Table of Contents:
Trump’s Broadening Of The Antisemitism Definition May Be Crucial Not Only For Academia, But For Society: Frederick Krantz, CIJR, Dec. 12, 2019
Jared Kushner: President Trump Is Defending Jewish Students: Jared Kushner, NYT, Dec. 11, 2019
Trump’s Anti-Semitism Executive Order, Explained: Michael Warren, CNN, Dec. 12, 2019
Why Left-Wing Jews Rejected Trump’s Executive Order – Analysis: Jeremy Sharon, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2019
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Trump’s Broadening Of The Antisemitism Definition May Be Crucial Not Only For Academia, But For Society
Frederick Krantz
CIJR, Dec. 12, 2019
Yesterday marked a truly decisive moment in the long struggle against anti-Semitism on campus, as President Donald J. Trump signed into law, in a White House ceremony celebrating the Hannukah season, an executive order broadening the definition of anti-Semitism within the framework of Federal human rights guarantees.
Essentially, Trump made compliance with the broad International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of anti-Semitism part of Federal human-rights guidelines. The IHRA definition includes anti-Zionism, treating Jews (and Israel) differently from other persons and nations, and denying the Jewish people’s right to a state, as inadmissible violations of human rights, and any institutions permitting such violations can now lose Federal funding.
Since American colleges and universities depend heavily on massive Federal funding, this act will strike directly at the increasingly widespread “progressive” campus delegitimation of Israel, and of Jewish students’ right to speak and demonstrate in support of the democratic Jewish state. Striking down the specious use of “freedom of expression” arguments to in fact block free speech, it will also radically delimit the ability of anti-Israel and “anti-Zionist” student groups to bring blatantly anti-Semitic speakers to campus, and to block legitimate pro-Israel speakers sponsored by Jewish groups. And it will also enable students to oppose professorial prejudices, as well.
That Trump’s courageous act has already come under attack, in part by liberal Jews outraged at the supposedly illegitimate representation of Judaism as a nation or national movement, is to be expected. As also indicated by the materials included in this Briefing, this notion is actually part of the stock in trade of traditional antisemitism, where it informed the (evidently still current in some quarters) 19th c. topos of “the Jewish question”. This asked whether Jews as a “foreign” element could be trusted to become citizens, part of the newly-emerging, post-French Revolution European national communities.
Indeed, much the same mentality currently underlies what is called the ”new” anti-Semitism, focused not on Jews individuals or groups, but on the restored democratic Jewish state, Israel. This pro-Palestinian ”anti-Zionist” campaign uses false analogies to supposed Nazi-like domination and “genocide”, and South African-style “occupation”. It seeks to first delegitimize (campus and media “BDS” propaganda) and, ultimately, to destroy, the Jewish state.
Trump’s executive order strikes at this abuse of free expression and human rights. But in this context it also has a larger, if related, importance, one connected not only to righting the wrong of injustice to Jews and Israel on campus and elsewhere, but also to the very survival of the university as a societal bastion of free inquiry and rational discourse generally.
Our universities and colleges are uniquely Western, Judaeo-Christian institutions, dedicated to the liberal arts and sciences, and descended from Biblical values, classical gymnasia, Hellenistic schools and traditions of study and discourse, as well as from the medieval universitas and Renaissance collegia, colleges. They have, since the eruptions and discontinuities of the 1960s, come under increasing attack, and are today in crisis.
This attack has focused on precisely the concept, key to liberal education, of freedom of expression, “academic freedom” (what the 19th c. German university, which pioneered in this regard, termed Lehrfreiheit, freedom to teach, to think). Paralleled by the Anglo-American tradition of political liberalism, of free inquiry, informed by the teaching of John Stuart Mill, universities and colleges became foundational institutions in the widening of human freedom, rational discourse and research, and social mobility which, since the end of the Second World War in 1945, has underlain modernity.
This tradition has, however, been increasingly imperiled by the advent of illiberal, exclusionary ideologies, often attacking academic freedom by using concepts like “equality”, “diversity”, and “racism” to in fact impose cultural uniformity and delimit equality and free expression. (We are all familiar with the campus excesses of “cancel culture”, “deplatforming”, and de facto ethnic and racial segregation.)
President Trump’s broadening of the definition of antisemitism, will guaranteeing a larger degree of academic freedom on campuses. It will probably do more than any other single step one might have envisaged, to defend the university generally, and finally, to begin to put a halt to its heretofore sad decline.
Paradoxically—or not so paradoxically–enlarging and defending the core values of freedom of inquiry and rational discourse and expression will not only help ensure the survival of higher education. It will also contribute to maintaining the vigor and élan of our democratic society generally, a crucial necessity given the current political and cultural juncture.
And, oddly enough, and however indirectly, this episode is yet another indication of the centrality, and contribution, of Judaism to Western civilization generally. Antisemitism, “the longest hatred”, has never been only about Jews—it is also, and always, reflective of those maintaining, and opposing, it. As one great scholar put it long ago, the cure for antisemitism is a human, not a Jewish, problem.
(Prof. Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, and Editor of its Daily Isranet Briefing.)
