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Jewish Voices for Palestine and Free Speech Slam House GOP 'Kangaroo Hearing' on Antisemitism
"What we are seeing has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe and everything to do with crushing dissent," said one Barnard College student.
May 07, 2025
Jewish students and academics for Palestinian rights and free speech on Wednesday condemned a congressional hearing in which House Republicans repeatedly conflated opposition to Zionism and Israeli crimes against Palestine with antisemitism, while Democratic lawmakers warned against the weaponization of civil rights to suppress dissent.
The House Education and Workforce Committee held the hearing—titled "Beyond the Ivy League: Stopping the Spread of Antisemitism on American Campuses"—which followed last year's panel on antisemitism, both real and contrived, at Columbia University.
This time, the presidents of Haverford College, DePaul University, and California Polytechnic State University were grilled by lawmakers including committee Chair Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), who said that Israel should deal with Gaza "m like Nagasaki and Hiroshima" and was a manager at the Moody Bible Institute, which according to a memo from a group of mostly Jewish Haverford professors, "trains students to convert Jewish people to Christianity."
The memo notes that committee member Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.) once said Jews and Muslims will never know "peace in their soul" until they renounce their religions and accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. Another committee member, Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), said that Nazi leader Adolf oHitler was "right" about political movements' need to capture youth support, before later apologizing.
Yet these and other Republican lawmakers on the panel pressured the three university presidents to crack down on constitutionally protected speech, while conflating support for Palestine and criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
"Haverford employs faculty members who engage in blatant antisemitism with no apparent consequences," said Walberg. "For example, one professor declared online that Zionism is Nazism."
Asked by Walberg if the phrase "long live the intifada"—an affirmation of Palestinians' legal right to armed resistance against Israeli oppression—is "protected speech at Haverford's campus," college president Wendy Raymond incorrectly said, "That is an antisemitic form of speech."
Walberg also falsely called the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel "unprovoked" and singled out students and faculty who praised Palestinians who resist Israel—which is facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice and whose prime minister and former defense minister are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination and forced starvation, in Gaza.
DePaul University president Robert Manuel said he was "deeply sorry" for "mistakes" made at the Chicago school, where two Jewish students were brutally attacked last November in what prosecutors have charged as a hate crime, while touting the banning of pro-Palestine groups including Students for Justice in Palestine from campus.
While noting that the Constitution "doesn't protect antisemitic violence, true threats of violence, or certain kinds of speech that may properly be labeled 'harassment,'" Georgetown University Law Center professor and former ACLU national legal director David Cole told the committee that the First Amendment "protects speech many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive, including anti-Israel advocacy and even antisemitic advocacy."
Cole accused the committee of making "broad-based charges of antisemitism without any factual predicate."
"To be honest, and with all due respect, the hearings this committee held on this same subject last year are reminiscent not of a fair trial of any sort, but of the kind of hearings the House Committee on Un-American Activities used to hold," Cole contended. "And I think we can all agree that the HUAC hearings were both a big mistake and a major intrusion on the First Amendment rights of Americans."
Cole also took aim at U.S. President Donald Trump's weaponization of antisemitism to threaten and defund colleges and universities that don't crack down on Palestine defenders, stressing that "the government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing such viewpoints."
Dozens of Jewish Haverford students signed an open letter to members of the House Education Committee ahead of Wednesday's hearing stating that "we are all deeply concerned by how you are weaponizing our pain and anguish for your own purposes."
Letter to the Editor: Jewish Haverford Students Reject Congress’ Weaponization of Antisemitism haverfordclerk.com/letter-to-th...
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— Karen Masters ( @karenlmasters.bsky.social) May 7, 2025 at 12:15 PM
"It is clear to us that these hearings will not, and have no desire to, protect us or combat antisemitism," the letter says. "Instead, this congressional hearing weaponizes antisemitism to target freedom of speech on college campuses, silences political dissidents, and attacks students who speak out in solidarity with Palestine. It is a blatant assault on our Black, brown, transgender, queer, noncitizen, and Palestinian peers."
