As President Donald Trump set his sights on Columbia University this month, pulling $400 million in federal funding and moving to deport a former graduate student who led last year’s anti-Israel encampment, predictably partisan responses emerged.

The president’s detractors cried that he is mounting a full-scale attack on higher education and liberal values. His supporters cheered what they see as a president hell-bent on fighting campus antisemitism and progressive excess. 

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens sees merit in both views — and thinks taking the center path is actually very Jewish. 

“Why be Jewish unless you can make fine-toothed distinctions between different situations?” Stephens said in an interview Tuesday, speaking on the sidelines of a Miami gathering for Zionist rabbis convened by the Leffell Foundation, The Paul E. Singer Foundation and Maimonides Fund. “That doesn’t prevent you from saying, ‘On the whole, I’m happier with him than I might have been with [Vice President Kamala] Harris’ or vice versa, but you should at least be able to say, ‘But the position on Ukraine is a disgrace.’ ‘But the tariff war is idiotic,’ and so forth. I don’t know why people have such a hard time doing that.”

The funding cuts to Columbia, where antisemitism has flourished since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and ensuing war, do not bother Stephens. “They are not entitled to the money. They have a multibillion-dollar endowment. Figure it out,” he said. “Now, if this becomes a general assault on higher education, then I’m more worried.” 

But he doesn’t think we’re there yet; case-by-case distinctions, on the merits, are what he sees as the way to go. Columbia may have deserved it, for instance, but Johns Hopkins University — which lost $800 million in federal funding as a result of Trump’s decision to freeze USAID projects — did not, Stephens argued. 

“Johns Hopkins is not a hotbed of antisemites,” he noted. “The thing that really worries me more than the assault on this and the assault on that is just the general incoherence and the kind of blunderbuss approach to everything, whether it’s DOGE or Ukraine or higher education.” 

But while Stephens may not be troubled by Trump’s targeting of Columbia as an institution, he thinks the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia graduate student of Palestinian descent who served as a lead negotiator for the encampment in talks with the university’s administration last spring, was a step too far. 

“The current claim, which is that he was saying things we don’t like, strikes me as a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment,” Stephens said. “It sends a chill down every green card holder, which included my wife for her first 16 years in America.” 

Using one’s deeply held values to identify what’s good and what isn’t is the way to muddle through any presidential administration, Stephens argued, but particularly the fast-paced disorder of Trump’s presidency, where tariffs announced in the morning may be pulled back by nighttime. Stephens conceded that Trump’s efforts to deport Khalil may be legal, but he thinks they contravene core American values.

“We should not have to forsake our liberalism to fight this battle,” said Stephens, who pondered what this precedent will mean for future administrations who could turn to deportation not to help Jews but to hurt them.

“Lord save us, if this is a precedent during some future AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] administration, from her using the same arguments to throw out a right-wing Israeli of whom she doesn’t approve,” he cautioned. 

The all-or-nothing attitude many apply to Trump, that you either love everything about him or despise it all, can be described in a single word, according to Stephens: “stupid.”

“I had dinner. The appetizer was good. The rest of it was inedible,” Stephens said. “We should be able to make nuanced judgments.”