This article is part of the forthcoming Summer 2024 issue of The Public Eye.
“Do you have the courage to truly confront and condemn the ideology driving antisemitism? Or will you offer weak, blame-shifting excuses and yet another responsibility-dodging task force?”
U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx asked this question at a now-infamous December 5, 2023 meeting of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where she serves as Chairwoman. Foxx’s committee had summoned the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania to question them about a purported crisis of antisemitism on their campuses driven, they and many commenters insisted, by widespread student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza after October 7. Yet it soon became clear that for right-wing congresspeople, the fight against antisemitism was just the beginning. The Left, Foxx complained, “pride[s itself] on diversity and inclusion,” and Palestine solidarity protests illustrated the “grave danger” of the “race based ideology of the radical Left.”[1]
One month later, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned amidst nonstop public scrutiny brought on by the hearings.[2] Right-wing activist and Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, a driving force behind the anti-CRT panic, called Gay “the symbol of the DEI regime that has conquered American academic life”[3] and insisted that “we must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America.”[4] Rufo’s victory-lap Wall Street Journal op-ed, which scarcely mentioned antisemitism, argued that Gay’s ouster marked the downfall of the “diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy” responsible for “the ideological rot within academic institutions.”[5]
For at least two decades, defenders of Israel’s unjust policies have sought to repress the growing movement for Palestinian rights, especially on college campuses, by alleging antisemitism and cracking down on free speech. Their campaigns have often dovetailed with the U.S. Right’s longstanding attacks on public and higher education. This alliance has been on full display since October 7, as the Right has blamed DEI programs and antiracist pedagogy for a supposed epidemic of campus antisemitism, cynically weaponizing their loud but selective concern to shore up White supremacy. Members of the U.S. Jewish Right have joined this authoritarian coalition of White Christian nationalists and anti-democracy ideologues, which takes advantage of tensions and contradictions involving antisemitism and American Jews’ relationship to Whiteness. By stoking fears of antisemitism and mobilizing racial resentment, the Right seeks to draw pro-Israel American Jews into its ranks, delegitimize racial justice movements, divide progressive coalitions, and neutralize its opposition as it moves closer to power.
Today’s authoritarian Right articulates a vision of national belonging shaped around the normative contours of White Christian America. But as the Jewish Right’s participation in the anti-DEI movement shows, this vision’s boundaries can be made porous and flexible, allowing the Right to strategically conscript some members of minoritized groups into its authoritarian coalition. As we navigate profound challenges to our rights and the future of a multiracial democracy that we can’t take for granted, it’s essential for progressives to understand these divide-and-conquer strategies to effectively counter them.
From CRT to DEI: A Right-Wing Backlash
The Right’s attacks on DEI have been building for some time. The George Floyd uprising in summer 2020 led millions across the U.S. to interrogate the White supremacist underpinnings of policing, prisons, and other social structures, and to issue antiracist demands across workplaces, universities, and other institutions.
