Trump’s charge that universities are hotbeds of antisemitism is absurd and is just a pretext to undermine America’s most import centers of liberal values. This assault is a vital piece of the overall fascist project we are witnessing today.
American higher education has been anything but antisemitic for the last century. Indeed, Jews have been historically overrepresented as a percentage of the faculty and students. While Jews make up 2.2 percent of Americans, they comprised over 20 percent of the faculty at the top ten universities in the 1980s, and an astonishing 50% of the “top intellectuals” of that era. From the 1920s on, Jews have had among the highest rates of college-going of any ethnic group.
There are several reasons for the strong link between universities and Jews in the 20th Century. Certainly, elite universities discriminated against Jews in the early 1900s; Harvard famously placed a quota on Jewish admissions in that era. But, unlike anti-Black, Mexican, Asian and Native American discrimination of that time, antisemitism did not take the form of state-backed legal sanctions; it remained the private purview of colleges, housing developers, businesses and social clubs. That is, while Jews in that era indeed faced private discrimination, they also enjoyed the public recognition that they were white during the Jim Crow era. As a result, Jews were able to find new avenues for upward mobility that only whites could achieve, such as in the new public sector law firms (spawned by the New Deal), and the rapidly growing entertainment industry and fields of medicine of the 1930s. As Jews achieved success through these routes, private sector antisemitism diminished (Although it never disappeared, especially among the very same white Christian nationalists who now are leading the charge against antisemitism!),
Certainly, Jews quickly grasped that higher education was the road to upward mobility. But even more, there was and is an important connection between Jewish cultural identity and the values of modern higher education as well. As Steve Mintz explains in Inside Higher Education (2023):
…(I)t seems to me that one can speak of a secular American Jewish faith—which involves activism, the arts and culture, entrepreneurship, intellectualism and science, behavioral, physical, psychological and social—and an American Jewish legacy—that, at its best, is a commitment to cultural pluralism and social justice, to peshat (intensive study and exegesis of texts), tzedakah (charity as a moral obligation), and tikkum olam (the obligation to repair and improve the world).
These values are not just Jewish values, they are core values of modern liberal thought. Liberalism itself evolved rapidly in the post-fascist world of the 1950s and 1960s, with the dawning recognition that individual liberty for all can only exist in the condition of political and economic democracy for all.
At their best, American universities embrace a commitment to these values. Of course, universities (and their academic disciplines) did NOT embrace these values before the 1970s. Universities claimed to embrace science and meritocracy even as they actively excluded the voices of people of color, women and queers. The deepening commitment to democratic values resulted from political action by graduate students and faculty in the 1970s-1990s, in which Jewish academics often played a central role. By the beginning of the 21st Century, virtually all universities understood that all academic/professional fields benefit from their commitment to inclusive hiring and culturally plural perspectives.
MAGA’s fascist project aims at remaking the United States into a white Christian nation. The values of American higher education run directly counter to MAGA, and so a vital part of the MAGA strategy is to take down the universities. And, like all fascist movements, their assault on higher education is legitimized by a white nationalist pretext, which in this case is to claim that antisemitism is running amok on American college campuses.
Their parlor trick was to force colleges to adopt a definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that states that criticisms of Israel are antisemitic. This absurd definition (see my previous posts on this topic) label all student and faculty support for Palestinians’ right to simply exist in the face of Israel’s genocidal assault as antisemitism. This definition made it possible for a gang of right-wing Zionists in Los Angeles (who were not UCLA affiliated) to physically attack the non-violent pro-Palestinian encampment of UCLA students and faculty in April 2024, injuring dozens, and get away with it with only one arrest while UCLA then dismantled the encampment. This definition made every Zionist student who said that pro-Palestinian activities “made them uncomfortable” into victims of antisemitism rather than people who were defending genocide. This definition demanded that pro-genocidal speech be given the same protections as all legitimate speech. This parlor trick allowed universities to try to silence leading Jewish voices against Israel’s genocide, such as Judith Butler at UC Berkeley and Analise Orleck at Dartmouth.
American colleges and universities have no future in Trump’s fascist state. Every academic field, all the sciences and all humanities, are based on ideas that run counter to MAGA’s belief system. Any attempt to conciliate the Trump administration, such as Berkeley turning in the names of 160 anti-Zionist students and faculty, is simply opening the doors to a political movement that seeks the total destruction of academia as we know it.
American universities must unite into a single voice rejecting the IHRA equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It is a Trojan horse that opens the gates for fascism, and the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.
The long view 