Antisemitism was on the march on a college campus in August 2017 when torch-carrying Nazis and other white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” during a rally at the University of Virginia.
Antisemitism was on the hunt on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman open fired during the Shabbat morning services at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, killing 11 people and wounding six — the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in the United States.
Several of the victims of the Pittsburgh mass shooting had survived the Holocaust, but not American antisemitism. In the aftermath of the Charlottesville rally, a Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer.
Antisemitism is real. It visited upon us one of the most incomprehensibly vile episodes in human history: the attempted extermination of European Jews. But it was not until Wednesday that the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, as if suddenly cognizant of the lethal power of anti-Jewish hate.
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Unfortunately, a more apt title for this feckless bill would be the Act Concerned About Antisemitism Act.
This response to pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses is more about curbing college speech and scoring partisan points than addressing antisemitism. Republicans hope to weaponize the “antisemitism” label to exacerbate the divide in the Democratic Party between progressives and President Joe Biden over Biden’s unwavering support of Israel.
Bipartisan support for this bill suggests that members of both parties would rather talk about campus protests than the root of those protests: U.S. complicity in the mass suffering and deaths of Palestinian civilians, including large numbers of women and children, during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas.
It’s ironic that the target of this bill is not avowed white supremacist actors like those in Charlottesville and Pittsburgh, but our nation’s institutions of higher learning. The bill expands the definition of antisemitism for the Department of Education in its enforcement of anti-discrimination laws by codifying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The bill, if it finds its way into law, would frustrate free speech more effectively than it would foil antisemitism. This act of deflection is virtue signaling at its worst.
U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-4th, was among the 70 Democrats who voted against it, along with fellow Virginia Reps. Don Beyer, Bobby Scott and Jennifer Wexton. Twenty-one Republicans opposed the measure.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
In an interview on Thursday, McClellan cited a number of concerns with the bill, including that the definition that the legislation is based on was not actually written into the bill; people would have to hunt it down. Also, the organization’s examples of antisemitism are not exhaustive; as a result, other acts of antisemitism might well be uncovered by the bill, she said.
“Definitions matter and words matter,” McClellan said. “And if you are going to define for whatever purpose a word, you should put that definition in the code and not incorporate by reference — without putting it in there — a third-party definition and examples that are not exhaustive that the Jewish community itself is divided over.”
That is particularly true if that definition is then going to be used at the direction of Congress for determining civil rights violations at educational institutions, she said, “because to violate a law, you have to put people on notice to what the prohibitive conduct is.”
Another concern is that “an overzealous interpreter of the definition could conflate criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism, and in doing so, begin to stifle free speech,” she said.
How would a classroom discuss the history of Zionism under such a law?
“Discussing the history of Israel and Palestine is complex, for many people emotional, and I think it’s important that these conversations be had to reach understanding,” McClellan said.
“Just like with the discussion of the history of racism, and racism in itself, is important to overcome racism, discussions of antisemitism, discussions of conflicts in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine or any other country are important context to help avoid antisemitism, anti-Muslim sentiment,” she said. “And what bills like this do is make that discussion less likely to happen because a lawyer somewhere is going to say, ‘We don’t want to get sued and have our federal funding taken away.’”
And if this sounds familiar, it should. The book banning, micromanaging of classroom instruction and measures like this are not intended to promote a more tolerate and enlightened society. They’re designed to chill speech, intimidate educators, and avoid uncomfortable conversations.
“If you’re ever going to confront hatred of any kind — whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Muslim sentiment, Islamophobia, racism, nationalism ... you have to educate people about the history of that hatred and give them a safe space to discuss why something is or isn’t antisemitic,” McClellan said.
The Anti-Defamation League reported that U.S. incidents of antisemitism skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. The Council on American-Islamic Relations says it received the highest number of anti-Muslim bias complaints ever last year, with nearly half of them coming after Oct. 7.
These reports suggest there’s a lot of hate going around. But Congress, in dragging college presidents before it to testify about campus antisemitism and passing this bill, has been less focused on anti-Muslim incidents such as the stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian boy in Illinois and the shooting of three students of Palestinian descent in Vermont — both after the Hamas attack.
On the same day Congress took up this antisemitism bill, Donald Trump was at his demagogic worst during a Wisconsin rally, merging his hostility toward Hispanic immigrants with the Islamophobia that characterized his Muslim ban.
“It should be no surprise that in addition to the millions and millions of people invading our country from the border, crooked Joe is now reportedly planning ... to bring massive numbers of Gazans from the Middle East to your American towns, your towns and villages,” Trump said.
“Joe Biden seems determined to create the conditions for an Oct. 7 style attack right here in America. It’s gonna happen with all of these people coming in from the southern border.”
It was only a couple of weeks ago that Trump — who seems to have a compulsion to defend white supremacists — called the violent 2017 Charlottesville rally “a little peanut” compared to the pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses. But his Mar-a-Lago dinner date with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes in November 2022 makes him a poor judge of antisemitism.
In an odd bit of timing, Elon Musk announced Friday that X, formerly known as Twitter, plans to reinstate the suspended account of Fuentes. But rather than confronting antisemitism on America’s far right, elected officials would rather stoke a moral panic that brands college administrators and students as enemies of the state.
You can’t hope to solve a problem unless you examine its roots, be it systemic racism, antisemitism or Islamophobia. The college campus is an appropriate place to interrogate these contentious but important issues.
If politicians are thwarting this dialogue, they’re not combating antisemitism. They’re perpetuating hate.