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      Trump reportedly threatening to freeze $510m in grants from Brown University

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      The Trump administration is taking aim at Brown University with threats to freeze $510m in grants, widening its promise to withhold federal funding from schools it accuses of allowing antisemitism on campus, according to multiple media outlets including Reuters and the New York Times.University officials said they had not yet been formally notified, but the school was among dozens warned last month that enforcement actions could be coming as the administration seeks to crack down on academic institutions .As at many universities across the US, students at the Rhode Island Ivy League school protested Israel’s attacks against Palestinians last autumn, raising a cluster of tents on the grassy quad at the heart of campus. But, unlike at many of its sister schools, Brown administrators chose to negotiate rather than clear the demonstrations forcefully.Trump has called the protesters antisemitic, labeling them sympathetic to Hamas militants and foreign policy threats, and has threatened to slash federal funds universities depend on to fuel important research.In an email to campus leaders on Thursday shared by a Brown University spokesperson, the school’s provost, Frank Doyle, said the university was aware of “troubling rumors emerging about federal action on Brown research grants” but added it had “no information to substantiate any of these rumors”.“We are closely monitoring notifications related to grants, but have nothing more we can share as of now,” he added.But Brown’s leaders have been bracing for backlash from the president for weeks. In a letter shared publicly on the university’s site, the president, Christina H Paxson, promised that Brown would not buckle under pressure.“The nation has witnessed what many in higher education fear may be only the first examples of unprecedented government demands placed on a private university as a condition for restoring federal funding,” she said.Paxson outlined three core values and the school’s response to protect them: following the law, defending academic freedom and freedom of expression, and a commitment to providing resources to international community members.“If Brown faced such actions directly impacting our ability to perform essential academic and operational functions,” she said, “we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms, and true to our values, we would do so with integrity and respect.”Last month, the Trump administration canceled $400m in federal funding for Columbia University, which had been the epicenter of pro-Palestinian campus protests. Princeton University said on Tuesday the US government froze several dozen research grants to the school, and $9bn in federal contracts and grants awarded to Harvard University is under review.Along with the funding freeze, there are concerns about other actions being taken by the administration to undermine academic freedoms or civil rights on campus.The administration has targeted schools over diversity, equity and inclusion programs and suspended $175m in funding to the University of Pennsylvania over transgender sports policies.Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have detained some foreign student protesters in recent weeks and are working to deport them.Rights advocates have also raised concerns about Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias during the Israel-Gaza war. The Trump administration has not announced steps in response.“These are uncertain times,” Paxson said in the letter. “We remain committed to taking the steps necessary to preserve our ability to fulfill our mission as a university dedicated to advancing knowledge and understanding in service to communities, the nation and the world.”Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Tufts student detained by Ice may not be deported without court order, judge rules

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      A Tufts University student who was detained by US immigration authorities this week, in an arrest that caused widespread outrage, cannot be deported without a court order, a US judge ordered on Friday.Rümeysa Öztürk, 30, was detained by masked, plainclothes officers as she walked in a Boston-area suburb on Tuesday, an incident that was captured on surveillance footage that has since gone viral. Öztürk, who is being threatened with deportation to Turkey, is a Fulbright scholar and doctoral student in the US with a visa.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said Öztürk’s visa was terminated, accusing her of engaging in activities in support of Hamas, but providing no evidence to substantiate that claim. Her attorneys, which include lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, have said the arrest appeared to be retaliation for an opinion piece that she and three other students co-wrote for the student newspaper last year, advocating that the university “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel”.After Öztürk’s lawyers filed an amended complaint on Friday, the US district judge Denise Casper issued a brief order stipulating that Öztürk “shall not be removed from the United States until further order of this court”. The judge also ordered the US government to respond to Öztürk’s latest claims by Tuesday evening.Öztürk has not been charged with or accused of any crime, her lawyers say.“This is a first step in getting Rümeysa released and back home to Boston so she can continue her studies. But we never should have gotten here in the first place: Rümeysa’s experience is shocking, cruel, and unconstitutional,” Mahsa Khanbabai, one of her attorneys, said in a statement on Friday evening. “Criticizing US foreign policy and human rights violations is neither illegal nor grounds for detention … The government must immediately release Rümeysa to continue her studies and rejoin her community.”The Trump administration has increasingly sought to deport students and academics who had varying degrees of involvement in pro-Palestinian campus activism last year, including permanent residents with green cards.Öztürk was on the phone with her mother and headed to an Iftar to break her Ramadan fast with friends when the officers confronted and apprehended her, the Boston Globe reported. A 32-year-old whose camera captured the arrest told the AP it “looked like a kidnapping”.Khanbabai had written emergency filings on Tuesday, which secured a court ruling that her client not be removed from Massachusetts without advance notice. Despite that order from US district judge Indira Talwani, officials with Immigration and Custom Enforcement (Ice), which is part of DHS, transferred Öztürk to Louisiana without notifying her counsel, the court or US Department of Justice lawyers, according to the ACLU.For nearly a full day after her arrest, Öztürk’s family, attorneys and friends could not locate or reach her, and when lawyers did finally speak with her, they learned Öztürk had suffered an asthma attack while being transported to Louisiana, the ACLU says.When questioned by reporters about her arrest, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, suggested the US was revoking visas from “people that are supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States”, saying international students don’t have a right to “become a social activist that tears up our university campuses”.Öztürk’s friends told the Boston Globe, however, that she was not much of an activist and not a leader in protests last year. They said Öztürk volunteered with refugee children, participated in interfaith gatherings and studied the representation of youth in media. Her brother said she had roughly 10 months left in her doctorate degree.“Grabbing someone off the streets, stripping them of their student visa, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint is an affront to all of our constitutional rights,” Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “We will not stop fighting until Ms Öztürk is free to return to her loved ones and until we know the government will not abuse immigration law to punish those who speak up for what they believe.”The Trump administration has also gone after students and academics at Columbia University, Georgetown, Cornell, Brown and other campuses.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

