Stop Exploiting Antisemitism To Destroy Academic Freedom

This past Saturday evening marked the start of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating the Biblical exodus from Egypt and the journey from slavery to freedom — a physical and spiritual reinvention of the Jews. Passover honors our liberation from oppression and the ability to live with dignity, autonomy, and purpose. But the story isn’t just about freedom from bondage; it’s about freedom as a foundation for knowledge and learning. After escaping Egypt, the Israelites received the Torah at Mount Sinai, a moment symbolizing not only religious obligation, but the genesis of a people with a purpose of questioning. Every year, Jews the world over read the Haggadah with friends and family around the dinner table before a commemorative meal. This text is an amalgam of questioning, dialogue, and rabbinical commentary. It reflects a cultural identity of inquiry and signifies intellectual freedom as intrinsic to Judaism.

Thus, I am outraged as a Jewish college student to see President Donald Trump's administration invoking antisemitism as an excuse for an authoritarian assault on academic freedom.

To be clear, many Jewish students have felt increasingly unsafe on college campuses (after the Oct. 7. Hamas attacks). And make no mistake, this is unacceptable. Numerous university presidents have done an insufficient job of protecting their Jewish students, missing the distinction between protected expression, however troubling, and expression that crosses the line into antisemitic hate speech (e.g., threats of physical harm, unlawful harassment, or provocation of immediate violence). Every college and university has the responsibility to discipline hate speech, but a government campaign to wipe out academic freedom will not protect Jews from harm.

On the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Heritage Foundation, the far-right organization responsible for Project 2025, published Project Esther. The document co-opts the historical Jewish trauma of the Book of Esther — a canonical story associated with Jewish survival in the face of annihilation — to create a “national strategy to combat antisemitism.” The document outlines a plan for dismantling the “global Hamas Support Network,” which they claim to be an antisemitic mob comprised of the “Pro-Palestinian — and, more so — pro-Hamas” groups across the country. Since inauguration day, the Trump administration has followed the Heritage Foundation’s playbook to a tee.

Institutions of higher education are the primary target.

On March 10, the now nearly-extinct Department of Education sent letters to 60 colleges and universities warning them of the consequences if they continue failing to protect their Jewish students. And it has followed through, threatening to revoke billions in federal funding from nearly every Ivy League university, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, and many more. In exchange for maintaining  $400 million in federal grants, Columbia University was pressured into appointing an academic overseer alongside the addition of  36 police officers with full arresting power to facilitate the enforcement of the now-locked gates to the main campus quad. Upon announcing its inquisition into Columbia, the White House tweeted “SHALOM COLUMBIA” superimposed on a comically large headshot of the president.

The administration is also persecuting individual students without due process for alleged antisemitic activities. At Columbia, legal United States permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for his participation in pro-Palestinian activism. Over the weekend, an immigration judge approved Khalil’s deportation. The judge deferred to the government’s contention that, even though Khalil was not accused of breaking any laws, he posed “potential serious foreign policy consequences” to the U.S. Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by unidentifiable (plainclothes) immigration officers for co-writing an op-ed in the student paper despite an internal State Department memo finding no links to terrorism or antisemitism. Since Trump’s term began, the federal government has revoked over 500 student visas and threatened indefinite detention and deportation.

Any individual should have every right to disagree loudly with these activists. The opportunity to voice diverse opinions is essential to university life. It’s fundamentally Jewish as well, per the old adage that two Jews in a room will have three different opinions. But when disagreement leads to arrest, we are stripped of our freedom to discuss and dissent; both universities’ and Jews’ values are at stake.

For actions designed to make me safer, I’m feeling remarkably unsafe. Regime-enforced censorship through the use of secret police is eerily familiar and deeply uncomfortable to many Jews.

And yet, with support from right-leaning Jewish organizations, the government is using the safety of the Jewish people as a pretext for eradicating “woke” ideology from college campuses. In reference to Khalil’s detention, The Anti-Defamation League, an organization traditionally defending Jewish rights, praised Trump’s “broad, bold set of efforts to fight campus antisemitism.” Other pro-Israel organizations are applauding Trump’s use of their databases of students who criticize Israel.

All the while, the Heritage Foundation and even President Trump himself, while claiming to protect Jews, are hurling offensive judgments and tropes at Jewish citizens. In a criticism of Senator Chuck Schumer, President Trump managed both racism and antisemitism in one sentence, saying, “[Schumer] used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” In Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation called out the American Jewish populace for their supposed complacency, saying, “Many simply do not know what to do and are waiting for leadership to guide them.” The same document called Senator Bernie Sanders a member of the “Hamas Caucus” and called his anti-Israel positions “notorious and inexplicable.” (Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has paused millions in security funding for vulnerable nonprofits, including many Jewish synagogues and day schools.)

It’s perplexing to me that, on the one hand, the administration characterizes Jews as victims, while on the other hand, those who don’t see eye-to-eye with the administration — presumably including the more than 70% of U.S. Jews who voted for Kamala Harris  — are “not real Jews.” Will those of us who don’t fall within the administration’s narrow definition of Jewishness be next in line for targeted repression?

This is a scary thought, and yet there are Jewish university leaders who, fully aware of the personal and institutional risks, are standing up to the Trump administration regardless. On Monday, Harvard’s President Alan Garber announced the university’s rejection of the administration’s demands, declaring that the institution “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its Constitutional rights.” Michael Roth, Wesleyan University’s president, conveyed a similar message in a New York Times op-ed last week. We should follow these leaders’ examples of standing up to repression.

If Jewish liturgy teaches us anything, it’s that freedom is not safety bought through silence. Instead, freedom is the radical, if often uncomfortable, act of speaking up and asking questions. We are the people who recite, year after year on Passover, that we were strangers in the land of Egypt; that we must recall what it means to be vulnerable, stateless, powerless. We should tell our children the story not only to remember our trauma, but to pass down a responsibility: to ensure that freedom, in every generation, is expansive, not exclusive.

We cannot sit silently as this administration wraps authoritarianism in the language of Jewish survival. We should not abide our government abducting students off the street or threatening universities into ideological submission under the guise of “protecting Jews.” We should not accept strategies of “protection” that flatten our values into talking points and reduce Jewish tradition to fear. And we must not confuse state clampdowns on free speech with safety. Not when our ancestors cried out from bondage, not when they sat around Seder tables through the centuries celebrating freedom, and not now.

We can not accept this. Not in the name of the Jewish people. Not at all.