Two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president for a second time in November, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt — then the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism — said she believed the Trump administration would take antisemitism seriously.

Now, in her first public comments about Trump’s recent actions to address the rise of antisemitism on college campuses, Lipstadt is raising concerns about the way the president is tackling the issue.

“I think it’s been weaponized,” she told Jewish Insider in an interview on Monday. “I think they [the administration] take it seriously. But I think the approach has not been as productive as it should be.”

For the three years Lipstadt served in the Biden administration, she was unable to speak about domestic matters from her diplomatic perch at the State Department, particularly after domestic politics threatened to sink her nomination. She had to work to win over Republican senators who were concerned with her partisan tweets. 

Since leaving government in January, Lipstadt has made clear her outrage at the way elite universities struggled to rein in antisemitism after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. She wrote in The Free Press in March that the very institution of higher education “could well collapse” if administrators don’t seriously address antisemitism and the illiberal environment on their campuses. 

But Lipstadt, a renowned Holocaust historian, isn’t ready to burn it all down, and she worries about the consequences of Trump’s threats to pull billions of dollars from American universities. “I’m not willing to say, ‘Oh, well, forget it. Columbia should close down,’ or whatever it might be: research on AIDS, research on pneumonia, research on cancer, research on so many different things,” said Lipstadt, who plans to return to her longtime academic home of Emory University as a distinguished professor this summer. 

Lipstadt described herself as being “a schizophrenic person in the middle” in her assessment of Trump’s approach to antisemitism at American colleges and universities. She called the recent actions taken by Columbia University in response to demands from the White House “important steps,” ideas that Jewish students had first raised to indifferent administrators a year ago — with little progress until Trump stepped in to pressure Columbia.

“I think that a lot of the issues that the Trump administration are addressing are serious issues, and some of the people they are targeting have done wrong things, bad things, potentially illegal things, or at least broken campus rules,” Lipstadt said. “I have concerns because I think that the impact in certain cases has been to make people who don’t deserve to be look like martyrs.” 

The Trump administration has revoked the student visas of at least 300 foreign students, many of whom are alleged by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to have acted in support of Hamas. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the White House wrote on X in March when it announced the planned deportation of green card holder and recent Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, described as a “radical foreign pro-Hamas student.” 

Despite accusations that these students supported Hamas, Trump administration officials have not provided evidence to back up those claims for many of the students it detained, such as Turkish Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was picked up by masked ICE agents outside her apartment on her way to an iftar dinner. 

“We still are a country of laws and a country of due process. And what disturbs me as much as the failure of due process and going after people for what they’ve said or written — which as much as I hate, they have a right to say or to write, as long as it’s not incendiary or inflammatory or threatening — is, A), we have these laws and [the] First Amendment and all those other things,” said Lipstadt. 

“But on top of that,” she continued, “it doesn’t end well for the Jews, that the Jewish student now is on campus saying, ‘Well, that guy really riled up and made Jewish students feel not safe on campus, or Israeli students not feel safe on campus, but now I’ve got to go and defend them?’”

If the Trump administration’s treatment of those foreign students turns them into heroes for left-wing activists, Lipstadt worries that that may ultimately have a negative impact on the Jewish students Trump claims to want to help.

“You turn some of these people into martyrs when they don’t deserve that. But you set up a situation where they are being attacked in a way that is antithetical to what this country stands for,” Lipstadt said. 

Over the past year and a half, in which university administrators kept letting rule-breaking protesters off the hook, the stakes have only gotten higher, Lipstadt acknowledged. They didn’t act. And now Trump is. 

“Universities said, ‘We don’t want to expel them because they’ll lose their student visas,’” she said. “So what’s the message you give? That this is OK.”

The way that many university leaders handled antisemitism, and the concerns of Jewish students, was to regard the rule-breakers as akin to toddlers, Lipstadt argued.

“The toddler starts by throwing a stuffed toy. Then they throw their little car, and then they throw their big toy. You gotta stop them,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you have to beat them up or put them in perennial time-out or whatever, but you have certain rules [and] laws.”