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      The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Columbia protester suit raises questions about free speech rights: ‘Immigration enforcement as a bludgeon’

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      In a matter of days, Yunseo Chung was sent into hiding.On 5 March, Chung – a 21-year-old student at Columbia University – attended a sit-in to protest the expulsion of several students involved in pro-Palestinian activism at the famed New York university. Four days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents showed up at her parents’ home.When they couldn’t find her there, Ice sought help from federal prosecutors and searched her dormitory – using a warrant that cited a criminal law against “harboring noncitizens”. They revoked her green card and accused her of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests.On Monday, Chung sued Donald Trump and other high-ranking administrations to stop their targeting of her and other students. And on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its efforts to arrest and deport Chung, saying “nothing in the record” indicated that Chung posed a danger to the community.“After the constant dread in the back of my mind over the past few weeks, this decision feels like a million pounds off of my chest. I feel like I could fly,” she shared in a statement to the Guardian after the ruling.Her location remains undisclosed, and Chung herself has remained shielded – for her own protection – from the public. But she has nonetheless made a powerful statement, by raising a simple question: if the administration can arbitrarily and unilaterally threaten immigrants over political views they disagree with, if it can disregard the free speech rights of lawful permanent residents – what limits, if any, remain on its power?“Officials at the highest echelons of government are attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike, including Ms. Chung’s speech,” her lawyers write in the suit.Unlike some of the other students the administration has targeted for pro-Palestinian activism, including recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who led protests on campus, and Cornell PhD student Momodou Taal, who delivered speeches at his university’s pro-Palestinian encampment, Chung’s involvement in the movement was low-profile. She didn’t play an organizing or leading role in any of the protest efforts; she didn’t speak to the media about her activism.“She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns,” her lawyers write.Chung moved to the US from South Korea when she was seven, and has lived in the country ever since. She was a valedictorian in high school; at Columbia, she had contributed to a literary magazine and an undergraduate law journal. She has maintained a 3.99 GPA and interned with a number of legal non-profits including the Innocence Project.Last spring, Chung was one of hundreds of students and other activists who set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the university campus, and hundreds of others visited the space to attend speeches, community events and protests. As the university began meting out disciplinary actions against protesters, hundreds of students and faculty also joined in a walkout in solidarity with student activists, demanding amnesty to student protesters.View image in fullscreenIn May last year, Chung and other students faced disciplinary proceedings for posting flyers on school campus – but the university ultimately found that Chung had not violated policies, according to the lawsuit.After that, Chung continued her studies, and it wasn’t until earlier this month that she came onto immigration officials’ radar.Earlier this year, Barnard College, a sister school to Columbia, announced the expulsions of several protesters – amid a renewed, nationwide crackdown on student protesters that came following pressures from the Trump administration to tamp down pro-Palestinian activism on campus.Chung attended a sit-in demonstration calling on Barnard to reverse the expulsions. Chung became trapped between a crowd of students and New York police department officers investigating a bomb threat, according to the suit. She, and others, were charged by the NYPD for “obstruction of governmental administration”.Days later, immigration officials obtained a warrant to track down and arrest Chung. In a statement on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security characterized the sit-in she attended as a “pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College”.In a press conference after a hearing on Chung’s case Tuesday, Ramzi Kassem, one of her lawyers, said that Chung “remained a resident of the Southern District of New York” and had been “keeping up with her coursework” even amid Ice’s efforts to track her down and arrest her.In a lawsuit filed Monday, Chung’s lawyers wrote that the prospect of arrest and detention has “chilled her speech” – and note that the administration’s pursuit of non-citizen students had overall dampened free expression.“Ms. Chung is now concerned about speaking up about the ongoing ordeal of Palestinians in Gaza as well as what is happening on her own campus: the targeting of her fellow students,” the suit alleges.Scores of other students could also be silenced with similar threats, the suit argues. Faculty at Columbia and universities across the US have reported that international students and green card holders have been worried about attending classes, and are reconsidering plans to visit family, study abroad or travel for research.The administration has also placed immense pressure on universities to cooperate with its crackdown on protesters. Last week, the university agreed to overhaul its protest policies and hire an internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus after the administration revoked $400m in funding for the university, which many faculty have taken as a dangerous capitulation that will endanger academic freedom.And the threat of deportation against her is a powerful one, the suit continues. If she is sent to South Korea, she would be arriving in a country she hardly knows – separated from her parents and community, and a sister who is about the start college as well.“Yunseo no longer has to fear that Ice will spirit her away to a distant prison simply because she spoke up for Palestinian human rights,” said Kassem in a statement to the Guardian. “The court’s temporary restraining order is both sensible and fair, to preserve the status quo as we litigate the serious constitutional issues at stake not just for Yunseo, but for our society as a whole.” More