The U.S. Right didn’t take long to mobilize a backlash, focusing White grievance upon the specter of “Critical Race Theory.” Operatives like Christopher Rufo crafted the narrative,[6] while an ecosystem of think tanks, academics, politicians, media and organizing outfits moved messaging and pushed policy.[7] Soon, conservative legislatures set about banning “CRT” from classrooms, libraries, and work settings.[8] Other targets soon emerged for the MAGA Right, with buzzwords like “intersectionality,” “wokeness,” “critical social justice,” and “Cultural Marxism” congealing into a catch-all conservative bogeyman responsible for Western civilizational decline.[9]
The anti-CRT crusade soon settled on public schools and higher education as focal targets, building on efforts to defund public education. Anti-LGBTQ invectives against “groomers” and “gender ideology,” outrage over COVID-19 school closures, and other culture war talking points were also added to the mix. The Right has used such campaigns to channel grievance into policy, entrenching authoritarianism and shoring up White supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy amidst challenges to these systems. “I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy,” Rufo explained to Politico in January 2024. “This is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful.”[10]
Whatever the target, core to the Right’s strategy is the argument that American culture and its institutions have been captured by a radical, identitarian ideology that sorts individuals into a binary of oppressor and oppressed that demotes White people, Christians and Jews, men, and cis and straight people. In embodying this ideology, the argument goes, DEI “demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual…[and] seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional,” as self-described “anti-woke liberal” pundit Bari Weiss put it in November, replacing “colorblindness with race-obsession.”[11]
“Whatever term you use” to describe the new ideology, wrote Weiss, “what’s clear is that it has gained power in a conceptual instrument called ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’”
The strategic addition of DEI into the Right’s culture-war rotation has lent concrete content to a nebulous abstraction. Whereas “intersectionality” seemed an intangible concept, millions of Americans were intimately familiar with the DEI programs launched to combat bias and inequity in their workplaces. As DEI-related job openings grew rapidly across sectors in the months and years following the George Floyd uprising, right-wing legislators moved to counter the trend. Since 2023, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, 85 bills have been introduced in 28 states and in Congress to ban or restrict DEI initiatives, and 14 have become law.[12] As a result of these laws and political pressure, nearly 190 colleges in 25 states have made changes to their DEI initiatives.[13] And it’s part of a broader effort designed to stifle vital discussions of race, gender, and sexuality in public education.[14]
The Right’s polemics thus target the very presence of people of color in the workforce and in society, while far-right figures inveigh against the Civil Rights Act and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is clear that the goal, ultimately, is to “repeal the 20th century”, as libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, an early influence on the Alt Right, put it in 1992 and as initiatives like Project 2025 seek to actualize today.[15]
And where MAGA went, the American Jewish Right followed, translating broader culture-war campaigns into a specific idiom aimed at its base. Over the last few years, Jewish and non-Jewish conservatives have developed and circulated a new anti-DEI talking point that would gain significant traction after October 7: DEI, they claimed, was antisemitic.
The Jewish Right Takes On DEI
“The age of Jewish liberalism is ending,” declared Eric Cohen, executive director of the Tikvah Fund, a conservative American Jewish foundation, at the opening remarks of Tikvah’s June 2022 Jewish Leadership Conference in New York.[16] At the conference, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and a who’s-who of Jewish Right leaders railed against “woke Neo-Marxism” and “gender ideology” in public education.[17] One year earlier, in 2021, the Maimonides Fund, another right-leaning American Jewish foundation, began publishing Sapir, a journal that tackled the subject of “Jews and social justice” in its first issue. “CRT,” wrote Dr. Pamela Paresky in the issue, “relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power — themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.”[18] That year, the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy published a series of anti-DEI reports that associated expanding DEI programs with “an increase in anti-Jewish hatred” on campus.[19]
With DEI already in the MAGA Right’s crosshairs, the mood on the Jewish Right was growing outrage. “When it comes to advocating for DEI abolition,” wrote conservative pundit Seth Mandel in the flagship neoconservative outlet Commentary, “Jewish groups should be the loudest voices in the room.”[20]
To make the argument that DEI is antisemitic, critics like Paresky claim that it’s guided by an oppressor-oppressed paradigm that perniciously scapegoats Jews as a privileged hyper-White caste in America, a rapacious colonialist cabal in Israel, and monolithic oppressors in either case. The antisemitism of DEI, in their worldview, flows downstream from its anti-Whiteness—“white privilege is bad, and Jewish privilege is even worse,” as one op-ed summarized the caricature.[21] In the DEI schema, they insist, Jews are not a legible minority and antisemitism is invisibilized or rendered unworthy of solidarity. Even worse, as Paresky’s article suggests, antiracist initiatives like DEI are structurally antisemitic. In this telling, hyperbolic conspiracy theories of Jewish power, not material injustice, are what motivate criticism of a White Jew’s microaggression, or of an Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
While a cynical misrepresentation, this narrative effectively mobilizes grievance because it hits on a grain of truth: DEI initiatives, and progressive movements more broadly, do sometimes rely on inadequate schemas to understand antisemitism. In our historical moment, antisemitism in the U.S. doesn’t manifest in the kind of structural income, housing, education and other disparities that undergird more widely understood systems of oppression like anti-Blackness. And while many bigoted ideologies purport to “punch down” at their targets, antisemitism claims to “punch up” at a nefarious cabal occupying the hidden heights of power. While such conspiracy theories are core to the authoritarian Right, they can also be found in some discussions of power on the Left.
