Press Room

Fourteen prominent Jewish and advocacy groups urged a key Senate committee to reform the Higher Education Act (HEA), which they claim is being “misused to promote biased, one-sided, and anti-Israel programming in our nation’s Middle East studies centers.”

Kenneth L. Marcus has been nominated to direct the Office of Civil rights in the United States Department of Education, based on his extensive experience as a civil rights attorney and a legal scholar. Marcus has held an endowed chair in Equality and Justice in America at Baruch College, served as staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights under President George W. Bush.

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.