Federal scrutiny over anti-semitism has deepened campus divisions
Duke University’s west campus. Creative Commons photo.
NEW YORK — Students say a federal inquiry into a joint Middle East studies program at Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has deepened divisions over a program meant to provide healthier discourse and understanding of issues like Islamic terrorism and the Israeli-Palestianian conflict.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has repeatedly opposed college campus movements to boycott Israel, saying such pro-Palestinian demonstrations fuel bias against Jews.
In September, the Department of Education published a review of federal funding for the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies, saying the program is advancing ideological priorities over increasing understanding, by for example emphasizing positive aspects of Islam without a similar focus on positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religious minorities in the Middle East.
The department also claimed the program was using funding for several other unauthorized activities. The program receives $235,000 annually under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Then on Dec. 11, President Trump signed an executive order broadening the definition of anti-Semitism used by federal agencies that enforce Title VI.
On Thursday, a complaint using that definition was filed with the Education Department against Columbia University alleging that the school’s administration has allowed activism critical of Israel to target Jewish and Israeli students. It was filed by The Lawfare Project, which describes its mission as “defending the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and pro-Israel community.”
“I think it is getting more divisive,” said Dorothy Gheorgiu, a Jewish Duke student who supports the Trump administration’s initiative but said she had mixed feelings about the order’s language. “I’m not sure anything is really getting solved.”
The order sparked heated debate and plenty of confusion. Most of the commentary centered on whether the administration was shifting its definition of Judaism from a religious identity to a race or a nationality, and what the intent was. Critics worry that the administration could use it to stifle free speech that advocates for Palestinian rights, marrying criticism of Israel with attacks against Jews writ large and triggering federal defunding of related college programs.
Some went so far as to draw parrallels to the Nazi classification of Jewishness as a race of foreign origin. Others pointed out that the order’s language is in line with Bush- and Obama-era interpretations of Title VI’s application. A law professor who worked with the Obama administration tweeted that the order is a “nothingburger” that will need to be judged by how the Trump administration applies it.
Kenneth Marcus, Trump’s appointed assistant secretary for civil rights and founder of a pro-Israel group, has lobbied for over a decade for the federal government to adopt a definition of anti-semitism that includes criticism of Israel’s policies and to defund some Middle East studies programs.
Fallout on campus
To critics, the federal review of the Duke-UNC program was the first volley in what could be a wave of similar legal challenges now that the White House has adopted its official stance. Since the inquiry was announced, the climate on both campuses around these issues has been one of devolving discourse and more digging in, students and faculty say.
“There is more of a drive to protest than a drive to have any dialogue,” said Bryan Rusch, founder of the Duke Association for the Middle East, a student group that organizes events and brings speakers from different cultural and political perspectives to campus.
Rusch works with groups on both sides of the Israel-Palestine issue. His association tries to bring them together in constructive ways, but that task has become harder than ever in the last few months, he said.
One example was a campus event featuring former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni in October. A student petition called for it to be cancelled, citing her role in what the petition called war crimes during a 2008 Israeli military offensive that killed 1,500 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. During the event, student protesters in the audience chanted at her and walked out. Some shouted, “You don’t belong here.”
The event’s organizer, Peter Feaver, knew about the planned action beforehand and had invited the students to ask Livni challenging questions, he told campus newspaper “The Chronicle,” but they went their own way. That level of contention around a speaker was unprecedented for Duke in recent memory, Rusch said.
The target: Anti-Semitism
Although the Education Department’s Sept. 17 letter announcing its inquiry doesn’t mention it, everyone interviewed agrees that it was due to concern about anti-Semitism on campus.
During a conference about Gaza at UNC - Chapel Hill last spring, a rapper named Tamer Nafar said he “fell in love with a Jew” in his lyrics. A formal complaint about the performance was filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in April. It alleged that by hosting the artist, UNC violated Jewish students’ civil rights under Title VI, which prohibits federal funding for any program that discriminates on the basis of race, color or national origin.
The Education Department’s letter generated a flurry of media attention when it was published. Eight days later, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organized a demonstration on the UNC campus featuring student speeches, poetry and Dabke, a traditional Arab dance.
“We used it as a platform for marginalized people affected by the Department of Education’s statement — Muslim people, Arab people, Middle Eastern people — to talk back,” said Aisha Vitan, president of the campus SJP chapter.
The university’s Muslim Student Alliance issued a statement: “You imply that there is something inherently problematic about teaching students a more nuanced view of Islam, a religion that many Americans have understood only through misrepresentation portrayed in the media. You criticize the program for lacking emphasis on Christianity, while seeking to undermine the Muslim heritage of the region.”
While critics decried the letter as inappropriate government intervention in legitimate academic curriculum, some on campus welcomed it. North Carolina Hillel, a Jewish student group, praised it.
“We have repeatedly raised concerns that programs supported by the Consortium, such as last spring’s “Conflict Over Gaza” conference, featured speakers who demonized Israel without challenge or discussion, and allowed their programs to be used to foster anti-Semitism,” said Ari Gauss, the group’s executive director.
