As head of the nonprofit Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Kenneth Marcus was early — critics would say premature — in using aggressive legal tactics to fight antisemitism on college campuses and other public spaces.
The former assistant secretary for civil rights in the first Trump administration, Marcus remembers when other Jewish organizations said his organization’s tactics — which include suing universities for not adequately addressing antisemitism and challenging educators and universities under the Education Department’s Title VI civil rights statute — was counterproductive and, in conflating anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism, targeted speech protected by the First Amendment.
The liberal Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which includes a number of Jewish groups, opposed his nomination to the administration post, saying he used the Title VI complaint process “to chill a particular political point of view.”
Others objected to the center’s tone. An American Jewish Committee official internally called an op-ed he wrote about campus antisemitism in 2022 “inflammatory.”
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Nowadays, more than a year into Israel’s war with Hamas and amid widespread complaints about anti-Israel activism on college campuses and antisemitism in the streets, he is seeing a shift.
“It is my consistent sense that my approach to campus antisemitism is shared by a very wide swath of the Jewish community, including Jewish communal organizations from center right to center left,” he said in an interview. “There was a time some years ago where that wasn’t necessarily the case.”
In a profile earlier this year, calling him “The Man Who Helped Redefine Campus Antisemitism,” the New York Times wrote that “his tactics have been widely copied by other groups.”
Among the groups that in the past year have partnered with the Brandeis Center (which has no affiliation with Brandeis University) are the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America and the AJC — the very group that circulated an internal memo criticizing Marcus in 2022.
Marcus isn’t alone in seeing a change in what American Jews see as ideologically mainstream. With the incoming Trump administration promising a crackdown on the kind of campus activism that left many students, parents and observers feeling alienated and isolated, a historically liberal Jewish community is increasingly embracing goals and tactics often seen at odds with historically liberal positions.
“I think that we [Jews] became alarmed at some of the initiatives happening in universities, happening in other settings, and are moving to figure out a way to limit that movement,” said Steven Windmueller, emeritus professor of Jewish communal studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. “And in the process, it has also shifted the debate and context of where we are on free speech.”
And it’s not just free speech, said Windmueller. Jews who felt burned by the left’s harsh criticism of Israel since the start of the war are questioning the wisdom of joining coalitions with groups with whom they have been traditionally aligned, on issues like civil rights, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. Jews who historically have embraced diversity at elite universities — in part owing to memories of having been excluded themselves — are joining longtime right-wing critics of campus DEI — or diversity, equity and inclusion – efforts.
“The failure of many of these DEI offices to effectively respond to the crisis right now is quite an indictment — it just is,” Jonathan Rosenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider in December 2023. Even though ADL supports the goals of DEI, it and other organizations are asking whether the offices adequately protect Jewish students and if they support an ideology of oppressed vs. oppressor that turns Israel and its supporters into pariahs.
Under a second Trump administration, Windmueller said, conservative Jewish groups are certainly going to enjoy increased influence and score policy successes. But even beyond the most conservative Jewish voters, “I think it may happen with at least a cadre of Jews who will feel comfortable, or at least come to terms with, the new political realities,” said Windmueller. “And part of that is that they are looking for someone, and maybe that’s Donald Trump, who will protect their kids on campuses.”
Granted, as the sizable majority of Jews who voted for Kamala Harris in the presidential election showed, such shifts aren’t drastic or widespread. The largest liberal Jewish groups are not about to embrace a right-wing agenda.
But Jewish communal professionals must navigate even subtle changes in the political winds, in order to stay relevant and effective.
Pressures to partner with unconventional allies and keep a distance from many traditional ones are being felt by Jewish community relations professionals around the country, according to Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a support group for the local Jewish representative bodies known as community relations councils.
“Certainly in a number of communities, there are parents and other stakeholders who are rightfully concerned about what their kids are facing on campus or in K-12 schools and sometimes take a very reactive approach,” she said. “So how to balance that with the policies and solutions that we know actually work is a challenge for many Jewish professionals right now.”
As an example of a reactive response, she offered the support that some Jews have offered to Trump’s pledge to expel or deport campus activists who are strident critics of Israel.
Spitalnik said Jewish safety isn’t assured by abandoning values like inclusivity, pluralism and democracy, but by doubling down on them. By the same token, she urges local leaders to resist some “very loud voices” saying Jews should walk away from coalitions that have been unsupportive of the Jewish community or deeply critical of Israel since the war.
