By Naftali Bendavid · The Washington Post (c) 2025
The Trump administration declared last week that “harassment of Jewish students is intolerable” as it suspended $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard University. The school’s president, Alan Garber, fired back Monday that “as a Jew and as an American,” he is well aware of rising antisemitism but that defunding Harvard is no solution.
The Trump administration has frequently cited antisemitism to justify its decisions to slash funding for elite universities, deport foreign students it accuses of anti-Jewish sentiment, and seek more control over what American schools and universities teach.
Some Jewish leaders welcome President Donald Trump’s efforts as the most aggressive fight against anti-Jewish bigotry in American history. But others worry that Trump is politicizing the fight against antisemitism by using it to promote his agenda – potentially hurting Jews in the long run, especially as Trump dismantles other antidiscrimination efforts.
On the state level, legislators – mostly Republicans – are also pressing ahead with bills that include a much-debated definition of antisemitism, one that critics say chills legitimatecriticism of Israel.
The dispute has exacerbated long-running tensions between liberal and conservative Jews, who increasingly diverge in their views of the Israeli government and in some cases Israel itself, as well as which side of the political divide best represents their values and interests.
“Antisemitism is real and it requires robust, constructive solutions,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “What’s happening now, though, is exploiting the Jewish community’s legitimate and real concerns about antisemitism to undermine rule of law, due process, educational institutions and our democracy.”
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, a conservative group, disagreed, saying Trump is enforcing federal antidiscrimination law as presidents before him should have done.
“We are deeply grateful to President Trump,” Klein said. “I assure you these groups that oppose Trump here – if those demonstrators were condemning Blacks and calling them horrific names, or calling Muslims or gay people terrible names – those same people would say, … ‘We have to protect’” the lives of targeted minorities and would be supporting Trump’s work, he said.
The turmoil began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants surged across the Gaza border and killed some 1,200 people, taking an additional 251 hostage. Israel responded with a punishing military offensive that has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and prompted major protests in the United States.
Antisemitic acts surged in the U.S. as well, and the White House said Trump is responding appropriately to that.
“If combating antisemitism is controversial to President Trump’s critics, their derangement has reached new lows,” said White House spokesman Harrison Fields. “No leader has been a stronger ally to the Jewish people than President Trump. His administration is fully committed to enforcing law and order, protecting civil rights, and ensuring pro-Hamas radicals face the full weight of the law in our unwavering fight against antisemitism.”
The Trump-Harvard dispute has received much of the attention, but the broader battle shows no sign of slowing. The administration has targeted other universities from Princeton to Northwestern the same way, and continues its crackdown on immigrants in suspects of antisemitic statements.
Battle in the states
While Trump and his adversaries fight it out on the national level, a quieter debate is playing out in a half-dozen conservative states where bills against antisemitism have been offered in recent months.
This state-level push has been underway for years, but it accelerated after the Oct. 7 attacks and has been turbocharged by Trump’s presidency, said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group.
In Missouri, Republican state Rep. George Hruza has sponsored a measure requiring public schools and universities to adopt policies against antisemitism. The issue is personal for Hruza, whose mother survived the Holocaust and who had two grandparents killed at Auschwitz.
“When I grew up in Czechoslovakia, my mother suppressed our Jewish heritage. She continued suffering from nightmares of being back in a concentration camp,” Hruza said. Those nightmares stopped when she moved to the U.S. because it had so little antisemitism, he said – and his bill is intended to help keep it that way.
The flash point, as so often these days and especially since Oct. 7, is the question of when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. Hruza’s bill adopts a definition of antisemitism that includes such examples as applying “double standards” to Israel or calling it racist.
Missouri state Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs, a Democrat, said such language risks chilling free speech and punishing legitimate criticism of Israel.
“It changes how college campuses are interpreting speech,” Fuchs said. “It shifts and changes the definition of antisemitism, conflating the real concerns about antisemitism with conversation about the war and what has been happening in Palestine after the October 7th massacre.”
Hruza’s bill passed the GOP-dominated Missouri House 108-10; the vote was bipartisan, but most of the opposition came from Democrats. It now moves to the state Senate.
Hruza said he is a big proponent of free speech and his bill is designed to distinguish between rhetoric unleashed at a rally and assaults aimed at an individual. “It’s when Jewish students get attacked, verbally or physically, because they are Jewish – that is what we are driving at,” he said. “It’s telling a Jewish student, ‘You should go back to Poland.’”
