Trump isn’t exploiting antisemitism; he’s attacking its root cause
The administration’s demands to elite universities go beyond the narrow question of antisemitism. If DEI and woke ideology are spared, then Jew-hatred will continue to thrive.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Apr 21, 2025
Pro-Palestinian students gather at Harvard University to show their support for Hamas at a rally in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct.14, 2023.
Critics of the Trump administration’s offensive against antisemitism in academia are right about one thing. The list of demands that President Donald Trump’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism sent to Harvard University, as well as those sent to other schools under intense scrutiny for their tolerance and encouragement of Jew-hatred, do go beyond that issue.
Trump has sought to change the way elite institutions of higher education conduct admissions and hiring, and conduct discipline, as well as probe the immigration status of foreign students, who are key to the pro-Hamas cause and who led mobs on campus that were guilty of acts of intimidation and violence. He has also threatened to pull federal funds from them if they fail to comply. But in doing so, the task force he appointed aims at more than just making college quads safer environments for Jewish students and faculty.
That has led some Jewish liberals, including many who have expressed criticism of the way Harvard and the other schools that are in peril of losing billions in federal funding, to claim that Trump is “exploiting” the issue. And despite their patent failure to deal with the problem, some Jewish college presidents, including the leaders of Harvard, Princeton University, Wesleyan University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all have the chutzpah to claim that they—and not the administration in Washington—have a better idea of what is and isn’t antisemitism.
They seem to be speaking for many on the political left.
That’s especially true of Jewish liberals, who have long been in denial about the reality of left-wing antisemitism. Their hatred for Trump—rooted in partisanship and class distinctions—simply will not allow them to accept that the “bad orange man,” who is largely supported by working-class voters, is actually fighting antisemitism instead of encouraging it. They also seem to brush aside the fact that, for all intents and purposes, Democrats they have ardently supported, like former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, actually fueled the fires of antisemitism while claiming to combat it.
Is fighting antisemitism ‘bad?’
This viewpoint is represented by a letter circulated by the left-wing Jewish Council on Public Affairs, an umbrella group of Jewish community relations councils once tied to Jewish federations but is now independent of them. It asserts that Trump’s effort to deal with antisemitism on campuses is actually “bad” for the Jews. The missive sticks to partisan talking points about antisemitism being primarily a right-wing phenomenon that were long out of date. Indeed, they are shockingly out of touch with reality since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the surge of hatred that followed that attempt at Jewish genocide. Their main point is a disingenuous claim that attempts to root out the prejudice against Jews and Israel that has become not only mainstream in academia and popular culture, but a new orthodoxy since Oct. 7, must be opposed because these efforts are against “democracy.”
They seem to think that moves to stop pro-Hamas mobs from harming Jews is an abridgement of the rights of those chanting for Jewish genocide (“from the river to the sea”) or terrorism (“globalize the intifada”), even though what is in question is not free speech but unlawful actions that violate the rules of these schools that have gone unenforced.
The text of the letter reflects the signers’ desire not merely to distance themselves from a Trump-led campaign against Jew-hatred but also from the State of Israel. Like individuals who oppose the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, these Trump opponents seem to want to create a “safe space” for those who oppose the only Jewish state on the planet that would exempt them from responsibility for their prejudice against Jews.
That this letter was signed by groups representing the major liberal denominations of Judaism in the United States—Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist—is a scandal. It’s also a terrible reflection of the way these movements have prioritized liberal or left-wing partisanship over their solidarity with fellow Jews or their sacred responsibility to stand up against bigotry and hatred.
A broader agenda
While that argument is too tainted by politics to be taken seriously, it’s true that some thoughtful and generally more responsible Jewish leaders are also troubled by Trump’s effort to bring academia to heel.
Prominent Jewish voices like Rabbi David Wolpe, the longtime leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles who spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School in the 2023-24 academic year, have been outspoken about the failures of the education establishment and approve of “the general goals” of Trump’s ultimatums to Harvard and other schools. But he’s worried about it, telling Jewish Insider that “I think this is a letter that will have a lot of unintended consequences, and it seems to me an overreach” and that “there are a lot of other agendas swirling around that are not directly concerned with antisemitism.”
That’s partially true, but it also misses a central point about this controversy.
At its core, the Trump effort to reform higher education is not only a response to the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism in the United States. It is based on an understanding that the epidemic of anti-Jewish bigotry did not come out of nowhere or is isolated from other societal trends and problems. To the contrary, the appalling scenes that played out on hundreds of American college campuses and in K-12 schools are the direct result of the way so-called “progressives” have changed American education for the worse during their “long march” through its institutions.
