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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Some more news about Columbia University and the Trump administration yesterday comes in the context of a generational collision of values and a Project 2025 style push connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Groups like the Heritage Foundation, which gave us Project 2025, and the Anti-Defamation League are trying to tie anti-Zionism more to antisemitism. Columbia just accepted a piece of that as Jewish students, themselves, and other Jewish young adults are feeling less attached to Israel as part of their identity.

All that comes as anti-Semitic hate crimes have become significantly more frequent in New York and the US in recent years. The news from Columbia is that the school officially accepted a definition of antisemitism that the Jewish newspaper, The Forward, calls controversial for its categorization of some forms of Israel criticism as anti-Semitic. Some other parts of the Columbia agreement may be less controversial as the school tries to get $400 million in suspended federal grant money back, much of it for medical research, that the Trump administration froze over allegations of antisemitism and failures to address it. We'll touch on some of those other changes, too.

For this conversation, we will mostly center the question when is anti-Zionism antisemitism and when is it not? We'll ask who's arguing for what definition to be enshrined at Columbia and elsewhere, and why? We have two guests from that Jewish-oriented news site, The Forward, Arno Rosenfeld, who writes a newsletter called Antisemitism Decoded. We have Katie J.M. Baker, a national investigative correspondent for The New York Times.

You might have heard Katie on The Times podcast, The Daily, this week with details of her article about the so-called Project Esther from the Heritage Foundation. The headline says, the group that gave us Project 2025 has a plan to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. Katie and Arno, thank you for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Katie J.M. Baker: Thank you so much for having me.

Arno Rosenfeld: Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Arno's latest newsletter, by the way, on his Antisemitism Decoded feed is about Elon Musk's AI chatbot called Grok, going on an anti-Semitic tirade, and how Arno sees that perfectly capturing what he calls our antisemitic moment. We'll try to save a little time at the end to get to that. Katie, what's Project Esther?

Katie J.M. Baker: Project Esther is the Heritage Foundation's proposal to, as they say, rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the US along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations, and in Congress. They published it online last October. It outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as, effectively, a terrorist support network.

Brian Lehrer: Arno, you reported on Project Esther as well. In fact, Katie gives credit in her article to The Forward for first revealing materials that included such goals as reform academia through defunding institutions and identifying foreigners vulnerable to deportations. I guess, halo schools like Columbia and protest leaders like Columbia's Mahmoud Khalil, who's now been released from immigration detention. Do you see some of the Project Esther blueprint from the Heritage foundation now being carried out by the government at Columbia and other campuses?

Arno Rosenfeld: Yes, it's an interesting question. I think Katie's piece gets at this. That even the Heritage Foundation is a little bit reluctant to say that the Trump administration is necessarily following their outline because Project Esther was, in many respects, drawing together a bunch of threads that had been out there in the world that conservatives have been talking about when it came to addressing antisemitism. They may have been doing some of these things anyway. It's a little hard to know. What I would say Project Esther has in common with the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism that you mentioned, this controversial definition, is they're both attempts to take [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Should we just define IHRA? It's the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, so when you say IHRA, people know what you're talking about. Go ahead.

Arno Rosenfeld: Yes. No, I appreciate the clarification. What both of these things have in common is their attempts to take a sort of intellectual debate. Obviously, it's a very important one. What is antisemitism? We talk about this with racism and sexism, and all these different things. People are on either side of them. We were trying to take that debate and sort of codify it into something that can be enforced. Heritage Foundation is trying to take it and really lean on legislation meant to target material supporters of terrorist organizations.

That's their focus, is to say this organization is not just anti-Semitic, they are providing material support effectively to Hamas, so we can arrest them, we can shut down their organizations. The IHRA definition is trying to say that, "We're not just going to debate what antisemitism is. We're going to tell you, and then if you cross this line, we're going to suspend you. If we're the federal government, we're going to sanction a university for tolerating anti-Zionism, because now we have a document that tells you exactly what is and isn't anti-Semitic." That's what I think they have in common.

