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AMERICAN JEWS WERE PLAYED — NOW WHAT?  
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Rabbi Jay Michaelson
July 18, 2025
Jewish Daily Forward
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_ It is now obvious that antisemitism was never the real reason for
the Trump administration’s attacks on universities. What lessons can
we learn from this great exploitation? And now we have Columbia
University caving in to Donald Trump. _

Representative Elise Stefanik during a House Committee on Education
and Workforce hearing., Forward

 

We all know this was never about antisemitism, right?

This was already true in January 2024, when Republicans hauled
university presidents into a perjury trap disguised as a congressional
hearing. Already, it was clear to many of us that the campaign against
universities was political, and that the hearings about antisemitism
were political theater.

But at the time, American Jews were reeling
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First came the murderous attacks of Oct. 7, 2023; then, before we even
had time to grieve, we faced the silence or ambivalence or even
support for the murder of civilians on the part of many progressive
organizations; then came brutal, radical anti-Zionist protests that
opposed not just the Gaza war but the state of Israel itself; and
along with them, there were frequent incidents of antisemitism: Jews
targeted and harassed, “Zionists” excluded from university
organizations, and extreme rhetoric drawn from age-old antisemitic
sources.

It is clear that many universities, in their attempt to balance free
speech and safety, erred too much on the side of free expression.
Detailed reports at Harvard, Columbia, and other universities have
substantiated these claims. Jewish students were afraid.

It was at that moment that Republicans seized upon our legitimate
fears and exploited them for political gain. So forgive us for not
seeing their motives more clearly.

But those motives are abundantly clear a year and a half later.

First, Trump and his Republican allies have attacked universities for
all manner of alleged sins: tolerating antisemitism, yes, but also
promoting “DEI” (a term that, like “woke,” now means whatever
Republicans want it to mean), failing to instill patriotic values in
students, allowing trans people to compete in sports, skimming too
much money off the top of grants, lacking “ideological diversity,”
and not paying their fair share of taxes.

What do these allegations have in common? Not antisemitism, obviously,
but the targets of Republican ire: universities, especially elite
ones, which MAGA nationalists, post-liberal ideologues, and Christian
theocrats all hate, albeit for different reasons.

We also know that these attacks on universities are part of MAGA’s
wider attack on small-l liberal society in general. There’s no
antisemitism at the NIH, for example, but Trumpists have cut its
grants by $20 billion a year
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most of which goes to, you guessed it, universities. Antisemitism was
just a convenient pretext for this much larger war against “elite”
institutions – the “Cathedral” in the metaphor
of anti-democratic darling Curtis Yarvin
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Said Yarvin in 2008, “all the rivers of state cash that flow to the
universities need to be plugged. No grants to professors, no subsidies
for students, no nothing.”

Second, in addition to what the Trump administration has done,
Republican ideologues have said quite clearly why they are attacking
universities — and antisemitism is an afterthought.

For example, on July 27, 2023 — two months before Oct. 7 —
Christopher Rufo wrote an op-ed in _The New York Times_
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against university DEI programs. “In order to strengthen the values
of liberal education, political leaders must use democratic power to
reform drifting academic institutions and resist the process of
ideological capture,” he wrote at the time. Argued Rufo, “Many DEI
programs seem to be predicated on a view radically different from the
liberal tradition: namely, that the university is not merely a home
for the discovery of knowledge, but also a vehicle for activism,
liberation and social change.”

Agree or disagree with that statement (and I completely disagree), it
clearly has nothing to do with antisemitism. And it should be taken in
the context of Rufo’s other work, such as his campaign to defame gay
people like me as “groomers” who endanger children, a charge as
dangerous as it is preposterous. Rufo is a cultural conservative, and
his crusade against elite universities is about cultural conservatism,
not protecting Jews.

Here’s another example. On Dec. 23, 2022, Kevin Roberts, president
of the Heritage Foundation and chief architect of Project 2025
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gave an interview
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the reasons legacy institutions of higher education needed to be
dismantled. Beginning with personal reminiscence (“s the lone
conservative graduate student in the history department at the
University of Texas, I had experienced the Left marching through the
institutions. Although I was treated very well by the faculty, it was
clear to me then that we had to create a parallel set of
institutions”), Roberts agrees with his interviewer that:

I could not agree with you more on the advice you give to younger
people about forgetting the legacy institutions. I think the
institutions you mentioned — and many others, too — are too far
gone to be saved. And yet they have endowments that are far too large.
We have too much work to do to think that they are actively going to
implode on their own. They are, however, in a slow-motion implosion.
We just need to sit back, drink bourbon, smoke a cigar, and celebrate
the hell out of it — while we work our butts off during the daytime
to go and wreck those institutions.

Again, this was well before Oct. 7 and the anti-Israel protests that
followed. The architect of Project 2025 — 56% of which has now been
put into effect [[link removed]] by the Trump
administration — declared his intention to “wreck those
institutions.”

Now-Vice-President JD Vance agreed. In June 2021, he said
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wanted to “destroy the universities,” saying college degrees made
people “deranged.” Later that year, he said in a speech
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“the universities are the enemy.”

Even the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” which this
publication first reported on last December
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which purports to be about attacking “Hamas Support
Organizations,” is actually focused on “progressive elites” who
seek to “dismantle Western democracies, values and culture.”
Notably, all but one of Project Esther’s architects are non-Jewish
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the project blueprint engages in antisemitic conspiracy-mongering, and
the Heritage Foundation lied about Jewish organizational support for
it. Project Esther is about Christian Zionism and post-liberal
Christian America
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not protecting Jews from harassment or defamation. Indeed, far from
protecting Jews, many of Project Esther’s _targets _are Jews.