A day before the hearing, the group Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVPA)—which called the panel a "kangaroo hearing"— brought nine Columbia University and affiliated students to Capitol Hill to meet with members of Congress and "speak about their experiences as Jewish students who have been steadfastly committed to advocating for the safety and freedom of the Palestinian people."
Columbia junior Shay Orentlicher said that "I'm here asking my representatives to call for the release of my friend Mahmoud Khalil and to put real pressure on the Trump regime," referring to the permanent U.S. resident facing deportation after helping to lead pro-Palestine protests at the New York City university.
"I cannot stand to see the Trump administration smear Mahmoud as an antisemite when it could not be further than the truth," Orentlicher added.
Tali Beckwith-Cohen, a Jewish senior at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College, argued: "The Trump regime is using false allegations of antisemitism to disappear our friends, punish student protestors, and dismantle higher education. What we are seeing has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe, and everything to do with crushing dissent."
"Thousands of Jews on campuses across the country have spoken out in solidarity with the people of Gaza and we will not be silent," Beckwith-Cohen vowed.
JVPA political director Beth Miller contended that "the far-right does not care about Jewish safety."
"Trump and his allies in Congress are platforming neo-Nazis and Christian nationalists, all while pretending to care about antisemitism in order to take a hatchet to our communities and most basic freedoms," Miller added. "This is intended to silence the Palestinian rights movement, sow chaos, and sharpen authoritarian tools that will then be used to dismantle civil liberties and democracy itself."
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the ranking member of the House Education Committee, pushed back on Republicans' assertions during Wednesday's hearing, noting that "my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have not held any hearings on other forms of discrimination and hate, such as racism, Title IX gender violations, Islamophobia, homophobia, or the challenges of meeting the needs of students with disabilities."
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) noted that Trump praised attendees of the deadly 2017 "United the Right" white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as "very fine people," and that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "spread an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Covid was engineered to target white and Black people but spare Jewish people."
Casar asked committee Republicans to condemn these and other antisemitic incidents by raising their hands. None did.
Antisemitism is an assault on all of our values. So why would Republicans cut funding to address hate crimes or protect synagogues? Republicans are not trying to keep Jewish students safe. They're trying to keep the Israeli government safe from any form of criticism.
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— Congressman Greg Casar ( @repcasar.bsky.social) May 7, 2025 at 10:24 AM
"Not a single Republican today has been willing to condemn any of this antisemitism," Casar lamented. "Unfortunately, the party of 'very fine people on both sides' or ' Jewish space lasers' does not give a damn about stopping antisemitism. If my Republican colleagues want to stop the spread of antisemitism, maybe they should stop apologizing for and promoting antisemites."
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) argued that "it is abundantly clear that the cynical work of the majority party on this committee is now being expanded and weaponized by the [Trump] administration seeking to squash dissent."
"Political protest, anti-war protest, pro-Palestinian protest—this is all protected speech under the First Amendment, regardless of citizenship status," Omar said after listing a number of Palestine defenders, including green-card holders, targeted for deportation by the Trump administration.
"Using immigration authorities to target, abduct, and detain noncitizens for their activism is a clear violation of their rights and a hallmark of an authoritarian government," she added.
Asserting that "throughout history, college campuses have been the places where worldviews, politics, cultures meet," Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said thato "some of the most transformative movements for justice in this country were ignited by students on college campuses."
"We cannot allow them to use efforts to divide our marginalized communities against each other."
"Now, that tradition of protest, academic freedom, and the core principle of free speech is under attack," Lee noted. "Not genuinely in the name of safety and student well-being, but under the guise of control used to suppress the voices of marginalized groups."
Lee said that it's clear that committee Republicans don't care about tackling antisemitism and other forms of bigotry "because they've dismantled and closed regional offices for civil rights... tasked with investigating antisemitism, that they have not spoken out against the Nazi salutes of Elon Musk or the Great Replacement Theory that led to the largest antisemitic massacre in my district."
