As the fall semester comes to an end, there has been only modest relief for Jewish college students in America. A series of congressional hearings throughout 2023 and 2024 led some university administrators to prevent demonstrators from taking over public spaces and the like, but institutions of higher learning remain rife with obsessive hatred of Israel. Jewish students feel threatened or targeted; many fear wearing outwardly Jewish symbols or mentioning trips to Israel lest they be ostracized as “Zionists.” Israeli students and faculty are especially likely to be harassed. The state of the campus has led many to despair.

But despair is not warranted. There is in fact a lot that can be done with little more than a change in approach and by making more effective arguments. While the underlying problems that led universities to become hubs for anti-Semitism are complex and longstanding—and may take generations to fix—the federal government already has the requisite legal means to crack down on the ongoing abuses of Jewish students. It can make clear to university administrations that they will be held responsible for allowing the sort of eliminationist anti-Israel climate that has persisted on too many campuses. It can punish institutions that incentivize or ignore anti-Jewish discrimination, including with the radical step of suspending federal funds. Even admissions policies that allow significant numbers of Hamas-sympathizers into universities can come under scrutiny. A range of new policies, if enacted, would strengthen these existing legal tools further. All it will take is political will—and for Jews to make explicit what it is they want, and why that political will is due.

Of course, there are several fronts on which American Jews need to fight: we ought to engage in the battle of ideas  in the academy, in the media, and in the public square; we must expose and stop foreign funding of campus protest movements (often by Iran or U.S.-designated terrorist groups), not to mention the vast social and political battle to support Israel beyond the campus. But most of this essay will focus on how to use America’s robust system of civil-rights law to make colleges and universities safe for all Jews once again.

I. Avoiding the Anti-Zionism-vs.-Anti-Semitism Trap

Before delving into civil-rights law, however, it is important to make one clarification. The anti-Israel campus agitators and their many apologists—no small number of Jews among them—insist that the campus demonstrations aren’t aimed at Jews per se, but only at the state of Israel or its policies. Universities seem to have largely accepted this argument. So long as administrators don’t condone the most obvious anti-Jewish actions by demonstrators—such as establishing no-go zones for Jews at UCLA, or stalking and assaulting Jews at Harvard—they can maintain the fiction that “anti-Zionism” is garden-variety political speech. As such, it is different in kind from anti-Jewish discrimination and cannot be punished.

After all, say the administrators, professors, and students, Zionism is a political ideology, one that stands for Jewish supremacy in a land once called Palestine. And how anti-Jewish can it be to chant “from the River to the Sea,” when so often it is chanted by Jewish activists as well?

Pro-Israel Jews, according to this logic, seek to ban legitimate political protest and restrict legitimate speech by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. And campus activists have been willing to take this argument quite far. When students at Columbia and Harvard staged demonstrations in front of campus Hillels—seemingly clear instances of targeting Jewish institutions—the apologists were ready. Their argument, paraphrased, went like this: we have no issue with Jews having a place to congregate and pray, but Hillel has an Israeli flag flying in front of it, sponsors trips to Israel, and hosts Israeli speakers. It has made itself complicit in Israel’s crimes, and we have a right to protest its explicit political stance. With this justification, the anti-Semites have even gone a step further, calling on their schools to sever all official relations with Hillel houses or the umbrella group that maintains them. It is often said that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism because nearly all Jews support Israel. But this makes clear is that that sword is double-edged. Anti-Israel extremists feel comfortable intimidating Jews because, it is true, nearly all Jews and the institutions that serve them support Israel.

Hatred of Israel may be distinguishable from hatred of Jews in theory, but in reality they are inextricable. Campus and street activists celebrated October 7, proclaiming “glory to the martyrs” and calling for Israel’s destruction “by any means necessary.” Less than three weeks after October 7, “Glory to Our Martyrs” was projected in bright lights onto the Gelman Library building at George Washington University—an undeniable celebration of the murderers of Jews that has been echoed in many campus pamphlets, signs, and chants since then. On the first anniversary of the attacks, several campus Students for Justice in Palestine chapters wished their members a “happy October 7.” Occasionally a demonstrator will forget to substitute “Zionist” for “Jew,” or will lead an Arabic chant about Mohammad’s armies coming to destroy the Yahud.