There are many reasons why nationalist conservatives
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higher education — why MAGA hero Viktor Orban decimated Hungary’s
once-proud universities
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and why the Trump administration sued Harvard, bullied Columbia into
total capitulation, and pushed out the president of the University of
Virginia. Nationalist conservatives seek to create, in Robert
Reich’s words
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an “illiberal democracy” based on conformity to
conservative-nationalist values, and universities stand in the way of
that. Wrote Reich:

Behind this cultural populism lies a deeper anti-intellectual,
anti-Enlightenment ideology closer to fascism than authoritarianism…
he greatest obstacle to dictatorship is an educated populace.
Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. That’s why slave owners
prohibited enslaved people from learning to read, fascists burn books,
and tyrants close universities.

Or maybe the answer is simpler: the “diploma divide
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In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris won the votes of college graduates
by 55-45, while Donald Trump won the votes of non-college-graduates
56-44. No wonder Republicans want to “destroy the universities.”

But whatever the reasons nationalists may have for opposing higher
education, the sad fact is that American Jews have been played. At the
moment of our entirely understandable trauma, fear and dread, these
ideologues exploited our fears and made us into _freiers_.

And not only that — it is precisely the American liberal tradition,
epitomized by university education, that made the American Jewish
dream possible in the first place. My grandparents came here as
immigrants from Russia, Lithuania and Latvia. They believed in higher
education and instilled those values in my parents, who attended
Columbia and Barnard. And my parents built a world for me that their
previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

This possibility of advancement and opportunity, part of what really
made America great, is now endangered by the draconian cuts in science
funding, the punitive taxes on university endowments, and the crusade
of censorship and fear that the Trump administration has conducted.
And the final insult? That they are claiming to do so _in the name of
protecting Jews_.

There’s a lot we should learn from this cynical exploitation of
Jewish trauma.

First, we should be deeply suspicious when outside actors suddenly
style themselves as Defenders of the Jews — especially when, as in
this case, the same people attacking pro-Palestine activists are mum
when it comes to Trump administration officials with close ties to
known antisemites
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including FBI Director Kash Patel, who has appeared eight times on the
podcast of Holocaust-denier and Hitler-praiser Stew Peters; Paul
Ingrassia, a lawyer for the rabidly antisemitic Andrew Tate; and
Department of Defense spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, who has shared
antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, including references
to the “great replacement theory” and the lynching of Leo Frank in
1915 (“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” she said in
2023).

If someone’s attention to antisemitism just so happens to track
their ideological priors while ignoring the bias within their own
ranks (and this is true on the left as well as the right), we should
be extremely suspicious of their motivations.

Second, we should look internally as well. How angry, fearful,
confused or traumatized do I feel right now? How might I be vulnerable
to exploitation? Am I making decisions based on reason, or emotion? It
is perfectly legitimate to disagree
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whether a comment, protest, person or group is antisemitic. Jewish New
Yorkers are experiencing such a disagreement right now. But for that
disagreement to be valid, it must be rooted in evidence and
reflection
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not reflexive, emotional reactions that are — again, quite
understandably — shaped by a long history of Jewish trauma and pain
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Third, and I say this as a rabbi and meditation teacher, there is a
place for anger, and this is one such place. I am absolutely furious
that Republicans have taken advantage of legitimate Jewish fears,
exploited actual antisemitic incidents and conflated them with
non-antisemitic ones, and used Jewish vulnerability as a pretext.
Quite honestly, I find such efforts to themselves be antisemitic. I
have seen their impacts firsthand, in my own community, in people who
are terrified into believing conspiracy theories without basis in
reality
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who are sincerely afraid for the wellbeing of their loved ones.

Finally, we need to stop the assault on liberal society being
perpetrated in the name of fighting antisemitism. On May 8 of this
year, a group of mainstream, centrist American Jewish leaders signed a
letter titled “Stand Up for Jewish Safety and Democracy
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part:

A range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as
a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances,
freedom of speech and the press. Let us acknowledge that these rights,
institutions and systems are the cornerstone of American Democracy and
enabled American Jewry to thrive in the 20th century. American Jewry
enjoyed more rights, more freedoms, more opportunities and more
achievements than we have ever known in 2,500 years of Jewish life…

e recognize the complexity of addressing these issues when there is
division within our communities. Our message is motivated by the
exigencies of this moment when democratic norms are under assault and
antisemitism is metastasizing. It is imperative to join with our
fellow citizens to protect and preserve our democracy.

We urge Jewish leadership to forcefully and publicly reaffirm the
historic and continuing commitment of the American Jewish community to
academic freedom, to the rule of law, to ensure due process to anyone
accused of breaking the law, to freedom of speech and the press. And
we call on Jewish leaders and institutions – national and local –
to resist the exploitation of Jewish fears and publicly join with
other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of
democracy.

The letter concluded, “The time to act is Now!”

Amen.

_[RABBI JAY MICHAELSOn is a contributing columnist for the Forward and
for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New
York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.]_

* anti-Semitism
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* Jewish community
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* American Jewish community
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Trump Administration
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* Trump 2.0
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* Donald Trump
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* Columbia University
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* Palestine solidarity
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* New York City
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* New York City mayoral election
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Palestinian solidarity
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