JVP Academic Council Condemns Federal Government’s Attempt to Intimidate U.S. Universities Into Repression

14 March 2025

The Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council condemns the Federal government’s attempt to intimidate U.S. universities into repressing their students, faculty and staff.

This direct assault on the autonomy of higher education in the United States follows from the stated aims of the “Federal Task Force on Antisemitism,” which has announced investigations of sixty-three colleges and universities around the country so far. The investigation’s purpose to “eradicate antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses” is actually a vehicle for enacting anti-Palestinian racism and a pretext for a broader attack on academia. It emerges from a Trump administration that promotes a full-throated military and diplomatic support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. This includes a campaign of scholasticide in which the Israeli army has destroyed every university in Gaza, universities in the occupied West Bank are under assault, and Palestinian students suffer systematic repression and criminalization at the hands of Israeli authorities. The Task Force’s attack on US universities uses the guise of antisemitism as an excuse to attack a student-led movement for social justice. There is nothing antisemitic about opposing genocide. As Jewish academics, we declare: Not in our name! 

The Task Force’s true aim is to coerce universities to suppress public protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, penalize dissent against Israel and Zionism, and violate scholarly autonomy. It is ironic that this initiative emerges from an administration rife with Christian nationalist and white supremacists with a documented history of antisemitism. At the same time, this administration ignores a documented increase in anti-Palestinian racism, violence, hate speech, and hate crimes. This anti-Palestinian repression is part of a broader attempt to dismantle entire academic fields – including critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, Middle East and related area studies and other disciplines that focus on colonial histories. Its ultimate objective is to assert government control over the production and content of knowledge in the U.S., compelling universities to destroy their own time-honored protections of academic freedom and freedom of expression. 

The Task Force began its illegal exercise of Federal power on March 7 by announcing the cancellation of $400 million in grants to Columbia University because of its alleged failure to protect Jewish students, faculty and staff. A letter sent on March 13th by the Department of Education, General Services Administration, and Health and Human Services Department to Columbia’s President threatened to cancel the remainder of the University’s federal contracts unless nine demands were met, eight of which involved the suppression of student protest, the prior restraint of expressions of opposition to Israel and Zionism, and interference in scholarly research and teaching. This intimidation came despite Columbia’s active repression of pro-Palestinian political expression on campus over the last year and a half in flagrant violation of rights of expression that should be protected in a democratic society. In response to the administration’s blatantly unlawful threat to withhold Federal funding, Columbia shockingly capitulated, implementing repressive actions targetting Palestinians and their allies as well as academic departments.

The work of the Task Force should be understood in the context of a broader authoritarian crackdown that includes misuse and abrogation of immigration laws to penalize campus protest. The warrantless abduction of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident of the U.S., for leading political protests against genocide by Israel is not only a gross abuse of federal police powers but also an ominous sign that the current campaign to suppress dissent in academia will not be limited to threats to withhold federal funding. More detentions and deportations of students and academics are happening each week, including the deportation of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University, deliberately contravening a federal court order, and the attempted deportation of Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown. Fully vetted academic job searches are being cancelled at CUNY, a legal scholar has been suspended at Yale, and students of all faiths and nationalities continue to be suspended, expelled and arrested.

Federal agencies are coercing university administrators into implementing repressive measures on campuses that have already been applied to other protest movements. Accompanied by the hateful propaganda that “professors are the enemy” of Americans, as Vice President Vance put it. These steps will devastate academic freedom and First Amendment protections of speech and assembly, while helping to create servile academic institutions unable to play their essential role of contributing to a free, democratic society.

The Task Force intensifies a wave of antisemitic attacks that have targeted Jews who act in solidarity with Palestinians. Over the past months, universities have levied professional sanctions against Jewish students, Jewish campus organizations, and Jewish faculty, including termination of tenured faculty members. Meanwhile, administrators have refused to intervene in physical aggression against non-violent Jewish demonstrators and have participated in abusive policing. Seders have been disrupted, sukkahs have been demolished, Jewish students and faculty have been arrested and banned from campus, Jewish elders have been brutalized by police officers. The Task Force implicitly endorses the slander that the many thousands of Jewish opponents of Zionism are “not real Jews” who should be prohibited from voicing their opinions. 

These antisemitic measures will only be exacerbated by the use by the Task Force of the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition is incoherent, overbroad, factually wrong, and opposed by the majority of experts. Further, its effective banning not only of legitimate criticism of Israel, but even of uncontroversial historical facts, constitutes a violation of the First Amendment guarantees of the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech.

The JVP Academic Council calls on institutions of higher education and academic colleagues throughout the country to refuse to participate in the investigations of the Federal Task Force on Antisemitism. We recommend that anyone called before an investigating committee retain legal counsel and refuse to comply with the unjust demands of an increasingly authoritarian administration. Institutions of higher education should boycott the proceedings. 

We must build our safety through solidarity, in coalitions which can defend academic freedom and the pursuit of justice within and far beyond the grounds of the university. Now is the time for courage, while there still is an autonomous higher education system in the United States, to struggle collectively for our institutions to live up to the ideals of the university.

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.