A defining issue
The definition of antisemitism in Hruza’s bill, originally crafted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is widely used – and increasingly controversial. Israel can be criticized like any other country, it says, but targeting it “as a Jewish collectivity” is antisemitic.
The definition provides examples of language that crosses the line, such as comparing Israel to the Nazis or blaming all Jews for Israel’s actions. Those examples are being incorporated into many of the state laws.
Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, strongly opposes codifying the examples in this way, saying they were intended only as guidance and that enshrining them in law violates the First Amendment by penalizing opinions on Israel.
“I think it’s bad policy, and as a lawyer I think it’s unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination,” Stern said. He added, “I am a Zionist and Israel is important to me, but there are young Jews whose Judaism leads them to a different point of view.”
The IHRA definition has many defenders who say it pierces the armor of bigots who have taken to attacking Israel as an acceptable way to go after Jews. “Criticizing Israel legitimately” is not antisemitism under its definition, ZOA’s Klein said. “But if you start comparing Israel to Nazis and saying they are perpetrating genocide and massacres, then you are crossing the line to antisemitism.”
Congress has not written the IHRA definition into U.S. law, despite repeated proposals to do so. But Trump signed an executive order in 2019, during his first term, ordering government agencies to consider adopting it.
A pastor raises concerns
Seven states have recently considered or adopted measures like Missouri’s, all of them with conservative and Republican-dominated legislatures, though some have Democratic governors. The dissenters are usually Democrats, but the bills tend to have bipartisan support.
A group called the Combat Antisemitism Movement has been encouraging state legislatures to pass antisemitism bills – working with legislators, testifying in the bills’ favor, touting them on its website. CAM was founded in 2019 and its advisory board is chaired by Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet refusenik and hard-line Israeli politician.
Sacha Roytman, CAM’s chief executive, said anti-Jewish acts must be countered at every level of government. “The threat is real. It is happening. It is happening every day. It is happening in schools and synagogues,” he said. “Every level of society has its responsibility.”
Hruza, the Missouri legislator, said he tweaked his bill’s language to stress that it was not aimed at squelching free expression. “We wanted to make sure it was about behavior and make sure people understood that in no way did we want to interfere with free speech,” Hruza said.
Ben-Ami, the J Street president, is concerned about the free-speech ramifications for many of the proposals.
“There is a very troubling pattern of codifying into state and local law – as well as attempts at the federal level – a definition of antisemitism that includes criticism of Israeli government actions and policies that would have the effect not simply of chilling speech, but criminalizing it,” Ben-Ami said.
The bills’ opponents are not solely liberal Democrats. In Oklahoma, Republican state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Christian pastor, objected that the examples of antisemitism cited in his state’s legislation include asserting that the Jews killed Jesus.
The Jews of the time did play a role in Jesus’ death, Deevers asserted, citing scriptures, and he said pastors should be able to say so. “While discouraging antisemitism in a worthy cause, the definition would instruct state entities to treat as bigoted the historical facts and biblical teachings surrounding the death of Jesus,” Deevers said in a floor speech.
To Fuchs, the Missouri legislator, the state debates are part of the pattern unfolding on the national level – broad or reckless attacks on antisemitism that target legitimate criticism of Israel.
“There is a connection between what is happening at the federal level with Trump’s executive orders and what is happening here in Missouri,” Fuchs said. “If you want to see what is happening in your state, we are going to show you first.”
Dinner with Ye
Many Jewish groups are struggling to find the right message for the moment.
Julie Rayman, managing director of policy and political affairs at the American Jewish Committee, said Trump deserves credit for spotlighting antisemitism. But the AJC also criticized the “broad, sweeping, and devastating cuts” universities are facing as a result of his actions.
Republicans and Democrats, Rayman said, are each quick to see antisemitism in their opponents but slow to see it in their supporters. Ideally, she said, “the administration can find a way to target not just the left anti-Zionist antisemitism that has become this new dangerous reality, but also recognize the dangers of neo-Nazi fascist antisemitism.”
Trump has a Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism. But critics say he has a history of antisemitic comments and associations that cast doubt on the sincerity of his antisemitism campaign.
Last September, Trump told a gathering of conservative Jews, “If I don’t win this election, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.” In 2017, he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a Virginia rally that included antisemitic chants.
