Trump Exploits Jewish Students as Pawns in Attacks on Higher Education

By now, most of us have heard of “Project 2025,” created in 2024 by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation: an ultra-right Christian nationalist organization. “Project 2025” is the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page book subtitled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”: a blueprint for the next Republican President for the establishment of a United States government imbued with “biblical principles” and overseen by a president who holds extreme sweeping executive powers.

While less familiar than “Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s updated edition includes what it calls its “Project Esther,” (released on October 7, 2024) named after Esther in the Jewish Torah’s Book of Esther (Megillat Esther). She is the heroine of the Purim story of survival of Jews who lived about 1500 years ago within the expansive Persian Empire.

Esther saved her people from Persian King Ahasuerus’s Prime Minister (Vizier) Haman’s evil plot to murder the Jews. This epic drama depicts the Jewish people’s victory over their enemies.

“Project Esther,” though the Heritage Foundation brands it as “a national strategy to end antisemitism,” is something far different. It is not about Jews protecting Jews, but, rather, a patronizing self-serving far-right program of Christian nationalism.

“Project Esther’s” Executive Summary lays out its contextual rationale:

“The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement inside the United States are exclu­sively pro-Palestine and—more so—pro-Hamas,” asserts the Project. “They are part of a highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN) and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.”

While the campus protests are, indeed, justifiably concerned with the perennial and current suffering of the Palestinian people, they are not all supportive of Hamas as a ruling authority nor are they all calling for the dismantling of the state of Israel.

In addition, the Project depicts youth and particularly college and university students as naïve and as conducive to brainwashing as impressionable children who are being led by a radical Pied Piper directing them into a mountain cave from where they will never be seen again:

“As their ends align, the HSN and its nihilist supporters indoctrinate the gullible into supporting Hamas and hating Israel to create the street mayhem that serves their ends” states the Project. “Its members hope to achieve their goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency.”

“Project Esther” indicts the entire system of education:

“The U.S. education system fosters antisemitism under the guise of ‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives across universi­ties, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology.”

The rhetoric employed in “Project Esther” could have come directly from the mouth of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the so-call “McCarthy” anti-Communist “Red Scares” and anti-homosexual “Lavender Scares” era of the 1950s by changing the terms “communist” and “homosexual” to “Hamas Support Network”:

“The HSN and its affiliated HSOs,” argues “Project Esther,” “are likely in every state in the Union, are active on most university and college campuses, are likely connected by both ideology and other tangible ties, and have managed to extend their influence into the highest reaches of the United States government…Moreover, the indispensable support network of activists and financial supporters that allows the HSN to succeed in its operations has a parallel goal of eliminating capitalism and democracy.”

“Project Esther” purports that many of these supporters are funded on “Foreign money from wealthy supporters of the Palestinian cause [which] flows freely into U.S. academic institutions as a way to influence curricula against Israel and Jews.”

The point made in “Project Esther” of a supposed “Jewish community’s complacency” comes directly from the antisemites playbook of timeless tropes representing Jews as meek victims of oppression. If this were so, why would the Heritage Foundation title its report as a commemoration of a Jewish upstander, Esther, against oppression?

The Project blames the American Jewish community for failing to demonstrate “a unified resolve against the HSN…and their program of Jew-hatred and America-hatred” and claims that “significant components of the [Jewish] community remain disengaged.”

“Some may be blind and deaf to the manifestation of HSN-inspired antisemitism at home,” “Project Esther” continues. “Some may be in such disbelief that they cannot even acknowledge the threat. More likely, many simply do not know what to do and are waiting for leader­ship to guide them….[T]he American Jewish community remains relegated to singular, large, ineffective bursts of symbolic activity with no support from other special-in­terest groups.”

So, does the Heritage Foundation truly believe that Jews are waiting for white Christian nationalist saviors to rescue us from antisemitism and from ourselves?

While this representation of the Jewish community is not only patronizing but extremely offensive – yes, antisemitic — it is patently untrue. Jewish organization and our allies have been conscious of and have been fighting the continual scourge of antisemitism for literally centuries in the United States, and we have been on the front lines in the fights to defeat all the ruthless and tyrannical forms of bigotry.

To be clear, the Heritage Foundation is a far-right Christian nationalist organization. It does not represent Jews or the Jewish community per se.

Many conservative Christians like themselves and their followers would prefer that Jews (and members of other religious groups) convert to conservative Protestant denominations. They do not generally work and act in ways protective of Jewish rights and for the separation of their “church” and state.

“Project Esther” was developed as a smokescreen to hide the actual reasons for Christian nationalist and white supremacist attacks on higher education including defunding and privatizing these institutions and reducing the funding of government in order to make the administration’s tax cuts to Donald Trump’s wealthy friends and their corporations a permanent entitlement to the very rich.

Let’s be real, the so-called DOGE cuts were never meant to bring about a more efficient system of government.

It is about a far-right Heritage Foundation empowering a far-right Trump regime to support and encourage a far-right Israeli government to continue its oppression, bombing, land theft, and ultimate deportation of the Palestinian people from their homeland and from any possibility of achieving their rights as a sovereign people.

This backing by a U.S. presidential administration, even more so than under the Biden administration, further justifies the Israeli government’s refusal to engage in good-faith negotiations in ending the Israeli-Hamas war and the return of captured Israeli hostages.

Yes, antisemitism exists and is rampant on many college and university campuses. I experienced this myself serving as an Associate Professor at a large Research I Midwestern university until I felt I could no longer remain.

But all forms of prejudice and discrimination comprising the many forms of oppression continue on many campuses and within other social, religious, business, and governmental institutions, and, therefore, must be challenged and eliminated.

The purpose of “Project Esther”

“…is to provide a strategic blueprint to all Americans who are willing to counter antisemitism in the United States so that they can protect not only American Jewry, but the sanctity of the core values derived from our Founding documents that ensure the security and prosperity of all Americans.”

Why does the Heritage Foundation not construct and offer a blueprint to defeat Islamophobia, racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, ethnocentrism, extreme nationalism, classism, and all the other forms of systemic oppression? And how much does this far-right Christian nationalist organization really care about “the core values derived from our Founding documents” like “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all people?

In particular, it seems quite evident that “Project 2025” combined with “Project Esther” does not value our Founding document titled “The Constitution of the United States of America.” In its attempts to enlarge and expand the power of the Executive branch of government according to Article II, the Heritage Foundation is attempting to unbalance the balance of powers between the three separate branches.

By highlighting only the safety of Jewish students, the Trump administration through “Project Esther” is following the Machiavellian playbook of “divide and conquer,” which actually places Jewish students at greater risk for antisemitic attacks including violence. And as I have written elsewhere, Trump has committed antisemitic actions in words and behaviors in so many instances that I lost count.

These assaults on freedom of speech, association, redress of grievances, and on academic freedom in higher education jeopardize not only our nation’s economic and technological development and our reputation as a leader of higher learning worldwide, but they seriously challenge our values of democracy and reliance on Constitutional law.

And his assaults are not limited to higher education. With his student props looking on, President Donald Trump signed what many Constitutional scholars see as an illegal executive order dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. This agency is charged with administering federal funds for students with disabilities, upholding school health mandates including vaccinations and free meals programs for students from low-income households and distributing Pell Grants for undergraduate students.

“Project Esther” does a great disservice to Jews and to our heroic queen.