American Jews were played — now what?

Contributing Columnist
Jay Michaelson
July 18, 2025

We all know this was never about antisemitism, right?

This was already true in January 2024, when Republicans hauled university presidents into a perjury trap disguised as a congressional hearing. Already, it was clear to many of us that the campaign against universities was political, and that the hearings about antisemitism were political theater.

But at the time, American Jews were reeling. First came the murderous attacks of Oct. 7, 2023; then, before we even had time to grieve, we faced the silence or ambivalence or even support for the murder of civilians on the part of many progressive organizations; then came brutal, radical anti-Zionist protests that opposed not just the Gaza war but the state of Israel itself; and along with them, there were frequent incidents of antisemitism: Jews targeted and harassed, “Zionists” excluded from university organizations, and extreme rhetoric drawn from age-old antisemitic sources.

It is clear that many universities, in their attempt to balance free speech and safety, erred too much on the side of free expression. Detailed reports at Harvard, Columbia, and other universities have substantiated these claims. Jewish students were afraid.

It was at that moment that Republicans seized upon our legitimate fears and exploited them for political gain. So forgive us for not seeing their motives more clearly.

But those motives are abundantly clear a year and a half later.

First, Trump and his Republican allies have attacked universities for all manner of alleged sins: tolerating antisemitism, yes, but also promoting “DEI” (a term that, like “woke,” now means whatever Republicans want it to mean), failing to instill patriotic values in students, allowing trans people to compete in sports, skimming too much money off the top of grants, lacking “ideological diversity,” and not paying their fair share of taxes.

What do these allegations have in common? Not antisemitism, obviously, but the targets of Republican ire: universities, especially elite ones, which MAGA nationalists, post-liberal ideologues, and Christian theocrats all hate, albeit for different reasons.

We also know that these attacks on universities are part of MAGA’s wider attack on small-l liberal society in general. There’s no antisemitism at the NIH, for example, but Trumpists have cut its grants by $20 billion a year, most of which goes to, you guessed it, universities. Antisemitism was just a convenient pretext for this much larger war against “elite” institutions – the “Cathedral” in the metaphor of anti-democratic darling Curtis Yarvin. Said Yarvin in 2008, “all the rivers of state cash that flow to the universities need to be plugged. No grants to professors, no subsidies for students, no nothing.”

Second, in addition to what the Trump administration has done, Republican ideologues have said quite clearly why they are attacking universities — and antisemitism is an afterthought.

For example, on July 27, 2023 — two months before Oct. 7 — Christopher Rufo wrote an op-ed in The New York Times railing against university DEI programs. “In order to strengthen the values of liberal education, political leaders must use democratic power to reform drifting academic institutions and resist the process of ideological capture,” he wrote at the time. Argued Rufo, “Many DEI programs seem to be predicated on a view radically different from the liberal tradition: namely, that the university is not merely a home for the discovery of knowledge, but also a vehicle for activism, liberation and social change.”

Agree or disagree with that statement (and I completely disagree), it clearly has nothing to do with antisemitism. And it should be taken in the context of Rufo’s other work, such as his campaign to defame gay people like me as “groomers” who endanger children, a charge as dangerous as it is preposterous. Rufo is a cultural conservative, and his crusade against elite universities is about cultural conservatism, not protecting Jews.

Here’s another example. On Dec. 23, 2022, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and chief architect of Project 2025, gave an interview about the reasons legacy institutions of higher education needed to be dismantled. Beginning with personal reminiscence (“[A]s the lone conservative graduate student in the history department at the University of Texas, I had experienced the Left marching through the institutions. Although I was treated very well by the faculty, it was clear to me then that we had to create a parallel set of institutions”), Roberts agrees with his interviewer that:

I could not agree with you more on the advice you give to younger people about forgetting the legacy institutions. I think the institutions you mentioned — and many others, too — are too far gone to be saved. And yet they have endowments that are far too large. We have too much work to do to think that they are actively going to implode on their own. They are, however, in a slow-motion implosion. We just need to sit back, drink bourbon, smoke a cigar, and celebrate the hell out of it — while we work our butts off during the daytime to go and wreck those institutions.

Again, this was well before Oct. 7 and the anti-Israel protests that followed. The architect of Project 2025 — 56% of which has now been put into effect by the Trump administration — declared his intention to “wreck those institutions.”

Now-Vice-President JD Vance agreed. In June 2021, he said he wanted to “destroy the universities,” saying college degrees made people “deranged.” Later that year, he said in a speech that “the universities are the enemy.”

Even the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” which this publication first reported on last December and which purports to be about attacking “Hamas Support Organizations,” is actually focused on “progressive elites” who seek to “dismantle Western democracies, values and culture.” Notably, all but one of Project Esther’s architects are non-Jewish, the project blueprint engages in antisemitic conspiracy-mongering, and the Heritage Foundation lied about Jewish organizational support for it. Project Esther is about Christian Zionism and post-liberal Christian America, not protecting Jews from harassment or defamation. Indeed, far from protecting Jews, many of Project Esther’s targets are Jews.

