On January 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” which states, “It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
The Department of Education also recently opened an investigation into antisemitism at five United States universities, including Northwestern. In theory, this is a good thing: antisemitism is a problem.
However, I believe the current administration is not acting in good faith towards the Jewish-American community, and is instead weaponizing accusations of antisemitism in a broader fight against higher education and intellectualism in general.
I am a Jewish student at NU, and the actions the federal government is taking to fight antisemitism do not represent me. I am actively involved in the NU Jewish community and have grown up in a variety of vibrant, tightly knit Jewish environments.
I am deeply concerned about the rise of antisemitism in the U.S., especially on college campuses. I understand that this executive order, as well as other actions aimed at preventing antisemitism, are responses to real concerns that many Jewish students have voiced.
While I wasn’t a college student last year, I spent months listening to friends at a variety of universities telling me about antisemitic incidents they experienced in their dorms, classes and quads. However, I don’t believe that this order has the best interests of Jews at heart.
This government claims to speak for me, my friends and my peers around the country, but the assertion that they care about the well-being of Jewish college students is questionable when I think about the long history of antisemitic comments and associations said by some of the members of the current administration.
In 2017, Trump called the protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia “very fine people” – the same people who chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”
Or, perhaps most timely, just a few weeks ago, Elon Musk made a gesture that was accused of resembling a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration — and then, when confronted with outrage, made a series of distasteful Holocaust jokes on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. He never apologized.
Many of Trump’s Cabinet appointees have ties to Christian nationalist groups, most notably U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — who has been described as a white nationalist and wrote a book describing his opposition to globalism, Marxism and progressivism, and describes the fight as the “American Crusade.”
Antisemitism often spreads in dog whistles and implications, especially references to international “globalist” conspiracies. Additionally, the right wing’s reframing of the Crusades as a metaphor for their “righteous war” against leftism conveniently ignores the widespread persecution and massacres of Jewish communities by Crusaders for centuries; references to the Crusades serve as dog whistles themselves. Antisemitic rhetoric used by the far right today has deep roots stretching back for hundreds of years.
Instead of protecting Jewish students, I believe that the White House is using Jewish students as a pawn in a broader fight against higher education and institutions promoting critical thinking as a whole. This opposition to intellectualism can also be seen in the President’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education, which would make a quality education less accessible for ordinary Americans in a myriad of ways, including by making it hard, if not impossible, to get a federal college loan.
This administration aims to not only end the ability of the American middle class to send their children to college with the help of federal loans, but also goes out of way to target universities it describes as “leftist [and] anti-American” by suppressing free speech through the guise of fighting antisemitism.
The blatant hypocrisy of the Trump administration in regards to their attitude towards antisemitism is clear: left-wing antisemitism is an urgent, sweeping problem that can only be solved through the deportation of protesting international students and the suppression of free dialogue on campus, but right-wing antisemitism isn’t a problem at all, or even a topic of conversation. The call is coming from inside the house.
Antisemitism is a problem on all sides of the political aisle; this executive order only confronts the antisemitism coming from the people that the current administration disagrees with and seeks to silence. I am particularly worried about the language in the order’s accompanying factsheet targeting “leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”
Who defines what these are? I’m an adult; I don’t want the president of the U.S. to sign executive orders to keep people from saying things that might make me uncomfortable, especially when those laws are only continuations of a worrying pattern of the censorship of only “leftist” ideas. I don’t want to be an excuse to suppress left-wing views, even those with which I disagree. Authoritarian governments that silence ideas they don’t like always end up hurting Jewish people; we see this everywhere in the history of fascism. I don’t know how to solve the problem of antisemitism on college campuses, but I’m sure that this executive order has an ulterior motive unrelated to protecting Jewish students. This executive order does not benefit me, and it will not ultimately benefit the American Jewish community.
Gabi Bernstein is a Weinberg freshman. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to th is op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
