Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump tried to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students—a move that was soon blocked by a federal judge. So, instead, on May 26, Trump floated the idea of taking US$3 billion of grant money, earmarked for Harvard’s scientific and engineering research deemed of national importance, and rerouting it to trade schools.
Nevermind the logistics—the Republican president has waged an all-out war on Ivy League education, and Jews are, once again, caught in the middle. The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has said the White House is “holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
But if you ask American Jewish academics, they’ll tell you the “fighting antisemitism” argument is a smokescreen to advance a different political agenda. “I don’t think the Trump administration’s response to it is anything other than a fig leaf for its attempt to crack down on the university writ large,” says David Schraub, an associate professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, on this week’s episode of The Jewish Angle. “We see that because when antisemitism, for whatever reason, isn’t available to them as a talking point on the given campus, they just switch to something else. The consistent point is the crackdown, and the justification comes and goes.”
Listen to this week’s episode above for more on how Jews are finding themselves used as pawns in a wider political struggle on modern American campuses.
Transcript
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, this is Phoebe Maltz Bovy. You’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN. So here in Canada, the fight against antisemitism is something that Jews are engaged in, at least many of us, with a handful of philo-Semitic allies. But there is not, at least as of April 24th when we’re recording this, any sort of top-down movement to purge antisemitism specifically.  So a sense that maybe not enough is happening from higher up has led some Jews in Canada to shift rightward in their politics, which in the Canadian context means, rather than voting NDP or Liberal, voting Conservative or just preferring sort of the platform of that party once the voting itself is done. And that is not the immediate issue.  But if you’re a Canadian Jew, you might be accustomed to speaking out against what you see as governmental inaction where antisemitism is concerned. But then what happens? And because I’m American, and I’m also Canadian, but because I’m looking at this kind of from both sides a little bit, my dual loyalty is here I look at what’s happening in the United States and there’s this jarring example of what can happen when a government takes action against antisemitism in full force.  So here to talk about this with us today is David Traub, an associate professor of law at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, and an expert in, among other areas, antisemitism and the law. He’s also a commentator and a writer whose work has appeared in arts and other outlets, but also somebody I’ve known through blogging for actual honest to goodness decades. Yes, we are that old. And he is still blogging at The Debate Link. We will have a link to this and other things David Schraub related in the show notes. But it was a Blue Sky post of David’s that prompted me to invite him onto this episode. So first of all, David, welcome to The Jewish Angle.
David Schraub: Good to be here. Thanks for having me. It has been a long, long time. I am alarmed at now thinking back at how long we have been running in the same blogging circles. Although I think this is the first time that we’ve, you know, interacted even virtually face to face.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Really? I think we once, I think I once interviewed you for a different publication, but maybe not with video. That’s possible.
David Schraub: Maybe it’s been a long time and I’m old and my memory’s going.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Fair enough. I mean, I noticed that we both have been blogging since 2004. So if you’re reading this and you were born in 2005, don’t tell us. We will feel too old. Yeah. So can I read what the post is, though, of yours that I really… I thought it was very astute, but also just like a point I had not seen made elsewhere and interesting for our purposes here. So you wrote one aspect of Trump’s antisemitism fig leaf I haven’t seen discussed. If you’re a Jewish student who does experience antisemitism but doesn’t want to blow up your college or get your classmates deported, you basically have no choice but to stay quiet and suffer in silence. Trump did that. Okay, so do you want to explain a little? What you sort of unpack that a bit for us?