Even so, anti-DEI polemics rely on shallow misunderstandings of Jewish positionality to reinforce the structural White supremacy DEI is meant to interrogate. Threading the needle requires unpacking U.S. Jews’ complex and evolving relationships to structural White supremacy.
Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and White Supremacy
As a multiracial religious and cultural minority, Jews have had diverse histories with White supremacy in the U.S. In the early years of settler-colonization, European Jews were generally considered part of the dominant caste eligible for slave ownership alongside, though not fully equal to, European Christians. The 1705 Virginia Slave Codes, for example, forbade Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian “infidels” from employing White Christians as servants—marking Christian supremacy vis-a-vis other groups—but not from owning enslaved Africans.[22]
Over the centuries, Jewish communities faced varying levels of antisemitic discrimination, exclusion, Othering, and violence, as de jure religious pluralism sat in uneasy tension alongside the Christian majority’s de facto strictures. At the same time, in a polity structured by anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous genocide, it was generally clear where light-skinned Jews stood on these foundational color lines.[23]
Modern antisemitism, which developed as one part of White supremacist, biological racism in late-19th-century Europe, demonized Jewish people as a foreign, unassimilable race. When fascist movements animated by this ideology took state power in Nazi-occupied Europe, it resulted in genocide. In the U.S. during this period, this antisemitism influenced immigration restriction and resulted in discrimination, far-right mobilization, and violence—but it never became a core, structuring racial logic of state power, as it did in fascist Europe and as anti-Blackness continues to be in the U.S.
In the post-World War II U.S., light-skinned Jews were among the “White ethnics” who benefited from laws that reinscribed and fortified the racial hierarchies of White supremacy. Returning Jewish and Italian war veterans, for example, received housing and education loans through programs like the GI Bill that were simultaneously denied to Black families, fortifying systemic inequities that deepened in the coming decades.[24]
Antisemitism persists in contemporary U.S. society, especially on the Right, where it is driven by White Christian nationalism, conspiracism, and other factors. At the same time, the majority of U.S. Jews are White. “White Jews may not live at the center of the tent of whiteness, but they are still white,” as Black Jewish writer and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein put it in 2019. “When white Jews refuse to acknowledge that they benefit from and participate in white supremacy, they are wasting time that could otherwise be spent upending that white supremacy.”[25]Meanwhile, at least 12 to 15 percent of American Jews are Jews of Color of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, according to a 2019 study. [26]
Anti-DEI campaigns forego grappling with this complex positionality, often by redeploying the rigid binary thinking they claim to reject. For example, in one oft-cited 2021 civil rights complaint against a DEI department at Stanford University, a Jewish staff member resented being asked to join a White affinity group because “as a Jewish person, she does not feel an affinity with white identity,” as described in the complaint.[27]
But Whiteness is neither a feeling of affinity, as the complainant claims, nor a biological essence, as White nationalists insist.[28] “White supremacy” describes a system of laws, policies and social relations that enshrine and reproduce racialized inequality as a social fact. White U.S. Jews benefit from this system as a material power relation structuring the world in which they live, irrespective of personal identity or affinity, even as they contend with antisemitism. At their best, DEI initiatives can use intersectional frameworks to help unpack these and other complex relationships between antisemitism and White supremacy.
The Right’s goal with these attacks, however, is not to deepen understanding but to weaponize antisemitism accusations in service of defending White supremacy. And for these accusations to stick, they needed to incorporate another well-worn culture war target: the movement for justice in Palestine.
