Hillel reports a 700 percent leap in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7

O

ne of the standard tropes of anti-Semites is that a Jewish cabal controls the world. Yet far from controlling the world, it would be more accurate to say that Jews and Israel are the targets of a group of some of the world’s richest people.

Park MacDougald does yeoman work unraveling the tangled skein of major fortunes behind the campus unrest and pro-Hamas demonstrations across America since October 7 in “The People Setting America on Fire” (Tablet Magazine, May 6, 2024). And Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute follows up in the June Commentary with “The Antisemitism Money and Power Network — and How to Smash It.”

The list of foundations funding radical Islamist groups and campus unrest includes such famous names as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, heirs of the RJ Reynolds tobacco empire, and Peter Buffett’s NoVo Foundation. Sadly, much of that money is supplied by Jews or the descendants thereof: George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, of course; Rachel Gelman, an heir of the Levi Strauss fortune; Sheldon Kaplan’s Kaplan Foundation; the Elias Fund created by investor James E. Mann and his wife; and a foundation funded by Hyatt Hotel heir Nick Pritzker and his wife.

MACDOUGALD AND PLETKA point to the existence of a loose amalgamation of radical left and Islamist groups. Like the Iranian mullahs, they hate both Israel and America, and seek to undermine both by creating widespread chaos. Many of those manning campus pro-Hamas encampments are not students at all but professional agitators. At the University of Texas, 45 of the 79 arrested when the campus encampment was dismantled were non-students, as were 134 of 282 at the City University of New York, 20 out of 30 at the University of North Carolina, and 21 out of 33 at George Washington University.

The tactics employed by those manning the encampments closely mimicked those of anarchist groups at the Seattle Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and Occupy Wall Street sites, including declaring the areas police-free and carefully screening all seeking entry. Lisa Fithian, a professional “protest consultant,” who has advised hundreds of groups in how to battle the police, was seen advising those who took over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall. The People’s Forum, a Manhattan event space, funded by Neville Roy Singham, who, according to an August profile in the New York Times, is financing Chinese government propaganda worldwide, urged activists to rush uptown to join those who occupied Hamilton Hall.

Southern Vision Alliance (SVA), headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, is the hub of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the state. Its website takes credit for organizing anti-Israel rallies, at which its paid activists have called for the complete eradication of Israel. Between 2016 and 2022, SVA received over a million dollars in direct and pass-through grants from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which once built hospitals and universities before turning to extreme left-wing causes.

Also headquartered with SVA is the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which rushed “backup” to the scene as police called upon demonstrators to disperse from the University of North Carolina encampment. Another Reynolds Foundation beneficiary is the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, headed by Rania Masri. At a social justice roundtable sponsored by two academic departments at UNC, she described October 7 as a “beautiful day” and called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.

THE THREE MOST ACTIVE pro-Hamas campus groups at Columbia University — whose encampment attracted the most attention — are Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist and has been termed the Jewish branch of the BDS movement; Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a subsidiary of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); and Within Our Lifetime (WOL), which has been banned from both Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas.

Since 2017, JVP has received $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’s philanthropic empire; $441,510 from the Kaplan Foundation; and $300,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in addition to $1.5 million via donor-advised funds, which preserve the donor’s anonymity. SJP has no independent corporate structure; it serves as the campus branch of AMP. Both were founded by Hatem Bazian, who raised funds for Kind Hearts, the assets of which were frozen by the Treasury Department as having been raised for Hamas. Several of AMP’s senior leaders formerly raised funds for the Holy Land Foundation, which was successfully prosecuted by the US government as a Hamas fundraising operation.

SJP is a “fiscal sponsorship” of the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC), run by one Howard Horowitz, a market researcher. Fiscal sponsorships basically allow the sponsored organization to borrow the sponsoring organization’s tax-exempt status, while hiding its donors. WESPAC is also a fiscal sponsor of WOL, which, in MacDougald’s words, has emerged “over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country,” and has instigated numerous highway and bridge closings. WOL-led protests inevitably employ eliminationist rhetoric against Israel and the prominent display of Hezbollah flags. Among WESPAC’s major donors are the Elias Fund; the Sparkplug Foundation, based on the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman; the Bafrayung Fund of Levi Strauss heir Rachel Gelman; and the Tides Foundation.

“Scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’s involvement somewhere,” writes MacDougald.

Tides has received substantial funding from Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Besides $500,00 donated by Tides to JVP, it donates to the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), which organized an illegal blockade of Tacoma Harbor and an anti-Israel walkout of San Francisco high school students. Adallah Justice Project, another Tides beneficiary, blockaded the Boeing manufacturing plant, as part of Strike4Gaza. Tides serves as the fiscal sponsor of the Community Justice Exchange legal defense and bail fund, and since 2020 has donated close to $3 million dollars to the Alliance for Global Justice, a far-left non-profit that sponsors Samidoun, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine front group led by the wife of a PFLP central party member, who told Columbia students in March that it’s okay to be a member or leader of Hamas.

Interestingly, the Tides board is filled with former members of the Obama administration or Obama fundraisers.

