You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Six witnesses presented to the House Judiciary Committee about free speech and antisemitism on college campuses on Wednesday. Protesters also filled the hearing room.
House Judiciary GOP
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans agreed that antisemitism is a problem on college campuses—but that’s where the consensus ended. While questioning a panel of six witnesses—three antisemitism experts, a Jewish student at Cornell University and two leaders of conservative student organizations—the lawmakers sparred over what’s driving the current spike in antisemitism as well as what the federal government can do to ensure Jewish students feel safe on campus.
Among Democrats, the proposed strategy for addressing the issue is to increase funding to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which fields complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and nationality, including against Jewish students. That would improve the office’s ability to handle what has become a significant influx of complaints about antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“When you’re in government, budgets are a statement of your values,” said Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat and one of several committee members who argued for increased funding to OCR. “How we spend money demonstrates what we really care about, and we should care about the rise in hateful speech and dehumanizing speech in America [in] general and, specifically, as is the topic of this hearing, on college and university campuses.”
At Balint’s prompting, witness Stacy Burdett, an antisemitism expert who used to work for the Anti-Defamation League, warned of the ramifications of cutting OCR funding at this time.
“We know that when hate crime victims and students have no place to call, that’s a secondary victimization. It means the law enforcement can’t respond to you; it means you have no recourse,” she said. “Where we have data about hate, and the Office for Civil Rights does data collection on what’s happening in schools … when we know what’s happening, we can intervene.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are seeking to ax the office’s budget by $35 million as part of a slew of cuts to education included in the 2024 Labor–Health and Human Services spending bill, which the House is slated to consider in the near future. They did not offer a counterproposal to increasing OCR funding; most were more interested in discussing campus attacks on conservative speech.
The hearing was the public’s first insight into how the nation’s lawmakers view ongoing tensions on college campuses, where discord between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian student groups has grown to a fever pitch since Oct. 7. Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe as pro-Palestinian groups have interrupted vigils and demonstrations, shared pro-Hamas statements on social media and displayed controversial slogans around campus. At the same time, pro-Palestinian students have reported a rise in Islamophobia and faced doxing and other backlash for their views, which they argue are critical of the Israeli government but not inherently antisemitic.
Nationwide, the Anti-Defamation League reported that in the weeks following the Oct. 7 attack, nearly four times as many instances of harassment, vandalism and assault directed at Jewish people were reported as in the same period in 2022. Also, in the weeks following the attack, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said reports of Islamophobic incidents were the highest since 2015, when then presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
One representative, Tom Tiffany, a Wisconsin Republican, pushed back on the idea that increasing OCR funding would benefit students who are victims of hate-related bias incidents. He argued that once a case lands on the OCR’s desk, the college and the government have already failed that student.
Referring to an earlier statement by Burdett, he asked, “Is there really a federal role? Should we be pumping more federal dollars in?”
In response, Burdett clarified her original statement. She argued that while students who report their cases to OCR have already been victimized, that makes OCR’s work that much more important.
“Fighting hate and preventing hate is a whole-of-society job … if all we do is investigate a crime after someone’s dead because of their identity, I’m just saying we can interrupt it earlier,” she said, calling for interventions that can decrease the number of hate crimes while also adequately funding OCR’s investigations into recent incidents.
Sources of Anti-Israeli Sentiment
In addition to their disparate views on how to address hate on campus, Republicans and Democrats varied wildly in pinpointing the source of the increase in antisemitic incidents. While Republicans cited foreign powers, Democrats blamed antisemitic language used by former president Donald Trump and his allies.
Republican representative Darrell Issa of California claimed that Iran, which he called “the last major nation to be, not just antisemitic, but wanting to destroy the state of Israel,” is, at least in part, behind the antisemitic language and attacks on campus. He stated that the government in Tehran is “funding activities around places, including college campuses.”
Democratic members of the committee, meanwhile, highlighted antisemitic comments former president Donald Trump made while in office—including his statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which white supremacists shouted, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.”
Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, also pointed out a controversial tweet posted by the House Judiciary GOP Twitter account approximately a year ago that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” (In the months prior to the tweet, the musician Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, had been in the headlines for publishing a slew of antisemitic posts on the site.) The post stayed up for over two months.
Swalwell blasted the GOP for appearing to support Ye’s antisemitic comments. “I don’t know why [Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan] put this tweet up. Either he believes it, which I hope is not the case, or he just wanted to own the libs, which, if that’s what you’re doing, you’re hurting a lot of people by keeping that tweet up for so long, especially knowing what it represents,” he said.
Wednesday’s hearing also covered free speech and reports of anticonservative bias on college campuses, especially in connection to antisemitism.
Multiple Republican congressmen questioned where to draw the line between protected speech and threats, as well as what constitutes support for terrorism; the Anti-Defamation League recently asked every leader of an institution with a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter to investigate the group out of concern that they could be providing “material support” for Hamas. The American Civil Liberties Union, however, sent an opposing letter urging institutions not to interfere with students’ freedom of expression.
Republican representative Tom McClintock of California specifically called attention to the phrase “from the river to the sea,” which is seen, by different groups of people, as either a statement of Palestinian liberation or as a call for the destruction of Israel. He called it “genocidal at its roots” and “absolutely despicable” but questioned whether using the phrase is punishable under the First Amendment.
In response, one witness, Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a former Education Department assistant secretary during the Trump administration, argued that hate speech and hateful conduct often go hand in hand. If a person who chanted “from the river to the sea” then went and vandalized a campus Hillel building, he said, the use of the slogan could help prove the motive behind the attack.
In response to a question from Kevin Kiley, a Republican representative from California, Marcus also said he believes the current rise in antisemitism on college campuses aligns with the trend of conservative speakers and student groups being shouted down or condemned for their beliefs.
“We no longer have, on even our greatest college campuses, a sense that we should have a reasoned debate among all or that every group should be treated with the same degree of equality,” he said. “What we have is a kind of orthodoxy that is taken over from the faculty and also the student body, and this has implications not only for conservatives but for other groups who are disdained within the institution, including Jewish Americans.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted the first several minutes of the hearing, cutting off witnesses as they tried to speak.
“Palestinian students deserve to speak on the genocide of their families,” one said.
Those who shouted were removed from the room, although a few silent protesters, wearing red paint on their hands to simulate blood, sat in the crowd, moving periodically to remain in view of the cameras live-streaming the event.
The House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development will hold another hearing on antisemitism on campuses next week.
“A wave of unabashed antisemitism at colleges and universities is leading to harassment and violence against the Jewish community, and it must be met with swift condemnation,” said Representative Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah, in announcing the hearing. “This hearing is part of our commitment to take action and ensure that students are afforded a safe learning environment. We must reclaim our nation’s crumbling postsecondary education system from the illiberalism and radical ideologies that are destroying it from within.”