David Schraub: Yeah, I think there’s been–and this even predates the current Trump administration–an alarming trend of people who hold themselves out as allies of Jews or Jewish students. They’re presenting themselves as standing in solidarity, but are really kind of making it almost impossible to be Jewish on campus. And I first started thinking about this with respect to the University of California, Los Angeles, and an open letter that Jewish students, and it was the Aquila leaders, it was people very much embedded in the mainstream of Jewish culture there, wrote to kind of. They said it was like a letter to Jews off campus or other people off campus and basically boiled down to, like, just stop. Stop trying to help us. Stop trying to support us. Don’t come here. Don’t march here. Don’t do any of these things. You’re making things worse. And, you know, I thought it was very powerful, except it wasn’t powerful at all because nobody listened to them. Right. The people who claimed to be supporting the Jews, right, didn’t care that they were making the lives of Jewish students worse. They didn’t care that they were discrediting them on campus. They didn’t care that they were isolating them from people who they still had relationships with, they still wanted to preserve relationships with. They wanted. They were trying to work things out. It was about their own agenda. And, you know, you look at various colleges where, you know, I remember at Berkeley there was a, you know, some antisemitism controversies there and a kind of a right-wing group pulled up a billboard truck with a big picture of Hitler. Like, oh, well now the Jewish students, I’m sure, feel a lot better, right, that they have to stare at Hitler outside their window every day while they walk to class. But it, you know, it puts them in an impossible position because for the non-Jewish students they see that as, oh, this is what it means when people say they’re fighting antisemitism. It means Hitler billboard trucks. It means, you know, kind of rabble rousers threatening our budget. Right. And so anytime a Jewish student tries to raise an issue, even not in that context, there’s that immediate worry, oh, this is going to lead us to some very bad, very dark places. And the Jewish students who know, honestly that kind of these outside groups really don’t care about them, don’t care what they think, right, are left at a loss and they end up feeling very, very isolated. And that’s something that I’ve heard, you know, from Jewish students in Portland and ones around the country as well. And I think it’s a really, it’s a dangerous phenomenon, but it’s just also a really depressing phenomenon which really is kind of the nutshell characterization of all of 2025 when you think about it.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But I was wondering how much of this just has to do with like the sort of political sort of weirdness of it all where Jews for the most part vote Democrat, but fighting antisemitism has become this right-wing coded activity. So is that some of it for the students as well?
David Schraub: I think there’s something to that, and it’s always a bit complicated because I don’t, I think it’s not fair, and I think it’s incorrect, to say that liberals have not fought antisemitism, have not prioritised fighting antisemitism. The Biden administration’s national strategy for combating antisemitism I think was a really important step. And so I think this idea, you know, that it’s only Republicans, even, even if we granted that they’re doing it in good faith, which I don’t know if that’s a concession we should make, is a little, is maybe a little too much of a concession.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right, right, Yeah. I mean, I, I don’t mean to be clear, I don’t mean that I think that only right-wingers fight endeavour. I mean like if you put in your let, like put it just very simply, if you have in your bio and like Instagram. So let’s not say X versus Blue Sky or something, but just something that’s like, politically it could go either way. And you put like fighting antisemitism, what would you assume is that person’s politics?
David Schraub: Right. And that’s very old. Right. I don’t know if you, if you ever read.
David Schraub: It’s an old anthology from the 80s, Nice Jewish Girls. But there is…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’m a nice Jewish girl from the 80s.
David Schraub: Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’re a radical lesbian, Nice Jewish Girl, which is what the anthology is a collection of. But, well, yeah, you know, it’s still a very interesting book. One of the things they talk about in that book, and again, this is from the 80s, is how one views themselves as a Jew. Have you silenced yourself talking about antisemitism because you think it’s right-wing coded? You assume people will think you’re conservative when you talk about antisemitism. This has been going on for a long time. There’s this deep mismatch in the United States, where the partisan divide is broader than in almost any other country. You have a Jewish community that is broadly left of center and a public understanding of Jews that views them as more conservative than they are.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That’s interesting. Just to compare with Canada, my sense is that fighting antisemitism is more right-coded in Canada than in the US, or was until about 5 minutes ago with all of this.
David Schraub: Yeah, I mean, there’s been efforts to talk about the importance of fighting antisemitism. It’s almost bizarre to have to say this, but on the far right, people who shoot up synagogues, that has to be a priority. Recognizing that is a serious danger to the Jewish community. It’s amazing how difficult it is to get that thought to penetrate. I remember Bari Weiss wrote her book, How to Fight Antisemitism.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Was that the title? Yes, I reviewed it. I remember this one.
David Schraub: And she talked about why am I focusing so much on left-wing antisemitism? The claim was it’s more insidious than right-wing antisemitism. The idea is that everybody knows shooting up a synagogue is wrong, but left-wing antisemitism is more subtle, harder to spot, so we need more attention on it. Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to believe the most insidious form of antisemitism, hard to spot, not on the public radar, is mainstream right-wing antisemitism. That’s the one nobody talks about. We’ll discuss a synagogue shooting or what someone from the squad or a left-wing Democratic activist says about Israel, but when it comes to mainstream Republican Party conspiracy about George Soros, globalists, and replacement theory, it gets less attention than almost anything else.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I wonder why that would be. I was gonna say, back to just one more thing about your post. When you write about if a student, a Jewish student, experiences antisemitism, I want to drill down on that word experience. A lot is happening around the question of the experience of antisemitism. Do you mean something that would meet an objective standard, or could it be like a feeling?