Jewish students and advocacy groups point out such brazen examples of Jew hatred, correctly noting that the mask has slipped. They denounce their schools for permitting this bigotry, and for their double standards, as many colleges go to extreme lengths to ensure “safe spaces” for other minority groups. Some students also note the stark difference in conduct between pro-Israel and pro-Hamas campus groups; only the latter, they argue, would rejoice in the deaths of innocent civilians.

No matter. Anti-Israel groups know that the pro-Israel community is reluctant to push for sweeping expulsions or, where appropriate, prosecutions, of offending students. We hesitate to condemn our adversaries wholesale, and continue to seek out nuanced discussion with, and tailored consequences for, those who call for Israel to be wiped off the map. The anti-Zionists, meanwhile, have no such compunction. When caught explicitly championing Hamas or slandering or harassing Jews, they often blame “Zionist saboteurs,” suggesting that interlopers seek to undermine the anti-Zionist cause by using especially inflammatory language or tactics. They then continue doing much the same thing as they were doing all along: seek to anathematize the idea that Jews should be sovereign in their ancestral homeland, and to create the illusion that supporting Israel is a fringe position. Those are the goals; the strategy involves intimidating Jews in the hope that they will stay away from the public square.

As things stand now, both the harassers and the harassed know exactly what’s going on, but the institutions tasked with refereeing their interactions—on the streets of our cities and especially on our campuses—maintain an affected neutrality between those who discriminate and those being discriminated against. This neutral pose is the major roadblock to securing Jewish civil rights.

The language of “anti-Zionism”—which transmogrifies prohibited discrimination into protected political speech—along with the treacherous Jews (or, sometimes, pretend Jews) who whitewash it, have thus far provided enough plausible deniability to stave off the conclusion that the discriminatory behavior exhibited by anti-Israel demonstrators is exactly that. Jews being singled out for mistreatment, at school or at work or on the subway, consequently face the challenge of articulating why this is no ordinary dispute. This is why we must clarify our terms.

We know that the defining element of contemporary anti-Zionism is the rejection of the idea that Jews, rather than some other group, may rule the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To borrow a legal term, the Jewishness of Israel is the “but-for cause” of anti-Zionism: but for Jewish sovereignty over the land, anti-Zionists would not exist. “From water to water, Palestine is Arab,” goes the Arabic version of the river-to-the-sea chant. And when they say “Arab,” they mean to exclude Jews.

Yet claims of discrimination, the specific legal avenue that can bring Jews some relief, require a conceptual framework that makes patterns intelligible and categorizes phenomena into useable rubrics; in short, claims of discrimination require a theory. Calling someone an idiosyncratic slur means nothing unless a neutral authority can understand why it carries some unacceptable meaning. And if the incoming Trump administration is going to use its law-enforcement powers to protect the civil rights of Jews—in part by holding universities accountable for their continued tolerance of civil-rights violations—it will need a theory that will hold up in court, articulating precisely what unlawful behavior has been wrongly tolerated.

II. Moving Past “Tropes” and “Safety”

In developing this theory, we must first reject the strategies that have so far failed to protect Jewish students on campus. American Jews have developed a vocabulary and set of concepts regarding anti-Israel activity that is meant to make the victimization of Jews more apparent, and to ostracize the victimizers. According to this argument, anti-Israel agitators should be cast out of American public life, just as other bigots are. This approach is fatally flawed.

This strategy relies on emphasizing that Jews—especially, to use that tragic term, “visible” Jews—are scared. Wherever anti-Israel demonstrations spring up, Jews must be afraid to don Star of David necklaces or kippahs, lest we become targets of anti-Zionist attacks. This fear, the logic goes, demonstrates that anti-Israel demonstrators—whatever their intent—are engaging in discriminatory intimidation, and laying the groundwork for violence against Jews. Communal leaders and college students thus frequently recur to some version of this line: I shouldn’t feel unsafe as a visible Jew here, but I do.

Such fear may be well warranted. But making a claim regarding civil rights based primarily on fear will not move the needle. First, it is too vague and subjective—how much fear, exactly, is enough to justify shutting down a non-violent political rally? Second, the fact that there is often a Jewish presence at anti-Israel demonstrations counters the idea that all “visible Jews” in the vicinity are at risk, especially if the anti-Jewish Jewish protestors wear kippahs or other religious garb to neutralize this line of criticism. If some Jews happen to be scared, naysayers can respond, it’s probably because they are Zionists, not because they are Jews. This strategy thus inadvertently bolsters the idea that anti-Zionism is merely opposition to a political ideology. It is both misleading and counterproductive.

