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The arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the freezing of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and contracts to colleges, the directive to Columbia University to put its department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies into receivership — these are not improvised actions of the Trump administration. They are calculated measures outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther. Prepared by the same far-right organization that spearheaded Project 2025 and quietly published before the election, Project Esther purports to offer “a blueprint to counter antisemitism” and secure the “prosperity of all Americans.” In reality, it is a detailed playbook for how to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism to undermine core tenets of liberal democracy in the United States.
To be clear, we believe that antisemitism is real and that it is felt in higher education and in the broader public (we have felt it ourselves; one of us through bomb threats to our children’s religious school). We understand that university leadership, not to mention members of our families and communities, are honestly concerned with how to respond to this problem.
But the goals of Project Esther and the Trump administration do not appear to be about antisemitism at all. They are about condemning free thought and expression in a democratic society.
Project Esther is a detailed playbook for how to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism to undermine core tenets of liberal democracy in the United States.
The Project Esther playbook relies on the idea of a “Hamas Support Network,” a term that the report casually conflates with any pro-Palestinian speech, activism, and organizing — and then labels “effectively a terrorist support network.” Encompassed in this network are actors such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros. By this logic, an extremely broad range of expression about Palestinian causes (and, for good measure, anything that the report’s authors deem “anti-Americanism”) constitutes a mortal threat to Jews in the United States.
Project Esther makes no mention of the necessity of linking the fight against antisemitism to a broader struggle against all forms of racial and religious oppression, including Islamophobia. The report also ignores the spread of right-wing antisemitism, including the “Great Replacement theory,” which posits that Jews are engineering a “white genocide” through their support for liberal immigration policies and racial justice. Replacement theory inspired the chant “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right riots in Charlottesville, Va., and appears in the manifesto of the shooter who murdered 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh — and in those of the shooters targeting Muslims at the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand, Latinos in El Paso, and African Americans in Buffalo, N.Y.
Project Esther uses the accusation of antisemitism to justify various shockingly antidemocratic actions. Its wish list of “desired effects” include purging content from the curricula of higher education, firing academic faculty and staff, deporting “leaders and members” of an undisclosed list of organizations, and making both the Jewish community and the broader public believe that political views on the Middle East that differ from those of the report’s authors are a threat to Jewish “safety and a functioning society.”
The goals of Project Esther do not appear to be about antisemitism at all. They are about condemning free thought and expression in a democratic society.
Project Esther unabashedly holds up the efforts of the Dies Committee — precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee — and the FBI under its infamous director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate German sympathizers in the 1930s as an effective model for combating antisemitism. Yet the report elides key aspects of this historical analogy. Dies and Hoover, previewing the purges of McCarthyism that soon followed, targeted New Dealers, labor unionists, artists, and LGBT people under the guise of weeding out subversives. Reframing these abuses of state power as heroic efforts to combat antisemitism requires forgetting, too, that both the Palmer Raids of the First Red Scare and the repression of the Second Red Scare under McCarthyism were deeply imbued with antisemitism. Jewish Americans and Jewish immigrants were frequent victims of blacklists, investigations, and deportations.
And Project Esther suggests that Jews will be made safer by allying with opponents of free speech and civil liberties. Even if this were a morally acceptable bargain to make — which it is not — our history suggests otherwise. Indeed, the report itself singles out individual Jewish lawmakers who disagree with the authors’ positions on Israel, and “significant elements of the American Jewish community, particularly the Reformed Jewish movement” as part of the antisemitic threat to be neutralized.
Just as federal officials during the Red Scares of the last century used their relatively unchecked power to deport and exclude as a weapon against political and ethno-racial groups they opposed, Trump is beginning the assault on civil liberties by moving against immigrants. And just as in earlier Red Scares, demagogues in Washington are using accusation, innuendo, the threat of investigation — and now, control over federal funding — to bully institutions into purging and expelling members for their beliefs.
It is imperative to identify the calculated exploitation of antisemitism as a wedge for a creeping authoritarianism in the United States. It is alarming that anyone would propose that combating antisemitism justifies the anti-constitutional targeting of peaceful protest and the abandonment of features of American democracy that make free and fair debate possible.
It is more alarming when the institutions targeted by this attack fail to distinguish between honest discussion of antisemitism and a concerted attack on free expression, academic freedom, and political dissent. Institutions like our own must stand up for their students and their faculty, and for the values of open inquiry and political dissent at the core of the university’s mission. Quiet accommodation will not protect us, or higher education generally, or American democracy.
