Philanthropy Roundtable recently met with Kenneth L. Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, to discuss the spike in antisemitism on college campuses and other areas of American community life following the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and what role donors may play in combating it.
Q: Can you tell us about your primary focus areas and the growing need for this work in the wake of rising antisemitism on college campuses?
Marcus: I founded the Louis D. Brandeis Center over a dozen years ago to fight antisemitism on and off college campuses, using law and public policy. We now have a growing team of lawyers who not only file lawsuits but also administrative actions. Increasingly, we have to defend Jewish students and faculty who are unjustly accused of infractions based merely on their support for the Jewish community and the state of Israel, and we counsel countless students, teachers, professors and families on how they can articulate their concerns in ways that will resonate with administrators because they speak to potential legal liability, and not just issues of education or facts about the Middle East.
In the year preceding October 7, 2023 we received more intake than in our entire history. Our staff was stretched extremely thinly, trying to address a historically high volume of antisemitism, but the threats seem small relative to what we’ve seen since then. We’ve needed to expand our staff. We have been filing lawsuits and administrative actions, not just with the Office for Civil Rights, but with both state and federal courts.
We have found that there are problems on far more campuses than ever before, but we have also seen antisemitism migrate from the campus to the school yard of elementary and secondary schools, as well as to the corporate boardroom. That’s why we are not only litigating on antisemitism in universities, but also in K-12 public school systems, in labor unions and in other workplace arenas.
Q: You’ve delved into the litigation arm of the Brandeis Center a bit, but what about your education endeavors?
Marcus: While we’re best known for our litigation and administrative advocacy, we’ve also been thought leaders and public policy educators, working with a variety of influential audiences. Some of that means congressional briefings on Capitol Hill, educating congressional staff so that they can more effectively legislate and conduct oversight. Some of it has been collaboration at a state level with gubernatorial staffs and state legislators. Some of it has been work on law school campuses, where we have seen that law students are an underserved community.
While there are many organizations that support Jewish undergraduates with information and education about Israel, the Middle East and antisemitism, there really were no other national organizations addressing law students. This was conspicuous because we realized that these law students will, in a relatively short period of time, become congressional staff, state legislators, judges and public officials of various kinds.
Worse, we realized that anti-Zionist groups were bringing their ideology onto the law school campuses and were largely unopposed. So we’ve started, over the years, developing both law student chapters and also what we call jigsaw fellowships for law students who want to be involved in fighting antisemitism using their skills as law students. The idea is not only to engage them as law students so that they can help increase our bandwidth, but also to train a community of lawyers who are able to work together in the future.
Q: Since the Oct 7 attacks, what has changed in the Brandeis Center’s operations? As the new school year starts, what are you anticipating in terms of evolving needs and initiatives in the coming year?
Marcus: We expect the new school year to be ugly. We have seen overwhelming evidence across the country of anti-Jewish forces organizing throughout the summer. On some campuses, this will mean encampments. In others, it will mean boycotts, divestments and sanctions. In some places, it will be campaigns of harassment. In others, it will be miseducation efforts. Some will be trying to marginalize Jewish and pro-Israel organizations. Others will be trying to marginalize and exclude Jewish students from student government positions, clubs and organizations.
Q: You mentioned before about the Brandeis Center’s efforts in K-12 education. Would you explain a bit more about that?
Marcus: In a year of horrors that we have seen with the Hamas atrocities and the reactions of college campuses, nothing has been worse than to see the campus problems spread to the high schools as well as in some cases, elementary schools. There have been many aspects of this problem, and it has exploded in recent months.
In some cases, the antisemitism is fueled by teacher groups or labor unions of teachers. In others, antisemitic and sometimes liberated ethnic studies curricula are being adopted by school boards. On some campuses, students are simply replicating the protest activity of their older siblings, using antisemitic rhetoric as well as protest techniques that we’ve seen on college campuses before, but that are now in the high schools as well.
Add to that the old school, more traditional antisemitism, with people throwing pennies at the feet of Jewish students or harassing them with language that has to do with age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes, and what you have is the potential for problems for our most vulnerable students that are far greater than what we’ve ever seen before.
At the same time, this also means that the next few years on college campuses, we’ll see more entering students who have already been propagandized with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, raising the prospect that at many colleges and universities things will get even worse.
Q: What about in the boardrooms of corporations?