David Schraub: We’ve struggled to come up with an objective standard of what is or isn’t antisemitism. I don’t think the quest is futile, but talking about experiences isn’t just in a cavalier fashion. Oh, if a Jew says they’ve experienced antisemitism, you have to believe them. It’s sometimes said other minority groups get that, but I don’t think any group actually does, nor is it feasible. We should take that sensation, that claimed experience seriously as a starting point of conversation. It doesn’t mean we defer to it or stop the conversation. We shouldn’t assume it’s opportunistic. Right now, just raising the issue of antisemitism concretely threatens to unleash serious political repression. We don’t have that space to do what we should be doing, which is starting conversations, thinking about things. We’re racing towards conclusions not fully warranted or grotesquely disproportionate, skipping over the work we should be doing. Many Jewish students recognize that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: What level of culpability, if any, do Jewish students who feel microaggressed, a term you’ve written about academically, have? If a Jewish student feels microaggressed by encampments or wants a safe space, is it on them that Trump is doing what he’s doing?
David Schraub: I don’t think that’s mostly fair. We can talk about individual.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Circumstances. And to be clear, I don’t think, as I’ve seen this argued.
David Schraub: Yeah. There’s a difference between someone on stage at the RNC directly appealing to this response and culpability as a different situation. Otherwise, no. What we’re seeing is a hijacking. While I understand why these students, in the context of mass deportations and budget slashing, aren’t seen as primary victims, they’re being victimized too. They’re being silenced and doubly silenced. Experiencing antisemitism and also being deprived of the resources they need to work through it.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’m thinking of writings by Sam Adler Bell on this—Jews aren’t the main victims when a non-Jew is deported, obviously. But what you’re saying about different levels of effects is true. Regarding encampments and all this, the complexity of marginalised groups in conflict wasn’t like previous social justice requests on campuses, where it was clear a group was marginalised. There could be discussions on appropriate accommodations, but not whether they count, which seemed to happen here. So I’m just wondering whether the way all of this has played out has changed how you see the role of the university, whether in making official statements about issues in the news or in fact in, you know, promises to students of a safe environment.
David Schraub: Yeah, it hasn’t changed that much. In some ways, it’s retrenched some things that I already kind of felt, and I feel more strongly now. You know, there’s something, a concept that’s been taking it on the chin recently, which is this idea of institutional neutrality. But I think there’s a lot to it, and I’ve always kind of felt that way. There are a lot of independent loci of power and of speech at a university. I never quite understood why it was so important that my dean or my university president issue a statement on October 7. I never expected them to do it, honestly. But it’s not like that was the only way that I could feel supported. I never fully understood why it was so essential that they be the ones to stand out. I think it’s perfectly capable of disaggregating and distributing some of these networks of support away from the institution itself and into your peers and colleagues. I think that remains the case rather than putting university leadership in, frankly, an impossible situation.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right. So, the statement saying, I think a lot of people, myself included, are kind of like, okay, then maybe just like not do the pronouncements as a kind of simple fix. But this sort of safe spaces aspect seems a little more complicated maybe.
David Schraub: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is a term that sometimes casts more heat than light because, I mean, what is it when people talk about a safe space? What are they actually talking about, right? Oftentimes, what we’re talking about are the sort of more distributed elements of university life. A Hillel, for example, is setting up certain rules and policies designed to make it into, you know, not spending all of our time, every second of every day, debating, should Israel exist? You can retreat, which…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Is why Hillels are sometimes not so popular.
David Schraub: It is. And I think that’s a problem. We can debate whether Hillel is drawing the lines correctly, and I think that’s an important conversation. I think the answer is often no. What I really wish is that Hillel would be more democratic in making those decision-makings rather than it being brought down from up on high. But the basic idea, which is that not every moment of every day needs to be about rehashing this issue, has to sit hand in hand. The reason why that’s important, the reason why those places of retreat and respite are important, is because in other places in the university, you are expected to have to encounter these difficult and tough ideas. The whole university could never be a safe space. That doesn’t work, and I don’t think that’s something that anybody serious claims it can be.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I think there had been, in the 2010s, this kind of idealistic hope that it would be for other marginalized groups. I don’t say this in the kind of “every other group got this, why not Jews?” But I don’t think it’s that every other group got this by any means. I think it was okay to demand it, and you wouldn’t be seen as out of your mind for demanding it.
