Published: 17 December 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
MASHA GESSEN: The real purpose of Trump’s executive order on anti-Semitism (New Yorker)
Donald Trump has a knack for taking some of humanity’s most problematic ideas and turning them on their head to make them even worse. He has done it again.
On Wednesday, he signed an executive order that will allow federal funds to be withheld from colleges where students are not protected from anti-Semitism—using an absurdly defined version of what constitutes anti-Semitism.
Recent precedent and the history of legislative efforts that preceded the executive order would suggest that its main targets are campus groups critical of Israeli policies. What the order itself did not make explicit, the President’s son-in-law did: Jared Kushner published an Op-Ed in the New York Times in which he stressed that the definition of anti-Semitism used in the executive order “makes clear what our administration has stated publicly on the record: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”
The real target of Trump’s executive order (Jewish Currents)
Wednesday’s executive order not only formally extends Title VI anti-discrimination protections on the basis of “race, colour, or nationality” to Jews (without specifying to which of these categories Jews belong); it also further codifies the dangerous and false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and designates criticisms of Israel as forms of anti-Jewish discrimination
Anti-Semitism or free speech? College students cheer and fear Trump order (New York Times)
Pro-Palestinian activists fear Trump’s anti-Semitism order will clamp down on their advocacy (Haaretz)
Those involved in the Palestinian cause on university campuses lament Trump’s attempt to ‘exploit genuine concern about rising anti-Semitism to censor advocates for Palestinian rights’
I drafted the definition of anti-Semitism. Right-wing Jews are weaponising it (Guardian)
KENNETH STERN: The ‘working definition of antisemitism’ was never intended to silence speech, but that’s what Trump’s executive order accomplished this week
Photo: Donald Trump at the Israeli-American Council National Summit, December 7 in Hollywood, Florida (Official White House photo: Joyce Boghosian)