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      USC enacts hiring freeze and makes cuts over Trump threats to funding

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      The University of Southern California announced an immediate hiring freeze for all staff positions, “with very few critical exceptions” in a letter to faculty and staff on Tuesday.The letter, from USC’s president, Carol Folt, and provost, Andrew Guzman, said the hiring freeze was one of nine steps to cut the school’s operating budget amid deep uncertainty about federal funding – given sweeping cuts to scientific research, the reorganization of student loans, and an education department investigation accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish students during protests over Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.“Like other major research institutions, USC relies on significant amounts of federal funding to carry out our mission,” the university administrators wrote. “In fiscal year 2024, for example, we received approximately $1.35 billion in federal funding, including roughly $650 million in student financial aid and $569 million for federally funded research. The health system also receives Medicare, Medicaid, and Medi-Cal payments – a significant portion of its revenues – and the futures of those funds are similarly uncertain.”The other measures include: permanent budget reductions for administrative units and schools, a review of procurement contracts, a review of capital projects “to determine which may be deferred or paused”, a curtailment of faculty hiring, new restriction on discretionary spending and expenses for travel and conferences, an effort to streamline operations, a halt on merit-based pay increases, and an end to extended winter recess introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic.Two weeks ago, USC was one of 60 schools notified by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights of “potential enforcement actions if they do not fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus”.The newly announced budget cuts follow a university statement in November of last year that informed staff that “rising costs require … budgetary adjustments”. In 2024, that statement said: “USC’s audited financial statement shows a deficit of $158 million.”“Over the past six years, our deficit has ranged from $586 million during legal cost repayments and COVID, to a modest positive level of $36 million in 2023,” USC administrators wrote in November.“Similar deficits are being reported at many peer institutions due to rising costs that outpace revenues across all of higher education,” they added. More

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      Why are other universities silent in condemning Trump’s attacks on Columbia? | Zephyr Teachout

