Anti-BDS Advocate Kenneth Marcus Tapped For Top Education Post
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Aiden Pink October 26, 2017
The Trump administration has nominated a Jewish advocate to hold the top civil rights position at the Department of Education.
Kenneth L. Marcus, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, was named Thursday as the nominee to be the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights. He will serve under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Marcus, formerly the staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President George W. Bush, is an advocate for extending the anti-racism protections of the Civil Rights Act to Jews. He is also a vocal opponent of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, especially on college campuses.
“The leading civil and human rights challenge facing North American Jewry is the resurgent problem of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism on university campuses,” the Brandeis Center states on its website. “This social problem requires an immediate, effective, and coordinated legal response.”
The Brandeis Center helped author a bill in South Carolina that essentially classified anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism for the purposes of investigating claims of racism at state universities.
The Department of Education is responsible for ensuring college students learn in a racism-free environment and has the power to initiate lawsuits against universities that fail to properly deal with anti-Semitism and other forms of racism.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
