A grant to study Hebrew is ‘woke DEI,’ Ted Cruz says
The senator’s attack on the National Science Foundation included seven grants intended to boost US-Israeli research partnerships
Hebrew Pentateuch (from 900-1188) written in typical Hebrew oriental book hand. (Stock image)
(JTA) — A grant to study linguistic differences between Hebrew and English was flagged as an example of “woke DEI grants” in a new database released by Sen. Ted Cruz.
The database is part of ongoing Republican efforts to justify significant cuts to federal research funding and diversity programs under President Donald Trump.
The $226,000 grant, given by the National Science Foundation to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022, was flagged by the Texas Republican senator’s team as having an inappropriate focus on “gender.”
But according to the description of the research in Cruz’s own database, the sole mention of gender in the grant’s description is in reference to the fact that the Hebrew language (like many) assigns gender to nouns.
The UMass grant was also one of seven in Cruz’s database of Biden-era grants that stated an intent to promote partnerships between American and Israeli research institutions — something that did not appear to mitigate opposition from Cruz, an avowed supporter of Israel. He said in a statement that the more than 3,400 grants in his database demonstrated that the NSF had funded “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
A request for comment to Cruz’s office was not returned; nor was an inquiry sent to UMass. Cruz, the chair of the Senate committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, said in a statement that his data “exposes how the Biden administration weaponized federal agencies to push a far-left ideology.”
He added, “Congress must end the politicization of NSF funding and restore integrity to scientific research.”
The public database of grants compiled by Cruz provides a window into how Trump and his allies are thinking about cuts to research funding. The flagged grants mentioning Israel were made to six universities including Brown, the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. They cover a range of scientific topics, from studying cognition to magnetic technologies to energy storage.
What they have in common is a stated intent to collaborate with an Israeli university. For example, Michigan’s grant specifically references a partnership with Ben-Gurion University in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva, while a second UMass grant mentions partnering with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in the port city of Haifa, as well as “outreach by the Israeli collaborator to local high schools in Haifa.”
The second common thread among the Israel-related grant descriptions is the use of keywords flagged by the database as related to gender or DEI. Cruz’s team sorted the grants based on the presence of keywords related to the categories of “gender,” “status,” “social justice,” “race” and “environmental justice.”
None of the grants to mention Israeli partnerships make such topics the focus of their research, though some state a general commitment to “groups underrepresented in science” or “outreach to women and underrepresented minorities.” UMBC’s grant states that it will allow participation “for local high school students from underrepresented groups on the US side, and from various nationalities on the IL [Israeli] side.”
The UMass grant exploring the Hebrew and English languages makes no such commitment to diversity. Its reference to gender comes as it states that “English and Hebrew differ in how they organize the words within sentences and whether they assign gender to nouns; Hebrew assigns masculine and feminine genders to nouns, similar to languages like Spanish and French but unlike English.”
The project’s stated focus is to study how such linguistic differences affect “interpretation errors” among people who speak both languages.
Cruz’s dragnet of so-called “woke” research grants also comes as a number of American researchers and campus groups have pushed for boycotts of all Israeli institutions, in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The database was posted as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has targeted federal research funding on the basis of keywords that, the Trump team claims, reveal evidence of gender- and DEI-driven agendas. On Tuesday a federal judge intervened to block steep cuts to medical research funding at the National Institutes of Health. Another injunction blocked key parts of Musk’s effort to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A report last week in the Washington Post found that NSF staff were also being directed to comb through their research projects in search of dozens of offending keywords, including “women,” “victims,” “trauma” and “ethnicity.” Such efforts are part of a larger slashing of federal spending, including the shuttering of entire departments, that scholars say is unlawful and may be leading to a constitutional crisis.
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