The Senate Judiciary Committee broke little new ground on addressing the surge of antisemitism on college campuses on Wednesday as it examined the issue at the Senate’s first dedicated antisemitism hearing since Oct. 7, 2023.

Wednesday’s proceedings saw minimal disruption beyond a few moments that garnered applause from the audience on both sides of the aisle, a marked shift in tone from the hearing organized by Democrats last September on religious-based hate crimes. That hearing was repeatedly disrupted by anti-Israel agitators in the crowd who repeatedly heckled Republicans and the lone GOP witness as they tried to discuss antisemitism. Despite this, the antisemitism hearing failed to deliver any bipartisan consensus on how to respond to the crisis. 

The sole issue that all participants demonstrated a mutual understanding of was the scope of the problem.

“Antisemitism is now an industry. It is an industry that is being perpetuated, unfortunately, by organizations that even have nonprofit status in America,” Asra Nomani, the editor of the Pearl Project and a GOP witness, said in response to a question from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee’s chairman. “These are organizations that are belying their own mission in order to use, as a trojan horse, this opposition to Israel to perpetuate this.”

Still, the committee and speakers failed to come to any agreement on who or what was responsible for the skyrocketing rates of domestic antisemitism and how to address it. 

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) argued that it was the Biden administration’s inaction on this issue and the federal government’s decision to give money to causes that directly benefitted Hamas that had created the “antisemitism industrial complex.”

Adela Cojab, a former student activist and legal fellow at the National Jewish Advocacy Center, said in response to a question from Lee about universities’ reforms since the Trump administration took office, “It seems that the new administration, because they’re putting teeth finally behind the Civil Rights Act that we’ve been begging to be enforced, administrations are finally making a difference.”

Cojab pointed to New York University, which implemented a new policy last summer on anti-Zionist discrimination on campus, something she called “a huge step forward.” “I really think that [university] administrations have started realizing that they were privileging activism over academics, to the detriment of not only their Jewish population but to any student who might think differently,” Cojab said. 

Committee members and their witnesses debated the issue of funding for the Office for Civil Rights, the usefulness of threatening to cut off federal funding to get universities to take action on antisemitism and the need to endorse deportations of foreign nationals as part of a broader antisemitism strategy during the hearing. 

Meirav Solomon, a Jewish student at Tufts University and co-vice president of J Street U’s New England branch, said she believes the far-right embrace of neo-Nazism was a greater threat to Jews than campus demonstrations and urged support for keeping the OCR from being shut down alongside the Department of Education.

“We have no common cause with those who want to discredit or defund higher education. Protecting education, civil rights and open dialogue is vital to my future and to the ability of Jewish students to succeed and thrive,” Solomon, one of the two Democratic witnesses, said. 

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top Democrat on the committee, said he struggled to reconcile the notion that the federal government could adequately tackle the issue while shutting down the OCR.

“If we are going to underfund the Office of Civil Rights, we can have these hearings every week, in fact we can have twice a week,” Durbin explained. “And the obvious question is: Who’s going to litigate the claims that are made of antisemitism on campus or anywhere else? If you truly want to stop antisemitism, you at least have to leave open the possibility that there be some way to litigate your case.”

Several Republicans pushed back, with Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) questioning what would be necessary to investigate given the wide array of evidence of university students forcibly taking over parts of their campuses and disrupting classes. 

“What’s there to investigate? We see it. We saw it. Did you watch television? Did you see what happened in Columbia? I mean, it was clear to me that the administration of Columbia and most members of the faculty believe passionately in diversity, equity, inclusion and the right to hurt Jews. That’s what I saw,” Kennedy said in a heated exchange with Kevin Rachlin, the Washington director of the Nexus Leadership Project and the other Democratic witness.

Cojab said in response to a question from Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) that she was “not advocating for the defunding of OCR, but I am saying that at the same time it has not been effective. Not a single school has lost their funding under Title VI and it has not been enforced.”

She also noted that the office “wasn’t defunded with nothing in place. They’re replacing it with directed investigations.”

Cojab and Alyza Lewin, the president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and another GOP witness, argued that threatening uncooperative schools with a loss of their federal funding had been the only mechanism that has resulted in action. Solomon and Rachlin, on the other hand, argued that such threats hurt the cause of protecting Jewish students. 

“I think that something has to be held over the universities’ heads, because unless something happens and something changes and there’s actual consequences, why would you change your actions?” Cojab asked in response to a question from Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL).

Moody, Florida’s former attorney general who was recently appointed to fill Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s vacant Senate seat, pointed to her work in the Sunshine State keeping anti-Israel protests from turning into encampments or allowing agitators to target Jewish students as campus demonstrations broke out last year. The Florida senator said that the calls for more OCR funding were unnecessary given the obvious lack of prior enforcement of civil rights law by the federal government. 

“We did not see the incredibly dangerous, reckless, offensive criminal behavior that we saw on college campuses around the nation, but that doesn’t happen by accident,” Moody said of her home state. “So I’m really interested in some of the statements that maybe we give additional funding to stop this behavior. I think that’s incredibly insane.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) urged the witnesses to consider incorporating deportations into their official platforms to combat antisemitism, noting Rachlin’s mention to Welch about the lack of organizations currently taking a position on the issue. The Missouri senator said that he’s urged Rubio to “write into the process a condition of the visa that if you assault a Jewish student on campus, you’re out of here, you’re gone.”

“I think he’s [Rubio] got the authority to do it. My position is it would send an incredibly clear message: if you come to this country on a student visa you are here as a guest of the United States for particular purposes. If you assault a Jewish student on campus, you ought to be out of here and we ought to make it clear to people we are not going to tolerate it.”

“Why would we permit a foreign student who’s on a student visa who commits an act of violence, an unlawful act against a Jewish student, why wouldn’t we say, ‘Sorry, but if you’re going to commit acts of violence against Jewish students, Jewish Americans or foreign Jewish students, whomever, we’re going to revoke your visa?’”