“To me, and I think to many doing this work of community relations and coalition-building, the pain and isolation some Jews are feeling is proof of the need to invest more deeply in coalition work … and to do the work of civil rights that is core to our values and safety,” she said.
Some groups associated with liberal positions do not see a contradiction between assertive and even aggressive tactics in fighting antisemitism and sustaining their core issues, including civil rights, immigration, LGBT rights and abortion.
“I think most Jews care about free speech. I think most Jews care about the freedom to protest,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. “They know that Jews need those freedoms to be safe in America, while at the same time, they want there to be smart policies to keep all minorities safe, particularly for us, the Jewish minority.”
Pesner says the RAC has been in conversation with partners in the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, talking about keeping Jews and all students safe while protecting freedom of expression and protest.
“We try really hard to take a nuanced view, and we try to be with other partners to help people balance free speech and civil liberties along with defense and safety,” he said.
But while many groups strive for balance, each week brings another clash between what Jews might call defense and safety, and others consider an attack on free speech and academic freedom.
At Cornell University, the interim president is facing blowback from higher education groups after he appeared to endorse the views of a Jewish instructor who felt a course on Gaza being taught in the school’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies program was biased and inflammatory. No action was taken to shut down the course or censure the instructor, but higher education groups said the president had no business saying the course lacked “openness and objectivity,” and that his criticism would have a chilling effect on other faculty.
Menachem Rosensaft, the instructor who said the Gaza course amounted to “antisemitism on steroids,” said the controversy had nothing to do with academic freedom. Instead, he blamed a “hypersensitivity and fragility on the part of those who don’t want to hear any criticism of courses” like the one on Gaza.
“No one is arguing that the course should be shut down,” he said in an interview. “However, I believe strongly that it is part of my academic freedom and my First Amendment right to express my views on the legitimacy of that course.”
Rosensaft, a former World Jewish Congress official who teaches classes on law, antisemitism and the Holocaust at Cornell and Columbia University, can point to his liberal bona fides. In 1988, he was part of a delegation of Jewish leaders who met in Stockholm with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, breaking a Jewish communal taboo when Israel itself refused to recognize what it considered a terrorist group.
Rosensaft said he finds it “amusing” that a group such as CAMERA, a right-wing Jewish media watchdog, agrees with him on the Cornell course. But at a time when Jews are being threatened on campuses, he said, “we find ourselves in need of allies — not for a political goal, not for a political purpose, but in order to keep [the campuses] from blowing up.
“I’m not a supporter of President Trump, but if, as a consequence of his election, the Department of Education will use Title VI to protect Jewish students on campus nationwide, that is a positive thing,” he said.
Even in the deep blue Bay Area of Northern California, Tyler Gregory, the executive director of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, senses a difference between Trump’s first term and his looming second.
“The first time Trump was elected, I think our community embraced the resistance mantra, like a lot of the country,” he said. “This time, I think our community wants to call balls and strikes. Where Trump stands up for the Jewish community, including in higher ed, we’re going to support that, and where he undermines our community by aligning with certain problematic far right groups, we’re going to call that out.”
Gregory also does not see a contradiction between calling out antisemitic or threatening speech on campus, and a belief in free speech. In a recent essay in the San Francisco Chronicle, he criticized local public schools, writing, “That parents had to resort to filing civil rights complaints is not surprising given lackluster and slow responses to antisemitism by some school districts.”
“If free speech is a core value of the university, why aren’t [ administrators] using it to call out antisemitism and isolate these bad actors?” Gregory told JTA. “If they’re not willing to do that, then how are we supposed to take this value seriously from the administrators?”
At the Brandeis Center, Marcus too says he believes very strongly in the importance of free speech and the First Amendment. “And for that reason we frequently decline cases that we believe would require an encroachment upon constitutionally protected freedoms,” he said.
That being said, his organization is busier than ever, filing Title VI complaints, suing universities and opening a K-12 antisemitism hotline.
“Our workload has increased exponentially, and our staff has increased arithmetically, and we have gotten very significantly increased [financial] support,” he said. “But this is related to the much, much greater increase in the number and complexity of the challenges that we’ve been asked to address.”
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