Marcus: We have increasingly large numbers of clients coming to us from various workplaces. In many cases, this is campus antisemitism, but with professors complaining that they are being harassed and subjected to a hostile environment. Where it’s teachers telling us it’s not only their students, but also they themselves and their colleagues, who are facing hostility, who are also talking to Jewish union members who are being forced to pay dues to labor unions that are pervasively anti-Zionist and antisemitic as well. And then hearing from Jewish people who are excluded from various aspects of their workplace, either from anti-Zionism or through misunderstandings of the Jewish community.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices within the corporate world have tended to be unhelpful and sometimes downright harmful. Jewish employees tell us that they have tried to form employee resource groups, or ERGs, similar to what other groups are provided, and they’re told no. They’re told that because Jews are members of a religion and not an ethnic group, they are not able to get the same opportunities as others. We won’t stand for that.
The problem, however, is not only that Jewish Americans are being excluded. And the answer is not to maintain the status quo except with more recognition of Jews and antisemitism. The fact is that these systems tend to bolster identity politics in ways that aren’t good for anyone. To the extent that these systems have become conduits for introducing divisive ideologies into the corporate world, they need to be stopped.
Q: How do you see the future of free speech on campus flourishing while simultaneously addressing the hostile environment facing Jewish students across the country?
Marcus: We believe strongly in free speech and the First Amendment, and we have frequently cautioned our clients that there are some situations in which the right response is not to litigate, but rather to educate. We need to use our own voices and make our own positions heard. At the same time, we are constantly seeing double standards being used, and administrators hiding behind the First Amendment when it comes to anti-Jewish speech, even though they do nothing of the sort when it comes to other sorts of speech. Much of what we’re seeing isn’t even speech at all. It is hateful conduct. There is no First Amendment protection for that.
Ironically, Jewish students are sometimes accused of trying to censor pro-Palestinian speech, when in fact what we see is the opposite. On college campuses in particular, there is no group that is more frequently censored or silenced than pro-Israel Jewish students. Their speakers are blocked or harassed or prevented from speaking on campus. Their organizations are excluded from various sorts of activities. They face any number of harassments and exclusions and marginalizations simply for expressing their views as Jewish Americans, especially when Zionism is a central part of their identity.
Q: For donors who want to get involved in fighting antisemitism on campuses, what priorities do you think they need to consider in this pursuit and where should donors be investing?
Marcus: Some of our major donors have reached out to us to partner in communicating with colleges to whom they make contributions. In some cases, they may want to cease their contributions entirely. In others, they may want to influence the administrators. We’ve sometimes been able to help them craft correspondence or provide talking points so that they can most effectively work with university and college presidents to help them to understand their legal obligation toward Jewish students and what they need to do—not just to satisfy funders, but also to comply with the law.
Our biggest investments now are in Brandeis Center litigators. We’re getting great lawyers to join the Center, but in order to expand, we need to be able to offer competitive salaries. While many lawyers take substantial pay cuts to work for us, we have to understand the market in which we operate. We also receive substantial pro-bono assistance from many major law firms, but there are some cases where we need to pay. That means that we need to be ready to invest in cases that easily can last three to five years and require, say, $500,000 per year. That’s a long-term investment at a substantial rate, but it is what’s required in order to hold institutions accountable and to have the deterrent effect that we need.
Q: For those who are not Jewish in the philanthropic community, could you please share your thoughts on the importance of prioritizing giving to combating antisemitism on college campuses? What is at stake if our country doesn’t curb antisemitism and its ill effects on our communities?
Marcus: For many years, I would tell people that I am in this battle, not just because of what Jewish students are facing today, but because of what they could face if we don’t address it. In recent months, people have told me that this is my moment and the Brandeis Center’s moment, because our worst nightmares are coming true. I hate to say this, but our worst nightmares haven’t happened yet. We continue on a trajectory that gets worse and worse by (the) year. We don’t know what the future will bring, but it’s certainly possible things will get worse.
We need to fight through the courts. We need to fight through the legislatures. We need to fight through the elections and the executive branch. We need to fight on the college campuses and in the K-12 classrooms and in the corporate boardrooms and in the labor unions. We need to fight through the media and the social media and in other battlefields as well. If we do this right, we may be able to turn things around, so we will be able to say there was an ugly moment, but we got past it. It is not yet too late, but we must fight now.
If you are interested in learning more about how Philanthropy Roundtable supports donors committed to countering antisemitism, please contact Esther Larson, senior director of Programs at Philanthropy Roundtable here.
