The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee plans a hearing on Thursday to look at the ongoing problem of Jew-hatred on college campuses, at a time when some critics of the Trump administration are saying that announced cuts to the U.S. Department of Education raise concerns that the agency will be unable to adequately protect the rights of Jewish students.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the committee chair, held a bipartisan roundtable on the issue on Nov. 9. 2023—about a month after Oct. 7—after his predecessor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) declined requests for a hearing.
Cassidy said that tomorrow’s session will provide a new opportunity to highlight the problem, which the Anti-Defamation League has reported to be nearly a 500% increase in antisemitic incidents at colleges from 2023 to 2024.
“It seems abstract if somebody is not in those universities or in those campuses, and you read about it in the news,” Cassidy told JNS. “But to actually have somebody who is prevented from going to class and the physical intimidation, I think that’s important.”
The senator also said there was evidence that campus demonstrations were not formed by “a spontaneous group of students” but rather the product of “outside organizers that come in and instigate.”
Lauren Wolman, director of federal policy and strategy at the ADL, told JNS that the Senate hearing is “an important step in confronting the urgent and deeply troubling rise of antisemitism at colleges and universities across the country.”
The hearing will provide “an opportunity for lawmakers to highlight the urgency of this moment and demand concrete action,” she said. “We hope this Senate hearing will further drive universities to adopt meaningful reforms, enforce their own policies against hate and harassment and commit to protecting Jewish students with the same urgency they afford to other vulnerable communities.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the committee who was a Democratic nominee for president and a governor of Virginia, said that he wants answers about how U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive budget cuts to the U.S. Department of Education will affect efforts to protect Jewish students under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Kaine told JNS that layoffs included those conducting investigations into allegations of Jew-hatred on college campuses.
“I’m sort of curious how we’re going to be able to do what we need to do on campuses without a functioning civil rights division in the Department of Education,” the senator said. “So that’s probably one of the major issues that I’m going to be digging into.”
Cassidy told JNS that the U.S. Justice Department could handle those cases instead of the Education Department—something that the Trump administration has claimed.
“They have very similar missions,” he said, of the two departments. “If you talk to the people at DOE, they say they’ve been underfunded. Other people would say they’ve been not very energetic. But if you’ve got all these resources already in one department, I don’t know if you need to replicate them in another.”
Pamela Nadell, a history professor and director of the Jewish studies program at American University, told JNS that the Education Department cuts will make it harder for the federal government to protect Jewish students on college campuses.
“I am not certain the Justice Department’s current staff is sufficiently large enough to handle these cases and to prioritize them,” Nadell said. “Why take something that pertains particularly to the field of education out of the Department of Education?”
In January, Cassidy and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) reintroduced legislation to let college students know how to file civil rights complaints with the Department of Education and require institutions of higher education to post links on their websites to the agency’s Office of Civil Rights.
Cassidy recently endorsed Trump’s call to abolish the Education Department.
“This is the committee that is in charge of the Department of Education and this is the same group that has acquiesced to what is the gutting of the Department of Education,” Nadell told JNS.
“Why are they holding a hearing after they just gutted the department and thrown it into absolute chaos, and how do they expect the department to oversee the Title VI complaints?” she added.
A Dec. 5, 2023 House Education Committee hearing on campus Jew-hatred—during which Nadell testified alongside the presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—made a star out of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and led to the resignations of the Harvard and Penn presidents.
Nadell, author of the forthcoming book Antisemitism, an American Tradition, said that her concern is that legitimate worries about antisemitism are being used to attack higher education.
“Antisemitism has been weaponized in the attack on higher education,” she said. “These hearings are not doing anything to make Jewish students and faculty feel more safe on college campuses.”
The scheduled witnesses for Thursday’s hearing are Carly Gammill, founding director of the StandWithUS legal center; Rabbi David Saperstein, director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad); and Charles Asher Small, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
Wolman, of the ADL, said that she hopes something good comes out of the hearing.
“We hope this Senate hearing will further drive universities to adopt meaningful reforms, enforce their own policies against hate and harassment and commit to protecting Jewish students with the same urgency they afford to other vulnerable communities,” she said.