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Kill it or reform it? Jewish critics of DEI debate the future of campus diversity programs

(JTA) — As director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota, Natan Paradise says he leads a research institution, not an advocacy organization. Yet since Oct. 7, he says his research has been put on pause while he spends his time “just dealing with this.” 

 “This” refers to fallout from the deadly Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

“A lot of conversations have had to be had, educating both inside and outside the Jewish community,” Paradise said in an interview thismonth. “That happens daily. People want to know, should we respond and should we respond in an uproar? The donors are in an uproar. Administrators need context.”

At Minnesota, various academic departments issued statements on the conflict that Paradise calls “dismaying,” and others called actionable. 

The university chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine plastered the doors of academic buildings with flyers bearing anti-Israel messages. A prominent Republican on the law faculty filed a civil rights complaint that this week resulted in a federal investigation. And the campus was roiled when a candidate for a senior position at the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion office gave a speech accusing Israel of genocide and denying reports that Hamas had committed sexual crimes in the Oct. 7 attacks. 

The candidate is no longer being considered for the position, but the incident still ramped up concerns about DEI at Minnesota and beyond. When Paradise joined fellow scholars for a panel discussion about “Jews, Antisemitism and DEI: Campus Experiences” at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in San Francisco last month, emotions ran high.

“We have problems” with the campus DEI office, said Amy Simon, an assistant professor of Holocaust Studies and European Jewish History at Michigan State University, where officials recently backed away from a project that would have addressed concerns about antisemitism. The office is known as the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, or IDI. “Sometimes they’re listening, but there’s never a real hearing from the top of the administration [or] the IDI either.”

DEI is a shorthand for a framework that says employers and institutions should be welcoming to diverse applicants, especially people of color, women and the LGBTQ community. Campus DEI offices offer training to students and faculty in how to be welcoming to marginalized groups, provide support groups for women, people of color and LGBTQ students, and work with the administration in promoting and identifying diverse candidates for faculty and administration jobs. 

Members of the Association for Jewish Studies gathered for the organization’s 55th annual conference, held in San Francisco, Dec. 17-19, 2023. (JTA photo)

College campuses have had minority and multicultural affairs offices since the late 1960s and 1970s, focused largely on hiring more diverse faculty and staff and enrolling and retaining more students of color. In the mid-2000s, diversity officers who had been working in isolation formed the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. The organization’s membership has tripled to over 2,000 since July 2020, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, as universities reacted to the police murder of George Floyd and calls to address systemic racism.

As the offices have grown — more than two-thirds of all major universities have chief diversity officers — and as a backlash to the 2020 reckoning on race has deepened, criticism has mounted against DEI. In recent years, it has become a prime target of a group of activists — mostly conservative, and some of them Jewish — who blame DEI for an antipathy toward what they see as traditional American values and a misguided focus on identity over merit in academia.

One leader of the anti-DEI movement is Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who has argued that diversity initiatives undercut the values of the liberal arts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him to the board of the New College of Florida as part of an effort to remake it according to conservative values — and one of the first moves was to ax the DEI office. But it’s not just Florida: In 2023, Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states proposed more than 30 bills targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education.

Since Oct. 7, some Jews who would not normally feel at home on the right have found themselves joining the ranks of DEI’s critics. At the Jewish studies conference, many scholars said their schools’ DEI offices ignored Jewish concerns — either not recognizing Jews as a minority or seeing them as white and privileged, and therefore not subject to marginalization. 

The seeming failure of many DEI programs to take Jews’ concerns seriously has led some Jewish leaders and conservative politicians to call for their dismantling. But others, particularly on the left, say the core values at the root of DEI initiatives are positive and the programs should be widened to include Jews.

No major Jewish group has called for abolishing the programs.

“We think it is an absolute mistake for anyone to say that DEI is the single cause of the explosion of anti-Jewish intolerance we are seeing,” Adam Neufeld, a senior vice president and chief impact officer at the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview. “It is a part of it, we’re sure, but it’s not the sole force. Antisemitism has existed for millennia.”