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      University presidents need to be working together to speak up against Donald Trump. Across the country, higher education is facing a crisis that threatens the entire vision of independence: a direct federal government effort to destroy academic freedom by controlling ideas and acceptable areas of inquiry. University leaders should be standing in solidarity with those who have been attacked to defend academic freedom and free speech. So far, all but five have been silent.The US president has made no secret of his intent to control what is studied, thought and debated. His administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding sweeping changes, including placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department under “academic receivership” for five years, abolishing the university judicial board, and centralizing all disciplinary processes under the office of the president. Such unprecedented intervention is blatantly illegal and a wholesale attack on academic freedom and free speech. On Friday, Columbia capitulated.It is an embarrassment to Columbia, of course, but the embarrassment is not Columbia’s alone. The use of federal funding threats to control universities should be a five-alarm fire for the thousands of other universities, and yet the response from the majority of academic leadership has been silence.By my count, five university presidents have publicly condemned Trump. The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has been the first and loudest, clearly expressing the unacceptable nature of Trump’s attack. The presidents of Mount Holyoke, Delta College in Michigan, Trinity Community College in Washington DC, and Princeton have also made clear that what Trump is doing is unacceptable.The thousands of others who are keeping totally quiet know what is happening, and how serious it is; in a recent survey, 94% said Trump directly threatened academic freedom.The silence from university presidents is particularly jarring when compared with the swift and seemingly coordinated statements universities have issued on dozens of other issues – from US supreme court decisions to international conflicts to campus protests. Now that it comes to defending their core institutional values against a direct authoritarian attack, their collective voice is crickets.The reasons are understandable. If any one university speaks out, they are scared Trump would pull funding. The president of that university will have to see the place they love and the people they are responsible for gutted by a $50 or $100 or $400 million cut, either to federal grants or scholarships. What if speaking out will change nothing? Why risk the all-critical research of their science faculty, important scholarships for their students, for a statement that might lead to naught?This is the grotesque genius of his attack on Columbia, which operated like putting a dead body on a car for all to see – so long as each university president sees their job in isolation, and their possible defiance in isolation, all arrows point towards silence. He wins without even having to fight.But what if he did have to fight? It is not at all clear that Trump will pull funding. He hasn’t attacked Wesleyan, Princeton, Delta, Liberty. This isn’t an oversight: he wants the ground of the debate to be at Columbia, to be conflated with Gaza-Israel, to be complicated by questions about protests and student discipline and the nature of Ivy League education.If he takes on the Big 10 schools, or a small liberal arts community college, or a Catholic university like the one at which I teach, or any school where there is no pre-existing major conflict, he will be more cleanly revealed as an anti-speech bully. The university presidents can have litigation counsel at the ready to file for a temporary restraining order if Trump pulls funding because of disliked speech, and they will win these lawsuits. Constitutional law is on the side of protecting academic freedom and political speech.I don’t want to sugarcoat it: Trump could cause real chaos, significantly hurt programs while the legal fight is going on, and scare off other alumni donors to a school – who are themselves scared. If they spoke up alone, it’s possible it wouldn’t matter. I understand why university presidents are so trepidatious – he could truly wreck havoc on the people that they have pledged to care for.But it is precisely because of this dilemma that each leader is morally required to speak up – and to be prioritizing identifying others who will speak up as well over all else. It is an existential moment: standing by in silence as other universities get humiliated leads to all being humiliated.While it is far from assured that a single voice will lead to others, courage is courageous, and not only because of its natural infectiousness. The more universities speak up, the more obvious it will become that Trump cannot take on all of them, the weaker he will be, the more he will be revealed as an anti-dissent authoritarian. Trump does care how popular he is, and it matters for his leverage in Congress, too. He ran in part on freeing speech; the more it is clear he is imprisoning it, the worse he’ll do.This red scare will not end with an appeal to decency that is seen around the country on national television. Trump is worse than McCarthy; he is more powerful, more vengeful, and more determined to destroy institutions and bend them into subservience. But it can end with collective bravery. If they can find a way to share methodology for financial aid, they can find a way to share a rebuke to Trump.To be sure, the reputational power of universities is low, and university presidents have little faith that they have any meaningful political power. Their weak reputations came about in part because of illiberalism in the last 10 years, brought on in part by a rhetoric of student safety trumping free discourse, and in part because of the ungodly cost of tuition. The recent price-fixing lawsuits haven’t helped.That leads me to wonder whether there might be other reasons university presidents are so quiet; more mundane, human, contextual ones. They tend to be trained in thinking strategically when virtue ethics is what is called for; game theory has a way of demanding data points that no one has. Or perhaps, after making too many statements on too many topics in the 2018-2022 period, presidents may be exhausted and annoyed when they are told that speaking out is a moral imperative. They have been turning towards institutional neutrality in most policy issues, tired of being told that every crisis demands a university president voice – one last call demanding courage can feel like overload, overwrought and irrelevant.The reason this is different is because the government is attacking free speech and free inquiry itself. The current collective cowardice is self-defeating. Their refusal to stand together now only makes them more vulnerable in the future, and less credible when they say they are privately resisting. How can we trust they aren’t complying in advance, reshaping their curriculum and research dollars to avoid retribution? We can’t.If university leaders, some of the most privileged people in our society, allow themselves to be bullied and blackmailed, and refuse to coordinate with each other on courage, how do we expect any other institutions – law firms, non-profits, businesses – to stand up?

