On October 7, 2023, Hamas carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Within weeks, the shockwaves hit American campuses. Reports of harassment, vandalism, and the targeting of Jewish students spiked.

What stunned many was not just the scale of the campus unrest, but the absence of sympathy. The mass murder of Jews in Israel was not met with mourning. Instead, students and faculty recast Hamas’s actions as “resistance” or as the predictable consequence of Israeli policy. Some aligned themselves openly with Hamas.

By spring 2024, Gaza Solidarity encampments had turned quads into battlegrounds. Classes were disrupted. Buildings were blocked. At some institutions, Jewish students reported being effectively barred from parts of their own campuses.

That was the backdrop for last week’s hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, titled “Antisemitism on America’s College and University Campuses: Current Conditions and the Federal Response.”

The hearing ran from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm across four panels, some of which had as many as six witnesses each. Participants offered sharply different assessments of how colleges and universities have handled anti-Semitism complaints. Lawyers debated statutory interpretation. Policy advocates sparred over enforcement priorities. Students recounted incidents of harassment and questioned federal actions aimed at curbing it.

To recount every exchange would require something closer to a book than an article. So, what follows here is a 40,000-foot view of where Washington actually stands on campus anti-Semitism: what people are saying, and what they may or may not do about it.

In my view, the hearing broke into two parts. First, the dispute over how the Biden and Trump administrations have enforced civil rights law, and how conservatives and liberals, especially students, assess the current administration’s handling of the problem. Second, the deeper question: does anti-Zionism qualify as anti-Semitism under federal law, and if not, should it?

Who done it better?

Much of the hearing unfolded as a partisan argument over enforcement philosophy.

Conservatives contended that the Biden administration was too passive in the face of escalating campus anti-Semitism. Liberals countered that the Trump administration has been too aggressive, alleging that anti-Semitism is merely a pretext to punish universities and dismantle parts of the federal education bureaucracy.

The numbers offer a starting point. 

During the Biden administration, the Department of Education’s (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) reached 16 resolution agreements addressing anti-Semitism complaints at colleges and universities, compared to six during the first Trump term. On paper, that suggests more activity under Biden. But anti-Semitic incidents rose sharply under Biden’s watch, particularly after October 7, and he left office with a significant backlog of unresolved complaints. Universities issued statements, formed task forces, and pledged to be inclusive, but protests intensified through 2024, culminating in encampments, building takeovers, and widespread disruption. Negotiated agreements, as anyone could see, had produced little actual change.

The Trump administration opted for a harder lever. Beginning in early 2025, it froze or terminated billions of dollars in federal grants to institutions deemed noncompliant with Title VI, citing failures to address anti-Semitism. Harvard was among the first targets, with the administration freezing over $2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts—though a federal judge subsequently blocked the withholding of those funds. (The Harvard Crimson welcomed the return of those funds in an essay titled “Harvard’s Funds Are Back. Can Its Scientists Trust the Government Again?” Our own Scott Turner responded, arguing that Harvard’s scientists were walking happily back into the federal funding trap.) The logic behind the strategy was straightforward: universities had no intention of reforming themselves, and money was the only lever that would get their attention. Supporters pointed to the results. The White House boasted on its website of a $30 million settlement with Cornell as evidence that financial pressure accomplished what years of negotiated agreements had not.

But the strategy carries its own contradictions. 

Trump’s FY2026 budget proposed cutting OCR’s funding by roughly 35 percent, with significant staff reductions and regional office closures. Beth Gellman-Beer, former Regional Director of OCR’s Philadelphia office, testified that investigators who had been actively working anti-Semitism cases were let go, bringing their open investigations to a halt. (Gellman-Beer’s testimony starts around the 2-hour, 32-minute mark.) Further reductions, she warned, would slow complaint processing at precisely the moment when incident levels remain high. Enforcement requires people and time, she argued, and the administration was cutting both while holding up anti-Semitism as a priority.

Student testimony added another layer of complexity.

Sarah Silverman, a Harvard undergraduate, described an incident in which her mezuzah—a small parchment scroll containing Torah verses, traditionally affixed to the doorpost of a Jewish home—had been deliberately removed from her dorm room door, an act Harvard’s Chabad rabbi characterized as a “hate crime.” (Silverman’s testimony starts around 4-hour, 48-minute mark.) Another student described being chased across campus. And others described a general climate of anti-Semitism across the country. One student pointed to a neo-Nazi group that had marched through Madison, Wisconsin, carrying swastika flags and shouting anti-Semitic slurs within steps of the University of Wisconsin campus.