The ADL is working to improve rather than abolish DEI programs, he said, from privately consulting with campus administrators, to publicly calling out universities that don’t protect Jewish students and faculty, to supporting litigation in cases alleging schools have mishandled antisemitic incidents.

That approach is a mistake in the eyes of DEI’s most vociferous Jewish critics — many of whom view the campus convulsions after Oct. 7 as proof that they are right. Some of them pointed to the pivotal congressional hearing in December featuring three university presidents, who stumbled when asked whether calls for “the genocide of Jews” would violate their campuses’ speech codes. Two of the presidents, Liz McGill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, later stepped down. DEI is “the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard,” Bill Ackman, a Jewish hedge fund manager and Harvard donor who led the charge against Gay, said in a lengthy tweet cheering her ouster.

“For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity,” Bari Weiss wrote in a Tablet essay about how Jews should respond to Oct. 7. Weiss, who runs the news startup The Free Press, argued that under DEI, “equity” has come to mean that people are judged deserving according to their group identities. “If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation — and Jews are 2% of the American population — suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege.”

A protester carries a sign at a “Shut It Down for Palestine” rally outside the Foggy Bottom George Washington University Metro Station in Washington, D.C., Nov. 24, 2023. (Elvert Barnes Photography/Wikimedia Commons)

Abraham Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider that DEI “cannot be fixed,” saying that “efforts by communal Jewish organizations to include the Jewish community or soften its impact on antisemitism have failed.” 

David Harris, the former CEO of the American Jewish Committee, also told Jewish Insider that he doesn’t believe that “outside efforts, however well-intentioned, that nibble around the edges or simply seek to add Jews to the DEI agenda, address the heart of the problem. DEI today poses a major challenge to liberal understanding of American societal aims.”

Other prominent Jews calling for the demise of DEI are Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer and pro-Israel activist; Mark Charendoff, president of the Maimonides Fund, and David L. Bernstein, a Jewish communal professional whose opposition to “wokism” led him to form the Jew­ish Insti­tute for Lib­er­al Val­ues.

“It’s not that we don’t want to make campuses comfortable places for people of color and gays and lesbians. God forbid,” Bernstein said in an interview. “Unfortunately DEI quickly evolved into an ideological framework that tells people in no uncertain terms who are the oppressed and who are the oppressors. It tends to divide people into racial affinity groups, which can be very divisive. It often imposes political litmus tests with DEI statements that applicants must submit for getting a job or getting promoted.”

Bernstein agrees with Weiss that DEI turns the relative academic and financial success of Jews against them by suggesting they are “riding on the backs of deprived minority groups.”

 Bernstein and others also cite a 2021 report from the Heritage Foundation on the “public communications” of DEI professionals, saying they showed a disproportionate tendency to “attack Israel.” 

“Against this backdrop, it’s not hard to see why so many DEI programs are loath to acknowledge the antisemitic nature of anti-Zionist behavior that so often leads to the harassment of Jewish students,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the pro-Israel AMCHA Initiative, wrote in a piece for Sapir, a journal of the Maimonides Fund.

At many campuses, DEI offices have staff who are trained in investigating and resolving complaints about discrimination, and are the main address for such complaints. However, in a college survey the ADL conducted before Oct. 7, more than half of all students surveyed said they had completed DEI training, but only 18% of those said those trainings included topics specific to anti-Jewish prejudice. 

“That is a terrible and unacceptable situation,” said the ADL’s Neufeld. “It is dangerous, both in the sense that it excludes a historically persecuted people who are incredibly vulnerable and actually sends the signal that the exclusion is acceptable.”

Jewish critics of DEI frequently say this exclusion is the result of an “oppressor/oppressed” framework that considers Jews as white and privileged, but tend to provide little evidence. Instead, campus insiders say, there are other structural reasons for the exclusion of Jews and antisemitism from DEI offices.

“Judaism is seen as a religion, and DEI offices don’t touch religion in the sort of structural ecosystem of how the university works,” explained Samira Mehta, the director of Jewish Studies and an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, during a session at the AJS conference. “The university chaplains’ office is in charge of religion and religious diversity. DEI is in charge of racial and gender diversity. DEI is also not so welcome to Islamophobia, except to the degree that they keep their eye on what’s happening to brown students.

