I Teach Jewish Studies. There's a Bitter Irony to What the Trump Administration Is Asking of My Campus.
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Last week, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to 60 institutions of higher education across the United States, warning them of potential enforcement actions if they do not address what the department calls 'the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year.' The small liberal arts college in New York where I teach Jewish Studies was among these 60 schools.
As the sole permanent tenure-track faculty member in Jewish Studies at my school, I would really rather be spending my time helping students pore through complicated legal arguments in old tracts of the Talmud, or evaluating the differences between rationalist and anti-rationalist trends in medieval Jewish thought, or thinking about the knotted course of Jewish emancipation in modern Europe. But in the past year, as our campus has become embroiled in contentious protests about Israel's war in Gaza and debates over our college's responsibility to respond to it, my academic discipline of Jewish Studies has become unavoidably politicized.
Since last fall, when our school had its Gaza solidarity encampment, Jewish students have come to my office to speak about their feelings about the campus climate. My Jewish students, contrary to what the Trump administration would have us believe, hold a broad spectrum of opinions about Israel and Palestine, the current war, and the environment on campus. I have a Jewish student who received disciplinary action from the school for leading the protests, and a Jewish student who felt sufficiently threatened by some of the rhetoric coming from the protesters that they did not want to leave their room for several days. And I have many Jewish students in the mushy middle between those two poles, sympathetic to some criticism of Israel's war while also feeling that some of the anti-Israel rhetoric has gone too far.
But what all my students, Jewish and non-Jewish, share, no matter their feelings about Gaza and campus protests, is disdain for the exploitation of real concerns about antisemitism on campus to fuel a broader crackdown on liberal education in the United States. And that is what they see coming from the Trump administration right now.
When they look at the actions of the Trump administration, my students observe a broad assault on the very concept of a liberal, humanist higher education, an ideal which all of us at this institution share. They see an administration cutting funding for necessary academic research to make examples of universities, even when that will hurt Jewish students.They see an administration detaining a Columbia alumnus with a valid green card for, while he was a graduate student, protesting the actions of the state of Israel, even while the administration admits he was not breaking the law. And they see an administration which entered office with detailed plans to dismantle higher education in this country root and branch, and is now seizing its opportunity to do just that.
My students see all that, and no matter their disagreements over Gaza and campus protests, they are unified in doubting the Trump administration's commitment to genuinely fighting campus antisemitism. When the Trump administration is telling German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of government, and appointing officials with long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to high office, my students across the political spectrum doubt that Donald Trump and his administration are serious about fighting antisemitism. Rather, they see a government using the pretext of fighting antisemitism to destroy the foundations of the liberal arts education that all my students, despite wide political differences, cherish and value.
And that, in turn, makes them less likely to want to speak up at all, even when they do have legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus.
Contrary to what the Trump administration seems to think, I have seen my students in class have productive, sensitive discussions about the complicated histories of the Israeli and Palestinian national movements, and how these histories redound today. I have seen them disagree respectfully, engaging with and learning from each other. But they are less likely to do that if they fear an errant word could be taken up by national politicians and turned against the college as a whole.
Much of my time is spent thinking and teaching about the transformations in Jewish identity that occurred as Europe as Jews gradually left the ghettos and acquired equal rights of citizenship. Though the specific histories differ according to time and place, what my students observe is that there is a reason Jews have tended to support liberal political movements advocating religious freedom, pluralism, and equality under the law. As a long-persecuted minority, Jews tend to do better in such political environments.
Trump, in contrast, is pointing us away from the liberal, pluralist values that have secured Jewish thriving in the United States, and toward an earlier model by which Jews related to sovereign governments: the court Jew, those Jews of Europe who made themselves indispensable to non-Jewish rulers by providing financial services and other support to the crown. In return, these Jews received temporary protection and an improvement in their social status—but these protections were always temporary, always something that could be taken away if times got tough and the ruler needed a scapegoat. Becoming a temporary protected class of the sovereign is always a dangerous position for a minority to be put in.
Earlier this year, our college received another directive from the Department of Education informing us that in the name of fighting 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' initiatives—a right-wing bogeyman that is as universal and as spectral an enemy for Trump now as Communism was for the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—we are no longer permitted to educate students about implicit biases during freshmen orientation, as we have long done. This directive, however, came with a large asterisk: We are still permitted to educate students about antisemitism. Antisemitism education, in other words, receives a special carve-out from broader anti-DEI policies. Jews get to be the special minority group receiving temporary protection from the government.
Not only does this separate Jews from other groups with which we might stand in solidarity, but it makes it impossible to educate students about the actual forms that antisemitism today takes. Imagine, for example, trying to teach about the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the deadliest anti-Jewish violence in American history, but being banned from teaching about the shooter's well-documented hatred of immigrants, which he linked to his hatred of Jews, whom he blamed for bringing immigrants into the United States. The mere thought of teaching about antisemitism this way is absurd, and yet this is precisely what the Trump administration's policy of allowing us to teach our students about antisemitism but banning education about xenophobia and anti-immigrant hatred would accomplish. By making Jews his personal pet minority—his court Jews, so to speak—Trump is making it impossible for us to link antisemitism to other forms of bigotry, and thereby to understand it in its real historical context.
My students learn about this history, and they see parallels between the long history of governments temporarily protecting Jews and how the Trump administration is now instrumentalizing Jews and Jewish safety, turning us into scapegoats for a larger crackdown on higher education across the country. Right now, Trump may say that he is acting on behalf of Jews. But a government that can detain student activists extrajudicially if it does not like their speech is a government that has abandoned its commitment to the liberal values that have made the United States possibly the greatest place for Jews in diaspora over many centuries.
By claiming to be acting on behalf of Jews while engaging in a preconceived right-wing ideological fight against the American university, the Trump administration gets a double win. They can claim to be acting on behalf of a powerful minority group, feeding into antisemitic narratives of shadowy Jewish power behind the scenes, while disguising the true nature of the Christian nationalist influences standing behind this campaign against higher education. Then if people start to actually miss the valuable research being done at these institutions of higher learning, American Jews will be made to take the fall for an assault on higher education that the American right has wanted to undertake since long before Oct. 7, 2023.
There is real antisemitism on college campuses and in American society more broadly, and it deserves to be addressed. But that would mean investing more in education, to learn critical lessons from history. And it would mean having difficult but necessary discussions about Israel and Palestine and their relationship to Jews and Palestinians living in the United States, discussions involving the kind of questions I know my students are fully capable of posing. But my students tell me they are now less likely to speak out, knowing how easily their concerns can be exploited by a hostile administration.
So when the Trump administration sends a letter to our college, turning us into a symbol of the liberal arts education model he is trying to decimate, I want to send them a letter right back, saying: 'Stay away from our campus. Our students deserve better than to be your pawns.'
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