Originally published in the Jewish News Syndicate.

Listening to members of the party, which claims to stand for “inclusion,” downplaying Jew-hatred because it doesn’t fit their desired narrative or identity politics was offensive.

Fighting hate should never be a partisan issue. Yet a recent House committee hearing on antisemitism on college campuses showed how embarrassingly one-sided that fight against bigotry has become. With Jew-hatred being normalized in universities across the country, Republicans have focused on the problem while Democrats have demonstrated, to a truly stunning degree, that they didn’t care.

It follows a pattern of indifference. In January 2024, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told Columbia University’s then-president, Minouche Shafik, that despite rampant obstruction, harassment and even violence against Jewish students since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, universities’ “political problems are really only with Republicans.”

The May 7 hearing on campus antisemitism, “Beyond the Ivy League,” hosted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, demonstrated that his remark was no exaggeration.

The hearing was a spectacle as university presidents from Haverford College, DePaul University and California Polytechnic State University fumbled their attempts to justify inaction in the face of calls for genocide, harassment of Jewish students and vandalism. Yet only Republican members of the education committee called out the lack of a cogent, purposeful response from university administrators as Jewish students were assaulted, intimidated and harassed daily—not for their politics or support for Israel, but for being Jewish.

For instance, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) noted that students at Haverford College had called for the violent eradication of Israel and its Jews without consequence. Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) pointed out that Haverford investigated, not the professors who incited violence, but the Israeli professor who called attention to “the horrors … taking place on the campus.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), questioned why the school still employed a professor who believes that “Zionist” students should be denied access to education, while committee’s chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) read into the record a letter from Haverford’s Chabad on Campus rabbi declaring that although “Jewish students have been marginalized, ostracized, and at times outright attacked, … their pain has been met with indifference.”

What these House members share is an “R” after their names.

Their Democratic colleagues, for the most part, used their time to deflect. They paid lip service to the “undeniable” rise in hatred and offered mandatory proclamations that “Jewish students deserve to be safe and feel safe.” But instead of confronting university presidents for failing to address the rise in antisemitism and the lack of safety for Jews on campus, they returned to tired talking points about “performative hearings” that are part of a “battle against higher education,” implying that the hearing was unnecessary and inappropriate.

Only Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) distinguished herself, saying that “exploding” antisemitism must be treated as a nonpartisan issue and rebuking her fellow Democrats for implying that their multiple hearings on the crisis were a “false obsession.” She demanded they ask why a yarmulke-clad Jewish student was attacked on campus despite never having visited Israel, and she even had the temerity to point out that while anti-Zionism might not be antisemitism at some theoretical level, “We haven’t yet really seen that exist.”

She is, of course, objectively correct. When a Jewish student ends up needing surgery after a violent antisemitic attack, only someone as gleefully mendacious as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) would assert that the hearing on campus antisemitism was targeting “protected speech.”

Omar, though, was not alone. Her colleague, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), likewise claimed that students were being deported “for writing op-eds … advocating for peace.” He also referenced “killing and starvation in Gaza,” but failed to note that the only emaciated people in Gaza are the Jewish hostages who are being deliberately starved by Hamas. For that matter, he failed to mention that there are Jewish hostages in Gaza at all.

Casar also called President Donald Trump “the most antisemitic president in modern American history,” said that hearings about antisemitic violence on campus were intended to protect the Israeli government from criticism and, for good measure, opined that it is the Republicans who are “distorting the definition of antisemitism.”

This was not the only way that Democrats attempted to haul the conversation off-topic. Even though blacks aren’t being denied access to libraries, gays are not surrounded by hostile classmates and no professor has refused to speak to Muslim students due to their faith, Democratic members of the committee claimed that anti-Jewish bigotry deserved no special attention, though it has uniquely manifested itself in all these ways and more. Listening to members of the Democratic Party, which claims to stand for “inclusion,” downplaying antisemitism because it doesn’t fit their desired narrative or identity politics was offensive.

And then there was the Democrats’ chosen witness, former ACLU’s national legal director David Cole, who at every opportunity compared the committee’s investigation of unchecked antisemitic harassment and violence to the infamous McCarthy hearings on Communist activities. Cole offered no logical connection between efforts to impugn the innocent during the McCarthy era and today’s documentation of the wholesale violations of Jewish students’ basic rights. Cole, now a professor at Georgetown Law, also made clear that the ACLU’s vaunted concern for civil liberties does not extend to Jews.

Antisemitism is too real and dangerous a crisis to deserve obfuscation and sidestepping. It is shameful that only one political side was willing to address it directly. When mandatory civil-rights protections are withheld from Jewish students and the campus environment has long since descended into open incitement of violence and calls for genocide, to cry about “free speech” is not advocacy for justice; it’s gaslighting. History will not remember those who stayed silent. But Jewish students, the Jewish community and the American voters will remember those who stood up against Jew-hatred on campus.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the House Education and Workforce Committee.