"They have done nothing about anti-Blackness—I won't hold my breath for a hearing on that," she continued.
"We haven't acknowledged that our safety and our liberation are tied together," Lee added. "We cannot allow them to use efforts to divide our marginalized communities against each other... We are the closest we have ever been—ever been—to losing our civil liberties. We have to fight against it."
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In Latest Legal Loss for Trump, Federal Court Orders Rümeysa Öztürk's Return to Vermont
The ruling in Rümeysa Öztürk's case came less than 24 hours after courts ruled that Badar Khan Suri's case must be heard in Virginia and that Mahmoud Khalil's case must remain in New Jersey.
May 07, 2025
On Wednesday, Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was the third detained international scholar in 24 hours to secure a victory in a case against the Trump administration when a federal appeals panel ordered the government to return Öztürk to Vermont from the crowded Louisiana detention center to which she was sent hours after plainclothes immigration agents arrested her in March.
The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down its ruling weeks after U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III in Vermont ordered the administration to return Öztürk to the New England state, where she had been located when her attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition on her behalf.
Sessions' ruling had demanded that Öztürk be returned to Vermont for a hearing by May 1, but she remained in Louisiana—where the Trump administration has sent numerous foreign students marked for deportation to ensure their cases would be handled by conservative judges—as the White House appealed the case to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
That court said Wednesday that Öztürk must be sent back to Vermont by May 14, where a federal judge will hold a hearing on her habeas corpus petition on May 22. A bail hearing for Öztürk's release will also be held on May 9.
Öztürk's lawyers argue that the government is unconstitutionally retaliating against her for co-writing an op-ed in her school newspaper last year in which she called on Tufts to divest from companies tied to Israel and its bombardment of Gaza. She was detained in March by plainclothes immigration agents—some of whom wore masks—near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.
"No one should be arrested and locked up for their political views," said Esha Bhandari, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, which is helping to represent Öztürk. "Every day that Rümeysa Öztürk remains in detention is a day too long. We're grateful the court refused the government’s attempt to keep her isolated from her community and her legal counsel as she pursues her case for release."
Lawyers recently submitted new filings in Öztürk's case in Vermont, describing her living conditions for nearly two months in Louisiana.
In a cramped room with 23 other women, Öztürk has suffered progressively more severe asthma attacks and has been exposed to triggers for her asthma, including insect and rodent droppings and a lack of fresh air.
"Rümeysa has suffered six weeks in crowded confinement without adequate access to medical care and in conditions that doctors say risk exacerbating her asthma attacks. Her detention—over an op-ed she co-authored in her student newspaper—is as cruel as it is unconstitutional," said Jessie Rossman, legal director for the ACLU of Massachusetts. "Today, we moved one step closer to returning Rümeysa to her community and studies in Massachusetts."
With Öztürk expected to return to Vermont within days, the ACLU this week was also celebrating another "huge blow for the Trump administration" in the case of Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, who was also arrested in March by masked immigration agents before being secretly transported first to Louisiana and then to Texas.
A federal court ruled Suri's habeas corpus case should be heard in a court in Virginia, where he was living with his wife and young children when he was detained.
The Department of Homeland Security said Suri was "rendered deportable" under the Immigration and Nationality Act because he was found "spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media"—claims for which DHS offered no evidence.
His lawyers have argued he was being detained for constitutionally protected speech in support of Palestinian rights.
A federal court in Virginia is now set to hear Suri's case regarding his demand to be returned to Virginia and released on bond on May 14.
Eden Heilman, legal director for the ACLU of Virginia, said the court rejected the Trump administration's effort to "find a court it believed would be friendlier to its unlawful detention of people advocating for Palestinian rights."
"We are pleased the court saw through the Trump administration's attempts to manipulate the law, and we won't stop fighting until Dr. Khan Suri is reunited with his family," said Heilman.
Meanwhile, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration's effort to appeal the issue of where former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil's habeas corpus case should be heard, ensuring that a federal court in New Jersey—where Khalil was detained when the petition was filed—will remain the venue for the case.
