The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing examining the rise in domestic antisemitism next Wednesday, March 5, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Jewish Insider.

Grassley, the committee’s chairman, intends to announce the scheduling of the hearing on Wednesday morning, one week before it is scheduled to take place. The title of the hearing, “Never To Be Silent: Stemming the Tide of Antisemitism in America,” was inspired by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s famed 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, during which he said: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.”

“Since Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel, antisemitic incidents have exploded in the United States, particularly on our college campuses. The Senate can’t turn a blind eye to these atrocities. We must confront antisemitism head on, and with moral clarity. I look forward to chairing this long-awaited hearing in the Judiciary Committee next week,” Grassley told JI in a statement.

Next week’s hearing will be the first specifically focused on antisemitism in the Senate since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. No Senate committee held hearings focused on the subject in the last Congress, with Democrats and then Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) largely avoiding the issue while in control of the upper chamber. 

The hearing’s singular concern with antisemitism marks a shift from how Democrats on the Judiciary Committee approached the issue when they held the majority. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who chaired the committee until Republicans retook the Senate, declined requests from his GOP colleagues to hold a hearing specifically on rising antisemitism. 

Durbin instead convened a hearing on religious-based hate crimes generally and invited witnesses who minimized antisemitism while defending the anti-Israel campus protest movement in their testimony. The hearing, which took place in September, devolved into chaos as anti-Israel agitators in the audience repeatedly heckled Republicans and their sole witness as they tried to ask about antisemitism. 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was forced to pause his remarks to allow security to escort out of the hearing room a man who was shouting that he did not care about “f***ing Jews.” One of the witnesses, Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, declined to say in response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran seek to destroy the Jewish state. 

The hearing itself and the disruptions were panned by Jewish leaders, and the situation led Republicans on the committee to publicly vow to hold a new hearing that would singularly address antisemitism. 

The Judiciary Committee is not the only panel planning to hold a hearing on the subject this year. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is also expected to hold a hearing on the surge of campus antisemitism since Oct. 7, though that is still in the planning stages and is not expected to be scheduled imminently. 

Like his Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the HELP Committee’s chairman, also pushed for a hearing last year. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who was HELP chair at the time, didn’t grant those requests