Six months after receiving warnings about the alarming rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses, the Biden administration is facing renewed demands to address the issue. Jewish leaders and experts, including the co-founder of JewBelong, Archie Gottesman, advocate for decisive action to combat the growing threat.
In the past six months, anti-Semitism on college campuses has seen an alarming escalation, according to Jewish leaders and experts. Archie Gottesman, co-founder of JewBelong, expressed his concern after several Jewish organizations met with Biden's Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, expressing their unprecedented concern about the prevalence of hate speech and discrimination against Jewish students.
"College campuses are hosting violent protests that continue to grow in number," Gottesman stated. "Those of us watching closely know that the violence will escalate, and many students don't even understand what they're protesting about. Faculty members joining them should be ashamed of how poorly they represent their institutions."
Gottesman called on the Biden administration to take decisive action, including deploying the National Guard to campuses facing lawlessness from anti-Israel groups. He argued that President Biden holds the authority to intervene but has yet to do so. "If these protests were targeted at people of color or the LGBTQ+ community, the administration would respond swiftly. They need to show real leadership," Gottesman emphasized.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), attributed the worsening anti-Semitism to flawed policies by the Biden administration. He pointed to the administration's initial decision to place antisemitism on equal footing with Islamophobia and the inclusion of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on the White House's antisemitism committee.
Abdul-Hussain also highlighted the influence of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an Islamist-backed group responsible for organizing anti-Semitic protests on campuses. He criticized the Biden administration for failing to foresee the escalating tensions and allowing SJP to exploit perceived weaknesses in the administration's stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Brooke Goldstein, a human rights attorney and executive director of The Lawfare Project, called for law enforcement to be empowered to address the threat immediately. She argued that elected officials have ignored the billions of dollars in foreign funding contributing to anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment on campuses.
"There must be congressional hearings to follow the money and expose how foreign state actors are destabilizing our country. This has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine but everything to do with destroying America from within," Goldstein warned.
During a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing, Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., grilled Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on the administration's efforts to combat anti-Semitism and whether he would expedite Title VI investigations to potentially cut funding from universities plagued by anti-Semitic incidents.
Cardona condemned the anti-Semitism on campuses and pledged to adhere to Title VI enforcement. He revealed that the Department of Education has 137 open cases of possible Title VI violations, including at Columbia University. Cardona stated that the department is proposing a $22 million increase in funding to increase the number of investigators and potentially remove federal dollars from schools that refuse to comply with Title VI.