The administration has been pushing for Khalil's case to be heard in Louisiana, where he has also been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention since March, when ICE agents accosted him and his pregnant wife and took him away in an unmarked vehicle—eventually sending him 1,400 miles away from his wife and his legal counsel, where he remained last month during the birth of his first child.
Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, expressed hope that Tuesday's ruling "sends a strong message to other courts around the country facing government attempts to shop for favorable jurisdictions by moving people detained on unconstitutional immigration charges around."
"It is the fundamental job of the judiciary," said Kaufman, "to stand up to this kind of government manipulation of our basic rights."
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Pro-Israel Senators Show Their Hand By Opposing Free Speech Protections in Now-Delayed Antisemitism Bill
The Antisemitism Awareness Act has never been about countering antisemitism or protecting Jewish students from discrimination; it is about silencing pro-Palestine students and protecting the Israeli government from criticism.
May 06, 2025
When Senate Republicans brought the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act up for a committee vote last week, they were expecting an easy win. After all, the bill had the support of Senate Republican leaders, most Israel advocacy groups, and even some Democrats.
Yet the bill faced an unexpected problem that may ultimately doom its passage. During a markup hearing of the HELP Committee, two Republicans broke ranks, joining all Democrats in approving free speech amendments that undermined the true goal of the bill: requiring colleges and universities to conflate criticism of the Israeli government and Zionism with antisemitism.
The first amendment considered was HELP Chairman Sen. Bill Cassidy's (R-La.)manager amendment, which affirmed that “Nothing in this Act shall be constructed to diminish or infringe upon any right protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
While that vague reassurance passed with bipartisan support, most Republicans refused to support substantive amendments that explicitly referenced Gaza as an example of free speech, laid out examples of protected student speech, and prohibited retaliation against dissent.
If the true purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act was protecting Jewish students from illegal anti-Semitic discrimination, then none of these amendments should have been a problem.
At start of the hearing, ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned, “Unfortunately and unacceptably, the Antisemitism Awareness Act we are considering today would label speech that criticizes the Israeli government and Netanyahu’s horrific war in Gaza as antisemitic and a violation of civil rights laws, and that is an extremely dangerous precedent.”
Sanders then offered several amendments designed to reduce the risk that government agencies and educational institutions can use the bill as a new tool of censorship.
His first amendment clarified, "no person shall be considered antisemitic for using their rights of free speech or protest under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to ... oppose Benjamin Netanyahu's led war effort, which has killed more than 50,000 and wounded more than 113,000, 60 percent of whom are women and children” and "oppose the Israeli government's devastation of Gaza..."
All Democrats voted in favor, which was itself a surprise given how many Democratic politicians have desperately avoided any criticism of the Israeli government. The bigger surprise came from Senator Rand Paul. He broke ranks with other Republicans and supported the amendment, ensuring its passage.
A second Sanders amendment declared that the federal government cannot force any school, college, or university to adopt a policy that a branch of the federal government may compel a school "to violate the rights of a student, faculty, or staff member under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
In a sane world, every Republican senator would have supported such a basic amendment. Yet all opposed it except for two: Sen. Paul and Sen. Susan Collins (D-Maine).
The third Sanders' amendment clarified that speech, such as distributing flyers, inviting guest speakers, or engaging in classroom discussions, is protected unless it involves true threats or incitement of violence. Again, Paul and Collins were the only Republicans to break with their colleagues to support it.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced an amendment prohibiting the federal government from detaining or deporting students based on protected political speech. That amendment passed by a single vote, thanks again to Senator Paul. Markey stated, “When a young person writes an op-ed in the student newspaper and get whisked off of the streets of Tuffs University to a prison in Louisiana with no charges that is what we are debating today.”
If the true purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act was protecting Jewish students from illegal anti-Semitic discrimination, then none of these amendments should have been a problem. They should have received universal support, and their approval should not have derailed the bill.
