Trump’s War on Free Speech & Higher Ed

Alan Wald

University of Michigan students march off campus to bring the BDS message to the Ann Arbor community. Kathleen Brown

THIS DISCUSSION IS excerpted from an extensive interview with Alan Wald conducted by Suzi Weissman on Jacobin Radio, April 18, 2025. In addition, another fuller version of Alan’s remarks appears in more detailed form, with documentation, in the essay “The Instruction of History” in the new pamphlet Operation Mind, edited by Silke-Maria Weineck and Rebekah Modrak (Ann Arbor: Disobedience Press, 2025).

Alan, how did we get from student protests and encampments to this narrative that campuses are now dangerous spaces for Jewish students?

Alan Wald: We must remember that what’s happening now was precipitated, and it’s still largely taking place, through what some of us are calling “The Antisemitism Scare.”

We’re invoking the Red Scare of the 1950s because there are so many similarities.

The first major use of this antisemitism pretext was after October 2023 to suppress student and staff rights who were protesting Israeli state policy and U.S. complicity, and then it quickly moved on as an attack on faculty academic freedom. Now, in the name of “Jewish safety,” the Federal Government is canceling research at Harvard into areas that include ALS and tuberculosis. And the Trump administration is supposedly “protecting” Jews by canceling cancer research at Columbia.

This abuse of “antisemitism” charges began under a Democratic administration by targeting pro-Palestinian speech and action with an extraordinarily exaggerated claim of an “epidemic of antisemitism” that allegedly endangered the safety of Jewish students.

What we’re dealing with is widespread and completely bonkers hyperbole that conflates what might be a tiny number of antisemitic acts (which must be absolutely condemned) with what are actually militant anti-Israel critiques.

Yes, some of these critiques of Israel or Zionism may seem reductive or slightly obnoxious, and probably not very effective. But 90% of the protestors are carrying signs along the lines of “Ceasefire” and “Divest.” So, what we’re talking about can be termed smokescreen antisemitism.

SW: When you spoke on a recent panel you used that term. What do you mean?

AW: The Trump administration’s “Jewish safety” is really a smokescreen to carry out a much larger and increasingly dangerous agenda. They’re creating cover for the antisemitism which MAGA itself is promoting.

You can see that very clearly by the MAGA associations with various antisemitic media figures. They’re also allying with Nazi parties or neo-Nazi parties in Europe. They’re trying to drive a wedge between Jews and other minorities, who, under other circumstances, might join in solidarity and oppose oppressive actions.

The campuses singled out for attack, like Columbia, Harvard, and University of Michigan, have a large percentage of Jewish students and faculty. This is no doubt part of the reason why they are sites of militant anti-Israeli protest — because a significant section of the academic Jewish community is horrified by what is being done in our name. But a large Jewish presence also would suggest a high degree of security of Jews in these environments, even though those Jews (and others) who support Israeli policy are discomfited by the encampments, disruptions, and pro-Palestinian flags and chants.

However, the MAGA-controlled government claim that it must defund, deport, and repress at the behest of Jews who are concerned about their safety is extremely dangerous. They are trying to make it look as if it’s Jews who are secretly controlling things from behind the scenes for Jewish gain, things that are really in MAGA’S interests and not those of Jewish Americans.

SW: Is this how they claim to “protect Jews” while blaming them?

AW: Yes, the fact that much of the Jewish establishment won’t acknowledge this MAGA game is serious. MAGA is using a false definition of antisemitism to do whatever it wishes.

Note also that MAGA supports the definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which many institutions (like Harvard) are adopting. It provides 11 examples of antisemitism, but seven are about criticizing Israel! One states that to describe Israel as racist is antisemitic. Yet Israel’s nation-state law says that only Jews have the right to self-determination in the “Land of Israel,” which is racist because there is another people there.

Research shows that where there is antisemitism, it’s mostly from rightwing young men who get from the idea from social media that Jews are some kind of conspiratorial group bringing immigrants into the United States to change the ethnic makeup and voting patterns. That kind of antisemitism must be fought. Of course, if actual antisemitism should appear among anti-Zionists we must categorically oppose it.