Moreover, after years of abusing the language of “safety,” college administrators tend to believe they can ignore group-based complaints rooted in fear, because they have good evidence that those claims tend to be fake. During the first Black Lives Matter moment, around 2015, radical student groups—most prominently at Yale, Princeton, and University of Missouri—appealed to their sense of feeling “unsafe” on campuses where administrators didn’t police Halloween costumes, that featured buildings named for racists, or that lacked sufficient grievance-studies majors or DEI programming. These claims were transparently absurd. Yet these activists often got what they wanted. The problem is that the administrators didn’t cave because they were sincerely worried about the students’ well-being, but because they feared the repercussions of seeming insensitive to the demands of certain groups.

When Jewish students today use what they believe is the magical incantation to get administrators to act, they are not just abasing themselves (and potentially inviting worse treatment in the process). They are signaling that they need not be taken seriously. The claim of being “unsafe” only works for those who can trade on their identity, and Jewish identity is not worth much in the prevailing hierarchy of victimhood—which is why it has proved futile to point out to school administrators that if other groups lodged similar complaints, universities would leap to action. This failure only goes to show that something both more objective and less dependent on appeals to progressive pieties is needed.

The other failed strategy from which we can learn is the reflexive reliance on arguments about “tropes” to prove that anti-Zionists are actually anti-Semites. This was especially apparent during campus conflagrations in the spring 2024 semester. For instance, Harvard came under fire when multiple student and faculty groups shared a 1960s-era poster, showing a hand tattooed with a dollar sign inside a Star of David, holding nooses around the necks of what appear to be Muhammad Ali and the former Egyptian president Gamal Nasser. Then, at Harvard, Northwestern, and California-Berkeley, student demonstrators distributed images of their Jewish presidents or deans as demonic lizard creatures with horns and/or drinking Palestinian blood for their insufficient support of anti-Israel radicals.

In all these instances, the groups responsible were briefly castigated for invoking anti-Semitic tropes, which they clearly had done. The Harvard group responsible for the poster admitted it was anti-Semitic and apologized. At Berkeley, the law students who had portrayed the Jewish dean Erwin Chemerinsky feasting on Palestinian children airbrushed the blood from their libel, removing the red drops from the dean’s face but leaving the rest of the image intact. But none of the three institutions expelled anyone responsible for these grotesque displays—not even after Chemerinsky’s tormentors hijacked an event in his backyard and accused his wife of assaulting them when they refused to leave. No students involved seem to have faced any repercussions. Pointing out that elite students (and faculty) had tapped into millennia-old and horrifying tropes about Jews’ sub-humanity simply did not stick.

That should not be surprising, given what the argument about tropes entails. To fault someone for anti-Semitism expressed through tropes implies that the anti-Semite is reaching into history for paradigms to express his disgust for the Jew, that there is an identifiable thread between traditional (usually European Christian) anti-Semitism and what’s presenting itself in Cambridge, Berkeley, or Evanston.

Yet it isn’t especially plausible that progressive and generally anti-white and anti-Christian demonstrators are the heirs to Inquisitors, Crusaders, or Nazis. The attempts to prove that they are expressing an ancient malice, tied to traditional forms of anti-Semitism, haven’t been persuasive—certainly not to most of the anti-Israel left. Again, Jewish anti-Israel demonstrators rush to cover for their comrades, occasionally blaming their worst excesses on naivete or acknowledging the odd bad apple, problems which could be remedied by some additional “education” regarding anti-Semitism and, doubtless, Islamophobia. While examining images, motifs, and choices of words might be a useful exercise in trying to understand anti-Israel ideology, it is not an effective defense of Jewish civil rights. Instead, it traps Jews in endless, pedantic, circular discussions about where exactly to draw the line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

It can also backfire. Trying to shoehorn contemporary expressions of Jew-hatred into “modern-day blood libels” similarly conditions Jews and non-Jews alike to conclude that if current controversies do not conform to historical paradigms for Jew-hatred they are not expressions of Jew-hatred at all. Even when these traditional forms are recognized and condemned, the accusation is too easy for anti-Israel groups to slip out of. All they need to do is adjust their word choice a bit and remove some imagery from their posters. Relying on pointing out anti-Israel demonstrators’ tendency to slip into traditional anti-Semitic imagery simply will not compute if the offenders are progressives, much less if they are progressive Jews.