David Schraub: Yeah, I mean, and I think that where that demand was made on this more holistic level, the whole university should just be free of this, it wasn’t feasible. It wasn’t feasible, and it never came to be because it couldn’t have come to be.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I think what happened here is what, I think that specifically this situation where there are different marginalized groups with competing conflicting goals sort of shows the flaws in it and why it couldn’t perhaps.
David Schraub: Yeah, that’s definitely one reason why it couldn’t come to pass. But I think one thing that you’re getting at is the idea that some members, particularly when we’re talking about 18 to 22-year-olds who are just starting out on this sort of journey and learning some of these contexts, are sometimes going to make unfeasible demands that, you know, when you actually work your way through it, can’t be put into practice. There’s nothing abnormal about that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, there’s nothing abnormal about it. I think there have been arguments to the effect that the 2010s, sort of long 2010s going up to about 2023, was this moment of really idealizing youth and saying, like, we need to learn from the young people. They have the moral certainty; they know what they’re doing; we need to defer to them. Now we’re seeing a backlash to that. I would argue, and I suspect you would as well, worse than the original thing. But I do think that, like, I guess what I’m saying is I don’t think I hallucinated the 2010s.
David Schraub: Well, you know, I mean, we were more plausibly the youth of that period.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Were we? No, but I think I was like, no, not millennials. Wasn’t it Gen Z or… I guess I’m getting my years wrong. But one thing I wanted to ask you though is, so do you think that campuses, that camp… We’ll just stick with the US for now, since that’s the example you’re coming from, were insufficiently attentive to antisemitism during the encampment protests? As in, do you see this as the Trump administration doing overreach, or is the whole thing about just basically destroying higher ed out of the hopes of returning the US to some kind of manufacturing and trad wife nation?
David Schraub: Yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And then using Jews as a pretext?
David Schraub: A couple of elements there. One very important one. Campuses are a “they” and not an “it,” right? I don’t know if we can make some overarching claim about what campuses writ large were doing. How do we assess Columbia versus Carleton College versus Lewis and Clark? They’re all dealing with this in different ways and with different degrees of success and dealing with different challenges. I don’t think there is some universal answer of, you know, were they handling this correctly?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, how about… What if we speak about the ones that are so much in the news, right? Like Columbia, Harvard, these ones.
David Schraub: Yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Which is still a “they” and not an “it,” but it is still…
David Schraub: And I have more sympathy than one might expect for university leadership at those schools who I think were put in some close-to-impossible situations. The way I sometimes describe it is they were dealt a bad hand, and they played it poorly. Columbia was just in a very difficult spot. I think one thing we learned was that sending in a SWAT team to just crack protesters’ skulls doesn’t work. It didn’t work, and that’s what made this whole thing go from just being at Columbia to being a national phenomenon. So beyond national, an international phenomenon.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah.
David Schraub: Right. And so I think there’s a lesson there for the people who are just like, oh, well, if university administrators just stop being babies and, you know, crack down on these malcontents, we wouldn’t have this problem. Sometimes the crackdown leads to a bigger backlash, and I think there were some people on the inside who recognize that risk. Right. I do think, you know, there’s definitely, you know, it’s a longstanding issue that Jews haven’t always been fully incorporated into these discussions about how we create kind of a diverse and inclusive campus environment. There’s a sort of assumption that they’re already on the inside and so they don’t need anything.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I think it’s more than that. Oh, it’s more than a sort of assumption. I think this is, you know, I don’t think.
David Schraub: Yeah, I don’t want to overdraw with Tu Burrata Vibra, the head of our kind of DEI office at Lewis and Clark at the time, who, at the time, anyway, she’s since moved to a different position, I thought was very well attuned to this and really did have a good, her finger on the pulse in a way that I thought was very, very helpful. But there’s a lot of situations where that isn’t the case. Sometimes it’s because, you know, people only have so much expertise. Right. And it makes sense that it might be focused on other areas. Where I think that turns into a problem isn’t where the expertise is lacking. It’s where the expertise is lacking and people assume that they already know what they need to know. It’s a Dunning-Kruger problem.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right.