Yet despite testifying to anti-Semitic harassment on their own campuses, the students on the third panel, “Campus Life and Antisemitism: Student and Institutional Perspectives,” condemned the Trump administration’s response. They argued that funding cuts to colleges and universities were actually intensifying anti-Semitism, and that the Trump administration was invoking the issue as cover for a broader conservative agenda rather than acting in genuine defense of Jewish students.

That argument carries real weight in liberal academic circles, where Trump’s enforcement campaign is widely cast as selective and politically motivated. Jewish students on the left have been among the administration’s sharpest critics, objecting to the targeting of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) offices and research programs under the banner of combating anti-Semitism.

Several student witnesses argued that the funding cuts produce a ripple effect that ultimately circles back to Jews. Foreign students leave. Research programs shrink. Opportunities vanish. And as those losses accumulate, some students look for someone to blame—and they blame Jews for the fallout. In their view, the effort to protect Jewish students risks generating a fresh round of hostility toward them, with Jews cast, once again, as the cause of everyone else’s misfortune.

But this is a difficult argument to take seriously.

At bottom, these students are lamenting the loss of DEI programs and the departure of foreign students. DEI offices, however, did not protect Jewish students when it mattered—in many cases, the framework worked against them. And while foreign students leaving campus is a genuine consequence of federal pressure, many of those same students arrived with, and expressed, deeply anti-Semitic views. Arguing to preserve both in the name of protecting Jews demands a level of cognitive dissonance that one might expect Harvard, of all places, to have trained out of its students. If universities failed to protect Jewish students for years and voluntary reform never came, what lever remains besides financial pressure? That question was raised more than once during the hearing. It largely went unanswered.

The partisan divide surfaced most explicitly at the close of the final panel. Commissioner Mondaire Jones asked whether scrutinizing the “impact” of Trump’s funding withdrawals might itself appear partisan, positioning himself as a good-faith actor who would have objected to such cuts under any administration. Afterward, I asked him a simple question: Would Democrats be this angry about funding cuts if Biden were the one making them? He declined to answer. “I’m done with this conversation,” he said and walked away.

Does anti-Zionism constitute anti-Semitism?

Beneath hours of testimony lay a single question: does anti-Zionism constitute anti-Semitism, and if so, what should the law do about it?

For Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the answer to the first question is largely yes. (His testimony starts around the 36-minute mark.) His argument begins with a premise he regards as foundational: for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Zionism is not a political preference but an element of Jewish identity itself. If that is true, then hostility directed at Zionism cannot be cleanly separated from hostility directed at Jews. The two, he argues, often function as the same thing, and the law currently lacks the tools to recognize when that is happening.

The reason, Goldfeder contends, is definitional. As he argued in prior Senate testimony: “Because Jewish identity is so multifaceted, without a standard definition for authorities to reference when analyzing the intent behind illegal, discriminatory actions, including hate crimes, it is easy for antisemites to hide behind this ambiguity and commit unlawful acts against Jews with impunity.” One solution he proposes is to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, giving federal agencies a clear standard when investigating Title VI complaints. The Antisemitism Awareness Act, reintroduced in the Senate last February, would require the Department of Education to apply that definition in enforcement. The National Association of Scholars has argued that the Act is unnecessary. Existing civil rights law already covers much of what the IHRA definition addresses. The problem is not a lack of statutory tools but a lack of consistent enforcement. (Read, “The Antisemitism Awareness Act Misses the Mark.”) 

The IHRA working definition describes anti-Semitism as hatred toward Jews expressed in words or deeds, encompassing conspiracy theories, collective blame, Holocaust denial, accusations of dual loyalty, and dehumanizing stereotypes. It also addresses conduct related to Israel: holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state, denying Israel’s right to exist, or applying standards not demanded of any other nation.

Proponents note that the definition includes an explicit safeguard: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” They point to that clause as proof that the definition does not conflate policy criticism with bigotry, arguing that it draws a line only where anti-Israel rhetoric targets Jews as a collective or treats the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate.

However, critics contend that the line is less clear in practice. With a majority of the definition’s illustrative examples focused on Israel, civil liberties groups argue that it risks collapsing anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism wholesale. Palestine Legal, which describes its mission as seeking to “bolster the Palestine solidarity movement,” has written that the IHRA definition “dangerously conflates criticism of the Israeli state with antisemitism and is routinely deployed to censor those who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.” That concern has fueled alternative proposals, including the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which seeks to draw a sharper boundary between anti-Jewish hatred and political opposition to Israel or Zionism.