The Turn to “Fighting Antisemitism”
Since Israel began its genocidal assault on Gaza, millions have taken to the streets and campus quads in protests in the U.S. and around the world, in a vibrant grassroots upsurge that has reinvigorated the anti-war movement and helped define a generation of progressive activism. Terrified by this movement, the bipartisan pro-Israel political and media establishment leapt into overdrive. By smearing protesters with hyperbolized accusations of antisemitism,[29] they created a climate of neo-McCarthyist repression on college campuses and beyond, with activists fired from jobs and doxxed, justice groups threatened with terrorism investigations and loss of nonprofit status, and students facing police violence on campus.[30]
Early on, the Far Right saw an opportunity to go on the offense. “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind,” tweeted Rufo, the anti-CRT ideologue, on October 13. “Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.”[31] Rufo advocated popularizing an Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian, and racist framing of campus protesters and Leftists as fanatical extremists and civilizational enemies.
A bevy of right-wing legislators, organizations, and movement leaders have since answered Rufo’s call to “attack, delegitimize, and discredit” higher education and the Left by blaming universities’ DEI programs for rampant antisemitism.[32] Jewish Right leaders have played a notable role within this coalition.[33] Woke Antisemitism author David Bernstein called on the “Oct. 8 Jew[s],”[34] the “newly minted parent activists,” to take “hard hitting action that protects their kids” from “coercive DEI” on campus. Maimonides Fund president and Sapir publisher, Mark Charendoff similarly called on Jewish educators, philanthropists, and activists to take advantage of the “once-in-a-century opportunity to change the face of American higher education” by mounting strategic takeovers of select small colleges to dismantle DEI and reshape educational curricula, mirroring Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2023 takeover of the New College of Florida.[35]
By equating DEI with antisemitism, the Right employs the same approach used to neutralize criticisms of the Israeli state. Israel’s defenders first developed the narrative strategy of equating Palestinian rights demands with antisemitism in the 1970s, and it gained momentum in the 21st century to counter the rapid rise of the BDS movement.[36] As calls for divestment from corporations complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses resounded in university, faith, and civil society settings across the Global North, Israel’s defenders scrambled to reframe the narrative—and realized they could effectively derail the conversation by recasting calls to dismantle structural oppression in Israel/Palestine as antisemitism.[37]
Like the anti-DEI crusade, the pro-Israel movement’s relentless pressure campaigns are designed to restrict speech. They generate a chilling effect across campuses and civil society, leaving many afraid to voice support of Palestinian rights. These backlash campaigns disproportionately target Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Black leaders and movements, underscoring the racism fueling right-wing repression.
The twin claims that antiracist activism makes White people inherently unsafe, or that Palestine solidarity activism makes Jews inherently unsafe, function as parallel forms of fragility, weaponizing rhetorical victimhood to squelch efforts to address material injustice. Recognizing this, the Right brought these rhetorical tactics together well before October 7.