Faculty Suspended or Fired

SW: It seems that faculty are increasingly under scrutiny. Faculty have been suspended, fired or silenced. It’s a real crackdown on academic freedom. Can you give us a sense of the disciplinary action that some faculty have faced?

Steve Thrasher, fired for trying to protect students, at Texas Book Festival, 2022, © 2022 Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.

AW: When students were attacked, the faculty who stood up to defend them were immediately persecuted. Here are eight cases, many still unresolved:

• Steve Thrasher was chair of social justice at Northwestern University. After he participated in an encampment demanding divestment in April 1924, all his classes were canceled. He was trying to set up a protective line between the police and his students, and they charged him with obstructing an officer and subsequently fired him.

• Richard Heyman was a longtime lecturer at University of Texas, Austin, for something like 18-20 years. He was fired by email after the police charged him with gesturing in a threatening manner with his water bottle.

• Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies and a MacArthur fellow at Princeton. She’s currently under investigation for pro-Palestinian activism.

Ruha Benjamin is “under investigation.”

• Katherine Franke, a distinguished Columbia law professor, was forced to retire because of an investigation resulting from comments she had made on “Democracy Now!” She had  expressed concern over former Israeli soldiers who were spraying chemicals on the Palestine protesters.

• Tiffany Willoughby Herard is a professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine, facing three misdemeanor counts for allegedly resisting arrest during a protest in May 2024, and was arraigned in January 2025.

Tiffany Willoughby Herard faces charges for resisting arrest.

• Michel DeGraff, a professor at MIT, received a letter of reprimand and his pay increase withheld after he asked to teach a course on Palestine.

• Sang Hea Kil, a Judaic studies tenured professor at San Jose State University in California, has been fired because she served as the advisor to a pro-Palestinian student group. The charge which resulted in her termination claimed she “directed and encouraged students to violate university policies” and “engaged in harassing and offensive conduct and comments that were directed toward her colleagues.”

Maura Finkelstein, a tenured professor fired for making students feel “uncomfortable.”

• Maura Finkelstein was the tenured chair of anthropology at Muhlenberg College in New Jersey. She was fired in May 2024 because of her social media posts about Zionism. Some students monitoring it issued a complaint because it made them feel uncomfortable. [Editor’s note: Her case was featured in the June 8, 2025 New York Times magazine.]

So, long before Trump took office, here’s what university administrators focused on:

1. They instituted new restrictions on campus protests. These were either suddenly imposed or rules previously not enforced. This meant students and faculty could get into trouble doing things that they assumed were the normal procedures.

2. They fed whatever forms of faculty and student consultation that had existed to the woodchipper. They no longer consult with the various bodies that are supposed ensure due process or they weaponize civil rights legislation. For example, the Muhlenberg administration claimed it was protecting Jewish safety and invoked Civil Rights Act Title VI to fire Maura Finkelstein.

This has created an atmosphere where people are afraid to speak. There are several websites, starting with Canary Mission and Antisemite of the Week, that irresponsibly broadcast names and personal information for purposes of blacklisting and harassment.

Machinery of Indoctrination

SW: Who are the Zionists that are behind this definition of antisemitism in the United States? Who is pushing this political, repressive atmosphere?

AW: At the top of the list are two main groups. Ironically, the larger group, Christian Zionists, is explicitly anti-Judaic and implicitly antisemitic in their theology and their views.

They support Israel and the expansion of Israel into what they call the Holy Land, and they think it’s going to happen very soon. Christian Zionists want Jews to move to Israel so that their conception of Biblical prophecy can be fulfilled — that the Second coming of Jesus means the end of time. That’s the point when every Jew will have to decide to convert or go to hell.

There are about 30 million organized Christian Zionists in the United States; they are the major financial force of the Israeli lobby.

In comparison, the U.S. adult Jewish population is about five million. But many Jews have only a vague idea of Zionism, largely based on the experience of the Holocaust and an understandable desire for Jewish security. These non-fanatics are people we can reach.

