Jerry Nadler on Trump’s university attacks: ‘He doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism’

Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, has accused Donald Trump of being a “would-be dictator” who is cynically exploiting the fight against antisemitism as a ruse to stamp his will on top-flight universities.

In an interview with the Guardian, the New York congressman lashed out against the president for using genuine dangers confronting American Jews as a guise to justify his attacks on Columbia, Harvard and other universities. “Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism,” he said.

Nadler’s broadside came as the Trump administration is stepping up its attack on Ivy League and other universities in an unprecedented challenge to academic independence. This week $210m in research grants to Princeton University were suspended by the energy and defense departments and NASA, under the mantle of a federal investigation into “antisemitic harassment”.

Days earlier, the Trump administration announced it would review $9bn in federal contracts and grants to Harvard University. Another $500m of federal funds to Brown University are reportedly under threat.

The latest assaults on the Ivy League follow the cancellation of $400m in federal money to Columbia University in New York. At least 60 other universities have been warned by the administration that they face similar punishment.

Earlier this week Nadler released a sternly-worded statement denouncing the attacks. He said the president was “weaponizing the real pain American Jews face to advance his desire to wield control over truth-seeking academic institutions”.

In his Guardian interview Nadler expanded on his stance, warning fellow American Jews not to be taken in by Trump’s rhetoric. He said that if the president were allowed to get away with his efforts to restrict free speech on campuses, Jews would be among those most impacted.

“Whenever freedom is curtailed, Jews in particular become victims,” Nadler said. “That’s the history.”

He added that Trump’s actions in the name of fighting antisemitism would paradoxically make the lives of American Jews less safe. “There are always antisemites looking for an excuse to react, so this is dangerous and it certainly does not help at all.”

Nadler said that if Trump were sincere about protecting Jewish people he would root out the “numerous antisemites he has appointed to some of the highest positions in government”. Asked to specify which officials he had in mind, the congressman named Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson.

Wilson has amplified on social media far-right lies about a Jewish businessman, Leo Frank, who was lynched by a hate-filled mob in Georgia in 1915. Frank had been wrongly convicted of killing a 13-year-old factory worker.

Nadler also pointed to Trump’s firing of large numbers of investigators in the civil rights office of the Education Department who act as the front line of federal efforts to curb anti-Jewish hate on campuses. “If he were serious about antisemitism, Trump would be bringing cases in front of the Office of Civil Rights rather than destroying it.”

Nadler, 77, has represented New York’s 12th congressional district, which covers a large swath of Manhattan, for 32 years. Until January he was the ranking Democrat on the powerful House judiciary committee.

He describes himself as a “committed Zionist” and a strong supporter of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people. Despite those convictions, he has increasingly spoken out in condemnation of the aggressive handling of pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses that erupted in the wake of the Gaza war.

“From my point of view, the protesters are expressing obnoxious opinions, I don’t agree with them. But they’re entitled to those opinions,” Nadler told the Guardian.

The congressman recently signed a letter excoriating the Trump administration for detaining and attempting to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last year. “I disagreed with the encampment, but regardless Khalil is entitled to free speech and shouldn’t be deported for his opinions.”

Nadler pointed to the 1969 US supreme court ruling, Brandenburg v Ohio, which says that the government can only punish speech that is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”. Nadler said that in his analysis the pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses broadly did not meet that standard, and therefore were protected as core political speech under the first amendment of the US constitution.

In recent years Nadler has also become a prominent critic of the move to define anti-Jewish hatred under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition. The IHRA definition of antisemitism was created by a European Union agency in 2005, and has since been taken up by a number of US entities including the Department of Education and several major universities.

The IHRA definition has attracted censure for stating that some forms of criticism of the state of Israel, as a Jewish collectivity, can cross over into antisemitism.

In his Guardian interview, Nadler said that the definition was being used to clamp down on legitimate criticism of Israeli government actions. “The problem with the IHRA definition is that it leads to the conflation of anti-Israel expressions with antisemitism. You can be anti-Israel, and not antisemitic.”

Nadler has been on his own journey on this issue. In 2018, he was a sponsor of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which requires the IHRA definition to be used in all federal investigations into claims of antisemitism on campus.

In recent years, however, Nadler has become a firm opponent of the legislation, on grounds that it would effectively ban anti-Israel sentiment on US campuses. Asked why he had a change of mind, he said: “I was wrong in 2018 – it was a mistake”.

A significant number of congressional Democrats continue to back the legislation, however. Last year 133 Democrats voted for the Antisemitism Awareness Act, along with 187 Republicans. It has not yet passed into law.

Nadler had a message for those of his colleagues who continue to back the bill. He said their actions were “dangerous to the first amendment”.

The representative urged fellow Democrats in Congress to do all they could to support universities under fire from Trump. But he reserved his strongest language for the universities themselves, whom he implored not to cave in.

Already, several major academic institutions have capitulated in the face of Trump’s bully tactics. Columbia’s almost total acquiescence, outlined in a four-page letter, included an agreement to remove control over the teaching of the Middle East from faculty and adopting the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Despite the concessions, the Trump administration has yet to restore the $400m in cuts, saying the university must comply first.

Harvard, which adopted that same definition in January, this week dismissed two faculty leaders of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The university reportedly considered the center’s programming on Israel-Palestine “insufficiently balanced”.

The president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, by contrast has said he will not bend to federal government coercion. In an interview with Bloomberg reported by the Daily Princetonian, Eisgruber said that “we have to be willing to speak up, and we have to be willing to say no to funding if it’s going to constrain our ability to pursue the truth”.

Nadler praised Princeton’s resilience, and called on other universities to stand up to Trump. He warned that capitulation carried its own “great danger”.

“If the Trump administration makes good on its threats, then Princeton should go to court. It would get a preliminary injunction, as this is a clear speech violation, and then I would try to get members of Congress to support the lawsuit by filing an amicus brief.”

He added: “Federal agencies can place conditions on money given to universities, but they have to carry out a legal process. There are ample grounds to sue.”