Summer 2021 saw widespread protests against an Israeli assault on Gaza roil U.S. campuses and city streets. In December of that year, the Heritage Foundation released a questionable[38] report, The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities, which highlighted Israel-critical social media posts from DEI staff at several universities to argue that DEI departments “often contribute to hostile conditions for Jewish students.”[39] In an accompanying interview, report author Jay Greene revealed Heritage’s deeper agenda. “The most important policy solution,” he stated, “is we have to starve the beast…we need to begin to really scale back the extent of public subsidy of higher education.”[40]
Anti-BDS groups began wading in the waters with a dual-pronged strategy. The 2022 campus report card published by StopAntisemitism, an anti-BDS watchdog, mentioned DEI over three dozen times as a driver of campus antisemitism.[41] StandWithUs, another anti-BDS group, sent a letter to university administrators that year pressuring university administrators to incorporate the repressive IHRA definition of antisemitism into their DEI programming.[42] Meanwhile, the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a civil rights complaint accusing Stanford’s DEI department of antisemitism. In 2023, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of the California-based anti-BDS group AMCHA Initiative, published a piece in Sapir blaming the “ideological leanings of most DEI programs” for “the blindness of DEI programs to Jewish students and antisemitism.”[43]
The Right won a major victory against antiracist education policy in June 2023, when the Supreme Court issued a decision that ended affirmative action in university admission policies.[44] But before this, when MAGA culture warriors came up short in the 2022 midterms, some wondered if the anti-woke crusade was running out of steam.[45]
In the wake of October 7, an emergent moral panic against “campus antisemitism” breathed new wind into DEI critics’ sails. “One of those things we’ve struggled with, those of us who want to reform higher education, is convincing people that there’s a problem,” said Greene, the Heritage report’s author, to the New York Times in December 2023. “Historically, they look around and say, ‘Huh, this seems fine.’ Everything they’re seeing right now is that things are not fine.”[46]
Rising Antisemitism and the Anti-Democratic Right
Together, the intertwined moral panics against DEI and “campus antisemitism” stand to further the Right’s anti-democratic agenda at a time of unprecedented authoritarian threat. The anti-DEI crusade is one more front in the MAGA movement’s ongoing war to constrict its circle of belonging around the contours of a cis, straight, White Christian America. By aligning that crusade with anti-antisemitism, the Jewish Right is anxious to secure its own spot within that circle of belonging. As they lament the “unfair weight– the weight of Western civilization…upon so few Jewish shoulders,”[47] as Tikvah leaders Eric Cohen and Elliot Abrams put it in March, they willingly lend their kosher stamp of approval to a sweeping counter-revolution against the very system of pluralism, church-state separation, and formal equality under the law that has made it possible for American Jews, and all minoritized groups, to at least imagine the possibility of full safety and thriving in the U.S.
As right-wing Jews help the MAGA Right weaponize Jewish pain and fear against Black and Brown people and drive a wedge between American Jews and potential allies, they secure fairweather friends in return. Antisemitism has become increasingly mainstream throughout the MAGA movement, with White Christian nationalists endorsing open or coded tropes of deicide, blood libel, and “great replacement” that could not be uttered in “respectable” conservative discourse even a few years ago. Unsurprisingly, right-wing antisemites like Elon Musk have used this alliance with the Jewish Right to launder their reputations. Weeks after he was criticized for boosting an X post that accused Jews of fomenting “dialectical hatred against whites,”[48] Musk called DEI “fundamentally antisemitic” in an interview with Ben Shapiro shortly after touring Auschwitz in January 2024.[49]
“Do you have the courage to truly confront and condemn the ideology driving antisemitism?” Representative Foxx’s charge against the university presidents at the December House meeting should in fact be levied instead against the Right, the leadership of the American Jewish establishment, and many liberals today. To truly uproot antisemitism, we must dismantle the structural foundations of White Christian supremacy in the U.S. that allow antisemitism and all other forms of oppression to flourish. Those who join the authoritarian Right in attacking such efforts are dangerously mistaken, and they are dragging the Jewish community—and the country—off a cliff.
Endnotes
[1] CQ Roll Call Staff, “Transcript: What Harvard, MIT and Penn presidents said at antisemitism hearing,” Roll Call, December 13, 2023, https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-and-penn-pr….
[2] Emma H. Haidar and Cam E. Kettles, “Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Shortest Tenure in University History,” The Harvard Crimson, January 3, 2024, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/.
[3] “Claudine Gay Was The Symbol Of The DEI Regime: Chris Rufo,” The Mark Levin Show, video, 0:30-0:34, January 8, 2024, https://www.marklevinshow.com/2024/01/08/claudine-gay-was-the-symbol-of….
[4] Christopher Rufo (@realChrisRufo), “Today, we celebrate victory. Tomorrow, we get back to the fight. We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America,” Twitter, January 2, 2024, https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1742269212750676357?lang=en.
[5] Christopher Rufo, “How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out,” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2024, https://archive.ph/qxnYi.
