel’s campaigns are always “disproportionate.” The Trump administration’s attack on terror-sympathizers and bigots is “weaponized” or “has gone way too far.” Compared with what? Nobody knows. The perpetually unanswered question is, What is the alternative that would accomplish the righteous goals of defeating terrorist murderers and protecting the minority rights of Jews? Crickets, crickets. One begins to suspect that there is no substantive position behind the condemnatory impulse. Just a fear of, or better yet, a visceral discomfort with, any exercise of power on behalf of Jews. How open-minded of the liberal Jews—those simpering and preening milquetoasts who steadfastly refuse to take their own side in the fight of their, and our, lives.
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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