Trump's 'Antisemitic' Task Force raids Northwestern.
It's not just a bad headline.
Who needs a visit from an Antisemitic Task Force? Certainly not Northwestern University. But the Sun-Times obviously needs some copyediting help.
The actual task force, the product of Trump’s Justice Department, was formed not to actually fight antisemitism but rather to smother campus dissent and rid the university of students and faculty members who’ve non-violently protested or expressed any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the West Bank.
The House recently passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which directs the U.S. Department of Education to consider a definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel with bigotry against Jews.
“Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews. Unfortunately, one doesn’t need to look far to find it these days. But the supporters of this bill are looking in the wrong places,” Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of the Jewish-led group Americans for Peace Now, said following the vote.
“They aren’t interested in protecting Jews,” he added. “They are interested in supporting right-wing views and narratives on Israel and shutting down legitimate questions and criticisms by crying ‘antisemite’ at everyone, including Jews” who oppose Israel’s far-right government.
Unfortunately, the university has been complicit in this McCarthyite-style witch hunt, which has clearly degraded Northwestern as a center for free expression and a research home for truth seekers.
The great irony here is that Northwestern was historically itself a bastion of antisemitism and even had a quota on Jewish admissions up through the mid-1960s. It was among the many prestigious universities, most notably Harvard, that imposed similar quotas to restrict Jewish enrollment. According to Rabbi Dov Hillel Klein of Tannenbaum Chabad House, until the 1980s, Jewish students still lied about their religion on their applications to get into NU.
If you’re interested in diving deeper into the issue of Judaism vs. Zionism, you can listen to our discussions on this and antisemitism on two recent editions of Hitting Left with poet, author, and educator Hilton Obenzinger and Rabbi Brant Rosen, leader of the anti-Zionist Jewish Tzedek Congregation in Chicago.