[6] Fabiola Cineas, “The culture war came for Claudine Gay — and isn’t done yet,” Vox, January 5, 2024, https://www.vox.com/24025151/claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-conservat….
[7] Key actors in this ecosystem include the Claremont Institute, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, author Scott Yenor, and Moms for Liberty. See Hialy Gutierrez, “Alarming New Report Shows Attacks on Public Education Are Coordinated by Right-Wing Think Tanks,” Religion Dispatches, May 28, 2024, https://religiondispatches.org/alarming-new-report-shows-attacks-on-public-education-are-coordinated-by-right-wing-think-tanks/; Nicholas Confessore, “‘America Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti-D.E.I. Crusade,” The New York Times, January 20, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/20/us/dei-woke-claremont-institute.html.
[8] Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons, “Why are states banning critical race theory?”, The Brookings Institution, November 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-states-banning-critical-race….
[9] Zeeshan Aleem, “How the idea of ‘wokeness’ was bludgeoned beyond recognition,” MSNBC, December 31, 2023, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/woke-trump-2023-identity-po….
[10] Ian Ward, “We Sat Down With the Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster,” Politico, January 3, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-clau….
[11] Bari Weiss, “End DEI,” Tablet, November 3, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-dei-bari-weiss-jews.
[12] Chronicle Staff, “DEI Legislation Tracker,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts.
[13] Erin Gretzinger and Maggie Hicks, “Tracking Higher Ed’s Dismantling of DEI,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/tracking-higher-eds-dismantling-of-dei.
[14] PEN America has tracked nearly 400 state-level bills introduced since June 2021 that it calls “educational gag orders.” Edith Olmsted, “Republicans Have Pushed Nearly 400 “Educational Intimidation” Bills Since 2021,” The New Republic, August 23, 2023, https://newrepublic.com/post/175150/republicans-400-educational-intimid….
[15] Murray Rothbard, “A Strategy for the Right,” Mises Daily, March 9, 2010, https://mises.org/mises-daily/strategy-right.
[16] Jacob Henry, “‘Wokeness’ is Enemy No. 1 at a conservative Jewish conference,” New York Jewish Week, June 14, 2022, https://www.jta.org/2022/06/14/ny/wokeness-is-enemy-no-1-at-a-conservat….
[17] Karen Lehrman Bloch, “Ideas Matter: How Tikvah is Aiming to Educate the Next Generation of Jewish Leaders,” Jewish Journal, June 23, 2022, https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/349535/ideas-matter-how-tikvah-is….
[18] Pamela Paresky, “Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew,” Sapir, Volume 1, Spring 2021, https://sapirjournal.org/social-justice/2021/05/critical-race-theory-an….
[19] Jay Greene and James Paul, “Inclusion Delusion: The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities,” The Heritage Foundation, December 8, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/education/report/inclusion-delusion-the-antise….
[20] Seth Mandel, “Campus Diversity Is Campus Jew-Hatred,” Commentary, June 2023, https://www.commentary.org/articles/seth-mandel/campus-diversity-jew-ha….
[21] Paul Miller, “Woke Racism: ‘Jewish Privilege,’” Newsweek, July 21, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/woke-racism-jewish-privilege-opinion-1518955.
[22] Mark Tseng-Putterman, “More Than a Feeling: Jews and Whiteness in Trump’s America,” Unruly, February 23, 2017, http://jocsm.org/more-than-a-feeling-jews-and-whiteness-in-trumps-ameri….
[23] Some Jews owned African slaves, for example, and Judah Benjamin infamously served as Secretary of State in the Confederacy. Ofer Aderet, “The Uncomfortable Truths of Jewish Life in the U.S. South,” Haaretz, June 22, 2021, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2021-06-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/slave-owners-confederates-and-wrestlers-jews-of-the-u-s-south-in-the-showcase/0000017f-da74-dea8-a77f-de766f7c0000; Ari Feldman, “Why Are There No Statues Of Jewish Confederate Judah Benjamin To Tear Down?,” The Forward, August 20, 2017, https://forward.com/news/380453/why-are-there-no-statues-of-jewish-conf….