These are strategies meant to sway the court of public opinion, and they have largely failed to gain ground. In fact, many radicals and domestic terror groups trying to push public pro-Israel voices out of polite society count on playing the game on this turf. We should excise these habits of thought from our communal and organizational playbooks.

This is not to say we ought not seek to counter and overcome the “anti-Zionism-not-anti-Semitism” argument. To do so effectively, though, we must develop and commit to a theory (or set of theories) that can effectively tap into existing anti-discrimination paradigms. The first step is to make explicit the core claim of contemporary anti-Zionism: that Jewish sovereignty in the Levant is illegitimate. From there, there are several ways to express how uniquely pernicious anti-Zionism inherently is, and why Jews’ civil rights are being violated.

III. Defining Jewish Civil Rights

Civil-rights law is based on the principle of equality despite differences in immutable characteristics. Americans, including bureaucrats and judges, are sensitive to violations of that principle. When a group or class of people is singled out for particular harm on the basis of group characteristics, Americans broadly recognize that the law should hold the perpetrators accountable.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Right Act is the key provision guaranteeing that people of all backgrounds receive equal treatment regardless of their unchosen characteristics. Through private and government lawsuits, it ensures that federal funding does not flow to organizations that countenance discrimination. Its reach is broad; plaintiffs suing pursuant to Title VI can allege that they were treated differently or otherwise harmed on account of a protected characteristic such as national origin, without having to prove malicious intent. And evidence of such differential treatment need not be obvious and direct; circumstantial evidence, like a suspicious sequence of events that bespeaks continued indifference to the welfare of a national-origin group, can count. Title VI is so welcoming to anti-discrimination lawsuits that the government can even sue for “disparate impact” if a university has a policy or practice that appears to be neutral but has the effect of leaving some groups off worse than others.

For instance, the Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Civil Rights, which usually investigates Title VI violations before recommending that the Department of Justice (DOJ) sue, found in 2022 that a Texas school district discriminated on the basis of national origin by requiring parents to present a Social Security card to enroll their children in school. Even though the district had never denied a child enrollment on the basis of a parent’s failure to produce a Social Security card, the office concluded that the policy violated Title VI because it “could have had a chilling effect on non-citizen parents’ and guardians’ efforts to enroll their children in the district’s schools.”

Even though the discrimination was speculative, in other words, Title VI still provided a remedy. In this case, the school district and DOE came to a resolution before the Department of Justice could sue. Title VI law is quite broad, and the threat of revoked federal assistance can be considerably effective.

A comprehensive cultural and legal strategy that brings the power of civil-rights law to bear, then, begins by cataloging the ways in which anti-Zionism is shot through with objective examples of differential treatment. These must be emphasized in the public square until they are common knowledge, too pervasive and obvious to ignore—no matter how much demonstrators may obfuscate or how many Jews participate in anti-Jewish canards. These examples must then form the basis of government investigations and, eventually, lawsuits.

It is undeniable, for example, that anti-Zionist demonstrators harass Israelis and Israeli-Americans on the basis of their national origin—which is prohibited by the plain language of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The fact that, as Norman Podhoretz put it, Israel has become the Jew among nations only makes this national-level form of discrimination easier to spot and root out. And suing universities on that basis has a simple but underappreciated benefit: it invokes Title VI to fight “anti-Zionism” by compelling universities to deal with it—without inviting any debate over whether it is truly anti-Semitic. Israelis are part of a national-origin group, after all, just like Chinese, Iraqis, and Ghanaians.

The mechanism to prosecute those who discriminate against Israelis would be simple: Title VI does not even require the presence of Israelis (or any other national-origin group) on campus in allegations of this sort of discrimination. It would be enough to show that a school environment is inhospitable to people of a particular national origin. By tolerating the mistreatment of any one group, even in the abstract, a university is guilty of discrimination, thus providing grounds for revoking federal assistance.

Such cases involving Israelis are endemic; a professor who refuses to sit on panels with Israeli scholars or work with Israeli graduate students, for example, has clearly engaged in unlawful discrimination under Title VI. This rationale may even apply to a department that refuses to collaborate with Israeli institutions. So, too, a case—and there have been such cases—when a professor singles out an Israeli student in a classroom and asks if he has murdered children.

