When Equal Protection Becomes “D.E.I. for Jews”

James Loeffler is a professor of modern Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University and the author of a book about antisemitism and free speech. That makes one sentence in his New York Times essay especially bewildering.

The Trump administration, he writes, has demanded “what amounts to D.E.I. for Jews.”

What he means is antisemitism training and measures intended to ensure that Jewish students can attend classes, use campus facilities and participate in university life without harassment or intimidation.

That is not D.E.I. It is equal protection.

D.E.I. programs may use identity-conscious policies to pursue representation or other preferred outcomes. On the other hand, civil-rights law imposes a simpler rule: institutions receiving federal funds may not discriminate against students because of their race, ethnicity or shared ancestry.

Preferred outcomes and equal protection are not just not the same thing. They are opposites.

If Black students are targeted, the law protects them. If Muslim or Arab students are targeted, the law protects them. If Jewish students are targeted, the law protects them. Applying the same rule to Jews does not create a Jewish preference.

Loeffler nevertheless describes Jews as having been selected for special protection. That is absurd. Title VI has long covered antisemitic discrimination, just as it covers comparable discrimination against other groups. Whether a particular penalty is proportionate is a separate question from whether protecting Jewish students constitutes D.E.I.

Loeffler avoids that basic distinction by reducing the conduct surrounding Gaza protests to “excesses.” But the issue was not criticism of Israel or a few offensive placards. Jewish students faced ongoing intimidation, exclusion, celebrations of Hamas murderers and rapists, and chants invoking violence while universities failed to enforce their own rules.

The relevant question is whether universities tolerated treatment of Jewish students that they would have confronted had another minority been targeted. Instead, Loeffler makes the government’s response the scandal. His essay moves away from the students suffering harassment toward theories about Trump, demographic change, white panic and “Jewish donors.” The people seeking protection disappear into an argument about the motives of those enforcing the law.

That this comes from a professor of modern Jewish history is difficult to understand. Loeffler is not an uninformed commentator stumbling over the difference between a preference and a right. His credentials rest on Jewish history, antisemitism and civil liberties. He is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute which promoted the article on its website.

How does a scholar with that background look at the present condition of American Jews and identify their protection as the suspicious development? How does he see Jewish students threatened and excluded, yet reserve his strongest language for the government finally acting? How does an authority on antisemitism mistake equal treatment for Jewish favoritism?

The New York Times paraded an “As A Jew” with Trump Derangement Syndrome to encourage students coming back to school to come after their Jewish classmates once more and vote against Republicans in the mid-term elections.

Disliking the administration enforcing the law does not transform the law into D.E.I. Equal protection does not become preferential treatment when the people receiving it are Jews.

Upon further investigation, it appears that Professor Loeffler received his doctorate from Columbia University. The scandal may also be revealed as a broken and anti-Jewish educational system which cannot place Jews within the framework of victims of preference.

ACTION ITEM

You can reach Professor Loeffler at jloeffl6@jhu.edu

You can also share your thoughts with the Shalom Hartman Institute for having Loeffler be an ongoing research fellow and promoting his article at 212-268-0300.