On college campuses and beyond, the fight against antisemitism is undergoing a revolution. For the past century, American Jews would protest, lobby, sue, and implore, in what was at best only a partially successful effort to prod the government or the courts to intervene. When the government did respond, it was too often halfheartedly. The current moment, marked by proactive confrontations between the Trump administration and universities over antisemitism, is a dramatic turning point that presents new opportunities to the Jewish community.
Antisemitism has deep roots in this country. In 1915, a mob lynched Leo Frank. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan grew strong as it expressed hatred not only against African Americans but also against Jews. Ivy League schools imposed quotas on Jews. The legal tools available to counter antisemitism were few, and the government rarely responded at all, let alone effectively.
One notable early success took place in those difficult times, but it depended on the initiative of a single Jew named Aaron Sapiro. On March 15, 1927, trial began in a libel case brought by Sapiro, the lawyer son of impoverished immigrants, against Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and one of the most well-known people on earth. Sapiro had been helping struggling farmers band together into cooperatives. Ford, in his antisemitic newspaper the Dearborn Independent, accused Sapiro of turning “American agriculture over to the International Jews.” Sapiro’s case was so strong that Ford — afraid to take the stand — settled, issued a retraction, and ceased publishing the Dearborn Independent.
But Sapiro’s case against Ford was the exception, not the rule. Jewish leaders of that era struggled mightily, organizing boycotts, demonstrations, and lobbying efforts. More often than not, those efforts were only modestly successful. The Sapiro precedent was limited to the libel context, and there was no generally available civil rights statute upon which Jews could rely to fight their battles in the courts.
Until, that is, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI of that landmark legislation empowers the government to withhold federal funds from any recipient, including any university, that tolerates discrimination based on race, color, or national origin under its auspices. The statute provides for two different procedural pathways for enforcement: Victimized students can sue the university in federal court and decide what remedies to seek or, alternatively, file a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), in which case it is the government, not the victim, that brings the case against the university and decides what remedies to seek.
It took a long time, however, to establish that the statute even extends to antisemitism. Unlike other civil rights laws, Title VI does not mention religion as a protected category — in order to allow, say, Catholic universities to hire priests. At first, the lack of clarity did not seem to matter; antisemitism was significantly and steadily waning after World War II. But a decade into this century, antisemitism began an alarming rise. In 2004, under the direction of Kenneth L. Marcus, OCR declared that it would interpret Title VI’s “national origin” category to apply to Jews (along with other groups that share a religious faith as well as an ethnic or national origin, such as Arab Muslims or Sikhs). Then, in December 2019, President Trump issued an executive order mandating that OCR consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and accompanying examples when evaluating antisemitism claims. Among the examples was “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” This extended Title VI even further, effectively deeming at least some forms of anti-Zionism to be antisemitism.
The confluence of these two events — the growing resurgence of antisemitism coupled with new legal tools to fight it — seemed to provide an opportunity to go back to the courts, following Sapiro’s example.
In the months following the 2019 executive order, the two of us — along with the Brandeis Center and the Chicago Jewish United Fund — filed a Title VI complaint against the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), alleging dozens of instances of discrimination, including many based on anti-Zionism. As an example, we recounted how a university representative trained undergraduate dormitory counselors to emulate the late terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and airplane hijacker Leila Khaled in performing their dormitory duties, extolling martyrdom (yes, martyrdom for dormitory counselors!).
The first positive results were not long in coming. On November 16, 2020, as part of the settlement process, UIUC joined us in issuing the following statement:
For many Jewish students, Zionism is an integral part of their identity and their ethnic and ancestral heritage. These students have the right to openly express identification with Israel. The university will safeguard the abilities of these students, as well as all students, to participate in university-sponsored activities free from discrimination and harassment.
