President Donald Trump’s new executive order on antisemitism focuses on exposing and punishing antisemitism on university campuses and on the left. It is not intended to address the more violent and more virulent antisemitism on the right — the overlapping MAGA movement, Christian nationalists, and neo-Nazi groups — who are by far the bigger danger to American Jews.
As I’ve written elsewhere, Trump has a long history of promoting antisemitism. He frequently resorts to antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories for political gain. He believes in the fake science of eugenics, which views Jews as a separate “race.”
Trump doesn’t give a damn about the recent rise of antisemitism. In fact, he’s responsible for much of it. Trump winks at, and emboldens white supremacist and antisemitic hate groups. This is all too obvious to anyone who is paying attention. Any other president would have criticized and fired Elon Musk for using a Nazi salute at a Trump rally. Trump’s silence is deafening. Any other president would ask the FBI to investigate and prosecute groups like the Proud Boys that engage in antisemitic and racist violence. Trump pardoned them.
Trump’s executive order is meant to intimidate colleges and universities from allowing students and faculty to protest Israel’s brutality in Gaza by labeling almost any anti-Israel protest or statement as “antisemitism.” Trump also wants to deport foreign students and faculty who participate in anti-Israel activities. But his executive order isn’t aimed just at anti-Israel/pro-Palestine students and groups. He is using this allegation as a tool to attack and undermine the credibility of colleges and universities in general as pillars of liberal thinking. That’s what last year’s Congressional hearings were about, with Republicans attacking elite university presidents for tolerating “woke” protests.
Historical Parallels
As Senator Joe McCarthy did during the 1950s Red Scare, Trump wants to silence liberal critics — in the media, in unions, among artists and writers, at K-12 schools, and at colleges and universities. This executive order is just one part of that strategy. We can also expect the Trump administration to cut funding for faculty research (even medical and scientific), to reduce financial aid to students (including Pell grants for low income students), and to attack and even defund colleges that seek to diversify the ranks of students and faculty (“DEI”) and offer courses that examine race, gender, family, and LGBTQ issues. We’ve already seen this strategy play out in Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
During the 1960s and 1970s, most anti-war protestors simply wanted the US to stop the deaths of American combat troops and innocent Vietnamese civilians. They wanted the US to end its support for the corrupt South Vietnamese government and to divert US taxpayers’ funds being used to destroy Vietnamese villages to improve health care, education, and housing for Americans. Only a tiny proportion of anti-war protestors — the Marxist and Maoist sects, like the Progressive Labor Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party — wanted the Communist side to win. But it was these organizations and their front groups that got the most media attention, as the late sociologist Todd Gitlin explained in his book, “The Whole World is Watching.”
Similarly, among those protesting Israel’s atrocities since October 2023, the most extreme groups get the most media attention and control the narrative. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the ultra-left ANSWER Coalition are the main organizers of the rallies and protests on and off college campuses. They are tiny in membership but fervent and disciplined.
They have a clear message that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly pro Hamas. To them, Israel is not a nation to be reformed, or to share its geography with Palestinians based on full citizenship and equality, but to be eliminated. In their view, “Zionist” is a term worthy of condemnation. They use provocative slogans like “from the river to the sea” and “intifada revolution” and controversial phrases like “settler colonialism.”
Their ideas and slogans are amplified by the media and by some professors. For example, the SJP calling the October 7th attack on Israel “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” and 34 Harvard student organizations issuing a joint statement declaring “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” can reasonably be interpreted as support for Hamas. These views are often what gets the headlines. Most news outlets, particularly TV, are suckers for extremism.
Legitimate Concerns
Most of the actual student protesters are neither antisemitic nor pro-Hamas. They aren’t members of these extremist groups. In fact, they are probably not familiar with these groups’ ideological program or financial backing. They simply want an end to Israel’s horrific violence, deaths, and violations of basic human rights (housing, health care, food, water) in Gaza and the West Bank that they see on TV and on social media every day.
And who can blame them? The only Israeli PM they’ve known is Bibi Netanyahu, the Israeli Trump. Is it any wonder that, as polls reveal, they have a strong negative attitude toward Israel?
Few student protesters actually believed that Israel should be dismantled and that Jews should be expelled and replaced by a Palestinian-run government. If they have any thoughts at all about the future of the region, it is that Jews and Palestinians should simply find a way toward peaceful coexistence. A small number refused to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden/Harris administration’s military aid to Israel and tepid criticisms of Netanyahu. Some students, faculty, and scholarly organizations (such as the American Studies Association) have supported the demand that colleges boycott Israel by divesting from corporations doing business in Israel and even cancelling exchange programs with Israeli scholars, artists, and universities; but colleges have refused to give in to these demands.
Most student protesters don’t consider these ultra-left sectarian groups to be their leaders, but some of them are caught up in the exhilaration of the moment and the legitimate cause of ending the violence and starvation in Gaza. That doesn’t mean they support SJP’s or ANSWER’s program. It certainly doesn’t mean they are antisemites.
Unfortunately, students who just want peace and an end to the atrocities, but aren’t ideological anti-Zionists, don’t have an organizational vehicle to mobilize on campuses. Democratic Socialists of America once could have been that vehicle, but a decade ago its leaders shifted to anti-Zionism and lost its moral leadership. So if you are a liberal or progressive college student outraged by Israel’s actions in Gaza and you want to show your concern, what do you do? You hear about a protest or an encampment on campus and you show up. You may get swept up in the fervor and get more involved. You may even hear your English, sociology, history, or international relations professor expressing the same ideas at rallies or in class.