“And the people who come up through these offices do not have training in religious diversity and don’t know how to do it,” she continued. “Also the people who come up in those offices sometimes are coming up from queer and gender diversity standpoints.” Mehta referred to these as “all of those structural ways that antisemitism, while real, is not something they handle.”

Lauren Strauss, a professor of modern Jewish history at American University, said that was the experience of Jewish students on her campus who faced antisemitism in their dorms and classes after Oct. 7. They were told that “they should go see a chaplain because this is a religious matter, not racial, ethnic or social prejudice, and outside the DEI office’s mandate,” she said at the AJS panel on DEI. (This week, an activist law firm filed suit against A.U. over its handling of incidents affecting Jewish students on campus.)

Jewish faculty at A.U. have also pushed, with little success, for discussion of antisemitism, alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia, in a core curriculum course for first-year students and transfers known as the American University Experience. Even after agreeing to one session on the Holocaust, the university’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion said it was optional. 

“The one bright spot in all this,” Strauss said, is the support she’s gotten from “a small group of Jewish studies and general studies scholars” and the campus Hillel director. 

Yet Strauss and the other scholars did not say they favored abolishing the programs. While it may be satisfying to condemn the ideology underpinning DEI, they said, campuses need departments whose task it is to increase diversity and make the marginalized feel welcome. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs three higher education bills, including one prohibiting institutions from spending federal or state dollars on “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” programs, May 15, 2023. (Florida Governor’s Office)

Stacy Burdett, a consultant who helps corporations, colleges and nonprofits enhance DEI programming to address Jewish concerns, said calls to dismantle DEI offices also ignore the ways they in fact advance diversity.

“It’s hard for me to imagine a discussion of DEI that isn’t cognizant of the role that gender equity plays in the DEI movement,” she said, offering one example. “And also that the Jewish community itself is a place where there is a paucity of women leaders.”

Burdett said the current debate over DEI lacks the kind of nuance that Jewish groups brought to debates over a previous era’s civil rights issues, including quotas and affirmative action. 

“There’s no question that some of the ideological underpinnings of DEI in some institutions are flawed, and sort people in categories that Jews don’t neatly fit into. I think everyone in the Jewish community wants the American public square to be a safer place for Jews, and there are just different ways of getting at that,” she said. “But we’re in a very polarized debate between two groups of people, one of whom sees diversity as a threat, and the other that sees it as the strength of a pluralistic society.” 

At the University of Minnesota, Natan Paradise shares many of the critics’ views of DEI’s shortcomings. But he is wary of joining in attacks that he sees either as politically motivated or hostile to the very idea of racial or gender inclusion. 

“Those who want to dismantle DEI are acting in bad faith,” he said. “DEI does a lot of good. It does make a difference for students on campus. It could make more of a difference. It could make a better, more nuanced difference. But I think DEI plays a critical role on campuses.” 

He prefers forming relationships with administrators at the university’s Office for Equity and Diversity, and said there have been successes, including a freshman orientation course that now includes discussion of antisemitism, and a change in how the campus Office for Equity and Diversity classifies antisemitism on its website.

“We are just not on their radar and we ought to be, and I have been working very hard at my institution to change that, and we’ve made quite a bit of progress,” he said about Jews on campus. “We have to be present in all the social justice initiatives, in order for us to be present when we need it. And when I mean relationships, that means being in the spaces with the people who are doing the work, so that they see you as an ally, and you can count on them as an ally. In too many instances, we just haven’t done it.”


The post Kill it or reform it? Jewish critics of DEI debate the future of campus diversity programs appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials

FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

i24 NewsIranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.

“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.

The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.

The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.

According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”

The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.

Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.

Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.

The post Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.

Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.

Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.

Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.

There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.

The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.

Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.

US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS

The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.

Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.

The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.

The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.

The post Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say

Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo

The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.

The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.

The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.

The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.

The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.

The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.

While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.

The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.

USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.

One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.

The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.

The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.

Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.

The post US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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