Unfortunately, after the 1967 war there was a massive Israeli-nationalist indoctrination of the U.S. Jewish community, and now many organized Jewish Zionist forces are in tacit alliance with the Christian Zionists.

Today the Jewish establishment inculcates generations of young people with ideas about going to Israel and joining the military. That’s why, when some Jewish youth discover the reality of an apartheid Israel, they become so active and so militant [as documented in the film Israelism —ed.].
Zionism, however, is a political ideology that is now turning Israel into a pariah and criminal state in the eyes of the world, but the background is complicated. We must explain it — not just shout epithets.

The roots of Judaism go back 3000 years to the ancient stories of Abraham, etc., but Zionism appeared in the 19th century, along with German nationalism and European nationalism. It then evolved in various streams, some promoting what we might see as a legitimate Jewish cultural presence in Palestine and others allying explicitly with British colonialism en route to a settler ethno-state in the wake of the Holocaust and the U.S. antisemitic exclusion of Jewish immigration.

SW: It seems that solidarity with Palestine is being folded into this broader war on academic freedom. Is that how do you see it?

AW: One thing we can say for certain is that this MAGA campaign against Palestine solidarity is actually increasing antisemitism. The MAGA endgame now seems to be the destruction of universities as an alternative intellectual center that might produce research that the Trump administration doesn’t like.

SW: Given the books and articles you have written about dissent, what historical parallels do you find? Is this just an echo or something different?

AW: You could compare this situation to a lot of other periods. There was a Red Scare after World War One and a Little Red Scare in 1939-41. In the 1990s there was the big attack on political correctness.

Today is most like the period that’s called McCarthyism. That was the era of the Cold War and the Right was out to crush what remained of New Deal politics and the post-war labor upsurge.

In the aftermath of the 2008 recession, today’s context has some parallels. We see the pitting of the rise of a new kind of populist and maybe semi-fascist Right against an activism focused on Occupy, Black Lives Matter, trans rights and Palestinian solidarity. A new socialist movement, centered around DSA, is part of that as well.

Back in the 1950s, the FBI sent agents to warn university administrators about alleged Communist sympathizers on the faculty. The presidents were told that, if you don’t clean house and get them, we’re going to come in and do it. Administrators at the University of Michigan and elsewhere decided they would “defend” academic freedom by getting rid of the Communists. Some people have called that “anticipatory obedience.”

We could date the beginning of this new Antisemitism Scare to when college presidents were called to testify before Congress. They capitulated and groveled, opening the door for Trump to escalate.

SW: In the 1950s, when people were singled out, was there any sympathy for them?

AW: According to Ellen Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower, when these witch-hunts first began, there were people who were ready to resist — on some campuses and also in Hollywood. For example, the overwhelming number of faculty in the University of California system said that they wouldn’t sign any stupid loyalty oath. And this was in spite if the fact that they were told that, if they didn’t sign it, they would not get a commitment to teach for the following year. They said, screw you. We’re not going to sign it.

But they were divided up by tactics of administrators in different ways and, in the end, it was just a handful who resisted. The lesson: If we don’t find a basis for unity, we’ll go the same way.

SW: What is the responsibility of public intellectuals and university faculty at such a moment?

AW: We need to keep our main activist focus absolutely on Palestinian rights, including the right of resistance and the condemnation of Israeli state behavior. (Many of us, of course, have no sympathy for the ideology and human rights violations of Hamas, and shouldn’t hide that in educational discussions and writings.)

Here I think we should measure everything by how effective we are at reaching new people and winning them over through an accurate and critical-minded education in history. We shouldn’t allow the construction of a false image of the anti-Zionist as a thug attacking Jews.

That means we must discipline ourselves and forgo ambiguous messages or actions as much as possible. If one must explain what one’s slogan “really” means, or the purpose of your tactics, they may not be the most effective slogans and tactics. Also, it’s understandable that many people are afraid of retaliation for speaking out, so we must promote activities that unify around positive demands.

July-August 2025, ATC 237