Last month, a federal judge in California issued a blunt verdict on attempts to deport student visa holders for criticizing Israel. In the name of fighting antisemitism, the judge found, the Trump administration had trampled on the First and Fifth Amendments. Combined with other recent legal defeats and whistle-blower allegations, it was yet more evidence that the administration has degraded civil rights law under the guise of enforcing it.
Why antisemitism, though? Why is the Trump administration, which is indifferent to discrimination against so many other minority groups, hypervigilant about antisemitism? (Antisemitism on the left, anyway; it remains willfully blind about antisemitism on the right.) How did this administration seize on this one form of hatred? The answers lie in an underappreciated fissure in American life. The civil rights paradigm created in the 1960s is unraveling under the pressure of demographic change and political realignment. The Trump administration is exploiting antisemitism to finish the job, claiming the moral high ground in defense of one group while gutting protections for everyone else.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the protocol for protecting vulnerable minorities from discrimination has evolved — imperfectly, contentiously, but with a core premise intact: Adherence to clear, consistent standards builds confidence in the entire enterprise.
The premise is intact no longer. This administration has read the conservative Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions not just as a rebuke to affirmative action policies but as a ban on any campus program that even acknowledges race — far beyond what the opinion called for. It has raised the threshold for what counts as unlawful discrimination, abandoning decades-old standards. It has pilloried diversity, equity and inclusion not merely as liberal orthodoxy but as reverse racism; it has withheld billions from higher education; it has dismissed roughly 90 percent of education-related civil rights complaints; and it has implemented detention and deportation policies that abandon any semblance of due process. In all but the last of these cases, it claims the goal is to eradicate any consideration of racial or ethnic differences.
Yet at the same time the government has demanded what amounts to D.E.I. for Jews: mandatory antisemitism sensitivity trainings and targeted measures to promote an inclusive climate. And when schools are accused of discriminating against Jews, instead of conducting fair investigations, the government has imposed penalties that are wildly out of scale — such as slashing hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for medical and scientific research. No one even bothers to pretend that makes the world safer for Jews.
Gutting anti-discrimination policies for most minority groups while supercharging them for Jews is hypocritical. The hypocrisy is the point. It turns civil rights law into a political protection racket, a tool with which to attack higher education and other perceived enemies.
The disturbing excesses of some Gaza war protests are not enough to explain why Jews were selected for this special protected status. Neither is the Republican alliance with Israel’s right-wing government, or the outsize influence of Jewish donors — a frequently heard explanation that risks lapsing into antisemitism. The simple truth is that mounting this initiative served the Trump administration’s cynical political aims. The largest campaign against antisemitism in American history has also been its supreme trivialization.
At every inflection point in the evolution of modern civil rights, the question of which groups merit protection has been contested. Just African Americans, the main focus of the original civil rights movement? Or other racial and religious groups, too? Does civil rights law apply to women and to sexual and gender minorities? How real is so-called reverse discrimination? Above all, should the government’s goal be to eliminate legal distinctions that wrongly divide individual citizens from one another, or also to protect vulnerable groups from harm in pursuit of actual, full equality?
Until recently, even the conservative establishment — including administrations under Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes — generally accepted anti-discrimination law as a valid instrument of governance, in theory if not always in practice. But the civil rights model we inherited was built for a different country — one in which a white, Christian majority belatedly yielded legal space for distinct minorities to become coequal citizens. If current trends continue, however, in less than 20 years America will be majority nonwhite. Within the next half-century, it will most likely be majority non-Christian. White populist panic has set in. Banning the word “diversity” in a nation of immigrants is a last-ditch effort to reverse history.
As the categories of majority and minority now shift and blur, Americans find themselves returning, almost obsessively, to Jews: a group that doesn’t fit easily into racial binaries, that troubles the boundaries between religion and ethnicity, whose members are not people of color but whose claim to whiteness was always suspect in the eyes of white supremacists, and who have diasporic ties to a polarizing nation-state.
This ambiguity has also created ideological blind spots. Centrist liberals were late to recognize the seriousness of antisemitism in American life. They likewise missed its potency as a political weapon for the populist right and the combustibility of the Palestine question in American politics. Progressives have failed to grapple with antisemitism among their own ranks. And now a conservative administration intent on undoing civil rights law has turned that ambiguity to its own advantage.
The civil rights revolution was never finished. Now its contradictions have returned, sharper than ever. They won’t end with antisemitism, because debates about Jews are never just about Jews. They are the seismographs of a society’s deeper tremors: its fears of difference, its contested visions of nationhood.
As Americans, we can build a legal framework that is more than a cynical tool with which to punish one’s enemies and also better than what preceded it — something capacious enough to protect all minorities, principled enough to command legitimacy and resilient enough to resist political manipulation. We can do it if we stop treating civil rights as a cudgel and start treating them once again as a covenant. Covenants are not merely inherited; they are renewed. This one must be renewed not for the America that was, but for the America that we are becoming.
James Loeffler is a professor of modern Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America.”
Source photograph by BlackJack3D/Getty Images
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