Media Coverage

At last month’s Senate hearing on the nomination of civil rights lawyer Ken Marcus to be the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) praised Marcus for his advocacy on behalf of a Virginia Tech student threatened by a white supremacist working for the university.

A key Senate committee advanced the nomination of Kenneth Marcus to a top civil rights post in the Department of Education on Thursday, clearing him for a final confirmation round.

When I was a child, having been born in the 1950s under the shadow of the Holocaust, I had naively thought anti-Semitism was mostly a thing of the past that vanished in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz. Yet within the past few decades, I have witnessed anti-Semitism blossom into a socially acceptable hatred that has managed to make its way into the corridors of polite society in a fashion that is as overt, obvious and unconcealed as it is alarming.

Dozens of advocacy groups on Monday called for the confirmation of Kenneth Marcus — a leading figure in efforts to combat campus antisemitism — to a prominent civil rights post at the US Department of Education.

Confirmation battles that pit one party’s nominee for federal office against senators from the opposition party long have been spectator sport in Washington. But when extremists from the nominee’s own party attack, well now, there’s a “man bites dog” story.

In December, the most important BDS-related developments came in the wake of the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Bal Harbour Mayor Gabriel Groisman describes the support he’s received from the South Florida community regarding the recent passage of the village’s anti-Semitism definition ordinance, which expands police officers’ ability to investigate such anti-Semitic incidents as hate crimes, as overwhelming.

Supported by antisemitic faculty who seek to redefine Jew hatred in such a way that excludes themselves, American students seem to be unable and unwilling to accept the definition of antisemitism. They should take a cue from their peers in Australia, who condemned antisemitism and pledged to counter its rise on university campuses.

Last week the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee concluded its hearings regarding the confirmation of Kenneth L. Marcus, President Trump’s pick for the position of Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights.