‘Using’ Antisemitism
Terry H. Schwadron
April 15, 2025
For all the talk at Donald Trump’s White House about protecting Jewish sensibilities on campuses and in conflating Israeli war politics with religion, you’d think that Trump would be out early with condemnation for the bombing at the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is both Jewish and a Democrat.
Instead, Trump was silent, finding other politically odorous targets for his social media posts. Even Vice President JD Vance said the violence was “really disgusting,” though he omitted mention that this was an attack on a Jewish politician during the Passover holiday. When Trump finally acknowledged the attack, he dismissed it as the work of a “whack job.”
Police arrested a suspect who apparently acknowledged the bombing and an intention to beat Shapiro with a hammer, but no one identified a motive. The suspect, a 38-year-old man, has been associated with White Supremacy groups.
Disturbing as the incident is, it falls into another in a series of escalating attacks on Jews and other minority targets of hate crimes that mark our era. Even before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas killing 1,200 Jews in Southern Israel and kidnapping 259 hostages, anti-Jewish incidents of varying seriousness had been reported on the noticeable rise.
Trump has leapt on antisemitism as justification for launching strong-arm tactics against colleges and universities for allowing “pro-Palestinian” protests and has bullied law firms that represent migrants with even a scintilla of public criticism of US-Israel policy whom he wants to deport after street arrests and no due process hearing.
In this light, the decision by Harvard University to tell Trump it would not relent to his threats takes on greater significance.
Trump Wields Antisemitism
As a political tool, Trump has incorrectly used adherence to an unrestrained hand to Israeli war efforts in Gaza and support for the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with whatever he thinks is antisemitism. Judaism is a religion, but it is also an ethnicity and cultural identity that crosses international borders; whatever else, Jewishness does not arrive with a fully formed partisan political agenda that only serves to support Trump and MAGA. Over centuries, Jews have served as political scapegoats in a variety of authoritarian states, particularly when economies tighten and leaders, churches, or militias find themself in need of someone to blame.
In Trump’s view, he seems not to recognize his own policies that promote a White, Christian nation as antisemitic, any more than he sees Oklahoma ordering Bible study in public schools, Elon Musk Nazi salutes, or inviting White Supremacists to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago as problematic, for example. But he has attacked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as “a Palestinian” for raising questions about over-the-top Israeli military responses in Gaza and around the West Bank settlements.
And so, over Trump’s years, we have seen name-calling and the familiar patterns of racial and identity discrimination increasing in intensity all the way to fatal attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh. The attack on Shapiro’s home fits with the targeting of Jews more generally, as we are seeing in France, The Netherlands, Russia and other countries.
Though most public protest has dissipated, Trump is still using the mounting of protests on college campuses about Israeli military response to Oct. 7 as exhibit A in his war to round up immigrant students who may have shown anti-war sympathies, written a single campus newspaper opinion piece, or participated in encampment protests. He is withholding billions of dollars at this point from universities that he thinks should have clamped down to stop all protest, all in the name of protecting Jewish students, many of whom also were participants on both sides of protests.
Pushback to Campus Crackdown
Yesterday we heard from Harvard that it was rejecting policy changes demanded by Trump to change policies regarding antisemitism and protest more generally, along with a host of issues that Trump finds objectionable about diversity and inclusion, student say, policies involving immigrants, and oversight of academic programs.
The university’s strong response acknowledges more protection for Jewish students who have felt uncomfortable but said no government could dictate what can be taught or discussed on campus. Trump has threatened loss of upwards of $2.2 billion in long-term grants.
That rejection is part of a rising sea of sermons, opinions and articles pushing back on Trump threats over his definition of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League has taken a strong position favoring anti-campus crackdowns, but others are concerned that the conflation of issues is not only false, but misleading. Two pro-Israel groups, Canary Mission and Betar, have even been involved in singling out pro-Palestinian protesters to target, but others see civil rights abridgments inconsistent with any effective protection that Jews too could be at risk.
Even as immigration agents were grabbing graduate students off the streets around Columbia and Tufts, Rabbi Sharon Brous in Los Angeles was advising that “This is not going to protect Jews. We’re being used.”
As The Times noted, for many in the Jewish community that has suffered more than its share of unjust arrests, disappearances, deportations and deadly violence over the centuries, the video of a state capture of a graduate student at Tufts evoked painful memories from Jewish history. That it was done in the name of defending Jews made it worse.
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,” wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece. “You’ll be looking awhile.”
“Anytime you put Jews in the middle on an issue, it’s not good for the Jews,” said Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project, a progressive Jewish group that has been searching for a way to combat antisemitism without suppressing political debate. “That’s a classic antisemitic position that antisemites like to put Jews. So they can be scapegoated.” Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, who leads a socially progressive but religiously Conservative Jewish synagogue in Manhattan, said “My community is very, very skeptical of the genuineness of the administration’s antisemitism rhetoric.”
In a PBS op-ed, Ja’han Jones wrote that Trump’s blaming of universities reinforces a antisemitic tropes. “What are the most toxic antisemitic tropes? Well, ‘Jews control the institutions.’ This is absolutely reinforcing this. Any young American is going to think: Remember what happened when they took down the world’s greatest university system on behalf of Jewish safety? And this will go down in history books — the history of this era will say that Jewish people were the sledgehammer for fascism.”
Kenneth Stern, the director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate and a lead drafter of the working definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, recently told NPR that the Trump administration’s campus crackdown risks scapegoating Jewish students as well. “It puts pro-Israel Jewish students in a situation where they may be seen as trying to suppress speech rather than answer it,” Stern said.
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