The Trump administration says it’s fighting antisemitism. It’s really fighting Columbia University.
On Friday, the administration announced that the university, home to some of the most high-profile protests against Israel and its war in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack, would be losing $400 million in federal funding, due to “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Over the weekend, Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and graduate student at the university who has been prominently involved in campus protests, and began preparations to deport him. The department alleged online that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” a claim repeated by several administration officials, including the president, as they boasted about his arrest.
Posting on his Truth Social platform, President Trump delivered a warning to student activists and university administrators. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again,” he posted on Monday afternoon. “If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.” Student activists like Khalil, he wrote, were not protesters but “paid actors” engaging in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”
In actuality, these developments are not about fighting antisemitism or, for that matter, keeping Jews safe. Rather, this appears to me to be a cynical ploy by an administration full of people who promote and enable antisemitic conspiracies, which is fixated on attacking higher education, free speech, free assembly, and immigration and due process norms by using Jews, Jewish fear, and antisemitism as pretense to do that.
I am not alone in this view. “Columbia’s administration has bent over backwards to satisfy the Trump administration, with the creation of a massive new Office of Institutional Equity and new training protocols, among other things,” Sheldon Pollock, professor emeritus of South Asian studies at Columbia University, wrote me via email. “Nothing has worked because this onslaught has nothing to do with actual antisemitism. Entirely legitimate criticism of Israel’s massive ethnic cleansing campaign is being used as a pretext to destroy the American university and its core principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
There are, of course, Jews in this country who very vocally disagree, and who, by all accounts, sincerely believe that the protests that have raged on college campuses over the last year are hotbeds of antisemitism and that cutting funding from universities and deporting students is indeed the right way to respond.
A Jewish Columbia student told the New York Post the funding freeze was a “much needed wake-up call.” The Anti-Defamation League said that “using the power of the purse can be effective in prompting change when it hits the right targets” and “We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.” The Columbia Jewish Alumni Association greeted the news of the grant cuts with, “It finally happened,” and then argued that people shouldn’t feel sorry for Khalil because a green card and the opportunity to study at Columbia are privileges that he “threw away.” (Last I checked, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association is not affiliated with the University; as a Jewish alumna of the institution, I will here add that they do not represent nor did they consult all Jewish alumni, though in this they are hardly unique among Jewish institutions claiming to speak for Jews.)
I am not writing this to argue that these individuals and groups are insincere, or not genuinely worried about antisemitism on campus, or that theirs is not a Jewish view. It is. However cynical the administration might be in its use of antisemitism, I know that there are those who are not only genuinely concerned by it but genuinely believe that the approach the administration is currently taking is the right one.
Instead, I am writing this because I think that they are catastrophically wrong; that this judgment flies in the face of history and present politics; and that the approach being taken by the administration will neither combat antisemitism nor make Jews safer. In fact, I believe it puts Jews at greater risk.
“This phenomenon is very real,” Ilan Goldenberg, former national director of Jewish outreach of the Harris-Walz campaign, told me. American Jews are concerned. Some campuses do have real problems, and there are some students who cross the line into antisemitism. “But this is just not going to solve that problem.”
For one thing, it immediately takes resources from Jewish students, who are also at these universities. There is no way to bring a university to its knees without taking all of its students, including the Jewish ones, along with you. “People are going to suffer as a result of this,” said Goldenberg. “Including students. You can’t browbeat your way out of this problem.”
Goldenberg added that taking resources from a university and saying it is doing so for the good of Jews risks adding fuel to antisemitic fire. As Pollock put it, the grants and contracts are “from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Department of Education, and other federal offices,” which is to say that the funding will be cut from scientific and medical research. I do not think that cutting federal research money from the National Institutes of Health and announcing that that research can no longer be carried out because of Jews is particularly good for Jews. “It’s going to make these students targets,” Goldenberg said.
Tying allegations of antisemitism to immigration is also deeply problematic. Antisemitism is not an imported problem, and acting as though it is, and as though the issue is students on visas and not American society, ignores the real work needed to fight it. Further, xenophobia and antisemitism are inextricably intertwined in this country. As the Forward pointed out in a story prior to Khalil’s arrest, the very law that may serve as the basis for deporting people on visas, the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, was “widely understood at the time to target Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet agents.” But we don’t need to go back decades to see how xenophobia and antisemitism are linked: We remember President Donald Trump musing in 2018 that perhaps Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist George Soros might have been responsible for the migrant caravan the right was obsessed with in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections; we know that the shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue that same year was motivated by the conviction that Jews were flooding the country with immigrants.
Suspending funding and trying to deport a green card holder are not the same, but both cases involve an apparent disregard for due process. That a Jewish group or even groups says that something is good or bad for the fight against antisemitism does not necessarily make it so. But there is, I think, a reason why the numerous Jewish groups that have spoken out against the Trump administration’s actions at Columbia—from the IfNotNow movement for “equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis” and the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace to Amy Spitalnick, focused on democracy at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, to progressive, domestically focused groups like Bend the Arc and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, to Nexus, which works on combating antisemitism and protecting free speech (and with whose task force of academics, in the interest of full disclosure, I work as a fellow)—have stressed the threat that these moves pose to the norms that keep ours a liberal, pluralistic democracy, with protections that keep Jews safe.
As Phylisa Wisdom, executive director at New York Jewish Agenda, put it to me, “New Yorkers across the political spectrum are concerned about the rise in antisemitism.” But at the same time, “history shows us this kind of repression will not make Jews safer.”
What would make Jews safer? What would it look like to fight against antisemitism? It would involve investing in, not attacking, education. It would mean trying to bring communities together instead of pitting them against one another. It would involve those in the most powerful offices in the country attacking conspiracies instead of elevating them. And, as Goldenberg said, it would mean creating space for discussions around Israel in which people could “decouple the discussion on Israel from the discussion on American Jews.” The administration is doing the opposite of that and, in fairness, so too are some American Jews and Jewish organizations. But as with cheering on the crackdown at Columbia, that doesn’t make it an effective way to fight antisemitism.
