Kenneth L. Marcus, a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, told JNS on the sidelines of the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference that he likes what he sees so far from President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for the department and the U.S. Justice Department.
Trump has announced Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, as his nominee for U.S. attorney general, and Linda McMahon as his choice for education secretary.
“Both of them seem to be both conversant about the issues and committed to addressing antisemitism,” Marcus told JNS in New York on Sunday. “Moreover, we know that they will be implementing the agenda of a president, who has spoken out forcefully against campus antisemitism. So, that bodes very well.”
Marcus addressed the president-elect’s nominees in a personal capacity, rather than his role as president and founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan group that does not take political positions.
He said that he is, so far, “encouraged by everything that I have been hearing and seeing” about Bondi and McMahon.
No matter how Trump’s administration takes shape, the Brandeis Center will continue to be “very broad” in the cases of alleged Jew-hatred that it takes on when it believes the allegations give rise to a legal course of action.
The center is “building up our litigation muscle so that we have the ability not just to bring administrative actions” before the Education Department’s civil rights office but also in state and federal courts, where the center has about a dozen pending cases. (At the Tikvah event, Shabbos Kestenbaum, who is suing Harvard University, said that Marcus now represents him.)
“We are also adjusting to the present moment so that we can both blanket the administrative agencies with the administrative cases,” Marcus told JNS, “but also on a selective basis bring them bigger, larger-scale lawsuits.”
While serving in the Education Department during the George W. Bush administration, Marcus developed what became known as the “Marcus Doctrine,” an interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would grant broader protections for the rights of ethnic groups, including Jews, that exhibit religious characteristics.
He founded the Brandeis Center in 2011 and has helmed it, excluding a two-year stint as assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump administration.
He used both platforms to pursue cases of campus antisemitism vigorously through the legal system.
Marcus told JNS that such work is safe, regardless of the Trump administration’s potential moves on the Education Department. The president-elect and some of his allies have threatened to abolish the department altogether—something that some experts say would be at least exceedingly difficult to do.
Suing educational institutions for alleged Jew-hatred might have to “be taken under a different address,” perhaps the Justice Department, according to Marcus.
“It is entirely possible that this will be a strong benefit, a strong plus, and here’s how it would work,” he said. “There may be fewer administrative cases of a lesser degree of significance that are pursued, but those that are pursued will be done with much greater vigor.”
The Justice Department has the power to bring far more resources to bear and to generate greater accountability through its investigations than the Education Department, according to Marcus. He added that major existential changes at the Education Department aren’t expected “to happen overnight.”
“There’s no reason to assume that it will lead to weaker, as opposed to stronger, enforcement in the cases that we care about,” he said.
“Not to worry,” he added. “It can all work out.”