David Schraub: And so you do have certain situations where people not only don’t know that much about Jews but think they know everything there is to know about Jews. And then you start seeing some really kind of toxic responses. I think that’s very real. So I do think that there were issues of anti-Semitism that were really kind of working their way through the campus body like a kidney stone. I think though, that the pain was not something that was invented or made up. I think that is something that is often mistaken in the conversations now. The Trump backlash is people are saying, oh, it’s these invented issues of anti-Semitism. No, they’re real issues of anti-Semitism. What’s invented is the idea that the Trump administration is interested in responding to them. That’s where the last thing you said is that even though I think some of the anti-Semitism issues are very real, I don’t think the Trump administration’s response to it is anything other than a fig leaf for its attempt to crack down on the university writ large. We see that because where anti-Semitism, for whatever reason, isn’t available to them as a talking point on the given campus, they just switch to something else. Right. The consistent point is the crackdown, and the justification comes and goes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I have only one more question for you, but because it’s just. I keep thinking about this clip, and I keep watching it. So it’s where Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL went on CNN with Dana Bash, and she asked him, what is the ADL doing to pressure the White House to give students who are being arrested due process? So that’s her question. He answered, starting, the answer begins, at the ADL, it’s our job to protect the Jewish people. This made the rounds with a lot of people saying, like, you know, unimpressed with his remark about these being Hamasniks, which I share the sentiment of not being impressed about that part of it, but I’m wondering if there is any sense in which, like in a small sense, perhaps, or maybe not so small. This is kind of true that, like I, as an opinion writer, as a whatever, pundit, whatever I am, like, I speak out about what Trump’s doing and the due process aspect of this. Every group is different. I wouldn’t say that the main goal of a group trying to free Palestine is, I think it should put a check on anti-Semitism in its ranks, but I don’t think it is an anti-Semitism fighting organization. What is the ADL’s role or just generally, how much does the organized movement to fight anti-Semitism now need to basically just pivot to renouncing to basically saying what Trump is doing is not in our name and saying that on loop?
David Schraub: Yeah. So on the one hand, the ADL is a very, is sort of the wrong organization to be making this point because it’s always viewed itself and presented itself and acted as if it had a broader ambit, that it’s not just an anti-Semitism organization, but I think I had wondered about that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I had wondered about that.
David Schraub: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that’s been a very consistent part of its identity for many, many years and a subject of some conservative critics who are like, oh, it should only be talking about anti-Semitism. Why does it do these other things? The now kind of wobbliness on that is kind of symptomatic of a broader disarray that has occurred under Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent leadership, where the ADL is just, it really seems to be floundering, honestly. That’s a very problematic element for the Jewish community that plays a large role historically in protecting the broader way of answering the question. I think if you’re an anti-Semitism organization, it is always in your bailiwick when people are talking about anti-Semitism. Wrong, right. I would agree with, at least arguably, if you only focus on anti-Semitism and people were being deported over their LGBTQ advocacy, you might say, not that you support it. It’s just like a different organization’s job. We’re focusing on this, you focus on that. But when again, this is what is being defined in the public eye as what it means to fight anti-Semitism, then you do have an obligation to challenge that. It’s a moral obligation, but it should be a self-serving kind of obligation too, because it threatens your identity also, it threatens your job too. This is a mistake, I think, that several analogous organizations have made where they’ve really ended up ceding too much power to largely non-Jewish institutions and actors, always thinking, oh, well, these are allies, these are useful sources of support, but if they ever go too far, we can kind of rope them back into line. They discover, you know, they’ll always recognize us as the leaders, and then they discover that actually they don’t really care what you think. If the ADL did try to say no to the Trump administration, no, this is too far, this is going too far. What they would discover is the Trump administration doesn’t care. They’re impotent, that the opinions of Jews are utterly irrelevant to the Trump administration’s purported fight against anti-Semitism. They are a speed bump at best. This whole idea is that they love to fight on behalf of Jews in quotes. This idea of Jews they have in their mind, they don’t really like Jews that much. They find Jews kind of inconvenient and very annoying and obnoxiously progressive, and they would be delighted if they could just be left in peace to fight anti-Semitism without having to deal with these pesky Jews telling them no.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That was fantastic. I think that should be where we leave it, because what else can be said but David Schraub , thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you?
David Schraub: I’m on BlueSky, just @schraubd.bsky.social‬. And then the Debate Lake is the longstanding blog that is still on Blogspot because I am really, really, really, really old school.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I like the retro of that. Well, thank you so much for coming on The Jewish Angle.
David Schraub: Yes, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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