There are many reasons why nationalist conservatives hate higher education — why MAGA hero Viktor Orban decimated Hungary’s once-proud universities, and why the Trump administration sued Harvard, bullied Columbia into total capitulation, and pushed out the president of the University of Virginia. Nationalist conservatives seek to create, in Robert Reich’s words, an “illiberal democracy” based on conformity to conservative-nationalist values, and universities stand in the way of that. Wrote Reich:

Behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual, anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism… [T]he greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. That’s why slave owners prohibited enslaved people from learning to read, fascists burn books, and tyrants close universities.

Or maybe the answer is simpler: the “diploma divide.” In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris won the votes of college graduates by 55-45, while Donald Trump won the votes of non-college-graduates 56-44. No wonder Republicans want to “destroy the universities.”

But whatever the reasons nationalists may have for opposing higher education, the sad fact is that American Jews have been played. At the moment of our entirely understandable trauma, fear and dread, these ideologues exploited our fears and made us into freiers.

And not only that — it is precisely the American liberal tradition, epitomized by university education, that made the American Jewish dream possible in the first place. My grandparents came here as immigrants from Russia, Lithuania and Latvia. They believed in higher education and instilled those values in my parents, who attended Columbia and Barnard. And my parents built a world for me that their previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

This possibility of advancement and opportunity, part of what really made America great, is now endangered by the draconian cuts in science funding, the punitive taxes on university endowments, and the crusade of censorship and fear that the Trump administration has conducted. And the final insult? That they are claiming to do so in the name of protecting Jews.

There’s a lot we should learn from this cynical exploitation of Jewish trauma.

First, we should be deeply suspicious when outside actors suddenly style themselves as Defenders of the Jews — especially when, as in this case, the same people attacking pro-Palestine activists are mum when it comes to Trump administration officials with close ties to known antisemites, including FBI Director Kash Patel, who has appeared eight times on the podcast of holocaust-denier and Hitler-praiser Stew Peters; Paul Ingrassia, a lawyer for the rabidly antisemitic Andrew Tate; and Department of Defense spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, who has shared antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, including references to the “great replacement theory” and the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 (“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” she said in 2023).

If someone’s attention to antisemitism just so happens to track their ideological priors while ignoring the bias within their own ranks (and this is true on the left as well as the right), we should be extremely suspicious of their motivations.

Second, we should look internally as well. How angry, fearful, confused or traumatized do I feel right now? How might I be vulnerable to exploitation? Am I making decisions based on reason, or emotion? It is perfectly legitimate to disagree about whether a comment, protest, person or group is antisemitic. Jewish New Yorkers are experiencing such a disagreement right now. But for that disagreement to be valid, it must be rooted in evidence and reflection, not reflexive, emotional reactions that are — again, quite understandably — shaped by a long history of Jewish trauma and pain.

Third, and I say this as a rabbi and meditation teacher, there is a place for anger, and this is one such place. I am absolutely furious that Republicans have taken advantage of legitimate Jewish fears, exploited actual antisemitic incidents and conflated them with non-antisemitic ones, and used Jewish vulnerability as a pretext. Quite honestly, I find such efforts to themselves be antisemitic. I have seen their impacts firsthand, in my own community, in people who are terrified into believing conspiracy theories without basis in reality, who are sincerely afraid for the wellbeing of their loved ones.

Finally, we need to stop the assault on liberal society being perpetrated in the name of fighting antisemitism. On May 8 of this year, a group of mainstream, centrist American Jewish leaders signed a letter titled “Stand Up for Jewish Safety and Democracy.” The letter reads, in part:

A range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press. Let us acknowledge that these rights, institutions and systems are the cornerstone of American Democracy and enabled American Jewry to thrive in the 20th century. American Jewry enjoyed more rights, more freedoms, more opportunities and more achievements than we have ever known in 2,500 years of Jewish life…

[W]e recognize the complexity of addressing these issues when there is division within our communities. Our message is motivated by the exigencies of this moment when democratic norms are under assault and antisemitism is metastasizing. It is imperative to join with our fellow citizens to protect and preserve our democracy.

We urge Jewish leadership to forcefully and publicly reaffirm the historic and continuing commitment of the American Jewish community to academic freedom, to the rule of law, to ensure due process to anyone accused of breaking the law, to freedom of speech and the press. And we call on Jewish leaders and institutions – national and local – to resist the exploitation of Jewish fears and publicly join with other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of democracy.

The letter concluded, “The time to act is Now!”

Amen.

La source de cet article se trouve sur ce site