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Universities Must Be Forced to Address Antisemitism
University of California, Santa Barbara student body president Tessa Veksler on Feb. 26, 2024. Photo: Instagram
JNS.org – “Never would I have imagined that I’d need to fight for my right to exist on campus,” laments Shabbos Kestenbaum, a student at Harvard University who is suing the school because “antisemitism is out of control.”
Jewish students have suffered an unrelenting explosion of hate on American higher education campuses—so far with little relief. They have endured antisemitic rhetoric, intimidation, cancellation and violence. But those charged with keeping campuses safe—whether administrators who govern student and faculty behavior or federal agencies responsible for ensuring that schools adhere to civil rights protections—are failing in their jobs.
Many Jewish students have complained to their colleges’ administrators about the injustices. But instead of responding with measures to ensure Jewish students’ safety—like stopping pro-Hamas protestors from hijacking campuses or expelling militants who incite Jew-hatred— administrators have largely shown indifference. In some cases, college authorities have made things worse for Jewish students by appeasing the riotous, pro-Hamas mobs who have been primary perpetrators of Jew-hatred on campus.
Snubbed by college administrators, Jewish students and their supporters have appealed for federal protection, filing Title VI complaints with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the body tasked with enforcing protections under the Civil Rights Act. Unfortunately, the OCR, which has the power to levy severe financial punishments against colleges that neglect students’ Title VI rights, has so far rewarded negligent universities with little more than slaps on the wrist.
Until college and university boards of trustees begin hiring administrators committed to Jewish students’ safety—and until the OCR begins seriously punishing antisemitic perpetrators—we can expect no respite. Safe to say, colleges and universities run by arrogant, apathetic administrators will not change until their jobs and schools’ survival are threatened.
College/university administrators don’t take antisemitism seriously. Their reactions to Jewish students raising concerns about Jew-hatred range from indifference to outright hostility. For example, when Mohammed Al-Kurd, who the Anti-Defamation League says has a record of “unvarnished, vicious antisemitism,” came to speak at Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum and other Jewish students complained to administrators.
Rather than cancel Al-Kurd’s appearance, which would have been the appropriate action, the administrators ignored the students’ complaints. “Harvard’s silence was deafening,” Kestenbaum wrote in Newsweek. Kestenbaum said he “repeatedly” expressed concerns to administrators about the antisemitism he experienced, but as his lawsuit alleges, “evidence of uncontrolled discrimination and harassment fell on deaf ears.”
Administrators at Columbia University reacted to Jewish students’ complaints about antisemitism even more cynically. In fact, during an alumni event, several administrators exchanged text messages mocking Jewish students, calling them “privileged” and “difficult to listen to.”
When Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania if calling for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, none could say “yes.” The presidents of Harvard and UPenn have since resigned. Good riddance.
Some college/university administrators have outrageously granted concessions to pro-Hamas students. For instance, Northwestern University agreed to contact potential employers of students who caused campus disruptions to insist they be hired, create a segregated dormitory hall exclusively for Middle Eastern, North African and Muslim students, and form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists could wield undue influence. Brown University agreed to hold a referendum on divestment from Israel in October.
Similar appeasements were announced at other colleges and universities, including Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota and the University of California Riverside.
So far, OCR has failed to take concrete action against antisemitism on campus. This is evident in recent decisions involving the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Michigan. CUNY was ordered to conduct more investigations into Title VI complaints and report further developments to Washington, provide more employee and campus security officer training, and issue “climate surveys” to students.
The University of Michigan also committed to a “climate survey,” as well as to reviewing its case files for each report of discrimination covered by Title VI during the 2023-2024 school year and reporting to the OCR on its responses to reports of discrimination for the next two school years.
Neither institution was penalized financially, even though the Department of Education has the power to withhold federal funds, which most colleges and universities depend on. There are now 149 pending investigations into campus antisemitism at OCR. If these investigations yield toothless results similar to those of CUNY and Michigan, it is highly unlikely that colleges and universities will improve how they deal with antisemitism.
Putting an end to skyrocketing antisemitism on campus involves three things.
First, donors and governments at every level should withhold funds from colleges that fail to hire administrators who will take antisemitism as seriously as they take pronoun offenses or racism directed at people of color.
