I co-wrote Biden’s antisemitism strategy. Trump is making the threat worse

Alexander Pascal
April 4, 2025

President Donald Trump has made a big show of fighting antisemitism — specifically at colleges and universities — in the first months of his second term. He has taken aggressive, punitive actions against institutions and individuals that his administration has accused of condoning, enabling or contributing to campus protests against Israel that have sometimes veered into antisemitism.

Some in the Jewish community have publicly lauded these steps. Many more have quietly cheered them in private. Even if his methods make you cringe, at least he’s doing something, the thinking goes.

But in this season bookended by Purim and Passover, when antisemitism — and redemption from it — are top of mind for Jews, we would be wise to see Trump’s rhetoric and policies on antisemitism for what they really are: gaslighting that will further endanger American Jews. As a policymaker who has studied and fought this unique, pernicious form of hatred, an American citizen, and a Jew, what he’s doing terrifies me.

Antisemitism has been on the rise in the United States for years. Last fall, the FBI reported that hate crimes exclusively targeting Jews had increased by 63% in 2023 over the previous year, reaching the highest number recorded since the FBI began collecting data in 1991. (2023 is the last year for which hate crime data is available.) Although Jews make up less than 2% of the U.S. population, in 2023, anti-Jewish hate crimes comprised 15% of all hate crimes.

But even before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 changed the landscape of American antisemitism, it was clear from the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville; attacks like that on the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018; and a surge antisemitism online that hatred toward Jews was on the rise. In response, former President Joe Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism — the first American policy of its kind, which I proudly co-authored — took hundreds of concrete steps to combat antisemitism.

What Trump is doing — detaining foreign students who’ve committed no crime for exercising free speech, and stripping universities of crucial research funding — will have the opposite effect.

By publicly linking federal funding for research to combating antisemitism — and cynically appropriating the Hebrew word “shalom” to announce ICE’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil — Trump has actually fed nasty tropes about Jews wielding financial leverage and pulling the strings of government to protect perceived “Jewish” interests. Meanwhile, the Departments of Justice and Education (or what’s left of it) have launched antisemitism investigations into dozens of universities nationwide, singling out Jews as worthy of federal protection while simultaneously dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that support countless vulnerable and underprivileged Americans.

These actions create the perception on campuses that Jews are getting special treatment, which will likely breed resentment against Jews among students of different backgrounds, who also suffer discrimination and harassment on account of their identities.

It’s obvious that antisemitism is a pressing issue on campus, and in American society broadly. But there’s a crucial fact that the Trump administration is failing to acknowledge — one that consultations with more than 1,000 rabbis, students, Jewish leaders and educators, and more clearly showed us as we worked on Biden’s antisemitism strategy.

It’s this: A strong democracy that values its people’s diversity, safeguards their fundamental rights, and protects them equally under the law is the only true bulwark against the catastrophic antisemitism that we have experienced throughout our history. The foundational insight of the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism was that any serious initiative to fight the very real scourge of antisemitism in the U.S. must focus on cultivating and strengthening a vibrant democracy — not destroying it.

If the Trump administration was serious about reducing antisemitism, it would work to promote the inclusion of Jews on campus, rather than further isolating them.

It would use federal agencies to educate Americans about the threat of antisemitism, and support cooperation among civil society, business, and state and local government to combat it, rather than eviscerate government departments and their workforces.

It would work with social media platforms and influencers to tackle pervasive antisemitic content online, rather than spreading and amplifying antisemitic conspiracy theories in the MAGAsphere.

The counter-productiveness of Trump’s so-called actions against antisemitism makes it clear that combating antisemitism is not his goal. Instead, that purported aim is just a smokescreen for political retribution, and a pretense to take a wrecking ball to American democracy.

This is bad for the U.S., and bad for Jews. It is corrupting the very idea of combating antisemitism, in a way that will make Jews even more unsafe, fearful, and dependent on outside “protection.”

But maybe that’s part of the point? During the 2024 campaign, Trump sold himself as the “protector of Israel,” a claim he has used to avoid accounting for allegations of past and present antisemitism by himself, members of his administration, and his supporters.

Whatever one thinks about Israel’s response to the horrific Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 — and Jews are divided on that question — it has undoubtedly put us at risk by fanning the embers of latent prejudice, helping radicalize a generation of young people against Jews, and sowing the seeds of future conflict. A key reason that the U.S. has historically been counted as Israel’s greatest friend is that, since Israel’s founding, American leaders of both parties have worked to counsel the Jewish state away from acting on its most aggressive and occasionally self-destructive impulses.

Trump has done the opposite. He has egged Israel on in its military campaigns with escalatory rhetoric, blank check material support, and a proposal for the de facto ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Unfair and unjustified as it is, Israel’s actions have incited attacks on Jews worldwide. And so, Trump’s encouragement and enabling of ever more extreme Israeli policies will almost certainly create greater backlash for American Jews.

Oct. 7 traumatized Israel, and Jews around the world. I felt it, too. Deeply. I can understand why people who feel vulnerable and threatened might wish for a strongman to protect them. But our own history, and scripture, show that this approach backfires.

Because while institutions and culture have staying power, kings are short-lived. They are also transactional, insecure, and capricious.

Look to the Megillah, which we read for Purim only weeks ago. It tells us how King Ahashveros of Persia flipped on a dime from endorsing a policy of genocide against the Jews of Persia to executing that policy’s architect, Haman. And look to the Exodus story we’ll recount next week at our Passover Seders. One pharaoh elevated Joseph to a position of great power, and welcomed his family into Egypt during famine. Another enslaved the Israelites, and murdered their babies.

So, too, must we worry about our contemporary leaders changing with the wind. Trump has already shown that he will exploit antisemitism to advance his own political and financial interests. Any Jew in the U.S. who thinks that he won’t, when it suits him, scapegoat and persecute Jews with the full power of the federal government, and his unprecedented digital bully pulpit, is tragically naive.

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