Choosing sides in the battle over fighting antisemitism Jonathan Tobin
The latest round of congressional hearings about antisemitism on college campuses that took place this week showed that some academic leaders still haven’t gotten the message that the era of woke leftist discrimination against Jews has got to end. In an echo of the clueless and transparently discriminatory stands of the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, the head of Haverford College demonstrated that she was both in denial about the plight of Jewish students and unwilling to do something about it.
What’s worse is the fact that some of those we ought to expect to regard this issue as not merely a priority but a matter of life and death are opposing the first and only serious effort to rid the education system of this vile prejudice.
That’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from recent events, as President Donald Trump’s administration and congressional Republicans are stepping up their campaign against institutions of higher education that have either tolerated or encouraged Jew-hatred on their campuses.
This crisis had been brewing for years as progressives completed their long march through institutions of higher education and imposed toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism on curricula, as well as admissions and disciplinary practices throughout the nation. The widespread adoption of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) fomented the surge in antisemitism that broke out following the Hamas-led Palestinian terrorist attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. By seeking to racialize and divide society, in addition to pointedly excluding Jews from the protections afforded to other minorities, DEI reigned over colleges and universities, setting the stage for an unprecedented siege on Jewish students.
Yet instead of giving their wholehearted support to Trump’s effort to force schools to end the harassment of Jews and the practices that backed it up, groups like the American Jewish Committee are siding with the opponents of the administration’s program, including a list of more than 500 rabbis from the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements.
Tacitly backing antisemites
They are essentially joining forces with recalcitrant schools like Harvard University, which has resisted the president’s demands to enact fundamental reforms that will keep Jews safe while also creating an atmosphere where left-wing antisemites no longer have the power to shape academic culture.
The supposedly centrist AJC, along with a list of leftist and anti-Zionist rabbis, insists that they are against antisemitism. But this is mere lip service to the greatest threat to American Jewry and Israel in living memory. They may explain their stands as, in AJC’s case, as opposition to what they say is Trump’s “overly broad” approach to the issue, while the radical rabbis say their stand is in defense of democracy. But by refusing to join the administration’s long overdue push to overhaul the way that schools police discrimination by using the power of the federal purse, both these groups are taking sides with antisemites.
This debate is largely disingenuous.
To assert that one can oppose antisemitism while opposing Trump’s efforts misses the point of what the administration is trying to accomplish. More decisive action against pro-Hamas mobs creating encampments, taking over buildings or other efforts to harass Jewish students is to be welcomed. For example, the expeditious manner with which Columbia University dispatched security forces and police to end the recent occupation of its Butler Library, and then arrest those who had carried out this illegal act, was an improvement on its appeasement of similar radicals last spring when it came to the takeover of and damage to Hamilton Hall.
But unless and until schools like Columbia and Harvard—and so many others that have enforced woke orthodoxy on their campuses—allow more viewpoint diversity in their hiring, as well as get rid of the DEI bureaucrats and departments that are responsible for mainstreaming Jew-hatred, nothing will really change. Critics of the administration, however, say they oppose those reforms as illegal interference in academic freedom.
Such a position is palpably dishonest since no one disputes that the provisions of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act involve federal authorities and rules in ensuring that there is no discrimination against protected minorities like African-Americans and Hispanics. Yet they balk at applying the same protections to Jews. And as Harvard has shown, they are also willing to forgo billions in federal funding that the law requires the administration to withhold from offending institutions rather than doing something about it.
A partisan divide
Sadly, some of this opposition seems to fall along partisan lines.
As was the case when the House Education and Workforce Committee held its first hearings on campus antisemitism, at this week’s hearing, Republicans were determined to hold the feet of academic leaders to the fire. But Democrats wouldn’t join them, choosing instead either to punt on the issue or attack the administration. Their main criticism of Trump was that his elimination of the U.S. Department of Education is harming efforts to oppose antisemitism.
That’s true up to a point, since currently the mechanism for withholding funds from offending schools rests in that department. But what they miss about this is that this largely superfluous government agency has conspicuously failed to enforce Title VI for years. The department seems incapable of doing anything more than issuing slaps on the wrist for antisemitic institutions. The only measure that has any chance of working is if the government deploys the U.S. Department of Justice and its Civil Rights division to sue schools where Jew-hatred has occurred.
As the committee hearing showed, Trump’s offensive against woke antisemites has had an impact on some schools.