      Zephyr Teachout is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and professor of law specializing in democracy and antitrust at Fordham University More

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      The new definition of antisemitism is transforming America – and serving a Christian nationalist plan

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      View image in fullscreenIn 1919, Jacob Israël de Haan, an Orthodox Jewish queer poet and lawyer, arrived in British Mandate Palestine from the Netherlands. Despite his initial sympathies with Zionism, within a few years de Haan would become an outspoken critic of the movement. Driven by what he called a “natural feeling for justice”, he advocated for “another Jewish community in Palestine” – one that sought cooperation with the Arab-Palestinian community. His steadfast opposition to mainstream Zionism made de Haan a controversial figure, drawing the ire of Zionist leadership. On 30 June 1924, de Haan was assassinated by a member of the Zionist organization Haganah.This political assassination represented not merely the elimination of one man, but a portentous statement about which perspectives would be tolerated in the emerging political landscape. A century later, we are witnessing a similar troubling pattern. As attacks against universities and intimidation of Palestinian activists become ever more rife, those who challenge Zionist orthodoxy – whether out of political conviction, religious belief or ethical principle – face exclusion, vilification and worse. This time, the main tool is a sweeping legal redefinition of antisemitism in American law and policy.Something unprecedented – and deeply unsettling – is unfolding: under the guise of a legal redefinition of antisemitism, the basic architecture of American public life is being radically transformed. What appears, at first glance, to be a technical change in terminology has become a powerful instrument for political control, solidifying executive power to enforce a narrow, state-sanctioned definition of Judaism. In the name of combating antisemitism, this effort threatens to reshape American public life – and with it, the pillars of American liberalism. But despite what some will have you believe, two things are clear: first, this campaign does not protect Jews – it endangers them; and second, this redefinition plays into a larger Christian nationalist project.The clash over the definition of antisemitismFollowing the horrendous Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, and the subsequent war and utter destruction of Gaza, two sharply contrasting positions have emerged. On the one hand, many Jewish organizations and advocates have seen the emerging pro-Palestinian protest movement as a manifestation of antisemitism, a classic example of the over-scrutinization of Israel, and the denial of Israel’s right to defend itself.On the other hand, many critics of Israel and of Zionism argue against this conflation and in favor of their right to support the Palestinian struggle. For them, labeling anti-Israel positions as antisemitic is a way to silence dissenting opinions and to prevent an honest discussion of Israel’s actions in Gaza.Even before this clash entered the mainstream in the last year and a half, American decision-makers and institutions had already taken a clear side, framing anti-Israel positions as antisemitic. A landmark moment in the emergence of this new understanding of antisemitism is no doubt the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has rapidly become a legal benchmark for defining antisemitism in the US and has a growing presence in both state and federal law.
      The redefinition of antisemitism isn’t simply a policy shift – it’s part of a deeper transformation of American democracy
      While the core definition makes no explicit mention of Israel, the examples of purported antisemitism that IHRA provides tell a different story. Among the illustrative cases, it notes that antisemitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”. Other examples include “claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor”, and “[d]rawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.Back in his first term, Donald Trump issued a 2019 executive order directing federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in federally funded programs, cementing this problematic standard. It has been formally adopted in multiple federal and state statutes, in which it is used to equate criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism. These laws have been applied in a range of legal and policy contexts – restricting free speech, shaping civil rights protections and even influencing the classification of hate crimes in state criminal codes.Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” marks a dangerous escalation in this trend. The order directs multiple federal agencies to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence”.Just days after the order, the administration slashed $400m in federal research funding from Columbia University over what it claimed was a systemic tolerance of antisemitic activity and demanded changes to the school’s policies – a move widely seen as retaliation for pro-Palestinian campus activism, to which Columbia has consented in an extraordinary surrender of its academic freedom. Similar threats have followed against numerous additional universities. In a recent chilling development, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and student organizer whom the government is now seeking to deport, with more arrests promised. (Indeed, they have begun.) The redefinition of antisemitism isn’t simply a policy shift – it’s part of a deeper transformation of American democracy.We have never been secularNo doubt, proponents of the IHRA definition raise an important point. To understand why, we need to recognize something distinctive about Jewish identity: it has always been deeply political. Unlike modern Christianity, which developed alongside a strong liberal separation of church and state, Judaism has never drawn such a sharp line. Jewish identity has long resisted the tidy categories that liberal theory prefers – religious or secular, ethnic or political, private or public. From biblical times through the diaspora and into modernity, Jewish communities understood religious life not just as a set of spiritual beliefs but as the foundation of a political community. Jewish religious leadership traditionally held legal and political authority – issuing binding rulings on property, taxation, even criminal law. This isn’t a historical anomaly – it’s a defining feature of Jewish tradition. Zionism, despite the secular aspirations of many of its founders, built on this legacy