(JNS) At press time, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee planned a hearing for Thursday, March 27 to look at the ongoing problem of Jew-hatred on college campuses, at a time when some critics of the Trump administration are saying that announced cuts to the U.S. Department of Education raise concerns that the agency will be unable to adequately protect the rights of Jewish students.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the committee chair, held a bipartisan roundtable on the issue on Nov. 9. 2023—about a month after Oct. 7.
Cassidy said that tomorrow’s session will provide a new opportunity to highlight the problem, which the ADL has reported to be nearly a 500% increase in antisemitic incidents at colleges from 2023 to 2024.
The senator said there was evidence that campus demonstrations were not formed by “a spontaneous group of students” but the product of “outside organizers that come in and instigate.”
Lauren Wolman, director of federal policy and strategy at the ADL, told JNS that the hearing is “an important step in confronting the urgent and deeply troubling rise of antisemitism at colleges and universities across the country.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the committee, said that he wants answers about how U.S. President Donald Trump’s massive budget cuts to the U.S. Department of Education will affect efforts to protect Jewish students under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“I’m sort of curious how we’re going to be able to do what we need to do on campuses without a functioning civil rights division in the Department of Education,” the senator said. “So that’s probably one of the major issues that I’m going to be digging into.”
Cassidy told JNS that the U.S. Justice Department could handle those cases instead of the Education Department—something that the Trump administration has claimed.
In January, Cassidy and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) reintroduced legislation to let college students know how to file civil rights complaints with the Department of Education and require institutions of higher education to post links on their websites to the agency’s Office of Civil Rights.
The scheduled witnesses for Thursday’s hearing are Carly Gammill, founding director of the StandWithUS legal center; Rabbi David Saperstein, director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad); and Charles Asher Small, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