In November 2022, Trump had dinner with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who has made anti-Jewish remarks, and Nick Fuentes, an antisemite and white nationalist. (Trump later said he did not know Fuentes’s background.) Ed Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, has praised a Nazi sympathizer.
“I take no comfort in their so-called concern about antisemitism,” said Wesleyan University President Michael Roth. “I find it shocking that so many of my co-religionists are happy to see enemies of Israel punished, even if the ways they’re punished are extralegal. For the Trump allies, many of whom are vicious, proud antisemites, this sudden Judeophilia will be short-lived.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York) agreed that schools like Columbia University may have seen antisemitism on campus as the Gaza war has unfolded. But he said slashing their research funds makes little sense as a response.
“Let’s assume there is antisemitism. How does taking hundreds of millions of dollars from medical research help that?” Nadler said. “Because there is antisemitism at Columbia, we’re going to say more people should die of cancer, more people should get Alzheimer’s?”
Muslim and Arab leaders, too, say they are deeply concerned about Trump’s campaign. Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of Emgage, a group that mobilizes Muslim voters, said the president is falsely equating support for Palestinians with antisemitism.
“It’s protected by the First Amendment and it’s not antisemitism,” Alzayat said. “We strongly stand against antisemitism and all forms of hate, but this is not doing the Jewish community any favors. It is misusing a very important fight to achieve other objectives.”
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, added that “it doesn’t take a genius” to see that antisemitism is a real problem, but Trump is using it as a pretext to target Muslims.
“You cannot use bigotry to fight bigotry,” Awad said. “The tactic of using Islamophobia to fight antisemitism is a nonstarter. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are two faces of the same coin, in my view.”
Jews divided
The U.S. Jewish community has rarely faced the level of internal turmoil it is now confronting. Even before the Oct. 7 attacks, American Jews were increasingly divided over Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pursued hard-right policies that pitted many Jews’ traditional liberalism against their attachment to the world’s only Jewish state.
That tension escalated after the Hamas attacks and Israel’s fierce response, as some younger Jews sided openly with Palestinian activists. Trump’s victory added more fuel, as he proclaimed his determination to protect a Jewish community that supported his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, 78 percent to 22 percent.
“It puts Jews in a very difficult position,” said Jeff Sovern, whose father Michael Sovern was Columbia’s first Jewish president in the 1980s. “It’s divisive among Jews, and also it makes it somewhat harder to defend action against antisemitism when you are troubled by what is being done to attack antisemitism.”
Some liberals, including J Street’s Ben-Ami, contend that leading Jewish groups have been too slow to condemn Trump’s repressive actions taken in their name.
“There have been a few voices and an occasional murmur, but like too many other segments of our society – like corporate America and media companies or law firms or in some cases university presidents – too many people are bending the knee rather than standing up and fighting back,” Ben-Ami said.
On April 1, Washington Post columnist Matt Bai took aim at the Anti-Defamation League, a leading group combating antisemitism, and its leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, for “remaining silent during the Trump administration’s thuggish roundup of pro-Palestinian activists.”
Two days later, Greenblatt wrote a piece denouncing the administration’s practice, as part of its antisemitism campaign, of targeting foreign nationals without due process. “It was shocking to see the images of plainclothes officers stealing people off the streets in an act of rendition that seems straight out of a movie,” he wrote.
Greenblatt’s piece appeared as an opinion column on the eJewishPhilanthropy website, rather than as an official statement of the ADL. Efforts to reach Greenblatt through ADL were unsuccessful.
A growing number of Jewish organizations are now publicly opposing Trump’s tactics taken in the name of protecting their rights.
On Tuesday, a coalition of 10 organizations, representing three of Judaism’s four denominations, issued a statement saying that while antisemitism is an urgent problem, “These actions do not make Jews – or any community – safer. Rather, they only make us less safe.”
At the same time, many of the groups say Trump’s focus on antisemitism is long overdue. In the Biden administration, second gentleman Doug Emhoff spearheaded a campaign against anti-Jewish discrimination, but Trump has made it a bigger part of his presidency.
“It’s fair to say this is a 3,000-year-old problem, and we don’t know what the solutions are,” Rayman said. “It’s easy to identify something as not the silver bullet. But until we find whatever the silver bullet is, we have to keep trying.”