The Anti-DEI Movement and the Jewish Right

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.