by channeling the political dimension of Jewish identity into the framework of a modern nation-state.View image in fullscreenAccordingly, for many Jews, Israel is a crucial element of their Jewish identity. As Noah Feldman writes in To Be a Jew Today, for many American Jews, “Israel can function as the chosen focal point of their Jewish identity and connection. Caring about and supporting Israel can be constitutive of what makes them actively Jewish.” An attack on that element, a denial of its legitimacy, feels to many like an attack on who they are as Jews.But this does not necessarily cast anti-Israel opinions as antisemitic. When we criticize something important to someone’s identity, it doesn’t automatically mean we’re attacking their identity itself. When political positions become enshrined as essential components of personhood, substantive disagreements risk being recast as attacks on identity. The result, as the scholar Richard Ford once put it, is the potential to “camouflage” ideological conflict as discrimination.Take male circumcision – a ritual at the heart of Jewish tradition practiced by most Jewish families worldwide. When medical experts or rights advocates question circumcision based on concerns about bodily autonomy or health risks, most people understand they aren’t being antisemitic. No matter where they stand on circumcision, they recognize critics may be raising ethical questions that exist independently of Jewish identity. This same logic must apply to Israel. Criticizing Israeli policies may, for instance, reflect genuine concerns about human rights rather than prejudice against Jews, even as the criticism is directed at a defining feature of their Jewishness.The labeling of criticism against Israel as antisemitism has already worked to quash serious discussions on Israel-Palestine in the United States. Even Kenneth Stern, who drafted the original working definition, argued in an opinion piece for the Guardian that the IHRA definition has been weaponized against legitimate political expression.Silencing dissentFederal measures such as Trump’s 2019 executive order have fueled a wave of investigations by the Department of Education into universities over pro-Palestinian activism, pressuring administrators to police student speech. At NYU, political statements such as “Fuck Israel” have led to antisemitism charges against students. At Columbia, students faced disciplinary charges for acts as simple as hanging Palestinian flags from dorm windows or displaying them on campus statues, underscoring the growing constraints on Palestine-related activism in academic spaces. Relatedly, recently New York’s governor ordered Hunter College to remove a job posting for a Palestinian studies position, claiming the need to “ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom”. This interference with academic hiring marks a dangerous precedent.The pressure from federal and state authorities has led universities to internalize this surveillance logic. Last week, Columbia University unveiled an expansive compliance plan in response to the administration’s $400m funding cut, pledging stricter enforcement of student discipline, new security forces empowered to arrest demonstrators, mandatory identification checks at protests and a top-down review of academic programs, including scrutiny of hiring decisions and curricula. These measures reflect not only institutional capitulation, but the chilling normalization of ideological policing on campus.
      The new definition of antisemitism imposes a straitjacket of Zionist identity on American Jews
      A similar pattern extends to Congress, where lawmakers such as Rashida Tlaib have been formally censured with another censure effort against Ilhan Omar introduced over statements critical of Israel, in effect framing Palestinian advocacy as beyond the bounds of legitimate discourse. Meanwhile, many individuals have lost jobs, been denied opportunities, or faced disciplinary measures for expressing pro-Palestinian views or criticizing Israeli policy. This dynamic narrows the space for legitimate discussion on US foreign policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The charge of antisemitism shifts the focus from Israel’s actions to the credibility of its critics. While combating antisemitism is imperative, the sweeping application of this label to pro-Palestinian voices endangers dissenting voices and erodes free expression, making open debate on one of the world’s most enduring conflicts increasingly difficult.View image in fullscreenBut that’s not the only problem with the new definition of antisemitism. By legally enshrining support for Israel as a defining characteristic of Jewish identity, the new definition of antisemitism imposes a straitjacket of Zionist identity on American Jews, in effect telling them that certain political positions are incompatible with being authentically Jewish. But, precisely because Jewish identity has always also been political, we should not be delegitimizing those whose Jewish identity entails a criticism or even outright rejection of ethno-national Judaism.The historical diversity of Jewish identityJewish communities have always been diverse and plural in their orientations toward Jewish nationality. From the ultra-Orthodox Satmar community that opposes Zionism on religious grounds to the socialist Jewish Bund that promoted cultural autonomy without a state, to current-day Jewish American organizations that oppose Israel’s occupation and military control over Palestinians, anti-Zionist and non-Zionist movements have always been central to Jewish identity.Many anti-Zionist Jews aren’t rejecting Jewish political life or denying Jews the right to self-determination. Rather, they’re expressing different visions of Jewish political existence and self-determination. Some of them view opposition to the state of Israel as emerging from Jewish values and traditions – whether stemming from religious beliefs about exile and redemption, or interpretations of Jewish ethical traditions that emphasize universal justice and opposition to oppression.In his recent book The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto, the religion scholar Daniel Boyarin reflects on how he moved from Zionism into anti-Zionism, with “my commitment to Jewish identity and identification, Torah study, scholarship, practice, literature and liturgy, and modes of speech and thinking undiminished, even growing stronger and stronger”. Criticism of Israel can stem from deep Jewish religious commitment.The real question, then, isn’t what the proper connection between Israel and Jewish identity is, but rather how to allow for multiple, sometimes competing interpretations of this relationship. By bootstrapping the definition of