The Gaza Solidarity encampments, however, illustrated precisely the problem IHRA proponents are trying to solve. Protesters typically framed their demonstrations as opposition to Zionism rather than hostility toward Jews—yet in a number of cases, Jewish students were surrounded, blocked from campus spaces, or subjected to intimidation. Anti-Zionist framing, the evidence suggested, can serve as cover for exclusionary conduct that targets Jews as Jews. If Jewish identity and connection to Israel are, for most Jews, inseparable, then civil rights law must be capable of recognizing when anti-Zionist action functions as anti-Jewish discrimination, regardless of how it is labeled.

That argument, of course, does not go uncontested. Harvard Law professor Benjamin Eidelson testified before the committee that Zionism is a political ideology, and political ideologies, however deeply intertwined with personal or communal identity, remain protected under the First Amendment. (Eidelson’s testimony follows Goldfeder’s.) To treat anti-Zionism as legally equivalent to anti-Semitism, he warned, risks bending civil rights enforcement into a mechanism for policing protected political speech. The practical consequence, he argued, would not be greater protection for Jewish students but greater pressure on colleges and universities to suppress lawful debate about Israel and Palestine.

Eidelson also challenged the premise that Zionism is inseparable from Jewish identity. He cited the 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study, conducted by Combined Jewish Philanthropies, noting that among Jews ages 18 to 29 in Greater Boston, more identify as anti-Zionist than as Zionist. (See page 11.) Similarly, a February 2026 survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found that while a strong majority of American Jews support Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, most Jews, especially younger Jews, do not identify as Zionist.

The tension between these two positions goes to the core of how Title VI should operate: when does protected political expression cross into actionable discrimination, and can the law draw that line without either ignoring genuine hostility toward Jews or becoming a tool for silencing legitimate dissent? Those are not easy questions, and the hearing did not resolve them. What is clear, however, is that they cannot be deferred any longer.

Did the hearing resolve anything?

By the close of the hearing, neither the enforcement debate nor the definitional debate had been resolved. The legal questions are hard, politics does its best to obscure reality, and anti-Semitism itself has proven, across centuries, resistant to remedies.

But this 40,000-foot view was not meant to resolve those questions. Rather, I wanted to capture where Washington actually is on campus anti-Semitism right now: what folks are saying about campus anti-semitism, what they are fighting over, and what remains unsettled.

Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics. The First Amendment protects political advocacy, including criticism of nation-states and political movements. The difficulty, however, lies in determining when speech, or conduct framed as political speech, crosses into actionable discrimination. That line has not been drawn clearly, and universities have used that ambiguity as a license to do very little. (Recall Claudine Gay’s remarks at the anti-Semitism hearing before Congress.)

Washington, at least the legislative branch, moves slowly. But campus anti-Semitism is an urgent issue. Hillel International recorded 2,334 anti-Semitic incidents on campuses during the 2024–2025 academic year, the highest since tracking began in 2019. As of February 10, 2026, over 1,000 incidents had already been logged for the current year.

The good news is that the Trump administration continues to enforce the law. This week, the Department of Justice filed suit against the University of California, alleging that it permitted a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff in violation of Title VII, describing exclusion from campus spaces, physical threats, vandalism, and administrative indifference.

The bad news is that other approaches being offered amount to more of what helped produce the problem in the first place. Organizations like Project Shema, as City Journal recently reported, are positioning themselves as DEI outfits for Jews—offering sensitivity trainings and allyship workshops at universities including Harvard, Columbia, and Tufts. But DEI is precisely the apparatus that casts Jews as privileged and places them in the crosshairs of left-wing protest. Its framework sorts the world into oppressors and the oppressed, and the activist left has never put Jews on the sympathetic side of that ledger. Jews don’t need to be made palatable to a movement that doesn’t want them. They need the law applied on their behalf.

The law already promises equal treatment. Whether Washington has the clarity and resolve to make that promise real remains an open question.

You can find the committee hearing materials here and watch all the testimonies before the committee here.

Follow Jared Gould on X.

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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that Benjamin Eidelson cited the 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study for its finding that among Jews ages 18 to 29 in Greater Boston, more identify as anti-Zionist than as Zionist. An earlier version suggested he may have been referencing the Jewish Federations of North America survey.