Trump's fight with Harvard risks making Jewish students a scapegoat | Opinion
President Donald Trump's targeting of universities like Harvard isn’t about protecting Jewish students. It’s a political weapon that exploits concerns over antisemitism to advance a broader campaign.
In a turbulent political moment, when fear is currency and higher education is a recurring target, the launch of a federal antisemitism task force might sound like a well-intentioned intervention.
But behind the language of protection is a familiar playbook. President Donald Trump’s effort isn’t about safeguarding Jewish students − it’s about leveraging their identity to dismantle the institutions that challenge his politics.
Trump's targeting of elite universities like Harvard isn’t about protecting Jewish students. It’s a political weapon − one that exploits rising concerns over antisemitism to advance a broader campaign against higher education.
Trump task force may make antisemitism even worse
By using Jewish identity as justification, it doesn’t just miss the mark − it risks deepening the very problem it claims to solve.
At first glance, the effort sounds principled: Identify and address antisemitism on college campuses. But the initiative isn’t grounded in a sincere attempt to understand or confront antisemitism in all its forms. It narrowly focuses on speech critical of Israeli policy, often conflating pro-Palestinian protest or advocacy with antisemitic hate.
Meanwhile, it ignores antisemitism from the political right, including conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric and explicit white nationalism.
The result is a distorted framework. Dissent is recast as bigotry. Jewish identity becomes a blunt tool to suppress academic freedom. And universities, particularly those seen as liberal or elite, are painted as hostile to Jews, even when they have long served as places of integration and advancement for Jewish Americans.
That is not a serious strategy to combat antisemitism. It’s a cynical attempt to harness Jewish fear in the service of a cultural and political purge.
The consequences are serious. By making Jews the public face of a campaign to censor universities, this approach invites backlash from both ends of the ideological spectrum. On the right, it feeds into age-old tropes about Jewish control of media, academia or public discourse. On the left, it generates suspicion that Jewish advocacy is merely a cover for the suppression of Palestinian voices.
American Jews are at risk of social and political isolation
The effect is to isolate Jews politically and socially − at the exact moment we are being told we are being “protected.”
Antisemitism is not hypothetical. It is a daily reality for many Jews in America. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Jewish American who hasn’t encountered it − whether through left-wing conflations of Israel with Jewish identity or right-wing conspiracies that cast Jews as global manipulators.
From online slurs and graffiti to daily language − where “Jew” is still used as a verb to mean cheating or stinginess − antisemitism manifests across the spectrum, shaped to fit the surrounding ideology. To pretend that only one version of antisemitism exists, or that it can be solved by silencing campus debate, is not just wrong − it is dangerous.
Equally troubling is the effort to collapse Jewish identity into a singular, uncritical alignment with Israeli policy. In reality, Jewish Americans hold a wide range of views on Israel, Gaza and U.S. foreign policy. Many oppose the occupation. Some support a ceasefire. Others support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and view its policies as necessary for Israel’s survival.
This diversity is not a liability − it is a sign of a mature, pluralistic community. Flattening that complexity erases many Jews from public discourse, and in doing so, hands more power to those who seek to instrumentalize us.
I’ve spent my career in academic medicine and public health, training at public and private universities across the country − from Michigan and Utah to my current fellowship at McGaw Medical Center in Chicago, which is affiliated with one of the institutions now explicitly targeted by Trump’s initiative.
I don’t speak for any of these institutions − only from my experience within them. They are imperfect, and they're fair game for criticism that drives improvement. But they also are vital to American success. These campuses remain among the few places in public life where diverse identities, political perspectives and intellectual traditions are expected to coexist − and sometimes clash.
For generations, higher education has played an outsized role in Jewish American life. In the early 20th century, when Jews faced quotas and exclusion from many professions, universities − despite their flaws − offered a foothold.
My grandfather was fortunate to receive a quota spot in medical school, a chance that helped launch our family’s trajectory toward stability and civic inclusion. Families often encouraged careers in medicine, law or academia not just for prestige but also as a path to belonging.
Today, Jews remain significantly overrepresented in advanced education: Nearly 60% hold a college degree compared with about 30% of the general U.S. population, and they earn doctoral and professional degrees at rates far exceeding the national average.
This legacy is not a sign of elite capture, as conspiracy theorists claim, but a reflection of how Jewish communities sought integration through education. To now cast these same institutions as inherently antisemitic is both ahistorical and corrosive.
That framing also obscures the real problem. Reducing antisemitism to a partisan talking point undermines efforts to address it meaningfully. True protection comes from clear, consistent standards that guard against all forms of hate − antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia − without suppressing legitimate political debate.
Elevating the experiences of Jewish students should not mean erasing the perspectives of Palestinian, Arab or Muslim students. The two can and must coexist in a just and pluralist society.
There is nothing novel about scapegoating Jews in times of political tension. What is new, and particularly insidious, is the pretense that such scapegoating is a form of protection. Jews do not need to be shielded from complexity. We need to be understood as complex ourselves.
To confront antisemitism honestly, we must stop using it as a tool to stoke division or suppress dissent. The Trump task force does not protect Jews − it exposes us, politicizes us and ultimately risks making us the justification for dismantling institutions that have long safeguarded our belonging in American life.
Dr. Alex Zheutlin is a fellow in cardiology at McGaw Medical Center in Chicago.