antisemitism to Israel, IHRA narrows the boundaries of legitimate Jewish identity. While Palestinians have been, without a doubt, the primary targets of this effort, it also takes aim at a rich Jewish tradition. It restricts the freedom of Jews to define their own identity, limiting the ways in which Jewish beliefs, thought and activism can be expressed.And indeed, on college campuses and in workplaces, Jews who express solidarity with Palestinians report being called “self-hating Jews”, “un-Jews” or “traitors” by fellow students or colleagues. In fact, just this month, Trump – our self-appointed arbiter of religious authenticity – announced that the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is “not Jewish anymore”.Defining antisemitism in the service of conservative ChristiansSmearing progressive Jews as “not real Jews” has ramifications that extend far beyond the Jewish community, serving a conservative Christian strategy to exploit religious liberties for the sake of suppressing progressive values.In recent years the US supreme court has taken a sharp turn towards conservative Christianity, altering the basic liberal structure of American constitutionalism. The court has upheld religious claims challenging pandemic restrictions on gatherings and vaccination requirements, LGBTQ+ non-discrimination laws, and the separation of church and state in public education.This strengthens conservative Christian influence by transforming political views into constitutional protections – for example, when the supreme court ruled the constitution allowed a Catholic foster care agency to exclude same-sex couples on religious grounds. However, as David Schraub, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, has pointed out, this strategy faces a significant obstacle: progressive Jews. Progressive Jews, and any other group whose religious commitments might be threatened by conservative policies, could leverage the expansion of precisely these religious protections to opt out of conservative policy initiatives.
      This farcical performance of concern would merely be amusing were it not for the very real possibility that it serves as a prelude for persecution
      Progressive Jewish communities have already begun to challenge conservative policy agendas on religious freedom grounds – most notably around reproductive rights. In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and the wave of state-level abortion bans that followed, Jewish women, congregations and community leaders have filed lawsuits asserting that such bans violate their religious freedom. In some cases, plaintiffs have argued that Jewish law not only permits but may even require abortion under certain circumstances. While many of these cases are still pending, in a landmark ruling in April 2024, the Indiana court of appeals recognized, for the first time, the legitimacy of such claims.One way conservatives can eliminate this risk to their project is by questioning liberal Jews’ Jewishness. “If liberal Jews can be erased – either pushed out of the public eye or denied as genuine or authentic specimens of Judaism – then the challenge of liberal Jews disappears with it,” Schraub explains.This isn’t just a theoretical concern – it’s already happening. Project Esther, a new initiative launched by the Christian nationalist Heritage Foundation known for Project 2025, offers a blueprint for combating antisemitism that targets not only pro-Palestinian groups but what it calls a broader “coalition of leftist, progressive organizations” – including Jewish groups – through tools such as anti-terrorism prosecutions, deportations, public firings, and efforts to “disrupt and degrade” dissenting movements. Despite its use of Jewish religious language, the plan has virtually no Jewish authors and is riddled with basic errors, including misrepresentations of Jewish texts. It chastises American Jews who don’t align with its worldview, calling them “complacent” and their positions “inexplicable”.This farcical performance of concern would merely be amusing were it not for the very real possibility that it serves as a prelude for persecution.Reclaiming Jewish religious freedom from the stateThe increasingly aggressive use of “antisemitism” as a political instrument was never about Jewish safety. It has always been about power: consolidating a political order that merges religion, nationalism and authoritarianism under the veneer of minority protection.The ease with which progressive Jews have been thrown under the bus makes this painfully clear. Their erasure is not a side effect – it is the mechanism through which this agenda advances. Because once Jewish identity is defined from above – even with the active participation of some Jews – any Jew who resists can be disqualified and delegitimized. This was true for de Haan, and it is true today.The threat is immediate and ongoing. Already, whole sectors of society – educators, students, artists, political activists and immigrants – are paying the price. And if this continues, we can expect the same logic to be applied across a wider range of policies: tightening ideological control, redefining constitutional norms and re-engineering public institutions in the image of an authoritarian state.But there is another path. The unique position of progressive Jews offers a way to push back against the rise of the far right in the US, both with regard to Israel-Palestine, but also more broadly. Recognizing the unique harm caused to Jews by the new definition of antisemitism allows us to develop new ways to combat it.The establishment clause of the US constitution, for instance, prohibits the state from intervening in religious disputes. By adopting the IHRA definition into law, the US government has in effect taken sides in an intra-Jewish debate, recruiting Zionist Jews to side in a war against its ideological opponents. The redefinition of antisemitism is therefore not only an attack on political dissent – it is an intrusion into Jewish religious life. By codifying support for Israel as a requirement for being Jewish, these laws function as a state intervention in an ongoing Jewish theological and ethical debate.By pushing against the legal redefinition of antisemitism, Jews can refuse to surrender their identity to the state. By continuing to anchor it firmly in their communities, they can resist the instrumentalization of Judaism against others.Reclaiming religious freedom from the state, as part of this act of resistance, would not just protect Jewish dissenters – it would offer a broader framework for resisting state attempts to control religious identity. No government – not the Israeli government, and surely not the American government – should have the power to define what it means to be a Jew.

      This article was amended on 23 March 2025 to clarify that Ilhan Omar was not formally censured by Congress

      Itamar Mann is an associate professor of law at the University of Haifa, and currently a Humboldt fellow at Humboldt University. He holds a doctorate from Yale Law School

      Lihi Yona is an associate professor of law and criminology at the University of Haifa. She holds a doctorate from Columbia Law School. Her research focuses on antidiscrimination law in the United States and Israel
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      in US Politics

      Columbia University caves to demands to restore $400m from Trump administration

      by

      Columbia University has agreed to a series of changes demanded by the Trump administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding the government pulled this month amid allegations that the school tolerated antisemitism on campus.The university released a memo outlining its agreement with Donald Trump’s administration hours before an extended deadline set by the government was to expire.Columbia acquiesced to most of the administration’s demands in a memo that laid out measures including banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty.The Ivy League university’s response is being watched by other universities that the administration has sanctioned as it advances its policy objectives in areas ranging from campus protests to transgender sports and diversity initiatives.The administration has warned at least 60 other universities of possible action over alleged failure to comply with federal civil rights laws related to antisemitism. It has also targeted at least three law firms that the president says helped his political opponents or helped prosecute him unfairly.Among the most contentious of the nine demands, Columbia agreed to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under a new official, the memo said, taking control away from its faculty.The university will appoint a new senior administrator to review curriculum and faculty to make sure they are balanced, and provide fresh leadership at the department, which offers courses on Middle Eastern politics and related subjects.The demand had raised alarm among professors at Columbia and elsewhere, who worried that permitting the federal government to dictate how a department is run would set a dangerous precedent.Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives last year criticized at least two professors of Palestinian descent working in the department for their comments about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.The school has also hired three dozen special officers who have the power to arrest people on campus and has revised its anti-discrimination policies, including its authority to sanction campus organizations, the memo said.Face masks to conceal identities are no longer allowed, and any protesters must now identify themselves when asked, the memo said.The school also said it is searching for new faculty members to “ensure intellectual diversity”. Columbia plans to fill joint positions in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the international affairs school in an effort to ensure “excellence and fairness in Middle East studies”, the memo said. The sudden shutdown of millions of dollars in federal funding to Columbia University this month was already disrupting medical and scientific research at the school, researchers said. More