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jewish voice for peace
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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Maintaining Empathic Sanity in Trump America
There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.
Apr 20, 2025
From Gulf of America to mass expulsion of “illegals” (people of color) to continuing genocidal complicity in Gaza to whatever the daily news brings us... welcome to Trump America! Welcome to the small-minded white nation so many long for, free once again from those large, inconvenient values—e.g., the Declaration of Independence—that keep disrupting the way things are supposed to be.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”
Cone on! In Trump America, those words were never meant to be taken literally. They create a sense of what I call empathic sanity, which has led to, for instance, the civil rights movement. But as President Donald Trump understands, empathic sanity can’t compete politically with hatred and fear—the creation of some good solid enemies—especially when mainstream Democrats, in their desperation for financial backing, are more than willing to shrug and minimize their values in the name of compromise.
If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments.
Trump, on the other hand, snorts at compromise, at least publicly, and pushes the agenda that works politically. He’ll do so even in defiance, for instance, of the Supreme Court, which recently demanded the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the hellhole prison in El Salvador to which he was sent without trial, without charges, without any chance to plead innocence. Garcia is a legal U.S. resident (father of three children who are U.S. citizens, husband of a U.S. citizen) and didn’t commit a crime, but he was snatched by ICE agents out of the blue and sent to a foreign prison. Team Trump has ignored the court’s demand for Garcia’s return, declaring that his deportation was an act of “foreign policy”—which they can conduct free of oversight.
This is all about clearing the country of enemies: of non-whites. Call them terrorists, call them criminals—dehumanize them—and then deport them. In Trump America, this is foreign policy. Millions of Americans are now in fear of deportation—for expressing the wrong political opinion (stop bombing Gaza), for simply being the wrong color.
And as Thom Hartmann pointed out, Trump is planning to up the ante. His team could start going after “you and me”—U.S. citizens who simply annoy him politically. Hartmann quotes Trump, in conversation with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele: “Home grown criminals. Home growns are next.”
And he adds, referring to the prison where Garcia was sent (the U.S. pays El Salvador for its use as a human dumping ground): “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
Trump as a looming Hitler? Yes, I’m sure that’s part of the current state of America, but in the present moment the primary issue is the full-on return of racism. As Clarence Lusane writes in The Nation:
There is a straight line from the 2017 “unite the right” rallies in Charlottesville to the far-right-led “Stop the Steal” movement to lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs to Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to power. No president in the post-civil-rights era has been as racially aggressive as the now-47th president.
Trump, Lusane notes, is the nation’s “white nationalist in chief.” His actions three months into his second term range from renaming the Gulf of Mexico (what was it again... Gulf of Some Country a Little Further North) to “re-renaming” military bases after Confederate generals to shutting down all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs to stopping “the expanding population of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the United States.”
Indeed, Lusane writes: “The second coming of Trump will be one long slog through the bowels of racial animus and juvenile reprisals. Permanent resistance is the way forward.”
Permanent resistance is certainly necessary, but as I think about what this means, I return to the concept of empathic sanity—that is to say, valuing all of humanity and working to create a world that works for everybody. There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.
What might this mean? Here’s one example, from Jewish Voice for Peace, regarding a rally a number of organizations held recently—on Passover—in New York City. Common Dreams quotes the organization’s social media post about it:
We are outside Federal Plaza to say: Stop arming Israel. End Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Free political prisoners held by ICE. Stop the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and students.
They chanted for peace in all directions: “None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free.”
Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Jay Saper, whose great uncle had been at Auschwitz, put it this way:
This Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we cannot celebrate as usual while Palestinians in Gaza face famine and the U.S.-backed Israeli government uses starvation as a weapon of war.
The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical: It calls us to strengthen our commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people. We commend the courageous students and all people of conscience raising their voices in dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners.
“The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical”: That hits the heart of it. No real values are theoretical. If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments. This is not a simplistic cry. It forces us to grope for understanding that lies well beyond the borders we have set for ourselves.
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Jewish Scholars, Israeli Academics Denounce Trump Weaponization of Antisemitism
"By singling out Jews as a homogeneous group to be protected at the expense of other marginalized groups and minorities, the administration is in fact fostering anti-Jewish sentiments," wrote a group of Israeli academics.
Apr 18, 2025
Jewish voices ranging from academics in Israel to a coalition of mainstream American Jewish organizations this week spoke out against the Trump administration, arguing that the White House's has used the fight against antisemitism as a pretext for targeting higher education. Some said the tactic actually makes Jews less safe.
In January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order with the purported aim of rooting out antisemitism at higher education institutions, and vowed to target foreign-born students who have engaged in "pro-jihadist" protests.
Since then, Trump immigration officials have detained multiple people involved in pro-Palestine campus demonstrations on Columbia University's campus, including Palestinian green-card holders Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.
The administration's antisemitism task force in February announced investigations into several of universities, and has also targeted funding at multiple universities.
In response to these developments, hundreds of Israeli academics—both in and outside of Israel—signed an open letter published Thursday, alleging the Trump administration is cynically using the goal of combating antisemitism to crack down on Columbia University and other U.S. universities.
"By singling out Jews as a homogeneous group to be protected at the expense of other marginalized groups and minorities, the administration is in fact fostering anti-Jewish sentiments," according to the letter, which also notes the signatories are alarmed by the persecution of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students and faculty.
"We condemn the weaponization of Jewish students' safety as grounds to silence, harass, suspend, punish, or deport pro-Palestinian members of U.S. academia," the letter states.
Other figures in U.S. academia also aired similar concerns this week.
University of Southern California journalism professor Sandy Tolan, who has written a book about Israel-Palestine, argued in commentary published Wednesday by Rolling Stone that the administration's "witch hunt" in higher education settings "has little to do with actual antisemitism."
"If it did, Trump would have fired Elon Musk immediately after his straight-armed salute on Inauguration Day—a gesture widely interpreted as a 'Sieg Heil,'" he wrote of Trump's billionaire adviser.
Similarly, the Jewish president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, toldNPR on Thursday that Trump's scrutiny on universities "is like using antisemitism as a cloak to do other things, to get universities to express loyalty to the president." Earlier in April, Roth wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times making this same point.
According to the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, over 30 prominent Jewish scholars of antisemitism, Holocaust studies, and Jewish history on Thursday challenged the Trump administration's embrace of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, which critics say conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry. The group said this definition has been used as a tool for the administration to attack higher education.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 10 organizations representing three out of four of the major Jewish denominations in American Jewry issued a statement on Tuesday taking issue with what they called a "false choice" between combating antisemitism and protecting democracy and the rule of law.
"In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding. Universities have an obligation to protect Jewish students, and the federal government has an important role to play in that effort; however, sweeping draconian funding cuts will weaken the free academic inquiry that strengthens democracy and society, rather than productively counter antisemitism on campus," wrote the coalition, which was brought together by the progressive Jewish Council for Public Affairs, but also included conservative groups like the Rabbinical Assembly.
"There should be no doubt that antisemitism is rising," the coalition wrote, but "these actions do not make Jews—or any community—safer. Rather, they only make us less safe."
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