Second, the OCR must mete out serious consequences to Title VI violators in the form of funding cuts. This may require legislation that specifically mandates withdrawing funding from offending parties. A bill recently introduced by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.)—the University Accountability Act—may be ideal, as it is designed to financially penalize institutions that don’t crack down on antisemitism.
Third, if OCR won’t act, Jewish students and their supporters should turn to the courts. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the legal director of the Deborah Project, a public-interest Jewish law firm, argues that the CUNY settlement demonstrates the futility of going to OCR and that going to court is more likely to produce “a clearly delineated and productive result,” such as punitive and compensatory fines. As of late May, at least 14 colleges and universities are facing lawsuits over their handling of antisemitism on campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
As long as college administrators are allowed to ignore antisemitism on campus and as long as OCR and other government institutions fall short in punishing Jew-hatred, antisemitism will continue to plague Jewish students.
The post Universities Must Be Forced to Address Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term.
Esther Panitch spent Tuesday evening the way she spends every election night since holding office: on her couch at home in an Atlanta suburb, watching The Campaign, the 2012 comedy in which Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play rival candidates for Congress who will stoop to anything to win.
It looks likely that the Georgia Democrat will have a third term in the state Georgia House of Representatives, where Panitch has been the only Jewish member since 2023. With 72% of precincts reporting, she is leading 67%-33% over her Republican challenger, Keith Gettmann. She may be joined in the state legislature by some additional Jewish members after Tuesday night’s vote.
Panitch is a pro-Israel Democrat in a party where support for Israel is increasingly contested. She has built her time in office on issues around antisemitism and Holocaust education, and she has criticized her own senator, Jon Ossoff, in public over Israel. Ossoff endorsed her this fall anyway.
Panitch has been warning for years that her party is drifting away from Israel, and she said she’s grateful Georgia’s Democratic leaders haven’t gone along. This summer she felt the pull at home. A local Democratic youth group told her to “mind her own business” after she asked a county party to move a fundraiser from Rosh Hashanah to another date. The Jewish Council of the Democratic Party of Georgia, where she’s first vice chair, condemned the group, and Panitch says the state and county parties did too.
She also survived a primary challenge from her left this spring. Aaron Baker, a fellow Jewish Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, called her a “DINO,” or Democrat in name only. Panitch won by a 13% margin.
Her complaint about Ossoff goes back to 2024, when he voted for resolutions to block some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, and Panitch criticized him publicly at the time. But she still voted for him in the midterms. “I’m not going to bite my nose to spite my face,” she said.
Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, is a “non-starter,” she said. Collins has faced scrutiny over a son-in-law who posted antisemitic videos and a former staffer who posted Nazi imagery. He has said he doesn’t share those views. Ossoff was reelected Tuesday.
Laws she’s passed
Much of Panitch’s record in office has been a response to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Georgia already had a hate crime law, she said, but it didn’t define antisemitism. She co-sponsored the bill that did — adopting a widely used, though controversial, definition — which the governor signed into law. She had been arguing for it before Oct. 7, but her colleagues, she said, “really couldn’t understand that until they saw it on Oct. 8.”
This past session, she co-sponsored a first-in-the-nation measure requiring public schools to disclose foreign funding, which she said grew out of research showing Qatar had funded Fulton County Public Schools and Georgia State University. She also backed a requirement that the state monitor complaints of antisemitism and other discrimination, from public schools through colleges. Previously, she said, parents had complained about incidents, but whether anything happened depended on the principal. A separate bill she led, creating one-stop family justice centers for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, passed unanimously and was signed into law.
The monitoring requirement puts her in the middle of the debate over where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. Asked whether she considers anti-Zionism antisemitism, Panitch said, “Not all of it. But there’s enough crossover that any of it should be examined.” Her line is a legal one. “They can hate Israel and Jews all they want,” she said. The issue is “if they commit a crime because of it.”
A tree for every critic
She’s also been targeted. On the morning the antisemitism bill was signed into law in January 2024, she discovered a threatening postcard in her mailbox containing antisemitic slurs, including a reference to “gassing the Jews.” A local rabbi who had backed the bill received a similar postcard. The man who sent the cards, Ariel Collazo Ramos, was convicted last fall and sentenced in February to five years in prison, the maximum. Panitch testified at his trial and sentencing.
