Trump's "defense" of Jews on campus is really a protection racket, aimed at destroying the academic integrity Jews hold most sacred

Favored treatment is always temporary and, for Jews, it always comes at a steep cost. And now, with the attack on Brown, Trump's use of Jews as tools for nafarious ends really hits home.

April 1, 1925, 100 years ago this week, on Mount Scopus

It was inevitable that the Trump administration’s all-out attack on academic freedom would take dead aim at Brown University. Brown is, after all, the home of the world’s most hippy-dippy “Open Curriculum,” allowing students to choose courses and majors with maximum flexibility and autonomy. There is no “Great Books of Western Civilization” requirement at Brown. There are barely any requirements at all. I got through without ever taking a math class! It’s also the actual birthplace of political correctness, a bastion of Democratic nepo-grads from JFK Jr. to Amy Carter to William Mondale and Donna Zaccaro (Geraldine Ferraro’s kid), and a whole bunch of liberal celebs, including Emma Watson and that Hamiltonian champion of diversity, Daveed Diggs (who is Jewish, BTW). You can see an extensive list of alumni, most of them left-leaning, here.¹

And me.

As has happened with prior attacks on Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, the excuse being used for denying crucial grants is antisemitism. Given the attacks on Jewish students since October 7, there is a case to be made for a disciplinary action on some campuses, and reviews of policies and curricula.

But to deny needed funding that could save lives in a clear effort to quash scientific research and independent thought, all for the sake of “the Jews,” is the equivalent of defeating an outbreak of measles with a Tomahawk missile. A nuclear response to antisemitism not only won’t solve antisemitism, it will increase it, but the administration won’t care because in fact the purpose behind these acts has nothing to do with Israel or Jews.² It’s all about the campuses.

As Sen. Chris Murphy explains in an X thread (I share it in full at the bottom of this post), it’s all part of a master plan that we can see unfolding before our eyes:

There’s going to be lots of blame going around when the dust settles from the damage of the Trump administration’s first hundred days. Whenever the world has faced massive economic upheaval, an upsurge of nativism and swelling unrest, Jews invariably have become targets. Never fails. I’m not sure what I’m more worried about as the stock market plummets this week: my retirement savings or my safety.

And when Jews are being used as human shields by an administration determined to employ “antisemitism” as the excuse to lock up and exile students without due process, padlock entire academic departments and oversee the implementation of Orwellian thought control, this is not what Jews want as the price for their protection. Those “pro-Israel” (but in fact far right and way beyond the mainstream) Jewish groups who are supposedly feeding names of prospective deportees to the government are only making matters worse for Jews on campus, who need to be building bridges right now and not relying on I.C.E to be their avengers.

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A world without the free-flowing exchange of ideas is not a world Jews would want to inhabit.

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It is a protection racket, reminiscent of the deals made with Jews by medieval monarchs. Jews would apply for letters of protection, which they would receive, but there was always a catch. These “Schutzjuden” (as they were called in Germany) paid dearly for the privilege, in money and rights. Jews also were restricted from many professions throughout medieval Europe. They were nominally protected by lords and kings, who then forced them into roles that made them even more unpopular, like moneylending and tax collecting.³

Do you think that maybe those very public - and despised - roles under the “protection” of the monarch helped reduce the tensions between Jews and their neighbors? Especially when Jews were forced to dress differently by the authorities - like the guy in the odd-looking hat:

Jewish poet Süßkind von Trimberg (right) wearing a typical “Jewish hat” in the Codex Manesse from 14th century Germany. These hats were originally worn by Jewish men by choice. But in many Northern European countries, beginning in the 12th century, they were made part of the mandatory garb for Jews. (The Public Medievalist)

In 1191, the Jews of York, England, about 150 in all, who were officially protected by the king as his feudal vassals and sought protection in the royal castle, were massacred by townsfolk whipped into a frenzy of hate in order to get revenge on Jewish debt collectors.

We’ve seen hate directed against Jews on college campuses and elsewhere. But as Yair Rosenberg wrote today in The Atlantic:

The Trump administration has not surgically targeted these failings at America’s universities for rectification; it has exploited them to justify the institutions’ decimation. Jews are caught in the middle—used by the White House to shield its agenda from criticism, yet attacked by Trump’s critics as enablers of that agenda due to their advocacy for themselves and against anti-Semitism.