The story, then, of antisemitism during the first 20 years of this millennium was one of slow and steady increase accompanied by similarly slow and steady progress by the Jewish community in fighting it. That fight was waged primarily in the form of complaints to OCR and a trickle of lawsuits in the courts. The strategy for the past couple of decades has been to achieve small victories — settlements and court rulings — that would in aggregate embed solid protections against antisemitism into American law. But that was before October 7, 2023, and before President Trump’s second term. Even then, however, Title VI cases alleging discrimination based on anti-Zionist expressions of antisemitism were still nowhere as common as they have recently become. Since October 7, there have been more than 3,400 reported antisemitic incidents on American college campuses (compared with 27 in 2013–2014, when Hillel first began tracking the numbers). The post–October 7 number includes more than 70 assaults against Jewish students, more than 800 attacks on Jewish property, and more than 200 acts of vandalism targeting Hillel locations. Most of the current torrent of Title VI antisemitism cases against schools have yet to be resolved, though there was a spike of 14 settlements during the final months of the Biden administration, several of which have resulted in significant changes on campus. The Hillel director at the University of Vermont, for example, described a “night and day” difference since its settlement in April 2023. This success was due to painstaking strategic legal work. Jews have had to push hard to get the government and the universities to respond.
Enter the Trump administration, which within days of taking office announced the creation of a Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism whose “first priority will be to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” It became clear almost immediately that we were now living in a very different world. Rather than filing complaints with OCR and waiting many months for them to be processed and investigated, which sometimes resulted in a negotiated settlement, the new task force announces that a school has violated Jewish students’ rights, demands sweeping changes, and threatens heavy sanctions if the institution does not immediately agree to comply. Early results have been swift.
At Columbia, for example, the site of the most ferocious protests, the university had dragged its feet in exercising control over its campus and thereby allowed a hostile environment for Jewish students to fester. On March 7, the task force announced the cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia. “Freezing the funds is one of the tools we are using to respond to this spike in anti-Semitism. This is only the beginning,” said the head of the task force. On March 21, Columbia agreed to the task force demands and committed to significant reforms, including robust disciplinary procedures for students and student organizations who violate regulations governing protests; hiring 36 special officers with arrest authority; mandatory Title VI training for administrators; expanding intellectual diversity in academic programs and faculty appointments; and appointing a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department.
The pressure exerted by the Trump administration has catalyzed action where there had previously been stagnation. After decades of careful fighting through painstaking legal and administrative processes, the Jewish community now sees its struggle being fought directly by the Trump administration, which has placed campus antisemitism at the very center of its larger campaign to fight DEI and “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left and Marxist maniacs.”
For those of us who have long been in the fight against campus antisemitism, the administration’s revolutionary results are cause for both marvel and caution. No one can fail to appreciate the administration’s quick action to protect students after the frustrating inaction of the past. That said, the administration’s rhetoric and actions, while directed at many of the same objectives the Jewish community has been advancing for years, seem to be aimed at reshaping the universities more broadly rather than combating the antisemitism within them. A recent threat by the head of the antisemitism task force that “we’re going to bankrupt these universities [and] take away every single federal dollar” could in fact hurt Jewish students, parents, and alumni who are deeply dependent on and connected to these institutions.
The interests of Jewish students and those of the administration may not always be one and the same. Harvard is a good example. Jewish students brought a pair of lawsuits against Harvard; the cases settled. As recently as January 21, 2025 (the day after Trump’s second inauguration, as it happens), Kenneth L. Marcus himself, chairman of the Brandeis Center and one of the plaintiff’s counsel in the Harvard litigation, praised Harvard for acknowledging “that a rule against Zionists is a rule against Jews,” noting that Harvard’s settlement was “the strongest we’ve seen so far, and it marks a major victory for Jewish students.”
Despite Marcus’s expression of satisfaction, the Trump administration has proceeded to assert additional demands, including changes to the university’s governance structure that the school said amounted to placing the entire university under government oversight. Accepting these demands would be, in the estimation of Harvard, tantamount to allowing itself to be taken over by the federal government, and the university rejected them. The Trump administration responded by freezing more than $2 billion in Harvard’s grants and contracts. It later announced plans to pull an additional $1 billion of Harvard’s funding for health research and is exploring revoking the university’s tax-exempt status — an act of open financial war.
