This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

The campus antisemitism crisis can look like an endless barrage of disturbing incidents, so my coverage is often rooted in a search for patterns. What do the national studies tell us about the scale of the problem? What antisemitism definitions are schools implementing? What is the federal government telling universities they must do to help Jewish students?

But this type of coverage relies on the relevant actors behaving in consistent ways: If you say it’s illegal for a school to provide resources for any minority groups — as the Trump administration has done — then how do you maintain programs meant to help Jewish students?

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If you say that the Florida State student whose case I wrote about last week committed an antisemitic hate crime, does that mean the government’s official position is that it’s antisemitic to say “F–k Israel”? Or to say “Free Palestine”? Or that it’s antisemitic to assault someone during an argument about Israel if that person is Jewish?

The answers to these questions should help us understand the government’s approach. Maybe the White House thinks that “woke” diversity programs make campuses hostile toward Jewish students, so a blanket ban on them will help Jews even if it means a school no longer celebrates Jewish American Heritage Month.

Or maybe the government has decided — as a federal judge recently ruled — that attacking the many symbols of the Israeli state, which often include the Star of David, is a de facto expression of antisemitism.

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But rather than stake out a clear position on these questions that can be applied in every case, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department are operating on a more ad hoc basis and declining to answer the questions I’ve sent them inquiring about their rationale.

Diversity is banned for everyone, but we’re still going to sign a settlement mandating some diversity for Jews because we think it’s important. And we aren’t going to explain exactly why the Florida State incident was antisemitic, but we think it was and so we’re proceeding accordingly.

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For Jews who were baffled by why the Biden administration didn’t take a more aggressive approach to campus antisemitism, this tact must seem like a breath of fresh air. Biden’s Education Department often seemed mired in the arcane legal rules that governed how his department could compel schools to improve the climate for Jewish students.

There were rule-making procedures and public comment periods and remedial opportunities for any institution facing the loss of federal funds, and his staff had an obligation under the law to investigate the conditions for all students on campus, not only Jewish ones.

And they were almost equally unwilling to state clearly whether, say, anti-Zionism was antisemitic.

Cold comfort for people watching clips of demonstrators taking over campus quads or harassing Jewish students who wanted to know: Why couldn’t the government just do something?

Now the Education Department has been restructured with a special focus on helping Jewish students and the Justice Department is literally basing its civil rights investigations off what viral posts its division chief sees on X each morning.

The law says the federal government must go through a lengthy process before it can suspend funding to colleges and universities that violate civil rights laws, but the Trump administration has skipped over that process to yank billions from schools across the country.

Critics of this approach caution that the result may be a rather brittle regime of protections for Jewish students the administration is trying to protect. If you allow the civil rights enforcement arm of the Education Department to wither, who is going to enforce your sweeping settlements? The federal regulations that take months or years to implement are generally far more durable and harder for a future administration to swiftly dismantle. Universities are also more likely to adapt to comply with these rules — creating new offices with new employees — because they know they’re going to stick around.

Trump’s approach has yielded the kind of response from universities that some Jewish students craved under Biden. The notion that university presidents only began taking things seriously once Trump got into office has been echoed by pro-Israel students on many campuses.

But some former Education Department staffers have cautioned that this strategy of leveraging maximum pressure in unpredictable ways may yield superficial wins that schools may only pretend to comply with, or that will immediately be rolled back by the next administration.

And it’s not only a liberal successor who might unwind some of Trump’s most aggressive measures to crack down on animus toward Israel. The right flank of the MAGA base — long wary of Jews in general — is increasingly skeptical of special protections for Israel.

I was struck by how many irate responses to Bondi’s announcement that she was investigating the Florida State student came not from progressives but from Trump supporters.

“You can’t control people’s feelings,” replied Cassandra MacDonald, who helped organize the DeploraBall to celebrate Trump’s 2017 victory. “You f—ing people are becoming worse than BLM.”

In failing to articulate exactly how and why she — and the administration — are seeking to address antisemitism, Bondi is opening the door for her aggressive actions to be reversed as swiftly as she has implemented them.

This story was originally published on the Forward.