Brian Lehrer: Arno, as I think we can get even more specific about that, I mentioned the article by one of your colleagues at The Forward about the new Columbia announcement. The headline on the article reads, "Columbia Adopts Controversial Antisemitism Definition as it Negotiates with Trump Administration." Can you explain what that definition of antisemitism is and why The Forward calls it controversial?

Arno Rosenfeld: Yes. The IHRA definition has been around in some form since the early 2000s. It came out of the European Union originally. It was meant to help European police classify hate crimes. If there was an instance where Israel did something, someone in Germany got mad, threw a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue, is that a political act, or is it antisemitic? The person might say, "Well, I was throwing it at the synagogue because I was mad at Israel. I wasn't mad at Jews." Most folks in the Jewish community look at that and say, "Well, that's antisemitic. You can't attack a synagogue."

In a context where there aren't as many Jews and Jewish voices, here's this document with some examples of how stuff related to Israel can become antisemitic. That was many years ago. Now it has since made its way to the United States. The definition itself is pretty brief. It's not particularly controversial. The controversy lies in these 11 examples that they attach to it, most of which, or about half of which, have to do with Israel. That includes denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination in Israel, which is basically anti-Zionism.

It also includes things that you don't even have to be anti-Zionist to run afoul of the definition. It includes holding Israel to a double standard. What does that mean? Who's determining what the double standard is? That's what makes it really controversial. It's really become, in effect, a definition that equates anti-Zionism and other harsh criticism of Israel with antisemitism. We could go really deep into the language of the document. It doesn't actually do that, but that is effectively how it is used, and that's why it's controversial when a school like Columbia adopts it.

Brian Lehrer: On this double standard example that you brought up, what we sometimes hear from people who call themselves anti-Zionist is that they are for a single standard. They don't support any country being organized around ethno nationalist legal superiority for one group over others. Can you decode the arguments from either side about that?

Arno Rosenfeld: Yeah, I mean, I think that that is the argument. It's that, of course, we're consistent. We don't want these things anywhere. There's no question that Israel is the subject of more media attention and more activism in the United States than you might think it should otherwise attract. On some level, there is a unusual focus on it. However, there are a lot of explanations that are not necessarily anti-Semitic. Obviously, the United States sends a lot of money to Israel. The United States has a very large Palestinian diaspora community, a very large Jewish diaspora community.

There are all sorts of reasons that it makes sense that Israel might be elevated in the public discourse in the United States. That's the argument for why calling out Israel or holding a march to denounce Israel's war in Gaza, but not holding a march about what's going on in the Congo or in China, or in Syria, is not an anti-Semitic double standard. There are good legitimate reasons for focusing on one rather than these other cases.

The flip side of that is what are the odds that after millennia of antisemitism and discrimination against Jewish people, that this fixation on the only Jewish state in the world, it's this tiny little country in the Middle East surrounded by all these much larger adversarial countries, what are the odds that that wouldn't be motivated by anti-Jewish animus? Then there are plenty of anecdotal examples of people criticizing Israel who do stray into overt antisemitism toward Jews. Those, in very broad terms, are, I think, the two sides of this debate.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any comments or questions? We can take a few. I know this is very sensitive on many sides, and sometimes these conversations break down, and everybody yelling at everybody else from multiple points of view. If you have a comment or a question on how much the definition of antisemitism should include elements of anti-Zionism, the news being what Columbia just adopted in that respect. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Call or text for our two guests, Katie from the New York Times and Arno from The Forward.

Katie, your article about Project Esther includes this from the task force that worked on the project, this is in its statement of purpose. "Antisemitism. We recognize any attempt to delegitimize, boycott, divest, or sanction the modern state of Israel or bar Jews from participating in academic or communal associations must be condemned. We recognize that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the different manifestations of the same hatred against Jewish people." From the task force that delivered Project Esther.

