Photograph by Guido Coppa via Unsplash

It’s been barely a month and the Trump administration has hit the ground running, issuing executive orders to pardon the January 6 rioters, dismantle the federal bureaucracy, and prepare ICE and the military to enforce mass deportations. But there’s another issue they’re using to advance their authoritarian agenda: antisemitism.

On January 29, Trump signed an executive order to weaponize existing laws to try to cancel the visas of international students who participated in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 7, 2023. They will instruct the Justice Department to investigate antisemitic intimidation on college campuses, claiming that this action is one part of their broader agenda to take on antisemitism, when in reality it’s another example of their effort to treat dissidents as “presumptively antisemitic” and to shut down debate over Israel/Palestine.

In the face of this terrifying reality, institutions of higher education have largely avoided fighting back, instead choosing to brace themselves for this new level of federal repression. In January, Harvard settled two existing lawsuits against them for antisemitism following the October 7 attacks. Among other things, Harvard agreed to incorporate the IHRA working definition of antisemitism into its disciplinary process, recognize Zionism as a protected category in their anti-discrimination efforts, and mandate outside training for staff reviewing antisemitism complaints. Meanwhile, they will also partner with an Israeli university and boost programming from the Louis D. Brandeis Center, a controversial organization leading the charge to present right-wing Jewish students as victims of Title VI discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.

There are serious problems with this settlement. For one thing, lifting up one definition of antisemitism avoids the hard truth that there isn’t a consensus among Jews about how to deal with antisemitism. When universities adopt rigid definitions, they make it harder to actually engage in complex debates about what antisemitism is, how it shows up, and what proactive steps we can do to address it. But the problems here run much deeper.

Former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson established the International Holocaust Remembrance Association in 1998 as an intergovernmental body to promote Holocaust education worldwide. This working definition of antisemitism, on the other hand, came much later; in 2016, the IHRA plenary adopted its Working Definition of Antisemitism to create a universal standard to serve as a baseline for other groups to draw from. However, it wasn’t created to be universally binding and was supposed to work as a shared standard that other groups and institutions could learn from and tailor to their own environments.

While the definition itself isn’t controversial, the issue has always been with the eleven examples, which critics have argued are vague enough to excuse the State of Israel from legitimate criticism and attack free speech.

In 2019, President Donald Trump passed an executive order that made violations of Title VI from the Civil Rights Act, a provision which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance, apply to diaspora Jews. It charged that all executive departments that enforce Title VI should consider the IHRA definition and its list of examples when evaluating claims of harassment against Jews.

In an article for The Guardian, Kenneth Stern, one of the authors of the IHRA working definition, wrote: “It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”

Given these controversies, there have always been legitimate other options. In June 2020, a group of leading scholars created a new working definition called the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism as a tool to provide “clear guidance to identify and fight antisemitism while protecting free expression.” It has around 370 signatories from some of the leading scholars in the world, including in Jewish studies, genocide studies, and in issues relating across the Middle East.

Like the IHRA definition, the JDA is fairly simple, but it takes a different stance in its case studies. For example, the definition explains that “Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism,” is not antisemitic, while noting carefully that there are indeed a number of examples that are antisemitic, including the assumption that non-Israeli Jews are more loyal to Israel than their existing countries or by treating Jews as agents of the state. The JDA has itself garnered serious criticism, but criticism should be helpful, even welcome, in a free society and the fierce debate around these definitions points to something much deeper.

As we have seen over the past five years, right-wing groups dominate the campus debate as they push the federal government to weaponize a particular form of Jewish identity to attack free speech, particularly for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and administrators. Harvard adopting the IHRA working definition is a major victory for those groups as they ready themselves to act on Trump’s executive order and cancel the visas of international students involved in demonstrations. Like the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban, this policy aims to target Muslim and Arab students and administrators, even if that isn’t explicitly stated as they use protecting Jewish students as their open excuse.

This effort represents a partial translation of the Heritage Foundation’s new playbook for combating antisemitism, Project Esther. On the one-year anniversary of October 7, the Heritage Foundation released a new report about how to dismantle pro-Palestine organizing on campuses and across the country. Getting universities to adopt the IHRA definition is a leading component of their efforts to dismantle these movements and further efforts to deport international students.

Let’s make no mistake: Harvard’s settlement and Trump’s executive order intend to attack Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and will not protect Jews. If universities go along with it, it will represent a profound dereliction of duty to protect their students. By extension, it will also hurt progressive Jews who, like other religious minorities, deserve to have their rights and opinions protected. As real antisemitism continues to rise, we must be vigilant to educate ourselves about its history while pushing back on false efforts to keep Jews safe. We should see this playbook for what it really is: a nakedly opportunistic attempt to advance an authoritarian agenda and restrict our First Amendment rights.

Much of what’s happening feels like it comes right out of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s terrifying dystopian novel of a future authoritarian American regime. Indeed, much of her story even takes place on Harvard’s campus because seizing control of Harvard would be a huge symbolic victory in cementing the power of the old-guard American elite.

We need to be clear: this is an Islamophobic attack on Muslim and Arab students and it will not protect Jews. The progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc has even called this “smokescreen antisemitism” and denounced efforts to pit the Jewish and Muslim communities against one another. The debate over antisemitism (and about how we understand antisemitism) is a pivotal battlefront in the war against authoritarianism and for the survival of what’s left of our free society.