What Sen. Bob Casey is getting all wrong about antisemitism

Sen. Bob Casey, currently locked in the toughest reelection fight of his career, wants Pennsylvania voters to know that he’s no Johnny-come-lately to the fight against antisemitism. He’s been backing federal legislation to better define anti-Jewish prejudice and more strictly sanction schools where it takes place since 2016 — two years before a gunman murdered 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, and seven years before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack roiled the Middle East.

But as the ongoing conflict in Gaza has split his Democratic base in two, Casey has more than doubled down on the hot-button issue.

At the exact moment on May 10 that Philadelphia riot cops were busting up a protest encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, Casey was just a few miles away at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History — announcing a $250,000 federal grant for education about anti-Jewish discrimination and touting the Senate bill he cosponsors called the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The senator also criticized the “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chants of campus protesters, calling them “horrific” and “a direct assault on the Jewish people.”

With watchdog groups reporting a U.S. spike in antisemitic incidents even before the tumult triggered on Oct. 7, what’s not to like about Casey’s efforts?

A lot, according to a growing number of critics who fear Casey’s bill and similar legislation that passed in the U.S. House will crimp free speech rights. The naysayers include more than 1,200 leading Jewish professors and scholars, who oppose the current bills that draw on such a broad definition of antisemitism that legitimate political viewpoints — such as opposing the concept of Zionism or even criticism of the state of Israel — could face government sanctions.

I spoke this week to one of the hundreds who signed the letter by Concerned Jewish Faculty Against Antisemitism — Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, a trailblazing female Jewish faith leader and professor emeritus of religion at Temple University. She and the other Jewish academics believe the definition of antisemitism in both Casey’s bill and the House legislation — crafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance — is so broad that it could punish not only actual hate speech but political criticisms of Israel like those voiced recently on college campuses.

“The problem with it is that it not just equates anti-Zionism but pretty much any criticism of Israel as antisemitic — and that it excludes those of us who as Jews identify as anti-Zionist.,” Alpert said. Although good surveys on what share of American Jews consider themselves Zionists — that is, believing in the need for a Jewish-run nation — don’t really exist, polls conducted before Israel’s eight-month onslaught against Gaza found about 20%-25% were, like Alpert, sharply critical of Israel’s actions toward Palestinians. Yet, Alpert, like many scholars, also acknowledges the complexities — that some anti-Zionists are also antisemitic, and that it’s clearly hateful to conflate Israel’s actions with all Jews.

Yet, the antisemitism bills now before Congress do have one surprising critic: the man who actually wrote the IHRA guidelines Casey wants to enshrine in federal law. Ken Stern, a former adviser on antisemitism to the American Jewish Congress, where he worked on the IHRA guidelines, and current head of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate, has consistently opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act. He recently told the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg there’s a reason federal civil rights law around racism or homophobia doesn’t contain specific definitions — because of the risk of punishing ideas instead of conduct. “Once you start defining what speech is OK for teaching, for funding, for all sorts of things,” asked Stern, “how does that differ from what we were doing in the McCarthy era?”

That’s a great question.

I also spoke this week with Casey’s office. The senator provided me with a statement: “In the wake of the Oct. 7 attack, we have seen a scourge of antisemitism across the nation. This bill will enshrine into law the currently considered definition of antisemitism to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment on college campuses without infringing on constitutionally protected free speech.” His aides stressed that his draft legislation includes specific language aimed at ensuring free speech rights aren’t impinged, and noted the IHRA language is already in use — since 2018 and the Trump administration — by the U.S. Department of Education when it investigates antisemitism complaints.

But the dispute over what constitutes antisemitism highlights deep divides within the American Jewish community over Israel, its current right-wing populist government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the campaign in Gaza that has resulted in an estimated 34,000-plus deaths, many of them women or children. It pits scholars like Alpert, her colleagues, and other liberal-leaning Jews against powerful groups like the Anti-Defamation League, which supports the antisemitism bills and, according to the Guardian, has increased its annual spending on lobbying Congress a whopping 16-fold since 2020, up to $1.6 million.

In past years, civil libertarians have successfully argued against the passage of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, but the climate on Capitol Hill has clearly changed. The antisemitism crusade has been embraced with new fervor by Republicans, who’ve latched onto the allegations as a vehicle for winning their longer-term war against higher education as a bastion of liberalism and gaining support for funding cuts to cripple U.S. universities. The potency of the issue — which sparked the ouster of presidents at Penn and Harvard — has caused some Democratic civil libertarians like Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, to flip to supporting the current bills.

Alpert said it would be much better if Casey and other lawmakers relied on a different definition of antisemitism that was crafted by 250 Holocaust experts and other Jewish scholars known as the Jerusalem Declaration, which gives space for evidence-based critiques of the Israeli government and support for pro-Palestinian justice. “That definition makes clear what we should be fighting when we fight antisemitism,” the rabbi said, “and what is problematic.”

But creating a strict federal definition of antisemitism is just part of the stepped-up campaign envisioned by Casey and others. The Pennsylvania senator also supports legislation to allocate an additional $280 million for the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, which would turbocharge its current wave of investigations into alleged antisemitism and racism at college campuses as well as K-12 schools.

» READ MORE: Storming colleges with riot cops to keep them ‘safe’ should scare America about what’s next | Will Bunch

But in 2025, those potential dollars might be spent by a second Trump administration and whatever Betsy DeVos-type acolyte he names to run the DOE — the leading edge of a right-wing movement that makes no secret of its hostility toward the modern university. The critics of the antisemitism bills are right to fear giving ammo to the spiritual heirs of Joseph McCarthy. The current campus crackdown, which has seen helmeted riot cops deploying military tools like tear gas, pepper spray, and even rubber bullets against peaceful protesters, is a preview of what could be normalized in such a climate.

That prospect is especially worrisome to someone like Alpert, a longtime critic of Israeli actions toward Palestine who advises the activist group Jewish Voice for Peace. In 1968, Alpert was a commuter freshman at Barnard College who was horrified to watch her Columbia schoolmates protesting the Vietnam War dragged off in handcuffs, battered and bloodied by New York cops. For her, the current police crackdown “is all pretty painful to watch.”

It’s great that Casey wants to end the centuries-old scourge of anti-Jewish hatred. Everyone who’s weighed in on the antisemitism debate, including left-wing Jewish scholars, would like to see that. But when your proposed weapon is the political equivalent of a 2,000-pound dumb bomb that obliterates the free speech rights of anyone standing nearby, you’re doing it all wrong.

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