A Senate hearing about Jew-hatred on campus on Thursday focused on U.S. President Donald Trump’s pledges to get tough with colleges housing such protests and his efforts to gut the federal agency that is tasked with protecting students attacked by protesters. It also included an announced probe of American Muslims for Palestine.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, stated at the beginning of the committee hearing that he launched the investigation “demanding answers about their activities on college campuses.”
“This group’s leaders have ties to Hamas and helped create the group Students for Justice in Palestine,” Cassidy said. “I also requested information from the Justice Department and several universities on these groups.”
The Trump administration has been very focused on Jew-hatred on campus, with supporters—including at the hearing—praising the federal government’s efforts and critics saying that it erring in its approach.
Trump withheld $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University over its response to protesters targeting Jewish students after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack. Two weeks ago, it warned 60 colleges—including Harvard University, Yale Universities and many public schools—that they could face federal funding cuts if found to violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the landmark anti-discrimination legislation.
“Universities have been put on notice. Failing to protect a student’s civil rights will no longer be tolerated,” Cassidy said. “If universities refuse to follow the law, address discrimination on campus and support their Jewish students, then they should not expect the support of the federal taxpayer.”
At the same time, the administration has reduced staff significantly at the U.S. Education Department as it tries to shut down the federal agency, including its Office of Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing Title VI.
Rabbi David Saperstein, director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, testified that the Trump administration opted to “fire hundreds of experienced employees from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights who know how universities function, what their needs are and how to effect change, to fire the very employees who are tasked with investigating and enforcing civil rights law on campus.”
That decision “has decimated one of the few channels available for students to take action and report their experiences, especially in the context of unreceptive university leadership,” Saperstein said.
Saperstein told the committee that the civil rights office has closed seven of its 12 regional offices, and the caseload per investigator has nearly doubled from 46 to 86. Moving enforcement to the U.S. Justice Department, as has been discussed, would change the way these cases are treated, the rabbi said.
The lead sponsor of legislation designed to make it easier for Jewish students to file civil rights complaints, Cassidy said that the Office of Civil Rights has enough staff to adequately handle any claims it receives. (Experts have told JNS that the Justice Department is equipped to handle cases as well.)
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) questioned that, given the Education Department layoffs.
“I would expect to be talking today more about how we are ensuring the Office of Civil Rights is being properly staffed and resourced,” she said. “The Trump administration has taken the opposite approach.”
Charles Asher Small, founding director and president of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, cited funding from Qatar. Some lawmakers suggested China played a role.
The debate over the Office of Civil Rights came after witnesses, including Saperstein and Small, talked about the increasing hostility that Jewish students have faced on college campuses since Oct. 7.
At the “most prestigious universities and campuses,” Small said, “we’ve witnessed hundreds of antisemitic resolutions and protests, which some of them turned violent, others leading to the harassment of Jewish students, faculty and staff.”
One reason for the antisemitic themes on campus is what Carly Gammill, founding director of the StandWithUs Center for Combating Antisemitism, called a “pernicious, well-funded campaign hat has co-opted and imposed its own erroneous definition of a term that is integral to the religious and ethnic identity of most Jews around the world, including here in the U.S.”
That term, she said, was “Zionism.”
“Zionism is the term that describes the desire of the Jewish people for safety and sovereignty in their ancestral homeland,” she testified. “This nefarious campaign, however, seeds to redefine Zionism as nothing more than a term of political support for the Israeli government, which the narrative falsely accuses of a host of evils.”
That erases more than 3,000 years of Jewish history and is “a direct attack against a core component of mainstream Jewish identity,” she said. “In short, a textbook definition of antisemitism.”
Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), said people need to push back.
“It is not enough for individuals or institutions to merely claim they are not antisemitic,” he testified. “As my father once taught me, it is not enough for people, especially public figures to be neutral or not be antisemitic. One must be anti-antisemitic.”
“We must demand the same of our universities and government institutions,” he told the committee. “This hearing, in my opinion, is an attempt to be just that.”
Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, told the committee that he was concerned about how the U.S. government was responding to schools dealing with post-Oct. 7 outbreaks of Jew-hatred. (Stern describes himself as “lead drafter” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred, a claim that is contested by its other authors.)
“Students, including Jewish students, have a right not to be victims of true threats, harassment, intimidation, bullying, discrimination, let alone assault,” Stern testified. “However, they should expect to hear ideas that cut them to their core. Attempts to affect the campus that aren’t grounded in protection of free speech and academic freedom are not likely to work.”
The Trump administration has gone after universities for what it says is a failure to address the post-Oct. 7 climate of Jew-hatred. It withheld $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University until the school took certain actions, including banning masks and putting its Middle East studies programs under external review.
“Recent threats against funding without a full investigation or an opportunity to be heard are not only likely illegal but horrible policy,” Stern said. “Arresting students should be a last resort, not a first impulse, especially for technical violation of rules.”
“The campus environment can be improved, with programs and courses, but if we bludgeon the campus into submission, we risk destroying an institution which has made America the envy of the world,” he said.
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, welcomed the announced investigation of American Muslims for Palestine.
“There’s a lot to investigate, including AMP’s ties to Hamas financiers, AMP’s support for the Hamas and Muslim terror organizations and AMP’s training and financial support for the Students for Justice in Palestine mobs who have turned U.S. campuses into zones of savagery where no Jewish student is safe,” Klein told JNS.
“The investigation should include Hatem Bazian, the co-founder of AMP and SJP, who called for intifada—the murder of every Jew—and scores of other terror supporters and fomenters involved in AMP and SJP,” he added.