Speaking to members of the Florida Democratic Party Jewish Caucus over Zoom on Wednesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) accused the Trump administration of not working in good faith to combat antisemitism, discussed recent Democratic National Committee votes on Israel and offered a strong defense of Israel against a growing chorus of critics.

Wasserman Schultz argued that a series of moves by the Trump administration — attempting to place new conditions on Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding, gutting the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and eliminating Justice Department programs focused on hate crimes — show that the administration’s focus on antisemitism isn’t genuine.

“None of that makes us safer, and all of it demonstrates that they don’t really care about taking care of our community. They aren’t concerned about antisemitism, they are concerned about maintaining power,” she said. “Let’s not let our community members believe the rhetoric and the BS.”

Highlighting the administration’s moves on NSGP funding, Wasserman Schultz noted the long freeze in reimbursements from the program, and said that the administration had also tried to demand that all NSGP recipients cooperate with immigration enforcement authorities and eliminate any diversity, equity and inclusion programs to make them eligible for funding.

She said that advocates had worked to ensure that the immigration demands were dropped, but said that “the DEI part is still being litigated.”

She said that universities largely “deserve the criticism and deserve to be investigated by an Office of Civil Rights that would be robustly funded. But if Trump cared about that, he wouldn’t have cut their budget in half and fired half their employees.”

The former Democratic National Committee chair also spoke about the recent DNC debate over a pair of Israel-related resolutions. One, which called for an arms embargo on Israel, was defeated, while one calling for a ceasefire, the release of hostages and humanitarian aid passed the Resolutions Committee but was then withdrawn.

“They moved past the issue, but there were many of us that had to work very hard to communicate our deep concern and opposition” to the resolution calling for an arms embargo, Wasserman Schultz said. “Thankfully, because our party does support the U.S.-Israel relationship, and because our party does believe that Israel should remain a Jewish and democratic state, that resolution was defeated.”

Addressing criticisms of Israel more broadly, Wasserman Schultz affirmed that she is a Zionist and emphasized that Hamas, by carrying out the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, was responsible for starting the war and could end it by releasing the hostages.

“Israel … are not aggressors. They don’t engage in land acquisition. They are only interested in living in peace with their neighbors,” she said. “The wars that have occurred across the millennia have almost exclusively, and certainly in modern times exclusively, been initiated by outside terrorist groups or other countries invading Israel.”

Wasserman Schultz emphasized the need for a ceasefire, the release of hostages, the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza and the end of Hamas as a security threat to Israel and a menace to the Palestinian people.

She blamed Hamas for the issues with humanitarian aid distribution, given the group’s theft of aid and the threat it poses to those who distribute it. “If they continue to be obstructionist and prevent humanitarian aid from getting to their own people, then they will continue to struggle.”

Wasserman Schultz said that “propaganda … is being used to make Israel look like they are the evil aggressors and oppressors,” calling it “outrageous.” She called out media photos featuring emaciated children, many of whom were revealed to have congenital diseases, as proof of mass starvation in Gaza as one example of such a phenomenon.

“We know as Jewish people that, at the end of the day, we’re very easy to blame. It is really like a reflexive, default position for far too many people. It’s embedded, it’s in societal norms,” Wasserman Schultz said. “This is happening regularly and we have to make sure that we are really fighting back.”

She said that criticism of Israel isn’t inherently antisemitic, but that the slogans “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” are clear calls for the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jewish people, and that “that is a very serious form of antisemitism. That shouldn’t be open for debate.”

Arab and Israeli leaders are insisting that any U.S. deal with Iran also include provisions to address Iran’s other malign activities in the region, including support for terrorist proxies, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told Jewish Insider following a trip earlier this month to meet with Israeli and Arab leaders in the Middle East.

Wasserman Schultz traveled with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to the Middle East for the third time since Oct. 7, 2023, visiting Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan.

“There was a very clear urgency that the leaders we spoke to had to make sure that we … don’t let Iran up from their very weakened state. They’ve been badly pummeled and had significant defeats,” Wasserman Schultz told JI last week. “The consensus across the region, no matter where we went, was that we needed to make sure that continued and that we prevented them from achieving their nuclear weapons goals and that we particularly prevented them from continuing their support for terrorist activity.”

