JNS
“Antisemitism thrives in loopholes. Congress has the power and the obligation to close them,” Adela Cojab, of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told the committee.
As the Trump administration threatens to take a hard line on antisemitic protesters, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wednesday that addressed where to draw the line between free speech and Jew-hatred.
“You’ll find few people who are more in favor of the First Amendment than I am, and I oppose censorship over political debate,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the panel’s chair, said at the start of the hearing. “Threats to the safety of Jewish people are obviously not protected forms of speech, yet that’s what we’re continuing to see and hear.”
Adela Cojab, a legal fellow at the National Jewish Advocacy Center, testified about encountering Jew-hatred as a New York University student even before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Anyone can say anything, no matter how abhorrent about Jews or the Jewish state, but they cannot use that hate to justify unlawful discrimination in terms of concrete proposals,” she told the committee.
Cojab endorsed the pending Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed the House last year and codifies Jew-hatred at a federal level. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who was then the body’s majority leader, declined to put it up for a vote, reportedly fearing insufficient votes from within his party.
Without defining Jew-hatred clearly—which she said ought to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition—“justice is arbitrary,” Cojab said. “Antisemitism thrives in loopholes. Congress has the power and the obligation to close them.”
The hearing, which was titled "Never to Be Silent: Stemming the Tide of Antisemitism in America," was the first to address Jew-hatred in a serious way since Oct. 7, according to Senate Republicans, who called the meeting.
Democrats called a hearing last year when they were in the majority, which had been ostensibly about Jew-hatred but became a discussion about discrimination more broadly. Anti-Israel protesters interrupted that meeting frequently, and one person delivered an antisemitic diatribe.
Alyza Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, was one of the witnesses to testify on Wednesday.
She told JNS after the hearing that “the Republicans who asked me questions seem to recognize that we need to increase the pressure on the university to make sure that they take adequate steps to protect the Jews.”
“I was gratified by that,” she told JNS.
Lewin told JNS that she hopes that the general public, who watched the meeting, “will maybe be impacted,” even if those in the committee room “came in with their own preconceived ideas and walked out with their preconceived ideas.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a committee member, told JNS that universities must ban masks on their campuses to end disruptive and often violent antisemitic protests.
“These demonstrators are deliberately trying to conceal their identity, so there are no consequences,” Hawley told JNS. “They ought to have the courage of their convictions, but if they are here and they’re breaking our laws and assaulting Jewish students, and they are here on a visa, they ought to be kicked out of this country ASAP.”
One of the witnesses whom Democrats called during the hearing was Kevin Rachlin, Washington director of the Nexus Project, whose definition of Jew-hatred states, in part, that “harsh” criticism of Israel’s creation or treating Israel differently from other countries isn’t necessarily antisemitic.
Rachlin called on Congress to move forward on the broadly-popular Antiseimitsm Awareness Act and to embrace the Biden administration’s 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which refers to both the IHRA and Nexus definitions.
“Developed with input from over 1,000 Jewish communal professionals and with robust bipartisan support, including most of the people on this committee, we need thoughtful, evidence-based policies rather than rhetorical gestures that explore our fears for unrelated political objectives,” Rachlin testified.
The other Democratic witness, Meirav Solomon, a Tufts University student, criticized the Trump administration for prior associations with Jew-haters, including rapper Kanye West (who goes by Ye) and podcaster Nick Fuentes, and for what he said was the White House’s refusal to condemn controversial hand gestures by current and former advisers.
“The actions of this administration are divisive, and they erode the civil rights and basic freedoms that have allowed American Jews to flourish,” Solomon testified. “This administration seems determined to sacrifice resources that keep Jewish students like me safe at the altar of their culture war.”
Allocating resources
Nathan Diament, executive director of Orthodox Union Advocacy, submitted a letter ahead of the hearing to Grassley and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the former committee chair and now its ranking member.
The letter called on the committee to address the urgency of the situation and laid out a number of recommendations.
Diament told JNS after the hearing that the most important thing that came out of the day was that the hearing occurred and largely stuck to the topic of Jew-hatred.
“Hearings lay the groundwork for legislation, and now they need to actually pass legislation that will improve the situation on the ground,” Diament said.
Durbin, the Illinois senator, told JNS that the right direction to go is “to make sure that we condemn all hate crimes, particularly antisemitism, which is the most prevalent.”
“But from my point of view, we should not restrict it to that,” he said. “It ought to be all hate crimes related to religious affiliation.”
Diament took issue with that view.
“No reasonable person should be saying that antisemitism is the only form of discrimination and violence that needs to be responded to aggressively by law enforcement authorities,” Diament said. “What we are saying is that when you’re having a crisis around antisemitism and around the Jewish community, that’s not time to talk about all these other minority groups that have had discrimination or hate crimes committed against them.”
Appropriate levels of federal resources ought to be allocated to areas of biggest need, according to the OU leader.
“If a hurricane is about to hit Florida and there’s one inch of snow falling in Boston, you’re going to put more resources into Florida than into Boston,” Diament said. “That’s the situation confronting the American Jewish community for the past couple of years.”