Episodes like this, and the billions of dollars of sanctions imposed on other universities, raise the question of how the Jewish community ought best navigate the differences between the Jewish community’s goals and tactics and those of the administration. One reason Jewish students and faculty choose to attend and work at research universities is to be part of cutting-edge research in medicine, public health, and STEM fields heavily supported by federal grants that make America’s research universities the envy of the world. For the past 20 years, the Jewish community’s efforts have been focused on enabling Jewish students to thrive — intellectually, religiously, and socially — on these campuses, contributing to life-saving work on tuberculosis, childhood cancer, and health and nutrition support for impoverished populations. For several years, Hillel’s Campus Climate Initiative has been working with thousands of university leaders to help them understand the needs of their Jewish students for safety and equal treatment, to be sure, but also for a broad set of reforms, including strict enforcement of protest and demonstration rules, mandatory antisemitism training for faculty and students, holiday accommodations, kosher dining, richer curricular offerings on Zionism, Israel, and Jewish history, and so on. While it may seem intuitive to embrace the administration’s revolutionary tactics, we who have been in the trenches fighting antisemitism for decades now must maintain a clear focus on our own specific goals and the tactics that will achieve them.
As of this writing, it is unclear how a half dozen or so other large universities will respond to the administration’s cutoffs of their funding — concede or fight — but what is clear is that the struggle against campus antisemitism has been reshaped in the administration’s image. On the road to a campus culture more hospitable to Jews, the Jewish community is no longer in the driver’s seat. It is the Trump administration. And that fact carries important implications, positive and negative.
On the positive side, the administration’s use of severe sanctions will require universities to respond at a speed and with concessions that were previously unheard-of. The Columbia example shows that an institution that dragged its feet for years in addressing onerous conditions for its Jewish students has now agreed to steps that were unthinkable even to ask for in private Title VI cases. Fear of financial ruin is a potent motivator.
On the other hand, the Trump administration’s reliance on preemptive declarations and executive orders skips long-accepted legal due process procedures of investigation and fact-finding that normally precede governmental sanctions. This circumvention of due process effectively undermines the Jewish community’s strategy, painstakingly pursued over many years, to build legal protections for Jewish students into the fabric of American law. It bears remembering that a future administration can rescind Trump’s executive orders and sanctions just as easily as Trump has issued them.
Aside from due process considerations, there are other points of departure between the community’s strategic approach and that of the administration. The community has long sought to impress upon university leaders their legal, moral, and mission-driven responsibility to protect Jewish students’ rights. But the administration’s approach is already triggering a backlash movement. This movement asserts that campus antisemitism actually is not the serious problem the Jewish community claims it is, but rather a cover for far-reaching and sudden right-wing attempts to subvert universities, the engine of America’s research and development ecosystem. Such a backlash is hardly in the interest of Jewish students on campuses across the country.
The fundamental question now facing the Jewish community is whether to fall in line behind the administration’s efforts or remain committed to its own course of legal activism.
In our view, the answer is clear. The Jewish community’s legal activism is indispensable for long-term, durable change. Instead of outsourcing that fight to the administration’s task force, the Jewish community should take advantage of the new legal landscape the task force has created. Namely, one of high pressure on universities to crack down quickly on antisemitic harassment and remedy violations of Jewish students’ rights. Under these circumstances, the Jewish community must aggressively expand and pursue its own lawsuits in federal courts, where they are more likely than ever before to obtain favorable settlement terms. Remember that Title VI affords two distinct avenues of recourse: filing lawsuits in federal court or lodging administrative complaints with OCR. After decades of favoring the second avenue, the new legal environment warrants pivoting toward the first. This will put the reins back in the Jewish community’s hands at a time when they are likely to prove more useful than before.
It has been nearly 100 years since attorney Sapiro’s landmark case against Henry Ford. The lesson of Sapiro’s case at the time was that the Jewish community could have confidence in American courts, the rule of law, and the protection of minority rights. Faith in those institutional values was a cornerstone of what is widely regarded as a great American Jewish century marked by unprecedented levels of Jewish flourishing in innumerable areas of American life.
But there might be an even greater, more timeless lesson in the fact that Sapiro brought the case himself, rather than hand it over to someone with more fame and power. For American Jews, that lesson may only now be coming into view, but it is the same lesson every Jewish community learns after every eruption of antisemitism.
That the fight against antisemitism, in the end, is ours to win.
For additional reading on this topic:
Anti-Zionist Harassment Is Against the Law, Too by ALYZA D. LEWIN