“More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party,” according to MacDougald.

And he suggests that it is no accident that an administration whose central foreign policy initiative was realignment with Iran would be happy to undermine American public support for Israel by portraying it as a “sectarian ethnostate with a pesky domestic lobby, bent on dragging American boys into another Middle East war.” Moreover, a defeat for Hamas would be a crushing blow to the Obama-Biden Iran realignment policy based on respect for Iran’s “equities” in the region.

PLETKA IDENTIFIES another source of funding that has made campuses nationwide such unpleasant places for Jewish students: foreign governments gifts to universities. Qatar is by far the largest foreign funder, with over $5.7 billion contributed between 1981 and 2023, some through allegedly “private” foundations. A study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) found that between 2015 and 2020, campuses that received donations from Middle Eastern sources had 300 percent more anti-Semitic incidents than those that did not.

Other studies have shown that faculty in gender and race studies and those in Middle East Studies departments are by far the most likely to support BDS. And it is not too much of a leap to think that Qatar money has gone to providing faculty sinecures for those hostile to Israel. The more BDS supporters on the faculty, the more anti-Israel speakers are invited to campus, and the greater the number of anti-Semitic incidents.

MacDougald points to another unlikely source of funding for anti-Semitic hate groups: the US government. The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) is an umbrella organization of 80 community groups, including one that arranged a protest at the Capitol Rotunda in December at which 50 activists were arrested. CJA’s website includes a Free Palestine page, which proclaims, “The path to climate justice travels through a Free Palestine.” Another CJA beneficiary was hit with a Georgia RICO indictment alleging it was a fraudulent charity paying for ammunition purchases in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to prevent the building of a police academy in Atlanta.

Nevertheless, the Environmental Protection Agency provided the CJA with $50 million in grant money under the Inflation Reduction Act — a step hailed by Vice President Harris. As MacDougald wryly summarizes the matter, the federal government is funneling tens of millions of dollars to a group that understands “environmental justice” to imply the abolition of policing, the perpetual struggle against “white supremacy,” and the liberation of Palestine.

THE SITUATION OF JEWISH STUDENTS on campus continues to worsen. Hillel reports a 700 percent leap in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7. A survey of 1,171 Jewish college students and recent graduates by a group called Alums for Campus Fairness found that two-fifths of Jewish students “never” or “rarely” feel comfortable identifying as Jewish, and three-fifths had witnessed a faculty member making an anti-Semitic remark to them or another Jewish student.

Campuses are bracing for new tent encampments. At the University of Maryland, which boasts one of the largest and most active Jewish student populations, the administration has given permission to SJP to celebrate October 7 on campus.

All the old taboos on anti-Semitic actions and remarks have been broken: lamenting Hitler’s failure to finish the job of wiping out the Jews, calls for missiles to destroy Tel Aviv, vandalism of Hillel and Chabad centers and Jewish fraternities and sororities. Even physical assaults of “identifiably” Jewish students.

The just-issued report of the Columbia Task Force on Antisemitism, chaired by former dean of the law school, David Schizer, concluded that “serious and pervasive” anti-Semitism has “affected the entire university” and broken “the larger social compact.” The report detailed incidents of a student who placed a mezuzah on her dorm door and was subsequently forced to move out of her dorm room, after fellow students began banging on her door at all hours; of students wearing kippahs who were spat at and berated; and of Jewish students shoved by keffiyah-wearing fellow students shouting, “We don’t want no Zionists here.”

Equally concerning has been the widespread participation of faculty in the encampments and glorification of Hamas’s murderous rampage on October 7. At Barnard College, 77 percent of the faculty voted no confidence in Columbia’s then president, Minouche Shafik, for calling in the NYPD to clear Hamilton Hall. At UCLA, the head of the Women Studies department led 200 faculty in a walkout in support of the campus encampment. And at Northwestern University, the dean of students joined demonstrators outside of Hillel to ensure that “demonstrators’ rights were protected.” Faculty at both Harvard and Princeton pushed for the reinstatement in time for graduation of students suspended for pro-Hamas demonstrations in violation of campus rules.

Since October 7, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, a pro-BDS group affiliated with SJP, has opened 95 campus branches. Another pro-BDS group, the Palestine Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, is supported by the Alliance of Justice, which is in turn funded by Tides and Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Both MacDougal and Pletka outline a variety of steps to limit the funding of anti-Semitic organizations fomenting chaos. For instance, the IRS prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits from planning illegal activities that violate laws or inducing the commission of a crime. That regulation could be applied to most of the organizations supporting campus unrest. Stricter enforcement of requirements that universities report foreign donations would also help, especially as there is substantial evidence of universities evading these requirements.

Speedy deportation of foreign students in the United States on student visas who engage in illegal activities would dampen the enthusiasm of some of the most active student activists. So would legislation, already passed by the House but unacted upon by Senator Charles Schumer, to codify a Trump-era executive order protecting Jewish students from harassment under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Sadly, however, it is hard to imagine any of these steps being taken by a Harris administration.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1027. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)