“Jews have a right to participate in civic life in the United States, just as any other American,” she said, “and I’m not going to allow anybody to stop that.”
She has a lighter response to online critics. In 2024, she was at the University of Georgia for Israel Week, walking a student in a yarmulke to another building so he wouldn’t be alone, when protesters followed and chanted at her. “Esther, Esther, you can’t hide,” she recalled. “We charge you with genocide.”
Her response: Donate a Jewish National Fund tree in Israel in the name of the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and post the receipt online. She has since sent trees in the names of individual trolls and other pro-Palestinian activists. “Okay, you get a tree! You get a tree!” she recalled in her best Oprah Winfrey impersonation. The harassment, she said, “really stopped bothering me after that.”
Her Jewish roots
Panitch grew up in a Jewish household in Miami, where she went to a JCC day camp and later spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah in Massachusetts. She’s a lifelong member of Hadassah, the third generation of her family in the organization. Her daughter is the fourth. She met her husband on a 1997 trip to Israel organized by the Jewish Federation of Miami, and they married the next year. Their three children went through Camp Judaea in North Carolina.
This summer she toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka with a group of teachers on a trip to concentration camps in Poland. They also visited Kielce, a city where survivors who had returned after the war were attacked by a mob in 1946 after a rumor that a Christian boy had been kidnapped. Dozens of Jews were killed.
What stunned her was how deep the roots went. “Jews had been there for 1,000 years before the war,” she said, “and were turned on in the blink of an eye. They were always othered, so I’m not going to allow that to happen in my country.”
She wants to bring that message home. Panitch is a legislative liaison for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and plans to push mandatory Holocaust education in her next term, especially given foreign money she believes has been used to create anti-Israel sentiment.
“I want to be able to show students what happens when mobs go after Jews, which is what is starting to happen now,” she said. “Everybody needs to know their history, Jews and non-Jews, and the ugly parts too, because we have to figure out how not to repeat them.”
Criticize Israel as much as you want, she said, but when it’s singled out for criticism “that they wouldn’t hold any other place to,” it can cross into antisemitism. “The result of antisemitism, unchecked, turns into atrocities.”
The post This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term. appeared first on The Forward.
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Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon
(JTA) — Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, a supporter of Israel, is projected to beat Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist of America member, in a special election on Tuesday that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
With 96% of the vote counted, Moody won by a 2.7 percentage points. according to Associated Press.
The incumbent, Moody, was formerly the state attorney general, and was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Ron DeSantis in January 2025 after Marco Rubio vacated the seat to become secretary of state.
She was endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and President Donald Trump. She is a staunch supporter of Israel who has said she wants the U.S. to be “the most pro-Israel country in the world.” She also said that she “worked to make Florida the most pro-Israel state in the nation” as attorney general.
She has been critical of pro-Palestinian campus protests, and introduced a bill last year that would “claw back federal funds” when universities “violate students’ civil rights.” Too many “woke schools prioritize support for Hamas over their duty to protect the civil rights of ALL students,” she added.
Moody supported Trump and Rubio’s move to deport green card holders for their activism last year. “It is time for Hamas agitators to go,” she wrote.
Nixon is a progressive state legislator, with a campaign focused on universal healthcare and free childcare. She became a DSA member this year, but was not endorsed by the left-wing political organization. She did draw endorsements from a number of major progressive figures and campaigned alongside Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama.
She accuses Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and opposes sending military aid or American weapons to Israel “at this moment.” In November 2023, she introduced a statewide bill advocating for “de-escalation and cease-fire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine,” which was defeated 104-2 in the Florida House. She has condemned Hamas and the “violent terrorist attacks” that it committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Nixon’s Israel stance raised questions over whether it would affect her performance among the state’s substantial Jewish minority. Some Jewish Democrats and independents in the state said they were hung up on her Israel views, while others said they are counting on the Democrats flipping the Senate and that Nixon has toned down her harsher talk about Israel.
The post Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon appeared first on The Forward.
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What would a Democratic majority mean for Chuck Schumer?
