On March 10, three days after the Trump administration canceled federal grants and contracts worth $400 million at Columbia University, the Department of Education sent a letter to sixty universities and colleges warning of similar consequences if they did not protect the safety of their Jewish students, including “uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” This was accompanied by a statement from the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, which said, in part, that the Jewish students at these universities and colleges “continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year.”
I have spent my teaching career at three of these schools: Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where I taught for twenty-five years; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I taught for fifteen years; and the University of Washington in Seattle, where in retirement I taught as a visiting professor for two quarters. At all of them I regularly taught a highly enrolled course on the history of the Holocaust. During my career I also published eight books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, three of which won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. In short, I am not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of antisemitism as it has manifested itself in history.
In 2016 President Trump’s election campaign produced two notorious ads: one featuring Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and a Star of David, and another promising protection against global special interests and featuring the portraits of three Jewish financiers, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein. Both ads were blatant renditions of the classic antisemitic smear of Jewish money and Jewish financiers as the sources of power behind an opponent. In August 2017, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstrators marched with swastika and Confederate flags in a Nazi-style torchlit parade, chanting the Nazi slogans “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Responding to this incident, Trump found there to be “fine people” on “both sides.”
After the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which attempted to overturn the legal election of his opponent, Trump praised those sentenced and jailed as “political hostages” and “patriots.” He did not say whether those labels applied to the protesters wearing sweatshirts that said “CAMP AUSCHWITZ,” or those seen elsewhere wearing what seems to be the Proud Boy version, “6MWE” (6 Million Weren’t Enough). Since he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022 with the self-proclaimed antisemite Kanye West and the leading Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, Trump is apparently not disturbed by such company or sentiments. And in the run-up to the 2024 election, he proclaimed that if he lost, it would be because too many American Jews had failed to vote for him—once again a classic antisemitic tactic: if things go wrong, blame the Jews.
In short, if the Trump administration were truly concerned about antisemitism, it could start in its own house. Instead the Department of Education, which Trump hopes to dismantle, is now seizing the pretext of antisemitism to wage a campaign whose real purpose is to defund, demoralize, and diminish higher education in the US. This is a campaign energized by the fact that the essential ethos and purpose of higher education stands in stark conflict with Trump’s alternate reality. “Trump World” is based on a paranoid imagination, an obsession with conspiracy theories, wishful thinking, and the pervasive and constant invention of disinformation and false statements immune to refutation by evidence and reason. In contrast, among their many functions, universities and colleges are the sites of scientific and medical research (dealing with such issues as climate change and vaccines) as well as the fact-based study of history and economics.
However regrettable incidents of antisemitism on American campuses have been, this must not obscure the broader issue. Universities and colleges must not impinge on the constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech for all citizens. They are obligated to protect the academic freedom of their faculty and students, just as they are obligated to ensure that faculty and students are treated with civility and respect and protected against harassment. What a university or college cannot do is try to protect its students from the anxiety produced by academic challenges or the political controversies that affect all society. The campus is not a sanctuary from discomfort.
In addition to being a major disseminator and legitimizer of antisemitism in American politics and promiscuously associating with neo-Nazi white supremacists, Trump has been an open advocate of unfettered violence against Palestinians. He has urged Israel to make a quick end to the Gaza conflict, by which he must mean that it need take no precautions to avoid noncombatant casualties. He has announced his intention for the US to take possession of Gaza for recreational development and to ethnically cleanse Gaza by sending its residents to other countries. At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, actions like these constituted crimes of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Germans who issued or obeyed orders to commit such criminal actions were sentenced to prison.
Advertisement
It is utterly contradictory but hardly surprising for Trump to feign indignation over the harassment of Jewish students while openly advocating criminal violence against Palestinians. His campaign against campus antisemitism is simply a hypocritical pretext for his assault on American higher education.
