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The Situation at Colleges and K-12 Schools Is as Bad as It Has Ever Been for Jewish Students
Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, US, Feb. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Ryder
University administrations continue to grapple with legal challenges to their handling of antisemitic protests. A series of lawsuits filed by the higher education industrial complex seek to reverse all the Trump administration’s initiatives to control costs, limit foreign students with radical pasts, and protect Jewish students.
University presidents are also being pressured to reverse the trend of institutional neutrality and to resume making statements on political issues. The lawsuits and the renaming and hiding of DEI initiatives indicate that universities are simply waiting out the current administration, but the structural changes being forced by economic conditions including Federal funding and broader demographics will be more enduring.
Reports indicate that the Trump administration is reworking its “compact with higher education” to make it acceptable to more universities, but in the meantime, a number of Federal investigations are ongoing. The University of Pennsylvania, however, has balked at a demand for employee records from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission as part of an investigation into discrimination aimed at Jewish employees.
The US Department of Education has also chosen not to challenge a Federal court ruling that prohibits it from requiring universities to remove all race based curriculum, student aid, and student services or risk losing funding. The move was represented by DEI advocates as a victory and reflects the industry’s efforts to wait out the Trump administration before restoring DEI as its central pillar.
Data from a new Department of Education website has again showed that Qatar is the leading funder of American universities with $6.6 billion in contracts and gifts. Cornell University received $2.3 billion, while $1 billion was given to Carnegie Mellon University, and more that $900 million each to Texas A&M University and Georgetown. Overall 1223 individual transactions involving Qatar are recorded, pointing to that country’s vast influence buying within the higher education industrial complex.
The influence of foreign funding has always been disputed by universities. A new lawsuit, however, alleges that Qatari funding directly shaped Carnegie Mellon’s neglect of antisemitism and discrimination directed at a Jewish faculty member.
In that case, the school was required to consult with the Qatar Foundation International before hiring the assistant vice provost for DEI and Title IX coordinator, while other DEI officials visited Qatar as part of their work. This pattern of support and collusion with Qatar through DEI is likely replicated across a vast scale across the higher education industry.
A new report has again detailed the manner in which the City University of New York systematically purged all Jews from its leadership and dramatically reduced the number of Jewish students. The university’s move appears to be a deliberate, top down marketing strategy focusing on New York’s Muslim community rather than Jews, which privileged partnerships with CAIR and endorsed BDS supporters within the faculty union.
Finally, in a significant move, the United Arab Emirates has banned scholarships for students studying in Britain. The stated rationale was fear of radicalization by the Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates British campuses.
In an interesting rhetorical shift, Harvard president Alan Garber blamed “faculty activism” in the classroom for chilling free speech on campus. He also stated that “there is real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
The incorporation of explicitly anti-Israel terms such as “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Apartheid Wall,” and “Zionist regime” into academic papers has expanded immensely since 2019 and has created a self-reinforcing web of citations that gives the additional appearance of legitimacy to anti-Israel standpoints.
As has long been the case, this new guise conveniently aligns with broader left-wing opposition to the West, capitalism, and whiteness.
Faculty also continue to organize conferences on campus that emphasize anti-Israel activism, often without a guise of scholarship or pedagogy.
In one recent example, a conference at the University of Washington was reported to have promoted pro-Hamas activism and included faculty members and activists who defended Hamas, Iran, and campus property destruction. The university recently lifted suspensions on students who had caused over $1 million in damages to an engineering building during a pro-Hamas takeover.
In another example, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies will host a Gaza Lecture Series featuring a number of prominent defenders of Hamas and other terrorist groups, as well as deniers of October 7th sexual violence.
Institutionally, academic associations continue to be besieged by anti-Israel members. In January the executive council of the American Historical Association vetoed a resolution accusing Israel of scholasticide and the silencing of protests regarding “the U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.”
The council stated, “As worded the two resolutions fall outside the scope of the American Historical Association’s chartered mission,” adding that “Approving them on behalf of the entire association would present institutional risk and have long-term implications for the discipline and the organization.” Supporters of the resolution complained the move reflected anti-Palestinian bias. The Modern Language Association also approved a similar resolution.
In the first month of the new semester, job fairs and individual corporations were be targeted by pro-Hamas protestors. In one example, the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine chapter organized a walkout to demand the university sever ties with Palantir, which it accuses of “enabling genocide” and profiting from “ICE raids, police violence, and mass surveillance at home.”
The Yale University “Endowment Justice Collective” also demanded that the university divest from investments in Palantir and other firms. The university rejected the demands. The University of Alabama SJP chapter made similar divestment demands.
Student sponsored events in support of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations also continue to be held. The University of Virginia Law School hosted International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf for a “conversation” about Gaza. In another, the University of Chicago’s pro-Hamas groups promoted an International Week of Action to secure the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the University of Washington, the presence of the Tariq El-Tahrir Student Network, “an international network of Palestinian, Arab, and Internationalist youth, students and organizations,” associated with terrorist organizations including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has provided the local pro-Hamas SUPER UW (Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at University of Washington) group with continuing support. This includes webinar series featuring terror supporters from Samidoun and other groups. SUPER UW remains banned on campus but the Tariq El-Tahrir provides them with an effective alter ego.
Finally, in a move that demonstrated how the Holocaust is being actively divorced from and turned against Jews, the University of California at Irvine student government passed a motion commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day but stripped it of all reference to modern antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
The K-12 sector continues to be manipulated by anti-American and pro-Hamas teachers unions and infiltrated by foreign influence operations. Pro-Hamas pedagogy inside and outside the classroom have now become commonplace, often piggybacked on holidays and commemorations.
In one example, pro-Hamas teachers held a NYC Educators For Palestine MLK Day Teach-In. The organizers are among the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers. A number of participants are also linked to pro-Hamas welfare organizations such as the Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund and ANERA. Teach-ins for “Palestine” were also held on Martin Luther King Day for students in Philadelphia and for teachers in Oakland.
Teachers and parents from the Berkeley Families for Collective Liberation were involved in organizing a student walkout at Berkeley High School to participate in a pro-Palestinian teach-out held on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Organizers claimed the timing was purely coincidental. Speakers also criticized California’s new law addressing antisemitism in public schools.
The complicity of school administrators in permitting and organizing pro-Hamas events inside and outside classrooms is well documented. One recent example is the decision by the Michigan Department of Education to accept teachers’ participation in a professional development seminar about “how to teach about Palestine” organized by the Arab American National Museum, in association with Rethinking Schools, and Visualizing Palestine.
New evidence continues to emerge regarding foreign influence operations, including initiatives by the Qatar Foundation International to insert Arabic language and social justice curriculums into Georgia schools. Both the language and social justice materials are deeply suffused with anti-Israel and antisemitic themes.
British primary and secondary schools provide a roadmap to how teachers and foreign powers reshape curriculum and how demographic change among students have made antisemitism and anti-Israel bias foundational.
British teachers unions are resolutely anti-Israel and have adopted numerous resolutions of condemnation. This has translated into classroom hostility towards Israel, as well as towards Jewish students and teachers, some of whom are told by colleagues that Israel simply does not exist, which is amplified by the growing number of Muslim students.
In one recent case, a school barred a Jewish Member of Parliament from visiting after protests from teachers. The educational oversight authority Ofsted later cleared the school of wrongdoing without speaking to the Member of Parliament. In contrast, reports indicate that Hussein Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, routinely tours British schools.
The Holocaust has also been co-opted and inverted as an anti-Israel and antisemitic tool. British teachers have begun presenting Israeli actions in Gaza as “genocide” and inverting Holocaust memory into an anti-Jewish concept. Reports also indicate that half of British schools have stopped marking Holocaust Memorial Day for fear of offending Muslim students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.
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Capers Funnye wasn’t a ‘Black Jew’ — he was a good Jew
This morning, when I woke up, it was the first time in my entire life that my spiritual leader, my rabbi and my friend, was gone. People are born and die every day, and we live totally oblivious to that fact, but I feel the absence of this one human being almost on a cellular level. And the very person I would call to help me make sense of a time like this is the one who is gone.
Rabbi Capers Funnye wasn’t your typical rabbi. How could he be, though? After all, his congregation was full of Black folks and people of color. There were also some white congregants, but for the most part, his temple was a place created for people like me to have somewhere to go and practice Judaism freely without suspicion or judgment. Beth Shalom was established over one hundred years ago by Black Jews who knew at that time that they could actually be arrested here in America, in Chicago, for daring to say out loud that they were Jewish. I know that sounds unthinkable, but it’s a historical fact: It used to be illegal in Chicago for Blacks to claim that they were Jewish.
Rabbi Funnye dedicated his life to ensuring that Black Jews wouldn’t have their Jewishness questioned.
White Jews love to reminisce about the Civil Rights Movement and their close relationship to the Black community, and this coalition brought about monumental changes to American society. But those same white Jews who marched in Selma and rode buses to Mississippi had little to no interaction with Black Jews. We were nonexistent. A myth, if you will. Some people had heard that there were Black people who called themselves Jews, but no one had actually ever seen one or met one.
We were there, but just as other Jews had hidden before, we were hiding too. We worshipped in basements, living rooms, and the backs of storefronts. We were in the shadows until Rabbi Funnye came along. He was born to leave the world a better place than he found it, and that’s exactly what he did.
Rabbi Funnye was supposed to be an AME pastor, but the church didn’t need him. The synagogue, the Jewish people, did.
I used to joke with him that I’d known him so long I could remember when he had a full head of black hair. And I did. I can remember going to services and seeing him on the bimah on Shabbat. Even as a little kid, I recognized he was different. He had a voice that could command the attention even of a pew full of antsy five-year-olds. But he also had a smile so warm that we never felt scolded. When he spoke, people couldn’t help but listen, and eventually he started saying what people wanted and needed to hear.
I watched him rise from assistant rabbi to leader.He could teach Torah in a way that held the congregation’s interest, imparting important lessons while adding levity with razor-sharp wit and perfectly timed humor.
If I’d been born male, I probably would’ve wanted to be a rabbi my whole life. I wanted to be like him. But I was a girl, and that was unthinkable.
But he made me believe I could do things.
I can remember when he started to integrate the Chicago Jewish community. When we’d go to events like Shabbat dinners or Black and Jewish seders, he was unfazed by the whispers and stares when he’d ask where the tables were for those who were both Black and Jewish. While this made the rest of us uncomfortable and, for some, unwilling to ever go back into any room where we were treated as oddities, he was undeterred.
He went back, over and over again. He would not allow the existence of Black Jews to go unacknowledged any longer. And many of us went with him. I was one. I saw how he was treated at times by white rabbis and even just by people who were white and Jewish and still felt that somehow they were better than him. It would infuriate me, but not him. He’d smile, tell a joke or one of his signature stories that would completely disarm them.
And while the behavior of some of my white co-religionists would thoroughly anger me, Rabbi Funnye understood how to deal with bigotry and hate in other ways. He grew up in it. He knew how to rise above it. Another lesson learned. He never met hate with hate or derision with derision. He met it with love.
He knew that was the only way he could move us from the shadows and out of the margins, into the mainstream. And it was also the only way that he could show white Jews we were nothing to fear or exclude.
At times, his message wasn’t popular with Black Jews who wanted nothing to do with white Jews or with white Jews who weren’t ready to accept the fact that G-d made Black Jews too.
None of that changed the fact that it was the right one.
Chief Rabbi Funnye wasn’t a Black Jew. He was a good Jew. And that is the lesson that I, and hopefully all who knew him, will learn from his life.
The post Capers Funnye wasn’t a ‘Black Jew’ — he was a good Jew appeared first on The Forward.
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All Jewish eyes are on Michigan as heated El-Sayed-Rogers Senate campaign draws to a close
(JTA) — DETROIT – The U.S. Senate race in Michigan, a deeply contentious contest that has strained Jewish relationships with the Democratic Party, drew to a bitter close Tuesday as voters headed to the polls in a race that could shape which party controls the chamber.
At its center is Abdul El-Sayed, the former county health director and Democratic nominee whose anti-corporate, Medicare For All candidacy has become a rallying cry for the national progressive movement.
His uncompromising stances on Israel have also made him a target among pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC, which has spent heavily against him in both the primary and general election. AIPAC’s rare entry into a general election race came to support El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican former congressman Mike Rogers.
One of El-Sayed’s positions on Israel — to end all U.S. military aid — was once thought a far-left pipe dream. But that has changed. On Election Day morning, Trump announced that, under his watch, nearly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel would wind down by the end of the year. Trump said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in agreement with the need to end aid and deny Democratic critics a point of attack.
In his announcement of the plan, Trump cited El-Sayed.
“Why should we suffer the slings like lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it?” Trump said on Fox News, referring to Israel’s financial strength.
Representatives for the El-Sayed and Rogers campaigns, and for the Republican Jewish Coalition, did not immediately return requests for comment on Trump’s new pledge. It is unclear whether it will be straightforward for the White House to halt the funding by the end of 2026, given that the existing memorandum of understanding that governs it extends to 2028.
El-Sayed’s campaign has galvanized young voters and a range of other constituencies, and he pulled ahead in the polls in the race’s final stretch. But his questioning of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and whether it or Iran posed a greater threat to the United States, as well as his prior associations with figures such as Hasan Piker, the streamer who has spread extreme rhetoric about American Jews, have sparked concern among Jewish Michiganders.
So, too, did comments the candidate made following the March terror attack on Temple Israel, a major synagogue in the state, in which El-Sayed appeared to link the attack to Israel’s war in Lebanon after reports that the attacker lost family in an Israeli strike. Hostile behavior from some of El-Sayed’s supporters toward pro-Israel Democrats, most prominently on display at the state party’s spring convention, have also alarmed Jews. El-Sayed has pledged to stand up to antisemitism.
Some Jews who had long considered themselves Democrats, including several local Jewish leaders, have cited such controversies in pledging to vote for Rogers. In some Michigan Jewish neighborhoods, yard signs proclaim that a vote for Rogers is a vote “against antisemitism.”
Accordingly, Rogers has made a play for the Jewish vote. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October that his opponent is “anti-Jew,” while running ads that played up El-Sayed’s tenuous family associations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Top Republicans have seized on the narrative, with President Donald Trump calling Jews “crazy” if they back El-Sayed, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz calling him a national security threat. A Trump administration event to address antisemitism was held at a Michigan synagogue weeks before the election, though El-Sayed’s name was not mentioned there.
Jewish Democrats who had broken with El-Sayed found major validation in the race’s dramatic closing days. Democrat Haley Stevens, a strongly pro-Israel congresswoman who had narrowly lost to El-Sayed in the primary, flipped sides to endorse Rogers days after her Jewish fiancé, a Democratic megadonor, did the same.
The surprise move, which Jewish Democratic leaders joined many other prominent Democrats in criticizing, came after days of back-and-forth between Stevens and El-Sayed as she sought to publicly pressure him to condemn a PAC ad that had linked rising grocery prices to U.S. aid to Israel.
Meanwhile, some prominent Jewish Democrats in the state either avoided endorsing El-Sayed or did so with heavy reservations. Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, whose leadership has been deeply divided on El-Sayed, issued a statement Monday declaring the caucus would never vote for a Republican.
“Our commitment to the Democratic ticket remains resolute as we work to build a more inclusive coalition,” the caucus stated.
Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed has sought to reassure Jewish voters. He apologized for his Temple Israel comments; distanced himself from Piker; hired a Jewish outreach director; said in a recent “60 Minutes” interview that Israel has a right to exist; and sent mailers to Jewish households stating, “I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice.” He told JTA in August that “the prerequisite of Jewish safety is never in question to me.”