It is impossible to comprehend what happened at Harvard, Columbia and so many other schools in the last 18 months without grasping that the demonization of Israel and Jews stems from the central role toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality, settler-colonialism and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have transformed academia and other sectors of society, including the arts, business and government.
Dividing Americans and fomenting hate
A central tenet of this set of beliefs is that humanity is divided into two groups—people of color, who are always victims in the right; and “white” oppressors, who are always in the wrong. This is a formula for a perpetual race war that can never be resolved. It is based on contempt for the foundations of the canon of ideas stemming from Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, which represent the foundation of not just Western civilization but the American republic. As such, it is part of a war against that civilization and America that treats both the West and the United States as irredeemably racist.
Though some may wish for this DEI ideology to include Jews as an approved minority and among the victims (which would be justified by their history of persecution and being the object of hatred to this day), such a designation is antithetical to the woke point of view. That’s because this essentially Marxist formulation has always adhered to the notion that Jews are, by definition, among the oppressor class because of their success relative to that of other peoples, including their neighbors in the Middle East.
In this way, 19th- and 20th-century Marxists and their 21st-century “progressive” successors have adapted age-old myths about Jews to accommodate their ideology. Antisemitism is not a bug but a feature of woke leftism.
In contemporary American academia, these ideas have long since moved from the margins to the mainstream to the point where they have become an orthodoxy from which no dissent is allowed. Anyone who doesn’t accept these ideas, such as those who are politically conservative or supporters of Zionism, has essentially become an extinct species to humanity and social-sciences faculties and college administrations.
That explains the response in American academia to Oct. 7 and the war against Hamas. It was uniformly hostile to Jewish Israelis, who were the intended victims of a genocidal war waged against them, and sympathetic to Islamist perpetrators and their supporters, whose medieval political, social and religious attitudes are otherwise antithetical to everything that American progressives support.
The role of foreign money
Another element to this malevolent atmosphere was the way so many top universities have essentially sold themselves to foreign interests, especially those from Middle Eastern countries, where Jew-hatred was already an integral part of the culture even before it was weaponized to whip up hostility to the modern-day State of Israel.
Foreign students now make up fully one-quarter of the population of Harvard, with at least an equal percentage of the faculty also coming from abroad. At Columbia, the numbers are even more lopsided, with fully 55% of the students at its various departments and schools coming from other countries.
The reason why these and other schools are so up in arms about Trump’s efforts to enforce the law and deport those students who violating the terms of their visas by engaging antisemitic violence and advocacy for terror groups like Hamas is that admitting foreigners—who pay full tuition far more frequently than Americans—is integral to their business plans and economic survival. It also makes it harder for domestic applicants, even those who are most qualified, to get into these schools, making admissions a scarcer and more valuable commodity for them.
So, when, for example, The New York Times reports that losing foreign students because of increased restrictions on visas and deportations of Hamas supporters, what they are tacitly admitting is that these terror supporters should be given priority over Americans, especially those who are not wealthy enough to buy their way onto elite campuses with their parents’ money.
Donations from foreign governments, entities and individuals, particularly those from nations like Qatar, have financed various departments, which makes it more understandable why Middle East studies departments have uniformly become hotbeds of antisemitism and hostility to Israel’s existence.
All of this served as the formula for an explosion of Jew-hatred on campus and in the streets of major American cities.
Yet this was not an end in and of itself; it was only one part of a much larger war on the West and America. Ending such animus therefore requires an effort that takes into account this context in which the antagonism against Jews and Jewish rights, which is now routinely falsely portrayed as evidence of idealism and progressive activism, has become pervasive within academia.
Defunding is essential
Any effort to curb prejudice against Jews that treats it in isolation, and is not also directed to ending the woke orthodoxy at universities that is producing hate against the West and America, would fail miserably. And that is exactly what has happened whenever the issue has been approached as one that does not include reforms to address the root cause of the left-wing antisemitism that dominates academic culture.
The only way to force these schools to change is to threaten their funding with decisive actions, such as those that Trump is attempting to implement. Doing so as part of a glacially slow process that always ends with slaps on the wrist for the offenders rather than punishments that hurt, as has happened with past complaints to the Department of Education to enforce the provisions of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is little better than doing nothing at all.
Contrary to the dishonest attacks on Trump coming from the left, the battle against woke ideology isn’t a conservative culture war issue or part of a populist or anti-intellectual effort to destroy education, science or even democracy itself. You can’t fight antisemitism without seeking to roll back the woke tide that has been ruining schools and so much else. Trump’s targeting of these institutions is the only plan of action that has the potential to save both Jewish students and the academic institutions they attend from forces bent on wrecking all of American society.
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