DePaul University, California Polytechnic State University and Haverford College, whose presidents testified at the hearing, are prominent examples of schools where faculty and students had created hostile environments by advocating support for anti-Jewish terrorism, terror groups like Hamas and the destruction of the State of Israel. This demonstrated that far from being solely a phenomenon of the largest and most prominent elite schools, antisemitism has become a factor at liberal arts institutions and certain science institutions of various sizes.
But even there, as well as at Harvard and Columbia, administrations have begun to show some awareness of the problem.
Harvard’s release of a 311-page internal report detailed the vast extent of the problem facing Jews there. Though the university’s record doesn’t appear to be much better, the presidents of DePaul and CalPoly at least tried to act as if they got it, apologizing and speaking of efforts to enforce disciplinary policies that could deter more targeting of Jews.
Haverford’s disgrace
Not so, the president of Haverford. Speaking in the same sort of lawyerly fashion as the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT that generated so much criticism, Wendy Raymond obfuscated, split hairs and spoke in vague generalizations. She also attracted attention for requiring the use of large flashcards with prewritten answers to questions, prompting committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik to write that this epitomized a “scripted, spineless and coached to the bone” character who lacked conviction when speaking about hatred against students enrolled in the college and thereby under the president’s care.
Raymond’s answers also smacked of dishonesty. When pressed about a number of egregious incidents of discrimination against and intimidation of Jews that had taken place on her watch that are detailed in a lawsuit brought against Haverford by The Deborah Project public interest law firm, she contradicted the legal record repeatedly, acting as if she had no direct knowledge of events or that the multitude of incidents of antisemitism at Haverford reported by Jewish students were imaginary.
Among the worst of these dishonest answers was her failing to admit that she did nothing when asked about demands that “Zionists” be banned. Raymond told the committee that she had made changes to the school’s honor code. That wasn’t true.
She also wasn’t being honest when asked about another incident concerning questions posed to her by Jewish students about a social-media post from a faculty member, who applauded the Oct. 7 assault. According to the students, she said she “heard people breaking free of their chains.”
Her appalling performance indicates that some schools where left-wing politics are deeply entrenched are not prepared to give an inch to critics who are aware of their terrible record on the treatment of Jews. Haverford’s administration, staff and faculty are clearly too committed to DEI and other woke ideologies to acknowledge that Jews are deserving of protection and that those who target them in the name of the Palestinian Arab cause are engaged in a pernicious form of hatred.
Raymond isn’t alone in behaving in this manner.
Harvard’s report on antisemitism can be considered a hopeful sign. However, it was accompanied by another report, issued by the university at the same time, devoted to the entirely fictional problem of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias at the school, all of which merely amounts to complaints about Jews who have the temerity to speak up about antisemitism that the school has both tolerated and encouraged. As retired Harvard professor of Yiddish Ruth Wisse told The Free Press, this amounts to the school telling the world that it doesn’t really have an antisemitism problem.
Just as damning was the news that Harvard has recently granted nine prestigious fellowships to vicious Israel-bashers whose “scholarship” is indistinguishable from Jew-hatred.
A clear choice
These incidents demonstrate that the endemic problems the Trump administration is trying to remedy, which require structural change in higher education, are more necessary than ever. And the only way to address the problem is to punish institutions resisting his reforms and that continue to violate Title VI by defunding them.
As is patently obvious, no one opposing Trump and the Republicans on this issue would tolerate it for a second if attacks on African-Americans or Hispanics were treated in the same cavalier fashion. Yet that is what groups like AJC, the radical rabbis, Democratic Party representatives in Congress and left-wing media outlets like The New York Times are doing by not only opposing but falsely labeling administration proposals as an assault on academic freedom and democracy.
The battle over academia is one that is vitally important. It’s also a sidebar to the greater struggle going on in this country between those who correctly identify the threat to Western civilization and the values of American liberty that is posed by woke ideology. The ideas behind the surge of prejudice are the real problem. And the plight of Jewish students on college campuses is, as is often the case throughout history, one of the Jews playing the role of the canaries in the coal mine.
It also offers Americans a clear choice on how they feel about the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism. In this battle, there can be no neutrals The answers of “yes, but … ,” in which political liberals profess opposition to Jew-hatred but wind up backing the forces pushing anti-Jewish bigotry to ensure that they don’t put themselves on the same side as Trump and political conservatives, aren’t merely shameful dodges. They amount to a willingness to tolerate a growing social scourge in the name of partisan loyalty and hatred of Trump. Those who do so may earn the applause of the left-wing press, but their behavior is nothing less than a tacit endorsement of antisemitism.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
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