Trump wants to make the Jews responsible
Antisemitism on US campuses is very real – the president's concern for it is not
Yesterday, the Trump administration announced it would reassess $9bn in federal grants and contracts for Harvard University, as part of what it called a “comprehensive review” into the failure of educational institutions to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses.
It follows the cancellation of $400m in funding for fellow Ivy League school, Columbia University, which became the focal point of anti-Israel protests and encampments after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas inside Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Criticism of the Israeli government, concern for civilian life or support for the Palestinians’ legitimate aspiration for statehood are not antisemitic. At the same time, anti-Jewish hatred on American college campuses is real and pervasive. Jewish students regularly face harassment and threats of violence on the basis of their religion and ethnicity.
A recent study from the Anti-Defamation League finds that 83% of Jewish college students experienced or witnessed antisemitism firsthand since the 7 October attacks. Meanwhile some pro-Palestinian groups on campus, such as Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which sparked the encampments, have openly supported violence, calling the 7 October massacre a “moral, military and political victory” and praised a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv last year that killed seven people, according to the New York Times.
Of course, the Trump administration does not care about any of this. Whether abducting legal residents who have committed no crimes, threatening law firms or unlawfully shutting down entire departments, the US government is on a revenge tour. Meanwhile, Trump himself is no stranger to accusations of antisemitism or proximity to antisemites.
In 2017, he said of white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, that they included “some very fine people” (they chanted, amongst other things, “Jews will not replace us.”) He sought to pre-emptively blame Jews for his defeat in the 2024 election, suggesting that if it happened, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss.” American Jews vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
He labelled Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish elected official in US history, a “Palestinian”, on the basis that Trump can apparently determine who is and is not Jewish depending on whether they agree with him. Addressing American Jews in 2018, he referred to Israel as “your country”, reinforcing an antisemitic trope about Jews having dual loyalties. Or just check out these various adverts during the 2016 presidential campaign. And all the while, MAGA welcomes all manner of bigots.
Trump is far from alone in criticising only the Jews who do not agree with him, and opposing only the Jew-hatred of his political opponents. Moreover, what unites far-right, far-left, religious and cultural antisemitism is a belief in the conspiracy myth of Jewish control, with the Jewish target “transformed into an avatar of absolute evil who stands behind the world’s ills,” in the words of the journalist, Yair Rosenberg.
Trump is using Jews as a battering ram to attack institutions he disfavours, in this case higher education. He is deliberately and cynically exploiting antisemitism as part of a wider plan to undermine if not ultimately abolish the rule of law. This, of course, puts Jews in even more danger.
Congresswoman Laura Friedman, Democrat of California, told Jewish Insider recently that Trump’s actions were an attempt to make Jews “responsible for the defunding of programs to deal with cancer research, with science, [which] has nothing to do with antisemitism.”
I’m going to end with a long quote from David Schraub, an associate professor at Lewis & Clark Law School:
“By wrenching "fighting antisemitism" away from what Jews actually want, and seizing it for his personal authoritarian revenge project, [Trump] isolates Jews yet further. We're isolated from other members of our community, we're isolated from actual resources of care and support, we're isolated from one another. It's despicable, and it's disgusting, and it is frankly terrifying. But the only way to fight it is to fight it. Don't indulge it, don't tip toe around it, don't even for a second pretend to think it has anything to do with actually fighting actual antisemitism. We will not be fig leaves for your fascism.”