The seals of the Federal Housing Finance Association (FHFA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities at the organizations’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., on May 20, 2024. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

“Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities,” said the letter I received last week from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, written on the letterhead of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The NEH grant in question has, over the past year and a half, helped finance my and my co-editor’s translation, from Yiddish and Russian, of prose written after the Holocaust by Jewish writers from the Soviet Union. Filled with memories, love and loss, these stories describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live during the Soviet period, when the Holocaust was not officially recognized as a Jewish tragedy separate from the larger devastation of World War II.

It would seem that a project exploring the nuances of Jewish life during and after genocide should not run counter to President Donald Trump’s alleged agenda. His administration has blared its intention to stand up for the safety of Jews. Its concerns over that safety, we’ve been repeatedly told, are why the federal government is withholding funding for medical and scientific research at universities over accusations of antisemitism. It’s why students are being arrested and detained, without facing criminal charges, because of their participation in protestsm or for writing op-eds against Israel’s U.S.-funded war in Gaza — an exercise of their right to free speech.

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And yet, for all that my project with co-translator Harriet Murav seems to align with the president’s supposed interest in fighting antisemitism, there it was: Our grant was being terminated, in accordance with “an urgent priority for the administration,” as the NEH was “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”

In some ways, Harriet and I are lucky. We are in the final months of our two-year grant, and have already drawn down most of the funds that have made this project possible. What the grant bought us was time, and help: We were able to reduce our university teaching and service loads so as to spend more time on translation; hire a research assistant; commission maps and art for the book; and conduct most of the research in the grant window because of its assistance. Our book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union, written into our NEH application as the promised outcome of the project, is expected to be published next year, by Stanford University Press.

But what concerned me most about the abrupt cancellation of our grant was never its potential effect on our specific work. It was what that cancellation proved to me about Trump’s real priorities when it comes to Jews — and when it comes to investment in the thinking and engaged public.

It’s clear, to me, that Jews interest the Trump regime only as rhetorical tropes: They are to be wielded as cudgels in order to help Trump attack institutions of higher education and vital research, as well as our  collective civic rights to due process and the freedom of speech. To this presidential administration, Jews are not a people with a diversity of rich cultural backgrounds and complex histories, the exploration of which can be deemed — as in the case of our grant, through a  rigorous vetting that is the mainstay of the NEH’s application process — of interest to the public and the society of which they are a part.

Several other grants for projects in Jewish culture have been affected by the rapid gutting of the NEH, among them: a collaborative translation of works by a Yiddish author who perished in the Minsk ghetto; the Klezmer Archive Project; a summer workshop on Jewish print culture; an extensive edited volume of Ukrainian-Jewish poetry in English translation; and a research project on Jewish life in the Middle East since 1800.

Some of those with canceled awards might make urgent pleas to Jewish foundations and seek to replace some of the canceled funding. Similarly, some of the humanities councils in any of the 50 states, which provide a wealth of cultural opportunities — often in out-of-the-way places and in underserved communities — may attempt to turn to private donors to try to replace what’s lost. But to default to the idea that some of these projects will still come to fruition, so it’s really not that bad, means accepting that the whole notion of public humanities is now defunct, yet another precious thing broken by Trump.

The NEH, established by an act of Congress in 1965, has advanced that notion because it understands that all Americans benefit from the chance to expand their understanding of history and culture — including the history and culture of the Jewish people. When we force Jewish-interest projects funded by the NEH to position themselves more exclusively within the Jewish world, we lose a meaningful opportunity to help broaden our shared American culture.

The public nature of the projects that the NEH has funded over the 60 years of its existence matters a great deal. It gives us more opportunities to connect with, and learn from, one another.

The grantees are carefully chosen by experts and laypersons, most of them evaluating proposals out of their own dedication to the public good. Many people assisted Harriet and me during our application process, making us rethink time and time again why it was that our project mattered to the greater public. I was looking forward to returning this favor for years to come.

My students at the University of Washington — a public institution — engaged with several of the translations in the class I taught last term, and their feedback helped the project become more publicly accessible. Humanistic projects are essential building blocks in the creation of a critically engaged public; with their help, we continue to be curious about what makes us richly different.

So, yes, my project will reach completion, despite this roadblock. But there are so many projects like it left to complete — projects that, if nurtured in an environment that continued to prize public humanities, would have a chance to have a markedly greater impact.

Harriet and I have translated works by seven different authors, four women and three men. There are stories about ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust, in places far less familiar to U.S. readers than Auschwitz and Treblinka. Between a quarter to a third of all Jews killed during the Holocaust were killed on Soviet territory. Many of them were gunned down close to their homes in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. Many were killed in the summer and autumn of 1941, before the Final Solution was announced by the Nazis at Wannsee in 1942 and before death camps were set up in Poland.

The texts we have brought into English, for the first time ever, are texts that I hope will help expand understandings — by Jews and non-Jews alike — of the lasting effects of genocide.

Why was our grant canceled? Was it because of our grant proposal’s use of the the word “genocide,” charged as it now is? It’s been tempting to play this guessing game over the past week. Why were any of the other projects canceled? Was it because some, like ours, lift up the voices of women — while others feature those of indigenous people, racial minorities, and other population groups that the current regime might dismiss as falling under the now-verboten rubric of DEI? Was it a focus on some aspect of history that goes against the grain of a familiar but oversimplified historical narrative?

In a way, as someone who grew up in the final years of the Soviet Union but still in the long and enduring shadow of Stalinism, I’m familiar with a version of this game. An instinct to want to be a step ahead of authoritarian logic kicks in, before we manage to realize that we might never know why exactly a given book was censored, what specific transgressions cost someone their job, or why precisely someone lost their life or was sent to the gulag.

When it comes to the current attack on the NEH, the likeliest reason that the Trump regime came for the agency funding public humanities, in its first hundred days in power, is that the promotion of humanistic thinking expands the public’s critical engagement. No autocrat or wanna-be autocrat in history was ever interested in allowing the latter to compete with them for attention.

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