Few college students (or faculty) know much about the history of the Middle East or of the Zionist movement and its many shades. In some extreme corners of the American left, all Jews are Zionists unless they show themselves to be anti-Zionists; this can put Jewish students and faculty in an uncomfortable position if they are critical of the Netanyahu government but think that some kind of bi-national or two-state solution is a good idea.
I consider myself pro-Israel but anti-Netanyahu, and pro-Palestinian but anti-Hamas. I believe in a two-state solution. In Trump-land and ADL-think, what box do I fit in?
A More Complicated Reality
The reality is that pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests have occurred on very few campuses. Of the 1,421 public and private colleges identified by Washington Monthly, only 318 have had protests and 123 had encampments –- disproportionately the most elite institutions. A national poll of college students found that 45% support the encampments, 24% oppose them, and 30% were neutral. But, overall, only 13% of students ranked conflict in the Middle East as the issue most important to them – far behind health care reform (40%), educational funding and access (38%), and economic fairness and opportunity (37%).
College presidents and administrators on the campuses where anti-Israel protests have occurred have walked a tightrope between supporting free speech and the right to protest, and criticism from Republicans and some Jewish organizations that they are ignoring antisemitism on campus. These colleges have spent much of the past few decades educating students about the history and current realities of racism, sexism, and homophobia, but not about antisemitism. One antidote is for more colleges to offer courses on Jewish history and culture, including the history of antisemitism, which most students (and faculty) know little or nothing about, and to help them understand the parallels and differences between antisemitism and other forms of hatred and bigotry, including Islamophobia, which is widespread in America.
Yet hatred of and attacks on Jews is not what Trump and his allies and the ADL mean by antisemitism now. They mean criticism of Israel.
The biggest dangers to American Jews are not college students and faculty critical of Israel, but right-wing pro-Trump antisemites, neo-Nazis, and Christian nationalists. (White evangelical Christians accounted for 45% of his total votes in 2016, 2020, and 2024, but include few college students). Trump’s executive order on antisemitism isn’t focused on the neo-Nazis and Christian nationalists.
But Trump and the GOP have managed to control the narrative so that anti-Israel protesters on college campuses are seen as the bigger danger. This diversion tactic has been aided by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center (NOT affiliated with Brandeis University), and Mothers Against College Anti-Semitism, as well as some of the major established Jewish organizations. In a 2003 book, longtime ADL leader Abe Foxman called criticism of Israel the “New Anti-Semitism.” His successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, has doubled down and curried favor with Republicans who support Netanyahu. In the past year, conservativeshave published about a dozen books on this theme. The mainstream media have been complicit in promoting this narrative.
My baby-boomer generation heard saw the not-infrequent expressions of overt antisemitic slurs like “kike,” “Christ killer,” and “dirty Jew.” That kind of language is very rare on college campuses today, although I don’t doubt that it happens. There are certainly a few some college faculty and students who are old-fashioned Jew haters — who harbor stereotypes about Jews, resent Jews, don’t want to be friends with or live near Jews, don’t want to hire Jews, and would like to see fewer Jews in positions of authority and leadership. But the number is very small, particularly when compared with prior to the 1960s, when public opinion polls showed widespread anti-Jewish stereotypes and attitudes.
What motivates most campus protesters is not antisemitism but humanitarianism. Still, for Jewish students who never had to deal with vitriol toward Israel, the campus protests can be unsettling. Many Jewish students who are themselves critical of Netanyahu’s actions have been upset by the slogans used by protesters, particularly their failure to criticize Hamas as a terrorist, repressive, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ, and antisemitic movement.
The ADL, the Brandeis Center, and Mothers Against College Anti-Semitism encouraged students to file lawsuits and complaints claiming that their institutions promote a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. These complaints come from a very small number of students on a handful of campuses. Their major concerns are that they are emotionally upset (even traumatized) by the anti-Israel protests and the occasional use of anti-Jewish name-calling. The ADL and its allies have used these complaints to pressure colleges to sign settlement agreements promising to police campus anti-Semitism or risk sanctions from the federal Department of Education — a threat that the Trump administration will now use to try to silence critics of Israel.
The Greater Threat
For sure, some protests get out of hand in both words and actions. Most of the campus protests have been were peaceful and orderly. On some campuses, the most militant activists engaged in various levels of civil disobedience. They blocked other students (including but not only Jews) from attending classes or entering campus buildings. Some disrupted classes. A few occupied college administration buildings. College administrators have the right to punish actions that restrict free speech or obstruct the right of students to attend classes — but only through due process and mostly not with expulsion.
But with a handful of exceptions, the campus protesters did not engage in violence against other students, administrators, or campus police. They didn’t carry guns. They didn’t try to kill or kidnap Jews or bomb Jewish buildings, like campus Hillel centers.
The scale and intensity of these anti-Israel protests have waned considerably this (2024-25) academic year. Hardcore groups will continue to organize, but they aren’t likely to have as many students willing to participate. Many of the student protesters are exhausted. Hopefully, if they return to activism, they will focus their protests against Trump’s efforts to destroy American democracy.
In contrast to the campus protesters, Trump’s MAGA followers like the Proud Boys are antisemites and neo-Nazis. Many are Christian nationalists who believe that the US is a Christian nation and think that Jews “pollute” society. They’ve resorted to violence and have inspired violence: at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, at the Highland Park Independence Day parade, the rally at Charlottesville, the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C., the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and other incidents. They are Trump’s storm troopers.
Before Trump’s 2016 campaign, they were marginal and in the shadows. Trump has given them legitimacy, particularly with his pardons of more than 1,500 insurrectionists. They feel emboldened and will continue to engage in violence of various kinds.
So, when it comes to antisemitism — which is a real threat — let’s get our facts and priorities straight.