Independent Inquiry, a Cherished Value: Exhibit A - The Seder

Also, by supporting the current Trump campaign to undermine the independence of universities, we are undermining one of our most cherished values. Think of how the Passover Seder, that primal Jewish ritual, has at its core the asking and answering of questions. Customs change, but questions are eternal. Blind obedience leads to the ossification of a tradition. Challenging unquestioned norms breathes life into them, or leads to their replacement by something better. On Seder night, our goal, then, is not to transmit something ancient into the skulls of the next generation, but rather to reinvent a tradition so that it will be brimming with life - so that a sense of wonder and pride will glow in the faces of the children. It’s a glow can only be fueled by curiosity⁴.

That feeling about the Seder extends to the entire Jewish worldview as regards to education and the academy. The Talmud is built on intellectual vitality. The very word “Torah” means teaching, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: God reveals Godself to humankind “not in the storm, the wind, the sun, the rain, but in the voice that teaches, the words that instruct.” A world without the free-flowing exchange of ideas is not a world Jews would ever want to inhabit.

A hundred years ago this week, on April 1, 2025, the Hebrew University opened in Jerusalem. It was an enormous symbolic achievement for the Jewish people.⁵ In his inaugural speech at the opening ceremony on Mount Scopus, the great poet H.N. Bialik said, somewhat prophetically:

“We must therefore hasten to light here the first lamp of learning and science and of every sort of intellectual activity in Israel, ere the last lamp grows dark for us in foreign lands…. Know well that true wisdom is that which learns from all; the windows of this house will therefore be open on every side, that the fairest fruit produced by man’s creative spirit in every land and every age may enter.”

There is some legitimacy to the claim that universities have actually stifled free thought by imposing uncompromising orthodoxies, both on the left and the right. But those rigidities can be challenged without exercising the nuclear option of state censorship. We’ve seen that formula in Orban’s Hungary, where a university was forced to close, the one, incidentally, associated with George Soros, making this an act of blatant antisemitism. As a Jew, I would never want to be party to this rape of our academic heritage.

• Read about how Hungary destroyed academic freedom

They came for Brown, and I was not silent.

And now, Brown University finds itself in the crosshairs. The New York Times states in today’s edition that the Trump administration intends to block $510 million in federal contracts and grants for Brown, “expanding its campaign to hold universities accountable for what it says is relentless antisemitism on campus.”

As if on cue, the right wing hate-o-sphere is drumming up anger at Brown for some sophomoric prank pulled by a sophomore Elon Musk DOGE wannabee. They are trying to build a case to hate this university that has brought so much good to our world.

Brown’s Jewish and other leaders are fighting back with a statement, as reported by JTA:

“With all of the ongoing discussions about antisemitism on college campuses, one might easily suspect that these environments are disaster zones for Jewish life,” the group — which included the rabbis from both Hillel and Chabad, as well as students — said in a statement. “At Brown University, this is not the case.”

• You can read the whole statement here.

At Princeton, Jewish leaders are also fighting back to defend their school in the face of Trump administration attacks. As reported in The Daily Princetonian:

“Jewish students on Princeton’s campus — to a very great majority — all experience a sense of feeling physically safe on campus,” Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, the executive director of the Center for Jewish Life, said. “There are real concerns, serious concerns, in the Jewish community about some of the discourse and rhetoric around anti-Zionism … but the fact that these elements exist at Princeton in no way is unique to Princeton University.” Rabbi Eitan Webb, the director and co-founder of Princeton’s Chabad House, wrote in a statement that there was more work to be done for Jewish students on campus. However, he noted that the campus climate “has significantly improved from last year.”

To his credit, ADL exec Jonathan Greenblatt is no longer taking the administration’s bait, reversing his prior position and calling out a “disturbing pattern” in Trump’s campaign to deport foreign students. “Jewish students need to be protected. They should be valued as much as anyone else,” Greenblatt told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “But on the other hand, protecting them shouldn’t require us to shred the norms that we use to protect other people. I don’t think it’s either or. I think it can be both and.”