But this argument can be taken even further. It only requires a candid assessment of what anti-Zionism is: an ideology advocating the elimination of a sovereign nation and the national-origin-identity that exists because of it. Differential treatment of Israelis and Israeli-Americans is this ideology’s inevitable goal. The entire point of the demonstrations, as their organizers freely admit, is to vilify and discredit one nation and its citizens. In the past, some anti-Israel activists may have insisted that they are mere “critics” of Israel who do not seek its elimination. Thankfully, in their candor they have clarified, unmistakably and repeatedly, that they “don’t want no two states/ We want all of it.” Again, under the law, it matters little whether this is anti-Semitic or genocidal when it is evidently a call singling out one nation for destruction.

Campuses that repeatedly allow such demonstrations to crop up, and that fail to expel the individuals responsible even when they have violated campus rules by engaging in acts of national-origin discrimination, have opened themselves up to significant civil liability. Their best chance of maintaining the status quo is to hope the government chooses not to pursue such litigation, gets bogged down in a prolonged investigation, or agrees to voluntary compliance that requires little substantive change from the university. And so far, that’s generally what has happened.

But a presidential administration with the will to root out anti-Israel fanaticism and deal a blow to the terror-supporting organizations that rely on campus activism could change things, and seriously reform universities that have become incubators of anti-Jewish and anti-American radicalism. Members of the incoming administration have already indicated that some interest in taking real action. Linda McMahon, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, has mentioned cracking down on anti-Semitism after her confirmation. The president-elect’s new choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has a record of pro-Israel statements, has spoken on multiple occasions about rising anti-Semitism, especially on college campuses, and suggested that she might direct the FBI to investigate student demonstrations where legally appropriate. Only time will tell how these statements will translate into effective action, but there is reason to be hopeful.

It is also worth noting that anti-Israel demonstrations discriminate on the basis of national origin in a less intuitive sense: they discriminate against Jews and not just Israelis. As the Jewish civil-rights champion Alyza Lewin succinctly put it:

Title VI does not mention religion, but according to sub-regulatory guidance, members of religious groups, including Jews, Sikhs, and Muslims, are protected by Title VI if they are harassed or discriminated against on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnicity. In addition, Executive Order 13899 on Combating Anti-Semitism, enacted in 2019, directs agencies, including the Department of Education, to refer to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA] Working Definition of Anti-Semitism when investigating Title VI complaints of anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination. The Department of Education includes FAQs about EO 13899 on its website. It recently referred university administrators to this resource in a “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the Department of Education pursuant to the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism.

Lewin has emphasized that Jews overwhelmingly view support for Israel as part of their national-religious obligations, like keeping Shabbat or kosher. The fact that some Jews do not share this sense of obligation has no bearing on the fact that it is central to the identity of those who do. “Would university administrators permit student clubs to demand that Catholics disavow the Vatican,” she asks, rhetorically, “or that Muslims shed their connection to Mecca, in order to be accepted?” This is a strong argument, albeit one that may prove hard for fully to grasp, since they tend to be less familiar with people who take ethnoreligious obligations seriously.

There is also an obvious sense in which Jews are “harassed or discriminated against on the basis of their actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnicity” when demonstrators deem Israel a settler-colonial project and call for its destruction. Understanding the logic of contemporary anti-Zionism is crucial to perceiving it. As Hannah E. Meyers and I pointed out in a 2022 article in Commentary, “logically necessary to every claim that Israel is colonialist or that Jews are white Europeans, is that Jews are not ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ to the Levant.” Rather, we Jews, as a people with shared ancestry, are “not real Jews” but “impostors,” and, by virtue of claiming a shared national heritage, we are inherently liars and frauds.

“All Jews are liars” sounds like textbook Jew-hatred, because it is. The demonstrators are calling us a nation of impostors who pretend to be Middle Eastern to steal land and exploit the natives. It simply does not matter if some Jews participate in this accusation. The claim is false, outrageously so. It singles out one national-origin group for scrutiny and attack. And this line of attack is not confined to demonstrations with the most overt postcolonial overtones. The core of anti-Zionism—the idea that one state in particular is a legitimate target for elimination because of the national origin of its population—is based on this lie. To claim that Jews have no claim to their ancestral homeland because they are not who they say they are is many things—false, heinous, dangerous. It is also inherently discriminatory, and should be recognized as such under law.