I guess it's that last line that's so broad. That's really a one-to-one equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism when it says we recognize that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the different manifestation stations of the same hatred against Jewish people. That's just from a think tank task force. How close is that, as far as to what the Trump administration or now Columbia, have accepted?

Katie J.M. Baker: Well, first, what I would just say is that I think what's interesting about Project Esther and what the Trump administration is doing that aligns with Project Esther is that even though there's historical context here, there's long been bipartisan efforts to counter criticism of Israel by labeling a range of speech and organizing in support of Palestinian rights as support for terrorism. Project Esther aims to go further because it wants to equate actions such as maybe simply just participating in a protest with providing material support for terrorism, which can sound far-fetched, but that's a broad legal construct that has really serious consequences.

Project Esther, it focuses primarily on college campuses, which is why critics say this isn't really just about Jewish people. This isn't just about antisemitism. This is about a larger plan that Heritage has had for a long time to go after other progressive movements on college campuses that they deem dangerous in a related way, such as DEI or Black Lives Matter, and that type of thing. That it's really about a fundamental distrust of higher education in particular.

It's much broader than just this issue of antisemitism, according to the critics of the plan. I do think that even if the Trump administration doesn't want to comment on Project Esther or whether they're following it letter to letter, our own analysis found that since Trump took office, his administration and other Republicans in Congress had called for actions that mirrored over half of Project Esther's proposals.

Brian Lehrer: Katie, your headline in The Times that I mentioned about Project Esther said the group that gave us Project 2025 has a plan to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. Does your reporting indicate that defining anti-Zionism or antisemitism is a tool for crushing the pro-Palestinian movement rather than actually protecting American Jews from acts or expressions of antisemitism, American or other Jews?

Katie J.M. Baker: Yes, well, I think that there's a lot of Jewish groups that are pushing back for that reason. They're saying that Project Esther and the Trump administration, they're really only focusing on antisemitism on the left. They're not talking about it from the right at all. One interesting thing I found, and I know that Arno also found in some of his reporting, I think, is that a few groups that Heritage assumed would be aligned with their mission didn't want to be involved at all because they thought this was too partisan.

That combating antisemitism should be a nonpartisan issue that everybody should get behind, not just one side or another. The other big reason, like I said, that some Jewish groups don't want to associate with Project Esther or the Trump administration is because of this concern that Heritage is exploiting these real concerns about antisemitism to execute this, this larger agenda that isn't just about Jewish people.

Brian Lehrer: Emily in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Emily.

Emily: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I just wanted to call in because I am a fourth-generation Jewish New Yorker. Honestly, since I was a very young person, I had either neutral or negative feelings about Israel, and my feelings about antisemitism and anti-Zionism really being linked. I've really noticed in the past couple of years that changing as a thing that other Jewish New Yorkers and other Jewish people in America are coming to kind of see those Zionism and antisemitism or Zionism and Judaism as not necessarily being intrinsically linked.

I just wanted to ask your guests about how that has been changing over the past couple of years, and what they see this move by the Heritage Foundation, by Columbia, by these larger institutions to pull back at that. I find that that's a very interesting thing that's happening, especially in the larger political climate.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, thank you for that question. Arno, you've written explicitly, and I mentioned this in the intro, about the generational dividend among American Jews over attachment to Israel, based on survey data. Maybe give us a brief summary of that and anything else you want to say in response to Emily's question.

Arno Rosenfeld: Yes, absolutely. I mean, one reality when we talk about campus antisemitism is-- This is not to say that there aren't many Jewish students on college campuses, including Columbia, that are very disturbed by what's been going on, and that do feel like some of the protests, for example, are anti-Semitic. The policy is really being driven by national Jewish advocacy organizations. Those organizations are not grassroots organizations. They don't respond to a constituency of a broad spectrum of American Jews. They respond to their donors and generationally, as you mentioned, they're in a little bit of the older mindset and attitude toward Israel.

