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Trump's crocodile tears on antisemitism
Trump has made his attack on Harvard all about antisemitism. That's nonsense.
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In his first 100 days in office, Trump has gone after political enemies and law firms and universities and the press, threatening anyone who isn’t submissive with the full might of the U.S. Presidency. So it was reassuring to see that Harvard refused to cave to Trump’s demands.
I don’t know where this fight ends,¹ and I’m not here to comment on the (il)legality or (im)morality of what Trump is doing—plenty of other people are doing that.
What I do want to discuss: nominally, the pretense for this is Harvard’s antisemitism.² This is nonsense.
Trump and his administration do not care about antisemitism.
By using antisemitism as the nominal pretense to exact personal and political revenge, what they’re doing is bad for Jews, bad for the fight against bigotry, and bad for the country.
I’m Jewish, and Jewish issues are personal to me. There are real issues with antisemitism and bigotry on college campuses that we need to fight.
But this fight is about academic freedom, research, and an overreaching executive keen to use the Jews as a political tool.
Article summary:
Antisemitism on college campuses is real, but today’s Republican Party has profound issues with antisemitism in their own ranks that they’ve never bothered to address. They don’t care about actually helping Jews.
Political bias on college campuses is a real challenge too. But Trump’s proposed remedies constitute breathtaking overreach without serious solutions.
Cutting funding for research at these institutions won’t solve antisemitism and won’t solve political biases. Funding cuts will, however, hamstring our ability to do life-saving medical research and stunt the growth of future scientists and researchers.
Antisemitism and political bias on college campuses are real problems
We need to be clear about both up front. Democrats and the political left have done a piss-poor job acknowledging that these are two very real issues.
First: there is a very real political bias among university professors.³
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Relative to the U.S. population, university professors are twice as likely to be liberal, and they’re significantly more liberal than even Americans with postgraduate degrees, the country’s most liberal demographic (by education). At places like Harvard, the disconnect is even more stark.⁴
Second: antisemitism on college campuses is a real problem. Hillel reports that the number of antisemitic incidents on college campuses is 7× higher than it was before October 7. Dozens of Hillels and Chabad houses have been threatened, attacked, and vandalized.⁵
Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism found that, “Jewish and Israeli students also have been targeted with violence…and threats.” At Berkeley, Harvard, Temple University, University of Texas, University of Michigan, DePaul, University of Rochester, and countless other schools, there have been very real antisemitic incidents.
Like the rest of the country, Jews moved to the right in the 2024 election.⁶ This is a huge part of the reason why. (Jews still overwhelmingly supported Harris over Trump.)
Republicans, to their credit, saw the political potential here.⁷ And if they were sincere about addressing academic freedom and antisemitism, I’d be more inclined to support what they say they’re trying to do.
The problem is that they’re not. The Trump administration is not sincere about addressing these issues. They want to assert power, nothing more.
Trump (and other Republicans) don’t care about solving antisemitism
Trump does not care about addressing antisemitism. If he did, he certainly has had a lot of chances to say something in the past:
There is literally a Wikipedia page titled “Donald Trump and antisemitism,” which is never a great start. And even beyond that, Trump deploys all the same language that antisemites across the internet use: “globalists,” “billionaire puppeteers,” etc.⁸ Trump actively fans the flames of QAnon, which has strong roots in antisemitism.
Trump was extremely reluctant to condemn the Klansman and Neo-Nazis—the ones walking around and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”—at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Trump invited Nick Fuentes and Kanye West to Mar-a-Lago for dinner in 2022. Fuentes is an avowed antisemite and Kanye recently said, “I’m a Nazi.” For this, Trump faced no lasting backlash from elected Republicans.
Trump, along with Vice President J. D. Vance, Governor Ron DeSantis, Governor Greg Abbott, and an impossibly long list of Senators and members of the House have all talked up different George Soros conspiracies—which is plainly antisemitic.⁹
Let’s not forget Elon Musk, who shares his own antisemitic conspiracies and allows antisemitism to flourish on Twitter. Bobby Kennedy, our HHS Secretary, talked about COVID being “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and his political career has only blossomed since then.
