Smokescreen

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has canceled billions of dollars in research grants (including for cancer research), opened sweeping investigations into dozens of campuses, and demanded a voice in admissions, hiring, and curricula, all in the name of fighting antisemitism. Rather than a sincere effort to address real threats against Jewish students, these actions are part of a broader campaign against higher education. By wielding antisemitism as a pretext for federal intervention, the administration has turned a moral imperative into a tool of intimidation—and a weapon to secure partisan advantage while advancing a broader political agenda.

To be clear, antisemitism on campus presents a real and growing problem for Jewish students, faculty, and staff. In the 2024–25 academic year, Hillel International tracked 2,334 antisemitic incidents on US college campuses—the highest number recorded since the organization began monitoring such incidents in 2019. Episodes have ranged from graffiti, swastikas, and verbal harassment to violent assaults in which Jewish students were physically attacked after being identified as Jews. 

To understand and productively respond to this moment, we need to hold two truths at once. Antisemitism on campus is real, growing, and deeply harmful to Jewish students, faculty, and staff, who deserve safety and belonging. At the same time, the Trump administration has taken advantage of this crisis to promote a political agenda that exploits Jewish pain while doing little to address it. Accepting both the urgent need to confront antisemitism and the dangers of its weaponization is essential if higher education is to respond to this crisis with integrity and effectiveness.

During the two-plus years since the October 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War, the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has grown increasingly volatile, marked by devastating violence, a humanitarian crisis, and a hardening of political positions on both sides. Regional and international efforts at de-escalation have repeatedly faltered amid cycles of retaliation, displacement, and rising casualties. The fallout has reverberated globally, fueling protests and demonstrations at colleges and universities, as well a surge in antisemitic incidents on US campuses.

The current situation builds on more than two decades of anti-Israel activism on campus that gradually blurred the line between political protest and personal hostility. In the late 1990s, as Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke down and the Second Intifada approached, student groups organized teach-ins and protests critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. These demonstrations laid the groundwork for the later launch of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which calls for cutting economic, cultural, and academic ties with Israel. By October 7, 2002, more than three hundred college and university presidents warned in a letter published as a full-page ad in the New York Times of an “atmosphere of intimidation” toward “students who are Jewish or supporters of Israel’s right to exist—Zionists.” 

Yet as American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell later admitted, antisemitism remained “a back-burner issue” on most campuses until the surge of antisemitic episodes that followed the October 7, 2023, attacks. The long period of denial and uneven response left colleges and universities vulnerable, creating an opening for the Trump administration to turn a genuine problem into a political weapon and a pretext for exerting federal control over higher education.

Simultaneous to the rise of antisemitism on campuses, Republicans have been targeting higher education in increasingly political ways. In 2021, then running for the US Senate, Vice President J. D. Vance told the National Conservatism Conference that universities were “fundamentally corrupt” and that the government had to “aggressively attack” them. In a Washington Examiner op-ed published September 25, 2023, Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, wrote that “our university system has been captured by anti-American and illiberal ideology” and “must be repaired.” Her argument linked campus antisemitism to what she described as a broader collapse of patriotic and moral values in higher education.

As chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, she later led the charge during the contentious December 5, 2023, House hearing on campus antisemitism. The hearing ultimately contributed to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Antisemitism offered Foxx and other Republicans a way to wage their campaign against higher education not as partisan or anti-academic but as a defense of Jewish students’ safety and civil rights. By positioning herself as protecting a vulnerable group, Foxx could pursue broad oversight powers—over speech, diversity programs, and governance—under the guise of civil-rights enforcement rather than ideological control. 

I remember the hearing well because I was the fourth witness on the panel. As a scholar of American antisemitism, I was there to show that the current wave of antisemitism, coming from the left and the right, is not new and has a long history in this country. Yet, that afternoon, I left Congress convinced that I had witnessed the opening salvo in a long-planned attack. One month before, then candidate Trump, after censuring colleges and universities for “turning our students into communists and terrorists,” had announced plans to tax university endowments to fund a free online college that would ban “wokeness or jihadism” and whose graduates would receive government jobs.

By the time Trump took office, that proposal had vanished. A different strategy had emerged. The new Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism inaugurated its work by rooting out antisemitism on campuses. The task force’s unprecedented actions and demands—including pushing for changes to admissions and hiring and the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—however, have had little to do with addressing and resolving antisemitism. Rather, they have been part of what New York Times columnist David Brooks described in April 2025 as a broad “assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life.”  

In a Boston courtroom in late July 2025, US District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs got to the heart of the matter. After pressing a government lawyer to explain how fighting antisemitism justified canceling cancer research, Burroughs observed that the Trump administration wasn’t targeting those guilty of perpetrating antisemitism but was instead cutting funding in a way that would harm all Americans.

Even as the administration has invoked antisemitism to justify punishing and controlling higher education, many colleges and universities have been working in good faith to protect Jewish students and staff. They have introduced antisemitism education, expanded civil discourse efforts, revised student conduct codes, and integrated Jewish history and identity into diversity initiatives and programming. While I applaud these steps, they will not erase Jewish students’ memories of swastikas left on dorm room whiteboards, taunts to “go back to Poland,” or a seminar leader’s announcement of “I hate Israel” during a senior thesis presentation on Israeli artists. 

For much of Jewish history, encountering antisemitism has been the norm. Current Jewish students are now experiencing a new chapter in that long history. This reality demands both vigilance and moral clarity. But confronting antisemitism must not become an excuse to erode the very principles universities must defend. As the Trump administration turns this struggle into a political weapon, educators face a dual responsibility: to protect students from hate while standing firm against efforts to use that hate as a guise for dismantling higher education’s independence.

Illustration by Daniel Stolle