Younger Americans of all stripes, but including Jews, are much more hostile and skeptical toward Israel than older generations are, but we're not really seeing that reflected in the policy. If you look at Columbia, Columbia just released a survey of the student body, including the Jewish student body, which found kind of a 60/20 split between students who were more supportive of Israel and students who were more supportive of Palestinians. Then some significant number that don't want anything to do with the conflict.

That suggests that even though there is a maybe majority of Jews, including perhaps younger Jews, that are worried about the protests, that think that the protests and that anti-Zionist movement might be antisemitic, there's also a very sizable 20% to 30% segment of the community that is participating in those protests themselves and certainly doesn't see them as anti-Semitic. You really don't see that reflected at all in the discourse at the national policy level. You don't see that really reflected when you hear Columbia's administration talk about these issues. You certainly don't hear it reflected when the Trump administration talks about these issues.

One interesting thing in the Heritage Foundation's documents about Project Esther is they actually include Jewish figures as being responsible for antisemitism. They put George Soros, they put JB Pritzker, of all people, the Illinois governor, at the top of this pyramid that is causing and creating this, in their view, anti-Zionist, antisemitism. I think there's this attitude that the Trump administration Heritage is interested in protecting Jews who share their politics around Israel and their skepticism of the political left. That if you're a Jew who is yourself skeptical of Israel or is on the political left, you're a problem to be dealt with by the forces combating antisemitism. It's a little bit of a strange dynamic we have going on.

Brian Lehrer: Katie, does that relate to something else in your reporting on Project Esther, which includes the involvement of people known as Christian Zionists. Christians who, maybe, for biblical reasons related to how they see Jesus coming back during the end times, or for other reasons, consider themselves Zionists. Maybe explain Christian Zionism just briefly, and the extent that leaders of that movement are involved in this, maybe relating to what Arno was just describing.

Katie J.M. Baker: Yes. A Heritage employee himself said at the time that this task force was coming together to create what would become Project Esther. That an interesting fact about the task force was that most of the groups on it were conservative organizations or Christian organizations. There were two Christian Zionists involved in the creation of the task force from the top, and most of them are not Jewish. In fact, people from Heritage have essentially said, "I mean, Project Esther accuses American Jews of complacency." They're saying, "We're going to take over American legacy. Jewish groups have not done enough, and it's on us now."

In terms of the Christian Zionism, some evangelical Christians have increasingly aligned themselves with conservative political forces in Israel, and many feel a kinship with Israel because of shared religious heritage. There are also some that believe that supporting Israel will hasten biblical end times or advance Christianity's global influence. I think for Heritage, the vice president at Heritage who oversees Project Esther, whose name is Victoria Coates, she told me that her interest in Israel really comes from a national security perspective.

Even though she's also a devout Christian and a religious person, she has had an interest in Israel specifically for a really long time. She said her views on Israel were based on an America-first approach that recognizes Israel's role in bolstering America's security interests more than-- She also acknowledges the biblical values that she sees as promoting an alliance between Christians and Jews. Yes, I think there's a lot of different, fascinating reasons why Christians are drawn to this issue. It's complicated, but when it comes to Heritage, I don't think that it's primarily religious, personally.

Brian Lehrer: Josh in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Josh.

Josh: Hi. I'd like to make a couple of comments about this. First, I consider myself a progressive. I do think there is a connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. One is that other progressives, and I think progressive leaders, they're not just challenging Israel's policies. A lot of them are challenging the existence of Israel as a state. Often, they use the philosophy of settler colonialism, which is ironic since, by that definition, the US is the settler colonial power.

The other point I wanted to make is that I think a lot of young people, a lot of students, oppose Israel because they've never known the country as anything but an increasingly right-wing country, because it's been like that for at least the last 20 years, especially under Netanyahu. I think that's really a reason for a lot of their objection to Israel's policy. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Josh, thank you. Thank you. Arno, what would you say to that? It goes back to something, I think, maybe that came up before a little bit. People who don't support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state say that it's because it's settler colonialism, as the caller says people call it, because other people live there. That other people came in and try to establish the state where only they had power.