The so-called Great Replacement Theory that motivated the mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 is openly shared by everyone from Trump to Tucker Carlson to Rep. Elise Stefanik. Frighteningly, voters have responded in kind—one-third of Americans buy into this conspiracy.
Unfortunately, this list isn’t exhaustive—I could go on for a while.¹⁰
Republicans have been vocal about addressing antisemitism when it scores them points against political adversaries. But do they actually care about addressing antisemitism? Has Trump ever called out a Republican on this?
No, of course not.¹¹ But imagine the outrage if any of this came from Democratic elected officials! Imagine the crocodile tears!¹²
So when his administration talks about antisemitism as the motivating factor for why they’re going after Harvard and higher education, it rings totally hollow.
Trump’s demands for Harvard are about asserting control
When it comes to antisemitism, the Trump administration is happy to cut funding for local Holocaust museums or for essential security services that keep synagogues (and other religious congregations) safe.
But for an administration that’s nominally about smaller government, they sure want the government involved in a lot of things when it comes to “addressing antisemitism” at Harvard. Non-exhaustively, here’s what’s included in their list of demands:
“All hiring and related data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit…”
“Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity…” (No clarity is given for who gets to define this or what specifically this means.)
Ban certain student groups and “reform its student discipline policies.”
“Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.”
Harvard, rightly, didn’t comply with this sort of insane overreach. And since then, the Trump administration has pulled funding, threatened the University’s tax exempt status, threatened the visas of foreign students, and more.
That’s not policy-making. That’s extortion.
Real problems, fake solutions
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.”
That was a quote from a recent op-ed. It feels particularly resonant in this context: the federal government is using Jews and antisemitism as a tool to accomplish its political goals. If they really cared about antisemitism, then they’re awfully silent when it comes to bigotry in their own ranks.
A few final thoughts on all of this:
We need to address antisemitism in the United States. These sorts of policies don’t advance the cause, but they do politicize an issue that shouldn’t be politicized. For all the reasons I outlined above, I cannot trust the Trump administration or today’s Republican Party to actually make things better for Jews.
Campuses have always leaned left, but in this moment of intense political division, addressing political bias on college campuses is obviously important.¹³ But for the federal government to insist on what students and faculty can and cannot believe is impractical and, more to the point, totally un-American.
All Americans will suffer if we start cutting funding for research at universities.¹⁴
We’ve made remarkable gains in public health in the last 50 years, in no small part because of research support from the federal government. And perhaps even more importantly, we’re training the next generation of scientists—Americans by birth or Americans by choice—who lead research in everything from cancer to HIV/AIDS to childhood diseases.
Instead, in the name of political vengeance, we’re making it harder for the world’s best and brightest to learn and research, and we’re slashing funding for causes that improve all of our lives.
What Trump is doing isn’t just totally ineffective in addressing antisemitism and political bias. What he’s doing is bad for economic growth, bad for our health, and bad for the quality of all of our lives.
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Even if the whole thing was started by mistake.
The same is true of Columbia, which caved to Trump, and of other universities.
Sources for U.S. overall data, by education level, of academic faculty, and at Harvard. Two notes on this:
The education-level data is from 2021. I couldn’t find cross-tabs on any of the more recent data. We can safely assume it’s shifted, though not enough to change the overall story.
The academic data is from 2022 and from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has its own biases as an organization. Nonetheless, I think their data is reliable.
This is nothing new, by the way. Richard Nixon is reported to have called Harvard the “Kremlin on the Charles.”
A reminder that these are Jewish organizations, not Israeli organizations. Even in bad faith, you cannot couch this as an anti-Israel protest; these incidents are plainly antisemitic.