Finally, we should consider what the new anti-Zionism substantively entails. It is not criticism of Israel, its government, or any of its policies. Nor is it the belief that Israel should withdraw its forces or influence from disputed territories such as Judea and Samaria and cease its blockade on Gaza. As already noted, by its own proud declaration, anti-Zionism seeks to undo what Zionism did: establish Israel. Its advocates champion the removal of Jewish sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The “occupation” with which it is concerned is the Jewish occupation—that is, control—of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

In Hamas’s plans for post-October-7 governance of liberated Palestine, the roughly 7 million Jews who would come under their control would be killed, expelled, or enslaved. Some Hamas apologists in the West explicitly approve, telling Jews to go back to Poland where we belong, or else. But most anti-Zionists obfuscate and dissemble about what a post-Israel Levant would have in store for its disenfranchised Jews.

Ask the most humanistic anti-Zionist what comes next, and you’ll get some pie-in-the-sky response about a secular binational state with equal rights for people of all religions and ethnicities. It’s not clear whether these people believe their own delusions or merely think this is a necessary gloss to make the idea of destroying Israel seem more palatable. It also doesn’t matter.

Jews are reluctant to go along with even the most humane version of anti-Zionism because they know from repeated experience that it will result in mass slaughter. The underlying claim, that Israel must be eliminated, reflects a serious and long-operative principle embedded in the anti-Zionist movement: that Jewish blood is cheap. Only Jews are expected to accept unimaginable risks to their own security, to let their sworn enemies—with a track record of, and avowed commitment to, the most grotesque violence—rule over them. Out of one side of the anti-Zionist’s mouth the value of one civilian life in Gaza is infinitely precious; out of the other, reckless indifference to the fate of 7 million Jews, and certainly toward the hostages held in Gaza. There is no version of contemporary anti-Zionism, no matter how sanitized or how many Jews participate in advancing it, that avoids this. It is a feature, not a bug.

As Lewin points out, the IHRA Working Definition of Anti-Semitism is encoded in our law by federal regulation. The famous multi-part document, published in 2016, attempts to distinguish anti-Israel expression from anti-Semitic expression. “Criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic,” it explains, but anti-Semitism can “include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” When DOE arbiters determine whether anti-Israel expression might constitute anti-Jewish harassment, they thus must separate between “criticism” of Israel and “targeting” or singling it out.

Perhaps that was once difficult in the university context. But the ruse of “just anti-Zionism” has been exposed through the behavior and rhetoric of campus activists over the past year and change. The IHRA deems anti-Semitic “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” Campus groups across the country continue to do all those things, explicitly and regularly. The kicker, though, is IHRA’s condemnation of “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Pro-Israel Americans’ intuitions about the anti-Semitic core of anti-Zionism are thus well aligned with the protections offered by American law. We are reflexively opposed to anti-Zionism because we know that what the anti-Zionists seek would amount to Jerusalem sacked a third time, or perhaps something more like a second Holocaust. That is reason enough to emphasize, in a cultural and legal response to the current situation, that Israel is the home of 7 million of our people, and we will not be careless with their basic safety.

IV. How the Government Can Put the Law to Work

American Jews need not accept the status quo. It’s what anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws are for. Jews are fully American, and ought not resign ourselves to being demeaned and harassed. Nor should we demand empathy from campus authorities. We can instead fight on the legal battlefield, showing that those who rage against us are objectively discriminatory and that the institutions coddling them are in violation of their civil-rights obligations. And availing ourselves of the law may have other salutary effects, such as pushing corrupt universities to rethink their institutional support for anti-American and anti-Semitic movements, and forcing the domestic terror organizations fomenting these demonstrations to open their books in the course of litigation.

Private pressure, brought by Jews and Israelis against universities for failing to uphold their Title VI responsibilities, can make a dent. Students, parents, alumni, and donors can try to use well-honed arguments about schools’ toleration of anti-Zionism in violation of their civil-rights obligations to pressure them into adopting measures to end to this trend, such as expelling those who have participated in discriminatory harassment disguised as protest.