She said that notion was raised by multiple leaders without prompting from the U.S. lawmakers.

She said that “across the board” the leaders shared her view that any deal with Iran must “include defanging them — and that was a term that was used repeatedly, defanging them — and stopping them from continuing to terrorize” the region.

“It was made very clear to us it was not enough to just negotiate over their nuclear ambitions, that in their weakened state, you could not separate Iran’s malignancy when it comes to all of their activity — particularly if they got any relief from sanctions,” she said.

Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the lead negotiator for the U.S. in talks with Iran, suggested in a recent Fox News interview that the U.S. would consider allowing Iran to retain its enrichment capacity as part of a deal — a statement he later walked back — while Wasserman Schultz and Ernst were in the region. The outline Witkoff provided on Fox appeared to many to be equivalent to the original 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which Trump withdrew from in his first term.

Wasserman Schultz called it “incredibly hypocritical” for officials from the new Trump administration, such as Witkoff, to endorse terms of a deal similar to the JCPOA. Wasserman Schultz ultimately voted for the JCPOA in 2015 and calls it “the most difficult vote I’ve cast in all the years I’ve been in Congress.”

She called on Witkoff and the American negotiators to seek a deal stronger than the original JCPOA, making her the latest pro-Israel Democrat to raise concerns about the potential terms of a new deal with Iran. 

She said she’s “frustrated and concerned … and even angry” that the administration seems to be going “from pillar to post. Their discussions seem like they’re happening on quicksand and I have seen nothing that looks different than the agreement that [Trump] pulled out of.”

With Iran significantly weaker and more vulnerable than it was in 2015, Wasserman Schultz said the U.S. must seize the opportunity to push for a more comprehensive deal to prevent Iranian terrorist activity and stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

If the U.S. does return to a deal similar to the JCPOA, Wasserman Schultz said that the ultimate result of Trump’s withdrawal from the original deal would have been allowing Iran to get “perilously close to a nuclear weapon” and removing the option to strengthen the original agreement through further negotiations.

Wasserman Schultz said that she told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aggressively opposed the 2015 deal, that she expected he would offer “the same howling pushback that occurred back during the Obama years when those negotiations were taking place” if Trump moves toward a deal similar to the JCPOA.

Wasserman Schultz and Ernst also discussed the ongoing war with Hamas in their meeting with Netanyahu. Compared to previous meetings, Wasserman Schultz said she believed that the prime minister and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer outlined more comprehensive and specific strategies to achieve the release of the remaining hostages being held in Gaza.

“I probably have met with him five or six times over the course of the last year and a half there in Israel and in the U.S.,” Wasserman Schultz explained. “I was glad to see that they had varying approaches in terms of their negotiations and strategy with the ceasefire and hostage deals that they’re discussing. I was glad to see that and hear for the first time Dermer — and Netanyahu too — talk about the various options that they had, as opposed to it being a more minimalist conversation.”

Wasserman Schultz said she and Ernst had also spoken to Arab leaders about their proposals for post-war Gaza and achieving Saudi-Israeli normalization. She said the Arab leaders had been “very clear-eyed” about the difficulties of finding credible Palestinian leadership able to help move toward an eventual Palestinian state, but said they believed it was possible.

“I came away feeling like there could be some progress made. But it was clear that as a result of the war in Gaza, the signs of progress that we had hoped for when we were in Saudi Arabia on the night of Oct. 6 [2023] [were] further away at the moment than [they were] then,” Wasserman Schultz said. 

But she added that the countries which have normalized relations with Israel are not retreating from those agreements and remain committed to them, highlighting as one example of the progress made that she was able to attend a Seder on the first night of Passover in Abu Dhabi.

Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, told lawmakers on Friday that existing federal law and procedures make it unlikely that any schools will lose their federal funding over antisemitic activity on their college campuses in the near term.

Some lawmakers have honed in on threats to colleges and universities’ federal funding as a method of pressuring or penalizing them over their failure to protect Jewish students. But Lhamon explained at a roundtable with congressional Democrats that pulling funding requires a yearslong litigation process under current federal statute.

Before seeking to revoke funding, Lhamon said that her department, the Office of Civil Rights, must first investigate and communicate a finding that the subject of an investigation has violated civil rights law, at which point she’s required to give schools the opportunity to voluntarily come into compliance.