Chuck Schumer has long described himself as a Shomer Yisrael, a guardian of Israel. If Democrats regain control of the Senate in the midterm elections, their leader may find himself playing a different role: guardian of a Democratic Party increasingly divided over Israel.
The highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, Schumer is hoping to return to the position of Senate Majority Leader to advance Democratic priorities and challenge President Donald Trump’s agenda after two years in the minority.
Schumer, echoing Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, described his mood Tuesday morning as “nauseously optimistic” about his hopes being fulfilled. “A year ago, no one thought we could do this,” Schumer told reporters, crediting the party’s recruitment of strong candidates in Republican-leaning and swing states. “We don’t want to count our chickens before they hatch,” he added.
A Democratic majority will likely save Schumer from going into retirement. It could also present one of the biggest political challenges of his 52-year career.
Much will depend not just on whether Democrats win enough seats to take back the Senate, but also on who wins. Victories by mainstream Democrats recruited by Schumer — former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska — would strengthen his position. But his job could become much harder if the new majority includes progressives like Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, fierce critics of Israel who he did not recruit and who have challenged the party’s direction.
And a narrow 51-49 Democratic majority would leave Schumer little room for disagreement. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a staunch supporter of Israel who has often broken with his party, has warned that he could leave the Democratic caucus if it becomes the “anti-Israel party.” If he joined the Republicans, the Senate would be split 50-50, giving Vice President JD Vance the deciding vote.
A changing Democratic Party
Schumer has made his Jewish identity and support for Israel a central part of his political career.
He often notes that his last name comes from the Hebrew word Shomer, meaning guardian, to describe his role in protecting Israel. “I have always tried to be in the Senate ‘Shomer Yisrael’ — someone who guards and watches over America’s critical partnership with Israel,” Schumer said in a 2024 speech to Jewish Democrats. In an interview with the Forward that year, he said that “having a majority leader who’s committed to Israel is vital for Israel’s relationship with the U.S.”
Schumer has become more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now struggling to form a government after an election that left his opponents with more seats in the Knesset. In a major Senate speech in March 2024, Schumer called for new elections in Israel and said Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace.
Still, Schumer has continued to support U.S. military aid to Israel and opposed efforts by progressives to place broad restrictions on it. He faced online backlash for saying his job as leader is to “fight” for Israel aid.
But he also did not push his fellow Democrats to vote against measures to block certain weapons sales to Israel, which drew support from 36 to 40 Democratic senators.
That balance could become harder to maintain if he becomes majority leader of a changed Democratic caucus. El-Sayed, Jackson and other progressives have called for an end to all military aid to Israel and others support more conditions. Schumer would share congressional leadership with fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries, who would become House speaker if Democrats prevail there. Both have longstanding ties to Jewish organizations.
Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he and Netanyahu had agreed to end the roughly $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel by the end of this year — two years before the current 10-year memorandum of understanding expires — could dramatically change the debate Schumer would inherit. Trump offered few details about the agreement, and Netanyahu’s office did not immediately confirm it.
Trump has repeatedly mocked the Jewish Democratic leader by calling him a “Palestinian” and “not Jewish anymore.” Schumer took the attack more lightly, telling the Forward, “I say jokingly, don’t tell my mother.”
The two will likely clash on many fronts, including over the Iran war, as a Democratic-controlled Congress may seek to impose restrictions on Trump’s power to strike Tehran.
With Schumer, 75, facing another possible campaign in 2028, his decisions over the next two years could determine whether he faces a primary challenge — potentially from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has also been floated as a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Schumer has seen his popularity decline since he supported a Republican spending bill to avert a shutdown last year. Schumer postponed his book launch events amid controversy and planned protests. A recent survey showed AOC with a 70% approval rating among New York Democrats.
As Senate leader, Schumer would have to adapt a leadership style shaped by an earlier era of the Democratic Party and two years in minority to shape an agenda that fits a party whose views on Israel are changing. That shift was already notable in his pre-election promises. Speaking to Jewish leaders last month, Schumer pledged increased funding for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, an issue that has broader support among Democrats.
Schumer’s job could also become easier if Gadi Eisenkot and his allies form a new government in Israel, replacing Netanyahu with a leader more acceptable to most Democrats.
The post What would a Democratic majority mean for Chuck Schumer? appeared first on The Forward.
