Student protesters demonstrate against the war in Gaza at Columbia University in New York on Monday, April 29, 2024. (Victor J. Blue/for The Washington Post)
House Republicans are seeking to unite their unruly majority around an evergreen conservative cause, devising a strict response to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that have roiled college campuses across the country in recent weeks.
GOP leaders this week announced plans for new oversight investigations of elite universities where — in the words of House Republican Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) — “pro-terrorist anti-Semites [are] taking over.” And on Wednesday, they passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which its advocates said would empower the federal government to crack down on anti-Israel protests on campuses by codifying a definition of antisemitism that encompasses not just threats against Jews, but also certain criticisms of Israel itself.
“We must give the Department of Education the tools to … hold college administrators accountable for refusing to address antisemitism on their campuses,” said Rep. Michael Lawler, R-N.Y., the bill’s lead sponsor.
The bill was approved by a vote of 320-91, with a majority of Democrats — 133 — joining Republicans.
Lawler’s bill — with 61 co-sponsors, including 15 Democrats — would create “a clear definition of antisemitism” in U.S. law that the Education Department could then use to cut off funding to academic institutions found to tolerate such behaviors. The definition, however, has drawn fierce opposition from First Amendment advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union and liberal Democrats, who say it veers sharply into the realm of restricting political views.
It’s unclear what the bill’s prospects are in the Democratic-controlled Senate or how the White House views it. Previous iterations failed to muster sufficient support in Congress, but both its supporters and opponents say the ongoing protests and a rise in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel have injected fresh momentum.
If it does become law, the federal definition of antisemitism, adopted from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, would include such speech as “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; “applying double standards” to Israel that are “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
The idea is that student-held signs, for example, like those displayed at Columbia University in New York this week, calling for “revolution” or “intifada” — which means “uprising” — would amount to antisemitism under the law. The Education Department, in turn, could then revoke federal research grants and other funding to a university that fails to take punitive action toward students who express such views, the bill’s proponents say.
Several Republicans said opposing Zionism — the political movement to create, and now to preserve, a state for Jews in their biblical homeland — would qualify as antisemitism under the law. Some suggested that even holding a prolonged protest would constitute antisemitism. “The erection of encampments on college campuses isn’t an expression of speech,” Rep. Marcus J. Molinaro (R-N.Y.) said on the House floor Wednesday. “It is a direct threat to Jewish students on college campuses.”
But the “double standards” example and the notion that Nazi comparisons are off-limits in the case of Israel, among other aspects of the definition, are deeply problematic because they’re too broad and present “viewpoint discrimination,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment advocacy organization.
“Nowhere else in First Amendment law does it say that you can criticize a certain country up to a certain limit, or else you might risk violating federal anti-discrimination law,” he said.
“The First Amendment allows individuals to criticize every country in the world, including our own” — and that includes comparing other governments to the Nazis, however disturbing many Americans may find that comparison to be, Coward said.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., a Jewish lawmaker who has co-sponsored other bills aimed at combating antisemitism and described himself Wednesday as a “deeply committed Zionist,” urged colleagues to reject Lawler’s bill, which he characterized as “misguided” because it “threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech.”
“If this legislation were to become law,” he said, universities wanting to avoid federal investigation “could end up suppressing protected speech criticizing Israel or supporting Palestinians,” and students and faculty might be driven to self-censor.
Debate on the House floor grew heated at times, as both sides accused the other of neglecting American values in favor of politics. Pro-Palestinian campus protests have included Jewish participants, and some Democrats noted that several liberal Jewish groups oppose the bill, in addition to the man who authored the antisemitism definition for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Republicans pointed to incidents of violence and destruction, exaggerating some — such as a report by a Jewish student at Yale who said she was “jabbed” in the eye by a pro-Palestinian protester bearing a Palestinian flag. According to irate lawmakers on the House floor this week, the student, who appeared uninjured when she spoke to CBS News, had been “stabbed in the eye.”
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), a centrist Democrat who co-sponsored the legislation with Lawler, pushed back on his colleagues’ free speech concerns, saying he “ensured” the bill “protects the First Amendment” because that is important to him. “It allows criticism of Israel,” he said. “It doesn’t allow calls for the destruction or elimination of the Jewish state.”
Opposing elite, often left-leaning universities has for years been a popular rallying cry for Republicans, and it could prove even more so in an election year in which intraparty tension over how to handle the war in Ukraine and other national security policy questions has slowed congressional action in other areas. The antisemitism bill and college oversight efforts allow conservatives to demonstrate moral clarity in support of Israel while spotlighting divisions among Democrats.
“What Republicans seem to be doing is bringing forward things that they hope will divide us,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters this week, noting that several liberal Jewish groups oppose the measure because the definition of antisemitism is so broad. “So why would you do that, except if you want to weaponize antisemitism and you want to use it as a political ploy?”
Polls have shown the American public has grown uncomfortable and divided over U.S.-Israel policy in the six-plus months since Hamas waged a devastating cross-border terrorist attack on Israel and Israel began its punishing campaign of retaliation, destroying most of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure and displacing most of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents.
The ongoing Israeli offensive, which has so far killed more than 34,000 people, according to local health authorities, and given rise to famine, has unleashed a furor among liberal college students in particular, who have disrupted classes and shut down campuses in protest, calling for their institutions to divest from funding, investments and partnerships with the state of Israel.
Police in New York arrested some 300 people overnight Wednesday, after officers in riot gear breached a campus building that had been occupied by pro-Palestinian protesters. A separate pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA meanwhile came under attack from counterprotesters, who unleashed fireworks and chemical sprays at the student activists, igniting clashes and a fierce rebuke from the campus newspaper’s editorial board.
Many liberals have called for police restraint and for university administrators to respect a long-standing tradition of campus activism, including antiwar movements. Democrats who oppose Lawler’s bill also called the Republican effort to crack down on antisemitism disingenuous and hypocritical, pointing to Republicans’ frequent defense of free speech — and condemnation of liberals’ “cancel culture” — in other contexts.
“How dare the party of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene come down here and lecture Democrats about antisemitism,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, D-N.M., said on the House floor Tuesday. “Remember, the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, dines with Holocaust deniers, and said there were ‘fine people on both sides’ at a rally where white supremacists chanted ‘Jews will not replace us.’ “
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said she opposed the bill because she was concerned it could be used to persecute Christians who claim the Jews killed Jesus — a belief that is regarded by many Jews as an antisemitic trope. “Antisemitism is wrong,” she wrote on X on Wednesday, adding that she would not vote for the law because it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) urged Democrats to back an alternative, also bipartisan antisemitism measure introduced in the House by Rep. Kathy Manning, D-N.C., that would establish new positions focused on antisemitism at the White House and the Education Department and require federal law enforcement to conduct an annual threat analysis of antisemitism in America.
Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.