The Duke Student Government quickly passed a resolution condemning the letter. Gheorgiu responded to it in the campus newspaper. She said that although the letter “clearly contains bias,” the impetus for the scrutiny was real anti-Semitism that was being overlooked.
“DSG’s decision to condemn the letter without seemingly acknowledging its cause is yet another unprovoked attack on the Jewish community,” she wrote.
Miriam Cooke, who founded the Middle East Center at Duke, said the government’s action could cause lasting damage to a program meant to include a healthy variety of perspectives. She noted a course by a Turkish-American economist and professor, Timur Kuran, that critically examined Islam’s role in impeding progress in the region.
“The mean-spirited DoE nitpicking is polarizing students and faculty in a university where Middle East Studies faculty have gotten on well and collaborated for decades,” she said in an email.
Curriculum under fire
At Duke, student opposition to the department’s notice was initially more muted than at Chapel Hill. Lama Hantash, a member of Duke’s SPJ chapter, said that’s because there is a strong pro-Israel culture on campus that makes it difficult to talk about Palestinian issues without inviting charges of anti-Semitism.
“Even the most progressive and outspoken people on this campus might shy away from the Palestinian apartheid [issue] because it’s just such a loaded topic,” said Hantash, who is first-generation Palestinian-American.
She called the Education Department’s criticisms “hollow.” Despite the initial stir, fears about its consequences faded as concerned students judged the claims to be baseless. Hantash said it felt familiar.
“It might be a more visible and more reactionary administration, but it’s the same kind of anti-Muslim — anti-Palestinian in particular — sentiment that we’ve been used to for decades,” she said.
It questioned whether enough students were enrolled in language courses. It cited a conference focused on love, sex and desire in modern Iran as material that had academic merit but did not appear useful to “the development of foreign language and international expertise for the benefit of U.S. national security and economic stability.”
Giacomo McCarthy, a Middle Eastern studies major who is among a handful of students with the most experience in the program, said its curriculum is well-balanced. He objected to the allegation that a conference focused on love, sex and desire in modern Iran did not appear useful to “the development of foreign language and international expertise for the benefit of U.S. national security and economic stability.”
That was “disingenuous,” he said.
“The idea that that kind of thing can’t actually guide our national security interests is flawed because one of the most important things when it comes to national security - and I say this with a deeply cynical tone - is understanding the region so we don’t make the egregious mistakes that we have continually made in the Middle East,” McCarthy said.
Both students thought that school administrators were laying low after the media attention. The program’s coordinators at Duke did not respond to requests for comment.
Problems with the premise
According to a 2010 study from the Pew Research center, 93% of people in the Middle East and North Africa identified as Muslim. Christians were 3.7% and another 1.6% identified as Jewish.
Dru Johnson, a professor at The King’s College in New York City and founder of its Center for Hebraic Thought, said that a lack of emphasis on Christianity and Judaism is not indicative of bias as much as it is a natural consequence of a poorly defined idea of what “Middle East” means.
“When we say ‘Middle Eastern’ the Western construct is Arab Muslim, but of course, people in Lebanon, a lot of them aren’t Arab,” Johnson said. “A lot of people from Afghanistan are not Arab.”
An accurate understanding of the region’s people would need to account for many religious and ethnic minorities, like Druze, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, he said. “But it’s just not the way it’s traditionally done.”
Renewed attention
The controversy made a blip in the news cycle on Nov. 25 when an agreement between UNC and the Education Department resolved the complaint about the Gaza conference. The university agreed to “continue to take all steps reasonably designed to ensure” that students would not be subjected to a hostile environment, and to respond to allegations of anti-Semitic harassment. It did not accept responsibility for the rapper’s remarks.
Trump’s executive order thrust the central issue back into the national spotlight. If it is applied as the Education Department is understood to have approached the Duke-UNC program, more scenarios like that could be ahead. The order instructs relevant agencies to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, and to consider “‘Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism’ identified by the IHRA, to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.”
For Gheorgiu, the order doesn’t change much. Judaism is already legally protected as an ethnicity, she said, but should never be classified as a nationality. She agreed with using the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism but said that overall, the urge to define things is “misguided.”
A better step would be to directly target the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which calls for an economic and social boycott of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians, she said. It creates a toxic environment for Jewish students and is anti-Semitic in that it threatens the entirety of the Jewish state, thereby threatening Israel’s existence and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination by default.
“I think they should outlaw BDS on campus,” she said.
For proponents of the Palestinian right to self-determination, the concern is that the order threatens their First Amendment right to criticize the Israeli government, including their right to boycott it and its constituency for political reasons.
At both campuses, students who opposed the administration’s stance said they are moving forward by focusing on building community support. Vitan, the SPJ chapter president at UNC, noted that the UNC Black Congress promoted her group’s protest in September. The strategy is to seek allies in the fight rather than conversation and compromise with opponents.
“One of SJP’s main missions this year is to build intersectional solidarity across campus and to really collectivize and not be afraid to speak up,” she said.
Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch media fellow and both reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. Liza Vandenboom is a student at The King’s College in New York.