The Jewish Community Should be Thanking Trump

By Morton A. Klein & Elizabeth Berney, Esq.

(April 10, 2025 / Jerusalem Post) Every Jewish organization should be applauding the Trump administration’s actions to end the nightmares faced by Jewish students. Instead, two major representative organizations, Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are undermining deportations and defunding – the crucial steps needed to protect our Jewish and pro-Israel students and, by effect, all students who want safe campuses.

Hillel and the ADL have joined a chorus that includes the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people in demanding an expansion of legal protections for the Jew-hating, Israel-bashing perpetrators harming Jewish students. It is concerning to think that two Jewish organizations could advocate for appeasing antisemitism instead of defending Jewish students.

Over the last 18 months, we have all watched in horror as Jewish students have been and continue to be openly attacked, harassed, terrorized, prevented from going to classes, blocked from walking across college quads, punched in the head, stabbed with flag poles, subjected to acts of vandalism, called Nazis and baby-killers and Genocide-supporters, confronted with daily Hamas-aligned riots calling for murdering every Jew on the planet (“globalize the intifada”) and made unsafe on college campuses throughout the country. And their universities have allowed this campus terrorism to mushroom out of control.

This tsunami continued to grow while the Biden administration failed to  heed the repeated calls of members of Congress and the Jewish community demanding action to halt the campus pogroms and hold their organizers and enablers accountable.

Republican Reps. Virginia Foxx from North Carolina and Elise Stefanik from New York held eye-opening hearings focused on campus antisemitism, which resulted in the on-the-record refusal of university presidents to acknowledge that calling for the murder of Jews violates campus policies. Each of these hearings demanded action from the university presidents and the Biden administration but ultimately fell on deaf ears – and led to the presidents’ resignations.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) filed multiple complaints with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Right, met with OCR officials, wrote detailed letters to the office and Biden’s attorney-general and FBI director calling for investigations, arrests and prosecution of organizations, leaders, funders and actors perpetrating violence and Jew-hatred on campuses.

Fortunately, the current US administration is responding to this crisis by doing what is necessary to stem the antisemitic campus horrors. President Donald Trump is implementing appropriate, legally authorized penalties for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including terminating funds to universities that continue to allow their campuses to be hotbeds of antisemitic hate.

The Trump administration is revoking student visas and initiating deportation proceedings against foreign students who lied on their visa applications, engaged in activities supporting the designated Arab/Islamist terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, and targeted and created an extraordinarily hostile environment for Jewish students.

ADL and Hillel undermine Trump’s actions

Yet, while the organized Jewish community should be celebrating that the administration is taking major steps to hold those attacking our children and grandchildren on campus accountable, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Hillel CEO Adam Lehman are decrying those defending us.

On April 3, Greenblatt began a press campaign to decry Trump’s protective measures to protect our children. He demanded the federal government and universities provide protections for foreigners terrorizing our Jewish students above and beyond what the US Constitution and due process actually require. Greenblatt asserted, regarding giving more legal rights to the Hamas-allied thugs: “It’s not just about the letter of the law, but the spirit of our country.”

Since when is enabling violent antisemites “the spirit of our country”?

He seems to want to provide foreign antisemitic terrorizers facing deportation all the rights (and then some) accorded to criminal defendants. However, as the US Supreme Court made clear, a deportation proceeding is a civil proceeding that does not entitle deportees to all the same Constitutional Rights that defendants in criminal cases are entitled to. (INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032 (1984)).

The same ruling (and the D.O.J. Confidentiality and Media Contacts Policy, 1-7.000) would also answer his demand that law enforcement provide detailed press releases on each case for removal, but probably not reach the point of addressing his imaginary core defamatory accusation that the administration is deporting foreign students for “Orwellian thought crimes.”

Similarly, Hillel’s CEO Lehman wrote on April 2 that he understood “concerns” about implementing deportations and university defunding, and absurdly complained that “actions to combat campus antisemitism can inadvertently fuel further antisemitism.” In other words, any form of defense of Jews from violent antisemites will fuel further hate. As Winston Churchill warned, those who appease the crocodile will simply be eaten last – that appeasement always fails. How ironic that an organization named for the great Talmudic sage Hillel seems to have forgotten Hillel’s dictum “If I am not for myself, who will be?”

Curiously, his statement was entitled “Building Stronger Campuses for Jewish Students and All Students.” Anyone who really wants to build stronger campuses for Jewish and all students should start by supporting the Trump administration’s policies to make campuses safe again.

The organized Jewish community, its umbrella groups, and its representative groups should be thanking President Trump and his administration for their meaningful, tangible, and clearly visible moves to protect our and their children from foreign terrorists infiltrating our college campuses rather than seek to appease those attacking Jewish students.

Morton A. Klein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Elizabeth Berney, Esq. is ZOA’s national director of research and special projects.

This op-ed was originally published in the Jerusalem Post and can be viewed here.