If a school refuses, then the DOJ can take the matter to an administrative law judge. If the judge rules that the school is in violation, the subject can still appeal the ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Only at the end of that process — which Lhamon acknowledged could take years — can funds actually be revoked, Lhamon said.

But, she added, most schools will agree to voluntarily take action — OCR is currently taking a discrimination case, related to disability issues, to a judge for the first time in 27 years.

Lhamon also acknowledged another gap in her office’s enforcement ability — she does not have the authority to require schools to dismiss problematic faculty.

Addressing the antisemitism that has pervaded campuses across the country over the past 11 months, Lhamon described herself as “shocked” by the comments she hears from school leaders professing to be unaware of their responsibilities to protect Jewish students from discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a situation she described as unacceptable.

“We are seeing kids assaulted. We are seeing kids stopped from going to class,” Lhamon said. “These are not close calls about whether a university should be responding to them, and yet our universities are treating them like there’s maybe something they don’t need to do, or there’s a byzantine process that a student needs to follow before they can get a university response. That’s not the law.”

Lhamon’s presentation to the lawmakers focused heavily on her office’s need for additional funding; she said that Congress “has never” provided sufficient funding.

The lawmakers who attended the event, Reps. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Kathy Manning (D-NC), Grace Meng (D-NY), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Wiley Nickel (D-NC) and Kim Schrier (D-WA), are supporting a Goldman-sponsored bill that pushes for increased funding for OCR.

Lhamon said her office has around 400 investigative staff, the same number it has since the Bush administration. Complaints, especially in the wake of Oct. 7, have surged, however, from 6,000 per year to 19,201 in 2023, a record it is set to easily surpass this year, with around 24,000 so far.

Four hundred of those complaints were related to discrimination based on shared ancestry or national origin, some of those being antisemitism complaints. OCR currently has 162 such cases under investigation and many more go unreported, Lhamon said.

“I cannot manage that complaint volume with the staff that I have,” Lhamon emphasized, warning that talented and experienced investigators could leave the office. “Our staff are now carrying about 51 cases per person, and you cannot do civil rights work effectively with a caseload that is that high.”

Lhamon said that staff shortages are causing cases to drag on, leaving students to wait, in some cases until after they’ve graduated, for their cases to be resolved.

“That’s not protecting civil rights in the way Congress intended,” Lhamon said.

Lhamon said that the administration’s requested budget increase would allow the office to add 77 new investigators. She said that the ideal target would be 20 or fewer active cases per investigator. But it appears unlikely that Congress will fulfill the administration’s request.

“We don’t have any more efficiencies we can bring to this problem,” Lhamon added. Some lawmakers have argued the case backlog is an issue of improper procedures or prioritization at OCR.

She explained that there is a low bar to opening a formal investigation, which includes extensive document requests and interviews and often surfaces additional instances of examples of discrimination.

Even once cases are resolved, OCR staff are responsible for continued monitoring of schools that have settled with the office. For instance, schools entering into agreements relating to antisemitism are now being required to report every complaint of antisemitism they receive to OCR, so that federal officials can monitor how the schools respond.

Pressed by lawmakers on why her office does not provide specific detail about the nature of the shared ancestry cases it is investigating — such as how many relate to antisemitism — Lhamon said that most antisemitism cases ultimately grow to involve other areas of discrimination as well.

“Here’s maybe an ugly answer to that, but if a university is not handling antisemitism, it’s also not handling anti-Islam,” Lhamon said. “What we’re finding is, if a school doesn’t know or isn’t fulfilling its obligations under Title VI, it’s not doing it for people in general.”

Lhamon also lamented what she characterized as a failure on behalf of schools to take steps to inform students of the rights and protections they are entitled to and how to report cases of discrimination.

She offered, as an example, that she frequently sees information sheets inside bathrooms on campuses about how students can report sexual harassment and sex discrimination, but not similar information sheets about other forms of discrimination.

Lhamon suggested Congress could consider legal changes to address such gaps.

Seventy-four House lawmakers  wrote to the boards of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania on Friday demanding that they immediately fire their presidents in response to widely criticized congressional testimony they delivered on antisemitism on their campuses earlier this week.

The presidents of the three schools have come under increasing scrutiny this week amid growing speculation that their jobs could be on the line following their refusal to say earlier this week that calls for Jewish genocide would violate their schools’ codes of conduct.

