Campuses That Are Not Judeo-Sanctioned: Jewish Voice for Peace, a Campus for Israel, is not a Temple
Since October 7, at least four universities have placed Jewish Voice for Peace’s chapters on suspended animation. In 2023 at BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now protests, 20 members were arrested. (The charges were dropped.) At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year. In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.” In September, Michigan’s attorney general brought felony charges for resisting or obstructing a police officer, as well as misdemeanor trespassing charges, against three Jewish activists — as well as four others — for offenses related to a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (They all pleaded not guilty).
Protests that have the title of Jewish religious observance are often shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. The universities said that the groups were not allowed to have structures on the campus.
The Story of Donald Trump’s First Day at Congress: The End of the Antisemitism Phenomenon and a Campaign to End the “Jew Card”
In the last decade, conservatives have protested Muslim immigration in the belief that it threatens Western progress on gay rights. The start of this posture was in Europe and it made its way into American politics with Donald Trump. In his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump decried the murder of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., by the Islamist Omar Mateen. He said that he would do everything he could to protect L.G.B.T. citizens from the oppression of a foreign ideology. A month later he unveiled his proposal for the “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants, which would exclude anyone who failed to “embrace a tolerant American society.”
It should have been clear that Trump’s concern about sexual minorities was an attempt to divide the Democratic coalition. During his first term, he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back some of their workplace protections. Last year he used a growing backlash to trans rights to propel himself back to power, where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with “L.G.B.T.” in it.
L.G.B.T. people should have been a warning to anyone that wants to attack liberal institutions about Trump’s campaign against antisemitism. Trump and his allies, after all, have mainstreamed antisemitism to an astonishing degree. Elon Musk, to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal government, is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda, thanks to his website X. (My “for you” feed recently served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of “the H man,” or Hitler.) The unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank, according to Robert Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. Last month, the head of Trump’s antisemitic task force shared a social media post of a prominent neo-Nazi who claimed that he had the power to take away Schumer’s “Jew card”. Trump ate with the rappers, as well as the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.