The White House is declaring war on campus DEI — except for Jews

Columbia students organize dueling memorials and rallies both for Israelis and Palestinians on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack. Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images

Joel Swanson September 3, 2025

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Columbia University agreed in July to pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it failed to stop the harassment of Jewish students on campus. In order to restore the university’s federal research funding, Columbia also agreed to submit to more federal oversight to ensure race and ethnic background are not used as criteria for hiring or admission.

There is, however, one exception to the White House’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion crusade, and that is for Jewish students. In the same document in which Columbia agreed not to “maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes,” the university also agreed to create “an additional administrator” to “serve as a liaison to students concerning antisemitism issues.”

In short, DEI is banned at Columbia, except for Jewish students, who get to have a specially appointed DEI officer.

The same exception was also mandated at the small liberal arts college in New York, where I am the sole permanent professor of Jewish studies. The college received a directive from the Department of Education during the last academic year informing us that we are no longer permitted to educate students about racism and implicit biases during freshmen orientation. The directive, however, came with one significant carve-out: We are still permitted to educate incoming students about antisemitism.

If this sounds completely bizarre, you’re not alone. Northwestern University law professor Paul Gowder was incredulous by the terms of the statement, writing on Bluesky: “Columbia MUST create a DEI office for Jewish folks but MAY NOT create a DEI office for anyone else? Am I reading this right?”

Antisemitism, in other words, gets to be the special exception to the Trump administration’s broad-based anti-DEI campaign. Jews get to be the sole specially protected minority group receiving special privileges from the federal government.

There is a long history in Europe of certain Jews known as “court Jews” being protected by Christian rulers in exchange for providing commercial and financial services. These Jews would receive improved social standing and temporary protections — but these advantages were always provisional, and could be taken away if times got tough and the ruler needed a scapegoat.

There is a lesson in this history for American Jews today. While those who are understandably concerned about antisemitism on campus may welcome this administration’s directive, Jews and those concerned about antisemitism should be careful what they wish for. Singling out Jews on campus as the only specially protected minority group that receive DEI programs will not go well for us.

This directive not only cynically divides Jews from other marginalized people, at a time when hate crimes are rising, but it makes it impossible to even educate students effectively about the manifold forms that antisemitism may take.

Consider, for example, trying to teach students about the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting or the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting, but being banned from educating about the links between antisemitism and the xenophobic hatred of immigrants espoused by both shooters. Both blamed Jews for supposedly engineering non-white immigration to the United States in a bid to undermine the white race, an example of the ways in which anti-immigrant hatred and antisemitism are intertwined in the far-right imagination.

The thought of teaching about antisemitism in this way is absurd, and yet this is what we will be forced to do if we are required to teach about antisemitism but banned from teaching about other bigotries.

Far from expanding the definition of what constitutes antisemitism, the federal government’s policies on antisemitism are actually shrinking this definition considerably, so that only anti-Israel protests will be defined as antisemitic. One Jewish Columbia student I spoke to recently told me that in a class about the Bible, several Christian students said that the difference between Jews and Christians is that Christians believe in a loving God and Jews believe in a harsh, judgmental God. When the Jewish student tried to report this as antisemitic, the university was uninterested because Christian theological anti-Judaism does not fit with the kind of antisemitism that they are thinking about right now.

With its intrusion into the internal workings of Columbia, the Trump administration will not look at anti-Israel protests and political movements in a nuanced fashion, evaluating them to see which are and are not antisemitic. Instead, the administration will claim the right to determine what Jews are supposed to believe about the state of Israel.

We know this because it is already happening at other universities. In its attempt to conform with government dictates about acceptable political opinions on the state of Israel, Harvard University’s antisemitism task force banned the courses of Jewish Israeli professor Atalia Omer for contributing to campus antisemitism – despite the fact that Omer “designed these courses as a Jewish scholar exploring the complexity of the region through multiple perspectives.” Harvard banned her classes, Omer believes, because the university effectively determined her to be “the wrong kind of Jew.”

When policies against antisemitism are being used to silence Jewish academics, something has gone badly wrong.

As a professor of Jewish history, I teach a diverse range of Jewish students at my college. I teach students who arrive at college and profoundly question in my classes the views on Israel and Zionism they were raised with; others defend their opinions.

I always tell them that there is a long history of Jews grappling with these questions and coming to divergent answers to them. I reassure them that wherever they end up, my students are in the best tradition of Jews grappling with complicated questions about history and identity.

I have seen my students in class, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have sensitive discussions about these questions. I have seen them disagree respectfully, engaging with and learning from one another. But they are less likely to do this if they fear they could get in trouble with the federal government for doing so.

Already, I have heard from students afraid to engage in class on these questions for fear of getting reported to the government. One student told me that they decided not to contribute to a class discussion on the intellectual history of Zionism, for fear that something they said could be taken out of context and reported to the government. I fear that in the coming academic year, these fears and difficulties will only grow.

My Jewish students deserve the right to ask complicated questions about their history and identity without worrying about getting in trouble with the federal government. All students deserve the same freedom of intellectual inquiry. And I fear that in its capitulation to the federal government’s extortion campaign, Columbia University has put all of our academic freedom in danger.