[24] Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 42.
[25] Chanda Prescod-Weinstein quoted in Bentley Addison, “Roundtable | White Jews: Here Is What Black Jews Need from You in 2019,” Forward, December 28, 2018, https://forward.com/opinion/416737/roundtable-white-jews-here-is-what-b….
[26] Ari Kelman et al., Counting Inconsistencies: An Analysis of American Jewish Population Studies, with a Focus on Jews of Color (Stanford: Jews of Color Field Building Initiative, 2019).The Jews of Color Initiative defines the term “Jews of Color” as “an imperfect, but useful umbrella term…to describe Jews from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, whether biracial, adopted, Jews by choice, or part of other national or geographic populations (or a combination of these).” Jews of Color Initiative, “Navigating Nuance: Using the Term ‘Jews of Color,’” June 2022, https://jewsofcolorinitiative.org/newsletter/navigating-nuance-using-the-term-jews-of-color/.
[27] Gabe Stutman, “Stanford therapists allege ‘hostile climate’ for Jews in the workplace,” Jewish News of Northern California, June 15, 2021, https://jweekly.com/2021/06/15/stanford-therapists-allege-hostile-clima…. As the staffer explained, “My people were murdered because we were seen as contaminants to the white race…. Being told to identify with the oppressor felt like a betrayal to my family.” The Stanford DEI department reportedly did not support Jewish staffers’ desire to form a Jewish affinity group, likely contributing to staffers’ experience of erasure. Sarina Deb, “CAPS counselors accuse University of antisemitic practices,” The Stanford Daily, June 17, 2021, https://stanforddaily.com/2021/06/17/caps-counselors-accuse-university-….
[28] The White nationalist movement views Jews as a biologically unassimilable, non-White race. See Eric Ward, “Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism,” Political Research Associates, June 29, 2017, https://politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemit….
[29] Ben Lorber, “Toward a Sober Assessment of Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish Currents, November 28, 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/toward-a-sober-assessment-of-campus-antisemi….
[30] On activists fired, see Marin Cogan, “The Israel-Hamas war is tearing American cultural institutions apart,” Vox, December 6, 2023, https://www.vox.com/culture/23983966/israel-hamas-war-museums-artists-protests; on justice groups threatened with terrorism investigations, see Alex Kane, “The Push to “Deactivate” Students for Justice in Palestine,” Jewish Currents, November 21, 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-push-to-deactivate-students-for-justice-in-palestine-sjp; on loss of nonprofit status, see Kate Aronoff, “This Bipartisan Bill Could Give Trump Huge Power Against His Enemies,” The New Republic, April 30, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/article/181087/treasury-pipelines-gaza-non-profit-terrorism; on police violence, see Lois Beckett, “‘They’re sending a message’: harsh police tactics questioned amid US campus protest crackdowns,” The Guardian, May 4, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/04/police-tactics-….
[31] Christopher Rufo (@realChrisRufo), “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic “decolonization” in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.,” Twitter, October 13, 2023, https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1712938775834185891.
[32] For example, GOP legislators have held multiple Congressional hearings connecting campus antisemitism and the fight against DEI; and conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and America First Policy Institute, as well as Christian nationalist groups like Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America have amplified the narrative. See Katherine Knott, “House Republicans Blame DEI Programs for Rise in Campus Antisemitism,” Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/2023/11/15/house-republicans-blame-dei-programs-campus-antisemitism; Jonathan Pidluzny and Matthew Lobel, “What University Presidents Should Be Able to Tell Congress About Their Response to Campus Antisemitism,” America First Policy Institute, December 15, 2023, https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/what-university-presidents-should-be-able-to-tell-congress-about-their-response-to-campus-antisemitism.