Yet the fate of the legislation is now up in the air.
HELP Committee Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said during the hearing that, “Supporting these amendments is an effort to kill this bill.”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Ok.) responded the next day by telling Jewish Insider that “Rand Paul totally killed that bill.” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) also said, “These amendments are dealbreakers.”
Why? Because the Antisemitism Awareness Act has never been about countering antisemitism or protecting Jewish students from discrimination; it is about silencing pro-Palestine students and protecting the Israeli government from criticism.
The bill would require government agencies and schools to enforce federal civil rights law using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism—a vague and widely disputed standard that poses a mortal threat to First Amendment freedoms.
Kenneth S. Stern, the original drafter of the IHRA definition, has testified to Congress that, "My fear is, if we similarly enshrine this definition into law, outside groups will try and suppress–rather than answer–political speech they don’t like. The academy, Jewish students, and faculty teaching about Jewish issues, will all suffer." Stern has repeatedly stated that the definition was never meant to be enforceable law and that doing so risks unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. That is precisely what this legislation seeks to achieve.
The IHRA definition declares that any student describing the founding of Israel as a "racist endeavor" has engaged in antisemitism punishable by their school and the government of the United States—even though racist militias and terrorist groups like the Irgun subjected Palestinians to a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder during the founding of Israel.
IHRA also declares anyone “applying double standards” to Israel is antisemtiic. If someone criticizes the Israeli government's war crimes in Gaza but hasn't made time to criticize the RSF's war crimes in Sudan, they must be antisemitic. Ditto for anyone “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” comparisons that--while controversial—have even been made by far-right supporters of the Israeli government.
As Sen. Paul noted during the hearing, these and other examples establish a dangerous double standard. No other foreign government is granted this level of immunity from criticism under U.S. civil rights law. If enforced through Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, these vague and politically motivated examples would transform legitimate political critique into grounds for federal investigations, and dissent into a punishable offense.
If passed, this bill—even in its watered-down form—would open the door for the Israeli government and its supporters to misconstrue American civil rights laws.
CAIR, like many other civil rights groups, has called on congress to not pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act into law, as it would give the Department of Education—under a Trump administration already targeting, arresting, detaining, and attempting to deport anti-genocide protesters—even more power to investigate, silence, and punish speech on campus critical of Israel. We are already seeing the consequences. More than 1,700 student visas have been revoked since January. Students like Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts’ Rumeysa Ozturk remain in ICE custody for nothing more than participating in peaceful, protected protest and speech. Others face deportation for daring to speak out. This is not theoretical. This is not speculative. It is happening now.
In its original form, the Antisemitism Awareness Act would have given the Trump administration even more power to escalate its attack on free speech for Palestine. Even with the addition of Sanders' amendments, the now-contradictory bill still threatens free speech protections by including the IHRA definition.
That's still not good enough for most Senate Republicans and pro-Israel groups pushing the bill. Now that the bill cannot be so easily weaponized to silence dissent against Israeli government's war crimes in Gaza or its founding ideology, at least some of its key backers are threatening to abandon it.
Congress must reject this bill in full. No amendment can salvage legislation built on an anti-democratic foundation. Americans have the right to speak out against injustice, whether it occurs in our own country or in Gaza.
We must be absolutely clear about what is at stake. If passed, this bill—even in its watered-down form—would open the door for the Israeli government and its supporters to misconstrue American civil rights laws. That is not only a betrayal of free speech. It is a threat to American sovereignty.
Americans must unequivocally oppose antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and all forms of hate. But conflating antisemitism with opposition to Israel’s military occupation, apartheid policies, or the ongoing genocide in Gaza is not just dishonest. It is dangerous.
Congress must reject this bill in full. No amendment can salvage legislation built on an anti-democratic foundation. Americans have the right to speak out against injustice, whether it occurs in our own country or in Gaza.
Silencing speech does not stop hate. It only deepens injustice. And we should not stand by while our government attempts to criminalize moral clarity.
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