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Jared Kushner: President Trump Is Defending Jewish Students
Jared Kushner
NYT, Dec. 11, 2019
As the poison of anti-Semitism spreads with dangerous violence throughout Europe, the Middle East, and even here at home — most recently in a horrific attack on Tuesday in Jersey City — President Trump is taking meaningful action to crush this evil.
On Wednesday, the president will sign an executive order to combat the rise of anti-Semitism on American college campuses. As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I understand the horrors of anti-Semitism. I could not be more proud of President Trump’s new policy.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents have been rising in the United States since 2013. Students, in particular, continue to face anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.
With Wednesday’s executive order, the president takes crucial action to support and defend Jewish students in the United States. For the first time, a president is making clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on race, color or national origin covers discrimination against Jews.
When news of the impending executive order leaked, many rushed to criticize it without understanding its purpose. The executive order does not define Jews as a nationality. It merely says that to the extent that Jews are discriminated against for ethnic, racial or national characteristics, they are entitled to protection by the anti-discrimination law.
This new order adopts as its definition of anti-Semitism the language put forth in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, while also accounting for other forms of anti-Semitism.
For example, the alliance defines “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” and those who deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor” or those who compare “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as examples of anti-Semitism. . …[To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Trump’s Anti-Semitism Executive Order, Explained
Michael Warren
CNN, Dec. 12, 2019
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday expanding his administration’s interpretation of race and national origin to include Judaism — a move that extends certain civil rights protections to Jews in education settings.
The move is part of the Trump administration’s broader efforts to combat what it considers anti-Israel and anti-Semitic movements on college campuses. But the order has ignited debate over federal funding, free speech and views about Israel, and prompted renewed questions about how Jewish people should be classified by the government.
What does the new executive order actually change?
The order concerns a section of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 requiring federally funded educational institutions not to discriminate based on national origin. Under this order, colleges and universities that support or tolerate anti-Israel movements — the most prominent being Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) — could be under threat of having their funding withheld by the Department of Education.
While protections from racial, color and national origin discrimination are covered under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, religious discrimination is not. In the past, the Education Department has nevertheless interpreted the law to protect students of any religion from discrimination based on shared ethnic, racial or national origin.
As a 2010 letter from the Justice Department to the Education Department’s civil rights office laid out, Title VI protects religious students when discrimination “is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members’ religious practice.”
The order would reinforce the inclusion of anti-Semitic conduct in this interpretation of national-origin-based discrimination for which students are afforded protection. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Why Left-Wing Jews Rejected Trump’s Executive Order – Analysis
Jeremy Sharon
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2019
The executive order US President Donald Trump is scheduled to enact on Wednesday – adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism – has sparked a fierce debate about free speech and the right to oppose Zionism as a legitimate form of expression protected under the First Amendment.
But aside from that highly charged debate, another dispute quickly arose across the airwaves and through the electronic ether when the story broke, as many left-wing and liberal Jewish activists, commentators and organizations denounced the executive order for effectively defining Jews as a “race of nation.”
Trump’s new measure directs the Justice Department and the Education Department to address discrimination cases against Jews under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which stipulates that discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin” is prohibited.
This aspect of the executive order promoted feverish denunciations by opponents of the measure, who vehemently objected to nationhood being attributed to Jewishness in any way, and implied that the measure was a fascist step which would lead to a new Holocaust.
Fred Gutenberg, a gun-control activist whose daughter was murdered in the Parkland school shooting in 2018, said on Twitter that the executive order “scares the daylights out of me!!!” and asked, “Does this mean I will need to have a yellow star on my license?”
Journalist Jonathan Katz condemned those supporting the executive order as “defending actual Nazism.” Meanwhile, the far-left organization IfNotNow said Trump’s measure “defines Judaism as a ‘nationality,’ promoting the classically bigoted idea that American Jews are not, well, American.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Watch: Trump Signs Executive Order Combating Anti-Semitism: Fox News, Dec. 11, 2019, YouTube — The Trump administration will now classify Judaism as a nationality, rather than just a religion, after the president signs a bill to take on anti-Semitism on college campuses.
Trump Readies Executive Order on Anti-Semitism, Setting Up First Amendment Battle: Michael Wilner, McClatchy Washington Bureau, Dec. 11, 2019 — President Donald Trump will sign an executive order this week directing the government to consider a specific definition of anti-Semitism in discrimination cases, circumventing Congress, White House and congressional sources told McClatchy.
The Ridiculous Storm Over Trump’s Latest Move Against Anti-Semitism: John Podhoretz, NY Post, Dec. 11, 2019 — Upon being told that the mayor of Dublin, Bobby Briscoe, was Jewish, Yogi Berra famously said, “Only in America.” You know what else could happen only in America? A president changes policy for the purpose of helping American Jews who find themselves under assault on college campuses — and gets called an anti-Semite as a result.
NY Times Story On Trump’s Executive Order Set Off A Major Freak-Out About Fascism, But The Story Was Wrong: John Sexton, HotAir, Dec. 11, 2019 — Yesterday afternoon I wrote about President Trump’s plan to issue an executive order aimed at anti-Semitism.
Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism: White House, Dec. 11, 2019 — By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