Arno Rosenfeld: You hear this a lot. I think it ultimately boils down to your views on the conflict and on Israel's policies itself. If you go back to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, for example, you could say that people who opposed the apartheid regime in South Africa were opposing South Africa's right to exist as a state, at least insofar as they wanted to effectively combine the Bantustans with the white South African sovereign entity and create a new country that was not the former Republic of South Africa. It was a new Republic of South Africa.

That's distinct from saying what you hear sometimes from leaders around the world that want to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel, for example, that "We're going to eliminate the state," in some literal sense. It's this political reconstruction. if you believe that Israel is practicing apartheid, for example, then it might be reasonable to call for an end to Israel in its current political form and its rebirth in a new sort of binational state where everyone in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel proper have equal voting rights and elect a government together.

On the flip side of that, if you think, "No, the apartheid claim is a slanderous accusation, is perhaps itself anti-Semitic," then you would view any demand coming out of that, say, for a single binational state that would not be a Jewish state as anti-Semitic. I think that's where it breaks down in the same respects. If you're talking about student protesters, including some Jews, of course, who are making all these claims about Israel. If you believe that Israel is, in fact, for example, committing genocide in Gaza, then it might make sense that these student protesters are saying all of these terrible things about Israel.

If you think they're totally wrong, they misunderstand what's going on, Israel is just carrying out legitimate self-defense, then the accusations that the protesters are making seem far more outrageous, offensive, perhaps anti-Semitic. At the end of the day, a lot of this just comes down to your views on what's happening on the ground in the Middle East, which is a little bit beyond the remit of my reporting.

Brian Lehrer: Katie, to come back as we near the end, to your headline in The Times, that the group that gave us Project 2025 has a plan to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. What would this new definition of antisemitism that Columbia has accepted do to people who want to protest what they see as Israeli war crimes in Gaza or the existence of a fundamentally discriminatory state?

Katie J.M. Baker: I think that the adoption of this definition is exactly the type of thing that the architects of Project Esther hope to see more of. The task force adopts the same definition as well, unsurprisingly. Project Esther has a lot of ideas of punitive actions that you can take once you deem people part of this, as they call it, so-called Hamas support network. Once you're a part of this, then you can be, in their view, deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized, otherwise excluded from what Project Esther calls open society. I think critics would say that adopting this definition is just going to make it easier to use this very broad brush to paint people as anti-Semitic, even if that's not the case.

Brian Lehrer: We're just about out of time. Arno, very briefly, like a 30-second tease, your latest newsletter is about an Elon Musk AI chatbot that went on an anti-Semitic tirade. What's this chatbot, what did it do, and what does it tell us about AI?

Arno Rosenfeld: This is Grok, the chatbot that lives on Twitter. It started referring to itself as Hitler and calling for a final solution. The company said, "Oh, sorry, I don't know, it was some bug." I think that it tracks this pattern that we've seen again and again from prominent media personalities and public figures associated in many cases with the Trump administration, who say similarly outrageous things. The Trump administration helped free Andrew Tate, the social media influencer, who has said-- He said like a week before the US brought him back from Romania, where he was banned from leaving the country because he was facing rape charges. He said he never listens to women, Jews, or Mexicans.

The Trump administration welcomes him back, and then a few weeks ago, Trump appointed his personal attorney to be the head of the office for special counsel investigating corruption for the federal government. We're actually seeing broad spread tolerance of not this wishy, is it anti Semitic? Is it not anti-Zionist rhetoric? Just people saying that they don't like Jews are being protected by the administration at the same time that they're cracking down on protesters for political contested reasons. Encourage folks to check it out on The Forward's website. I think that's the best summary I can give.

Brian Lehrer: Arno Rosenfeld writes a newsletter called Antisemitism Decoded for The Forward. Katie J.M. Baker is a national investigative correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you both very much for joining us.

Arno Rosenfeld: Thank you.

Katie J.M. Baker: Thank you so much.

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