Trump’s Funding Threats Are an Affront To Jewish Values

In President Donald Trump’s assault on higher education, the safety of Jewish students has been his primary alibi.

Two days ago, the Trump Administration began reviewing billions of dollars of Harvard’s federal funding in reprimand of the University’s handling of antisemitism. In the context of recent funding cuts from the University of Pennsylvania and administrative concessions from Columbia University, we must not be naive to the fact that this review is a pretext to undermine academic freedom at Harvard.

But funding cuts would not merely be an abnormal and frightening degradation of Harvard’s scholarly mission. They would also be discordant with Jewish values.

Talking heads of the MAGA movement — including Steve Bannon — have unabashedly communicated their ravenous desire to plunder elite universities of all federal funding. At Columbia, Trump imperiled funding under the guise of fighting antisemitism. But at Penn, threats to $175 million worth of funding related to transgender athletes.

The ubiquity of funding cuts across issues, coupled with influential Republicans’ explicit loathing of higher education, suggests that yesterday’s decision was not carefully crafted with the idiosyncratic needs of Jewish students in mind, but rather was a brute force weapon in Trump's callous war against universities.

I cannot speak for Columbia, but the genuine prominence of antisemitism at Harvard does not justify crippling the financial health and independence of research. Coverage of antisemitism here has been a disingenuous spectacle that does not distinguish between legitimate claims of harassment, insensitive yet not bigoted rhetoric, and natural discomfort from students who encounter harsh but genuinely insightful criticisms of Israel.

Certainly, no matter their relationship to Zionism, few of the Jewish students I know regard the problem as severe enough to browbeat Harvard out of a nonpartisan relationship to billions in academic funding.

But to those who nevertheless believe these sanctions are warranted for the sake of Jewish students, I urge you to consider how incongruous cuts would be with Judaism’s own intellectual values.

In Judaism, rigorous scholarship is sacrosanct. Age-old Jewish tradition teems with a robust intellectual spirit. In my upbringing as a Modern Orthodox Jew, the religion’s erudite accomplishments inspired me. Beyond being remarkable rabbis, the ideological architects of my childhood — from Maimonides to the Rav — were also remarkable scholars.

My formal schooling was subsumed by a religious imperative to adore learning and to regard it as a divinely created mechanism of the human mind. From a young age, I balanced secular studies with studies of the Bible in its original Hebrew, numerous medieval commentaries of exegesis, Modern Hebrew language, and Jewish law.

These religious voices frequently differed. Judaism derives the bulk of its rulings from painstaking and brutal debate, rather than passive dogmatism. The entire Talmud, from which halachic Jewish law is largely derived, consists of dispute after dispute. Our texts treat the pursuit of knowledge with perennial enthusiasm. Even if I have wavered in faith, I have an expansive pride in Judaism that springs from its treatment of learning and education as something core to Jewish existence, as something beautiful in addition to sacred.

There is no pride in antisemitism’s role in Harvard’s federal funding investigation.

If Harvard’s funding is slashed, antisemitism will have been scapegoated to debilitate vital scientific research with consequences that are wholly independent from the safety of Jewish students. If Harvard compromises through any degree of concessions, then antisemitism will have been leveraged to sweep true academic independence into Trump’s pocket. Centering Judaism in this authoritarian attack on universities simply does not treat its promotion of intellectual vitality with care. When considering our core values, it is truly perverse.

One week from Saturday, we will partake in a Passover seder. As we slosh syrupy Manischewitz into our hungry bellies and sting our throats purple with horseradish, we will reach Maggid and retell portions of the Passover story. We will tell the tale of the Four Sons. Together, we will reach the Wicked Son, the Son who spits on Judaism, who agitates against salvation. The Son who inquires in bad faith, “how do God’s miracles serve you?”

But most importantly, we will see that this Son was still included at the seder. Among the likes of his lesser-wicked brothers, he is provided equal opportunity to speak his words, to be engaged with and learned from, in his own way. This is the Judaism I know, a religion with a near boundless appetite for opportunities to teach, a religion that derives merit from seating all sons at the table.

Do not treat this particular handicapping of academic integrity — even if you are enraged about antisemitism — as anything but antithetical to Jewish tradition.

At this coming seder, as we speak of the Four Sons, remember that we are conferring value on intellectual robustness, a task that we cherish, a task that we are commanded to do for generations to come.

Abigail Chachkes ’25 is an English concentrator in Leverett House.