More than 1,000 Michigan Jews have signed an open letter pledging to vote for El-Sayed, compared to 560 who have done the same for Rogers. Progressive Jewish figures of note have held salons throughout the state in a bid to convince on-the-fence Jews to back him.
Yet El-Sayed also has continued to stake out positions many Jews find alienating. He asserted in the campaign’s closing weeks that Israel was “not actually our friend” and declined during a debate to say whether Israel or Iran was the bigger danger to the U.S. His campaign also released an ad, designed to appeal to conservatives, that featured a brief clip of Tucker Carlson, the right-wing pundit who has promoted conspiracy theories about Israel. In addition, El-Sayed’s careful sidestepping of objectionable material about Jews and Israel from his ostensible allies, such as Piker and his uncle, left-wing anti-Israel pundit Cenk Uygur, has continued up to Election Day.
Ahead of Election Day, some liberal-leaning Zionist Jews tried to put pressure on El-Sayed to speak more directly to their concerns. A group of rabbis and other Jewish leaders launched Nonnegotiable Michigan in a bid to have him affirm what they called five core principles of Jewish participation in the Democratic Party, including “Jewish sovereignty in Israel.” After silence from the campaign, some of Nonnegotiable’s figureheads urged their followers to write in the 19th-century Jewish poet “Emma Lazarus” instead of voting for either candidate.
Michigan’s already small Jewish population, which numbers around 105,000 adults, has further splintered over El-Sayed’s candidacy. But it could prove pivotal to the outcome of a race that may determine control of the chamber. In 2024, the state’s Senate race was decided by fewer than 20,000 votes.
Either way, the race has crystallized the Democratic Party’s shifting fault lines over Israel — and many Jews’ growing uneasiness with their place in the liberal coalition.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post All Jewish eyes are on Michigan as heated El-Sayed-Rogers Senate campaign draws to a close appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump says US aid to Israel will stop at end of year
(JTA) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning said that the United States would halt billions of dollars in annual aid to Israel by the end of 2026, potentially ending decades of military support for one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East.
“We were giving them $4 billion. We are. But it gets cut off at the end of the year,” Trump declared during a call-in appearance on the “Fox & Friends” morning program on Fox News. Israel’s 10-year memorandum of understanding with the United States, which currently gives Israel $3.8 billion annually, runs through 2028 so it’s unclear how easy it would be for the White House to stop the funding this year.
Referencing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in January that he wanted to taper off aid to zero at some point in the future, Trump questioned why Republicans should have to deal with criticism from hardline pro-Palestinian Democrats like Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed when “we give them more than anybody else and they no longer need it.”
“It’s a bad talking point,” he added. His comments came as Americans across the country are voting Tuesday in midterm elections that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate.
“We reached an agreement on that” and Netanyahu “brought it up,” Trump continued. “He said: ‘I think it would be appropriate if we do not receive aid,’ because he understands that this is one of their points of contention.”
A growing number of Democratic congressional candidates across the United States have campaigned on a platform of reducing or halting military aid to Israel during the run-up to today’s midterm elections. This April, dozens of senators — almost all of them Democrats — voted in favor of a failed motion to block the sales of certain weapons to Israel.
Yair Golan, chairman of Israel’s liberal Democrats party, slammed Netanyahu in the wake of Trump’s statement, tweeting that “precisely at a time when Israel’s defense spending has reached enormous proportions, when Israel needs to replenish its offensive weapons stockpiles, and after air defense capabilities have been depleted following such a long war—Netanyahu logs another massive failure under his name.”
“The cessation of U.S. aid is heavy damage to Israel’s security” and “a responsible prime minister would have fought to increase American aid, not eliminate it,” added Golan, whose party opposes Netanyahu’s and is trying to form a coalition to oust Netanyahu from power following Israel’s own elections last Tuesday.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump says US aid to Israel will stop at end of year appeared first on The Forward.