But there are two items to keep in mind with regard to this strategy. First, an argument that universities need to undertake massive reforms (when doing so would surely invite significant faculty, administrative, and student pushback) is only as compelling as the credible threat of litigation behind it. Second, private litigation is limited by its nature. Those limitations—having to do with doctrines of standing (who can legitimately bring a lawsuit) and mootness, and the difficulty of showing “deliberate indifference,” among others—are often quite technical.

Fortunately, there is another approach that avoids many of these problems. For what is often difficult for private litigants like students to accomplish is relatively easy for the government to achieve through investigations and lawsuits. As the law professor David E. Bernstein has noted, the federal Department of Education “does not appear to have opened a single investigation of its own” into campus anti-Semitism, “nor has it referred even the most egregious cases to the Justice Department for potential civil litigation. Every lawsuit that has been filed has been the product of private rather than government efforts.”

When private action has led to DOE investigations, they have often languished. Those that officials pursued more vigorously resulted, for the most part, in feckless settlements in which universities make a show of doing something through bureaucratic reshuffling. These settlements have not forced any universities to address the ways in which they have systematically recruited students and faculty who are ideologically committed to national-origin discrimination. The settlements also mean that universities failed to punish the perpetrators of repeated and flagrant discrimination. Private parties’ incentives and limitations—to achieve small wins that make campus life more tolerable without becoming embroiled in time-consuming and often expensive litigation for too long—make private litigation imperfect vehicles for enforcing civil-rights law fully.

But a new administration might take a different approach. If the incoming leadership of the DOE and DOJ want to achieve something more substantive, they have the authority and tools to do so. The DOE can begin by launching its own investigations into campuses where there has been persistent anti-Israel activity, especially where there have been documented instances of unmistakable eliminationism, such as references to undoing Israel’s founding or removing Jewish sovereignty “from the River to the Sea.”

Perhaps more importantly, the DOE can issue regulations (often referred to as “guidance” or “Dear Colleague” letters) that tell universities how it plans to act in the future so that schools can get in line. For instance, the DOE might consider a statement noting that it considers tolerance of anti-Zionist demonstrations a form of prohibited discrimination under Title VI. The guidance could detail what it considers the proper remedies for such discrimination, which could be harsh, e,g., expulsion of students and termination of faculty known to participate in activities that create a hostile environment on campus. Another remedy would be requiring campuses found to have violated the rights of Jewish students to submit to audits of admissions practices, overseen by a third party, to understand why they have been overrun with anti-Semitic and anti-American fanatics, and to ensure that admissions departments stop courting such applicants.

If universities fail to comply, or counter with flimsy offers to create more committees or Title VI coordinators, the DOE should recommend lawsuits to the DOJ. The Justice Department could even create an internal or interagency task force to handle these suits efficiently and with expert staff committed to seeing them through. The DOJ has in the recent past had to overcome recalcitrant attorneys either dragging their feet or outright refusing to litigate ideological cases, such as prosecutions of the extreme leftist network Antifa. While it’s easy to imagine a similar reaction from career government lawyers asked to take similar steps against universities, a special task force could help make sure that the right people are given the job.

Above all, the DOJ should use every argument at its disposal to enforce Title VI. It should emphasize that anti-Zionist demonstrations have been explicitly and objectively discriminatory against Jews and Israelis. And if university administrators still do not take meaningful steps to address the problem, the government should take the harshest measure at its disposal: revoking federal funding.

Here, Congress has a role to play. It can enact provisions, including legislation overwriting agency regulations, which make it easier for the DOE to revoke funding from civil-rights violators so that the agency does not get bogged down for years trying to hold schools accountable when they have clearly violated the law. Just last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce introduced a bipartisan anti-BDS bill crafted with universities in mind, and the committee’s leaders seem open to taking further action. The executive branch can enforce the law even without congressional intervention, but Congress can make the job easier.

State governments, too, have their own anti-discrimination laws and provide funding for universities in their jurisdictions. Though civil-rights laws, school funding policies, and procedures required to revoke funding vary by state, attorneys general across the nation might consider following this blueprint: investigate schools, demand reforms, and sue in cases of noncompliance. All this would, of course, be backed by the argument that offending schools have tolerated discriminatory speech and conduct in violation of civil-rights law. State legislatures have a great deal of latitude, especially when it comes to state universities, and that includes writing bills that would cut off state funding to schools that allow anti-Semitic discrimination in any form.