To what extent? It depends on who you ask. (As the saying goes: “Two Jews, three opinions.”) The Jewish Democratic Council of America says that Jews shifted very slightly towards Republicans, as does a poll from the Jewish Electorate Institute. The Republican Jewish Coalition, on the other hand, would have you believe that the shift towards Republicans was seismic.
The truth, as ever, is probably somewhere in between. For a variety of reasons, polling Jews is a challenging task, but there’s no question that some of the most Jewish voting precincts in the country—especially in Orthodox and Hasidic areas—shifted towards Trump.
Take Rep. Virginia Foxx as an example. She represents North Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District, where 4,300 Jews live—a modest 0.6% of the population, well less than the U.S. average. And she’s made combating antisemitism a marquee issue.
Of course, it’s possible to care about something that doesn’t impact you or your constituents personally. Empathy is a powerful thing. An example I point to all the time: Bob Dole genuinely cared about the plight of Armenians and Armenian-Americans, and he fought for the U.S. government to recognize the Armenian genocide.
But I don’t believe that Foxx’s passion for fighting antisemitism is genuine. Why? I looked pretty exhaustively, and I cannot find a single instance of her calling out antisemitism among Republicans or on the right—and as I establish later in this post, there’s plenty of antisemitism in her own caucus.
Instead, I see this as a way for her to score political points, not to address antisemitism.
In the 2022 cycle, Foxx raised $85,560 from donors living in New York. In the 2024 cycle, she raised $258,209 from donors living in New York—3× more, which is a substantial haul in the context of a race that isn’t competitive. Obviously, not every political donor in New York is Jewish, but many of her newest donors are, because she’s speaking to many Jews (effectively) about the risks of antisemitism, and she’s made it a signature issue.
Look, there’s nothing new about politicians staking out positions because it helps them raise money. It’s literally the whole reason why the Republican Party has become so pro-crypto—they’re spending a lot of time in rooms with, and collecting checks from, crypto people.
But until she starts getting serious about attacking antisemitism wherever it’s coming from—left, right, center, wherever—she’s a) not going to make a dent in fixing antisemitism, and b) not going to convince me that she cares about this issue more than she cares about scoring political points and raising money for her campaign committee.
As a Jew, I’m pretty outraged by partisanship on this issue. (To show that I put my money where my mouth is on this one, I was aggressive in calling out Cori Bush on this issue, and on other issues.)
And this is before you get to people like former Iowa Rep. Steve King, who is in bed with some of Europe’s most antisemitic political groups and was never condemned by Trump. Or Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who has close ties to Nick Fuentes and retains the support of Trump. When you get to the state legislative level, it gets even more extreme.
And I did, originally. It’s an unfortunate commentary that there’s enough examples of antisemitism in the Republican ranks that I was even able to cut 1,000 words—and even then I wasn’t putting together an exhaustive list.
I don’t, by the way, necessarily think that Trump is an antisemite. I just don’t think he really cares that much. I have pretty expansive thoughts on this, but the short version:
As I’ve said once before, I think this Yair Rosenberg op-ed is spot on: “Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews.”
More than anything, I think Trump values loyalty and he doesn’t care where that comes from. That’s why it was so hard for him to condemn the White supremacists protesting in Charlottesville—they were fans of his, and he likes that.
Trump has Jewish members of his cabinet and Jewish grandchildren. (His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner.) He also has antisemites in his cabinet. Again, I just don’t think he cares one way or another, as long as you’re loyal.
Interestingly enough, the example of crocodile tears on the Wikipedia page is also about antisemitism, this time in the context of Ulysses S. Grant: he claimed to care about the persecution of Russian Jews despite his own history of antisemitism as a General during the Civil War.
The “how” here is important and I’ll write more about this coming up.
Is federal grant money for science research spent particularly efficiently? No, probably not, and there are real ways to make the government work better—something I’ve written about before. But we should also be taking swings and pursuing moonshots; universities are pretty well positioned to be doing that, in a partnership with the federal government that’s become more robust over the past few decades.
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