"Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses" United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary

PREFACE

On a chilly fall morning, I passed through security into the Rayburn Building, found the House Judiciary Committee hearing room, and took a seat—where I never thought I would be—at the witness table.

How did I come to testify before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary? Three weeks before the committee convened the hearing, "Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses," Kenneth Stern, executive director of the Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation, called. During World War II, Danzig-born Justus Rosenberg, known as Gussie, was a courier for Varian Fry's Centre Américain de Secours, which had rescued 2,000 artists and intellectuals, among them Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt, from Vichy France. After the war, Rosenberg came to America; became a professor of European history, literature, and culture; and, around 2014, established a foundation to fight antisemitism. Kenneth Stern, formerly of the American Jewish Committee, was its executive director.¹

Stern was looking for a scholar who shared the foundation's concern about a bill then wending its way through Congress, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. The act proposed codifying the State Department's 2010 fact sheet "Working Definition of Anti-Semitism" and its examples which were adapted from the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia. At the AJC, Stern had been the lead author on the working definition for the European Monitoring Center. There it provided guidance for gathering data on antisemitic incidents.²

Turning the State Department's fact sheet into federal law would transform this rubric for compiling data into a statute used to investigate complaints under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal funding, like those at colleges and universities.³

I knew little about the bill, but I know something about antisemitism. My regular Jewish history rotation at American University includes a survey where I introduce the tropes of medieval anti-Judaism and their consequences and a course on the Holocaust. For about a decade, I also taught the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism to parochial Catholic school educators for the Anti-Defamation League's Bearing Witness summer institute on the Holocaust.

Stern walked me through the bill's legislative tangle. The previous December, the Senate, without a committee hearing and without any meaningful debate, had passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act just hours after it was introduced. The House was then poised to follow suit. A parallel resolution had been introduced and was about to bypass committee deliberation. Then the American Civil Liberties Union sounded the alarm: The bill posed a "serious threat" to the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.⁴ The ACLU called for careful consideration of the bill. Now more than ten months later, that was about to get underway in the House.

Stern had spoken with colleagues I admire who shared the ACLU's and his concerns about the bill. But none was available to testify. My name had come up; I was conveniently located in Washington. Would I do it?

In the following days, I spoke with colleagues who urged me to step forward. A former student with long experience on the Hill told me not to waste my time. The bill would fly through the House. I consulted with the Association for Jewish Studies Executive Committee because I was then AJS President.

Meanwhile, I began thinking long and hard about the fact sheet and its addenda "Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism" and "What is Anti-Semitism Relative to Israel?" Other than my preference for the spelling of antisemitism,⁵ I had no problem with the working definition:

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

But I became increasingly uneasy about the examples and their implications for curbing free...