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.

It turns out that anti-Semitic Facebook posts have consequences.

On Friday, two months after a blog called IsraeliCool first reported the anti-Semitic social media habits of Rutgers professor Dr. Michael Chikindas, the university’s leaders announced that they were taking action.

Democrats on the Senate education committee had some tough questions for President Donald Trump’s picks to head up civil rights and special education policy at the U.S. Department of Education as the members vetted them for confirmation.

n recent decades, academics promoting pseudo intellectual studies have sought to advance the notion that antisemitism in the contemporary context, and specifically on college and university campuses, is a mere illusion, created by a group of alarmists,” attempting to exaggerate the severity of threats against the Jewish community.

Did antisemitism somehow become a job prerequisite in academia? “We are horrified by the reports that we are hearing from Virginia Tech students,” Jennifer Gross, an attorney with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law says. “The problem is not just that Virginia Tech employs an avowed white supremacist as a graduate student instructor and that many undergraduate students are required to take his course.”

It’s been almost four years since members of the American Studies Association voted by a nearly two-thirds majority to adopt a resolution backing a boycott of Israeli universities, but a lawsuit opposing the resolution filed by four of the association’s current and former members rages on.

Kenneth Marcus, founder, president and general counsel for the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, has dedicated most of his career to fighting for civil rights.

Last week, the Bal Harbour Village Council took a tremendous step forward in the fight against antisemitism: under the leadership of Mayor Gabriel Groisman, the Council voted 5-0 in favor of the “Anti-Semitism Definition Act.”

Anti-Israel activists implemented a “covert campaign” to gain leadership positions at the American Studies Association (ASA), which they subsequently manipulated into endorsing an academic boycott of Israel, a Jewish human rights group said on Thursday.

Leaders of the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement conducted a covert campaign to take over academic associations, without disclosing their political agenda, and then to use their influence to impose boycotts on the State of Israel, according to newly discovered documents, according to a press release sent out on Friday by The Louis D. Brandeis Center.