“Testimony provided by presidents of your institutions showed a complete absence of moral clarity and illuminated the problematic double standards and dehumanization of the Jewish communities that your university presidents enabled,” the letter reads. “Given this moment of crisis, we demand that your boards immediately remove each of these presidents from their positions and that you provide an actionable plan” to ensure the safety of the Jewish community on campus.

“Anything less,” than the steps they requested, the lawmakers continued, “will be seen as your endorsement… and an act of complicity in their antisemitic posture.”

The letter was led by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who questioned the presidents on the genocide issue, and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL). Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) is the only other Democrat who signed the letter; the rest are Republicans.

The lawmakers said that the testimony makes it “hard to imagine” any Jewish or Israeli person feeling safe on their campuses when the presidents “could not say that calls for the genocide of Jews would have clear consequences on your campus.”

It adds that subsequent social media statements seeking to clarify or walk back those comments “offered little clarification on your campus’ true commitment to protecting vulnerable students in this moment of crisis,” describing them instead as “desperate attempts to try and save their jobs” and “too little too late.”

Shortly before the Stefanik-Moskowitz letter was released, a group of thirteen House Democrats wrote to the boards of the three schools urging them to re-examine their codes of conduct to make clear that calls for the genocide of Jews are not acceptable.

This second letter, led by Reps. Kathy Manning (D-NC), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and Susan Wild (D-PA), includes similar language to the bipartisan letter regarding the presidents’ testimony and how it would make Jewish campus members feel unsafe, but stops short of directly calling for the presidents to be fired.

The lawmakers wrote that they felt “compelled to ask” if the presidents’ responses “align with the values and policies of your respective institutions.”

“The presidents’ unwillingness to answer questions clearly or fully acknowledge appalling and unacceptable behavior — behavior that would not have been tolerated against other groups — illuminated the problematic double standards and dehumanization of the Jewish communities at your universities,” the letter continues. “The lack of moral clarity these presidents displayed is simply unacceptable.”

The lawmakers requested that the schools update their policies to “ensure that they protect students from hate” and describe their plans for protecting Jewish and Israeli community members.

“There is no context in which calls for the genocide of Jews is acceptable rhetoric,” the letter reads. “While Harvard and Penn subsequently issued clarifying statements which were appreciated, their failure to unequivocally condemn calls for the systematic murder of Jews during the public hearing is deeply alarming and stands in stark contrast to the principles we expect leaders of top academic institutions to uphold.”

The letter notes that federal civil rights law prohibits discrimination against Jews on campus, and that criminal law bans hate crimes, violence and incitement to violence.

“Students and faculty who threaten, harass, or incite violence towards Jews must be held accountable for their actions,” the lawmakers wrote. “If calls for genocide of the Jewish people are not in violation of your universities’ policies, then it is time for you to reexamine your policies and codes of conduct.”

Signatories to the Democratic letter include Manning, Wild, Auchincloss, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Haley Stevens (D-MI), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Grace Meng (D-NY), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Dan Goldman (D-NY), Donald Norcross (D-NJ), Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).

All of the signatories to the Democratic letter are either Jewish or deeply involved with Jewish community issues on the Hill. 

Earlier this week, a third letter by six House Republicans from Pennsylvania — Reps. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), alongside Congressmen John Joyce, M.D. (R-PA), Mike Kelly (R-PA), Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), and Dan Meuser (R-PA) — called for University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill specifically to be fired.

By Jacob Kornbluh & JI Staff

By Jacob Kornbluh & JI Staff

DAY 5: Netanyahu: It’s Going To Take Time: “We are here in the midst of a complex operation. We need to be prepared for the possibility that it may take time. This is a serious event and there will be serious consequences. We are working together in a considered, responsible and very determined manner.” Netanyahu urged the international community to decry the kidnapping: “I expect all responsible elements in the international community – some of whom rush to condemn us for any construction in this place or for enclosing a balcony in Gilo – to strongly condemn this reprehensible and deplorable act of abducting three youths.” After 5 days and without mentioning Hamas, the EU finally released a statement: “We condemn in the strongest terms the abduction of 3 Israeli students in the West Bank and call for their immediate release.” [Statement] (more…)