[33] They have included MAGA pundits like Ben Shapiro and Josh Hammer; right-wing magazines like Tablet (funded by Tikvah Fund), Jewish News Syndicate and the Jewish Journal; National Conservatism leader Yoram Hazony; representatives of the far-right Orthodox-led Coalition for Jewish Values; and “‘anti-woke’ liberal” pundits like Batya Ungar-Sargon and Bari Weiss, among many others. See Jonathan S. Tobin, “Why aren’t Jewish groups fighting DEI-based antisemitism?,” Jewish News Syndicate, December 22, 2023, https://www.jns.org/why-arent-jewish-groups-fighting-dei-based-antisemitism/; Yoram Hazony, “Should Universities Protect Campus Anti-Semites?,” Public Discourse, February 11, 2024, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/02/92656/.
[34] David Bernstein, “The growing disconnect between American Jews and mainstream Jewish organizations,” eJewish Philanthropy, April 9, 2024, https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/the-growing-disconnect-between-american-jews-and-mainstream-jewish-organizations/. Bernstein borrowed the phrase “October 8 Jews” from The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. Bret Stephens, “For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8,” The New York Times, November 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/opinion/us-jewish-israel-sept-11.html.
[35] Mark Charendoff, “Goodbye, Columbia,” eJewish Philanthropy, January 8, 2024, https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/goodbye-columbia/.
[36] This strategy was first popularized with the 1974 publication of The New Anti-Semitism by Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League. See Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz, “Anatomy of a Moral Panic,” Jewish Currents, May 2, 2024, https://jewishcurrents.org/anatomy-of-a-moral-panic.
[37] See Shane Burley, “Interrogating the “New Antisemitism,” Jewish Currents, September 15, 2022, https://jewishcurrents.org/interrogating-the-new-antisemitism; Stifling Dissent: How Israel’s Defenders Use False Charges of Anti-Semitism to Limit the Debate Over Israel on Campus (Oakland: Jewish Voice for Peace, 2015).
[38] Steven Lubet, “What the Heritage Foundation gets wrong about DEI and antisemitism,” The Forward, January 6, 2022, https://forward.com/opinion/480444/what-the-heritage-foundation-gets-wr…
[39] Jay Greene and James Paul, “Inclusion Delusion.”
[40] Jay Greene interviewed by Michelle Cordero, “New Study: Diversity Officers at U.S. Colleges are Anti-Israel,” The Heritage Foundation, December 19, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/education/heritage-explains/new-study-diversit….
[41] Antisemitism on US College and University Campuses: 2022 Report Card (StopAntisemitism), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cc20f51ca525b73bdd50e3a/t/6329e….
[42] StandWithUs, “Attention University Administrators,” August 5, 2022, https://www.standwithus.com/post/attention-university-administrators.
[43] Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Why DEI Programs Can’t Address Campus Antisemitism,” Sapir, Volume 10, Spring 2023, https://sapirjournal.org/antisemitism/2023/08/why-dei-programs-cant-add….
[44] Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “He Worked for Years to Overturn Affirmative Action and Finally Won. He’s Not Done,” The New York Times, July 8, 2023, https://archive.ph/WnLZ0#selection-583.0-583.82.
[45] Trip Gabriel and Nicholas Nehamas, “Where’s ‘Woke’? Republicans Test a Different Education Message,” The New York Times, August 28, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/us/politics/republican-education-wok….
[46] Nicholas Confessore, “As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment,” The New York Times, December 10, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/us/universities-antisemitism-conserv….
[47] Eric Cohen and Elliot Abrams, “A classical Jewish education to rekindle the American spirit,” The Times of Israel, March 12, 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-classical-jewish-education-to-rekindle-….
[48] David Goldman, “Elon Musk agrees with antisemitic X post that claims Jews ‘push hatred’ against White people,” CNN, November 17, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/15/media/elon-musk-antisemitism-white-peopl….
[49] Lauren Sforza, “Elon Musk: Diversity-oriented hiring policies are ‘fundamentally antisemitic,’” The Hill, January 22, 2024, https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4422893-elon-musk-diversity-orien….