Such a policy response naturally raises First Amendment and free-speech concerns. At some level, it uses the power of government to crack down on certain kinds of expression. But this is a violation of neither the First Amendment nor its underlying principles. The government would not be depriving speakers of life, liberty, or property for things they say, write, or tweet. It would, rather, be setting the conditions for universities to receive funding as part of a legal regime that has been in place for a long time and is overwhelmingly considered a fitting government response to discrimination. The government does not owe all schools money under all circumstances.

Moreover, the First Amendment does not protect all expressive activities. Many laws and campus rules regulate expression to maintain an environment appropriate for education. Discriminatory harassment is one form of unprotected expression. Even when it involves only words, it can still lead to legal liability, and for good reason—it interferes with the promise of equal access to education for all.

Indeed, the legal rationale for an aggressive federal response to rampant anti-Semitism is not innovative. Thirty years ago, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) laid out what it considers an appropriate response by a university receiving federal money, should it learn of ongoing discrimination “on the basis of race, color, or national origin against students” on its campus:

Though the recipient may not be responsible directly for all harassing conduct, the recipient does have a responsibility to provide a nondiscriminatory educational environment. If discriminatory conduct causes a racially hostile environment to develop that affects the enjoyment of the educational program for the student(s) being harassed, and if the recipient has actual or constructive notice of the hostile environment, the recipient is required to take appropriate responsive action. This is the case regardless of the identity of the person(s) committing the harassment.

In other words, if students or faculty members create a hostile environment for certain groups, the law requires university administrators to do something about it. And it’s not hard to argue that having to walk, day after day, through a quad filled with masked students waving Hizballah flags and calling for the violent overthrow of the Jewish state and a global intifada creates a hostile environment for Jewish students. And that’s not even to mention the frequent instances where individual Jews have been harassed, or where Hillel houses are targeted for protest. The regulations are also clear about what must be done:

The appropriate response to a racially hostile environment must be tailored to redress fully the specific problems experienced at the institution as a result of the harassment. In addition, the responsive action must be reasonably calculated to prevent recurrence and ensure that participants are not restricted in their participation or benefits as a result of a racially hostile environment created by students or non-employees.

In evaluating a recipient’s response to a racially hostile environment, OCR will examine disciplinary policies, grievance policies, and any applicable anti-harassment policies. OCR also will determine whether the responsive action was consistent with any established institutional policies or with responsive action taken with respect to similar incidents.

Examples of possible elements of appropriate responsive action include imposition of disciplinary measures, development and dissemination of a policy prohibiting racial harassment, provision of grievance or complaint procedures, implementation of racial awareness training, and provision of counseling for the victims of racial harassment.

These guidelines clearly justify all the measures this essay calls for. One could, in theory, argue against the wisdom of the policies they articulate. But no one can reasonably claim that using the DOE’s published guidelines to defend Jews constitutes a defeat for free speech or a new frontier of authoritarianism. The only thing new would be the DOE taking anti-Semitism as seriously as discrimination against other groups.

Legal reasoning does not exist on a separate plane from regular reasoning. Before a court can rule that discrimination and harassment are “severe,” an important standard in Title VI law, regular citizens must set the expectations and mores against which the facts of the case are weighed. In other words, for the law to protect us, we Jews must articulate what it is that we need protection against accurately and in a way that resonates with our fellow citizens who do not have the same intuitions. To do so, we need to point out what the anti-Zionists think and want. We must repeatedly point out that the anti-Israel movement’s claims that it is merely engaged in garden-variety political speech, and that Jews who complain are maliciously conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, does not hold water. The presence of Jews at campus demonstrations does not counteract the fact that the demonstrators are, at best, not bothered by the mass shedding of Jewish blood and, at worst, eager to see that blood spilled.

Jewish students are under no obligation to endure hearing their classmates tell them repeatedly that they are frauds and criminals. Israeli-American high schoolers are under no obligation to avoid applying to certain colleges, including the nation’s most prestigious, because they know they will be demeaned and harassed by students and faculty. Indeed, a key purpose of civil-rights law is to ensure that universities put an end to such mistreatment immediately and without reservation. But getting the legal vindication we are due requires some changes to the way we think about and express what we are going through. Whether we are willing to commit to a language and theory of Zionist civil rights that may be unfamiliar but are nonetheless true and, crucially, designed to work, will depend on just how serious we are about defeating those who torment us, rather than simply pandering for sympathy.