This fall, Brown will celebrate 130 years of Jewish life on campus. I’m proud to be helping in the planning of that event; the school is a special place for me, part of my extended family for three generations, including one cousin of my late father in law, class of 1936, who was the first Jewish member of the Board of Fellows, and a Vice Chancellor. It’s the place where, ironically through my study of other religions, I became the Jew (and rabbi) I am today, immersed in free thought and questioning, supported by a creative community of seekers, Jews and non-Jews alike. The school is hardly a bastion of antisemitism, and it has successfully diffused tensions over the past couple of very challenging years. It has a deep and vibrant Jewish history, true to the spirit of religious tolerance that Roger Williams brought to Rhode Island when he founded it.

Let me put it in my most Greta Thunberg-y manner:

How DARE the Trump adminstration slander Brown in this way!

There are so many fronts in what has now become an all-out war to save America, which Trump clearly now wants to take down, culturally, intellectually, legally, politically and economically.⁶ Jews and other targeted groups need to work together to confront these mortal dangers to our democracy. We can start by rising up to defend our institutions of higher learning and the life-enhancing - and life-saving - research they do.

And if you look below, yes, that’s me at my graduation in 1978. My parents are on the left. Mom’s looking at the camera and Dad, who would be dead of a heart attack six months later, is beaming with pride. I graduated in four years. No, actually three. But I never had to take math.

My Brown graduation in 1978. My parents are on the left.

1. And here are the “Top 100”

2. See Trump’s Jewish Cover Story, by Yair Rosenberg (Atlantic) -

“The Trump administration wants you to know that it’s just looking out for Jews. In recent weeks, the White House has cited anti-Semitism as the motivation for many of its controversial moves, whether deporting foreign students who allegedly engaged in pro-Hamas activism or threatening to pull millions of government dollars from Ivy League schools. “SHALOM COLUMBIA,” quipped the White House’s X account, after it canceled federal funding to the university over its “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.” But this branding is profoundly misleading. In reality, Donald Trump and his allies have been using “anti-Semitism” as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that has nothing to do with Jews at all—and that most American Jews do not support.”

3. During the Middle Ages the position of tax-collector was often filled by Jews. Mention is made of Jewish tax-collectors in France as early as the sixth century (Gregory of Tours, "Historia Francorum," vii. 23). In 587 the Council of Mâcon issued among other prohibitions one against farming the taxes to Jews. That this prohibition was disregarded is seen from the fact that the Council of Meaux (849) deemed it necessary to renew it. The collection of Jewish taxes was always entrusted to Jews; during the reign of Charles V. (1364-80) Menassier of Vesoul was receiver-general of the Jewish taxes for the north of France, and Denis Quinan for Languedoc. The kings likewise often entrusted to Jews the position of receiver-general of taxes. Among the renowned receivers mention may be made of Joseph Pichon, Joseph of Ecija, and Samuel ibn Waḳar, all of whom paid with their lives for the riches they had accumulated in office. Until the regency of John I. of Castile (1385) Jews held the position of tax-receivers in Portugal also.

In Germany the Jews were very early excluded from all public offices; and it can not be ascertained whether they ever filled there the position of tax-receiver. It seems, however, that such Jewish officials existed in Austria in the thirteenth century; for in a document dated 1257 two Jews are mentioned as the king's financiers. In Hungary the Jews were excluded from the office in 1279 by the Council of Buda. The higher Polish nobility, however, depended largely on the Jews for tax-collectors; until lately the Russian government also made use of Jewish tax-gatherers ("sborschiki") for the collection of taxes from the Jews; and it still leases to the highest bidder the special Jewish taxes, such as that on kasher-meat ("korobka"), and on the candles used for Sabbath and for other religious purposes. Until the middle of the seventeenth century the customs duties were generally leased by the Turkish government to Jews. According to Manasseh ben Israel (1656), "the viceroy of Egypt has always at his side a Jew who bears the title 'ṣarraf bashi,' or 'treasurer,' and who gathers the taxes of the land. At present Abraham Alkula holds the position." Alkula was succeeded by Raphael Joseph Halabi, the rich friend and protector of Shabbethai Ẓebi (Grätz, "Gesch." x. 34). (Jewish Enclyclopedia)

4. Click to read more of my thoughts on the role of questioning in the Seder.

5. Read about it here.

6. See Sen. Chris Murphy’s very scary explanation of why Trump is driving our economy off a cliff: