What Trump Should Do to Fight Fight Antisemitism

Even without new laws, the incoming administration has plenty of tools at its disposal.

The Oct. 7 massacre revealed big problems with our institutions of higher education, particularly the so-called elite ones. It’s amazing that the heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country. And yet that’s where calls for the annihilation of Israel began even before the IDF went into Gaza—which has exposed the deep rot in academia.

As Bill Ackman put it in a revelatory essay the day Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues. This “oldest hatred” is always a leading indicator of assorted underlying pathologies, and here that means everything from cancel culture to ideological indoctrination, intellectual corruption to moral decay.

We’ve seen a subversion of the core mission of universities to seek truth and develop human knowledge, and of classical liberal values like free speech, due process and equality under the law. It’s been a shift from education to activism.

An anti-Israel student protester waves a large Palestinian flag at their encampment on the Columbia University campus, April 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)

The root cause of antisemitism on campus is a noxious postmodern ideology that contends that truth is subjective and must be viewed through lenses of race, gender and other identity categories. Your rights and freedoms depend on whether you’re part of a class deemed oppressor or oppressed. There’s also a false narrative of decolonization.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, wrote a year ago that as a 70-year-old Jewish man, “never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.” Some of us were less surprised given the anti-Israel, anti-American and generally anti-Western ideology that has taken root in higher education.

But all is not lost. Even apart from social and cultural fights against illiberalism, there’s a vast panoply of civil rights and other laws that can be marshaled to push back on the abuses and disorder the latest incarnation of antisemitism has wrought. As the most pro-Israel president in American history is set to return to office—and the only one with Jewish grandchildren—here are some concrete things that Donald Trump can do.