Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism

LAW & JUSTICE

Whitehouse.gov

  Issued on: December 11, 2019:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Policy.  My Administration is committed to combating the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and around the world.  Anti-Semitic incidents have increased since 2013, and students, in particular, continue to face anti Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), 42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq., prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance.  While Title VI does not cover discrimination based on religion, individuals who face discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin do not lose protection under Title VI for also being a member of a group that shares common religious practices.  Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color, or national origin.

It shall be the policy of the executive branch to enforce Title VI against prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by Title VI.

Sec. 2.  Ensuring Robust Enforcement of Title VI.  (a)  In enforcing Title VI, and identifying evidence of discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, all executive departments and agencies (agencies) charged with enforcing Title VI shall consider the following:

(i)  the non-legally binding working definition of anti Semitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which states, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.  Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”; and

(ii)  the “Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism” identified by the IHRA, to the extent that any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.

(b)  In considering the materials described in subsections (a)(i) and (a)(ii) of this section, agencies shall not diminish or infringe upon any right protected under Federal law or under the First Amendment.  As with all other Title VI complaints, the inquiry into whether a particular act constitutes discrimination prohibited by Title VI will require a detailed analysis of the allegations.

Sec. 3.  Additional Authorities Prohibiting Anti-Semitic Discrimination.  Within 120 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency charged with enforcing Title VI shall submit a report to the President, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, identifying additional nondiscrimination authorities within its enforcement authority with respect to which the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism could be considered.

Sec. 4.  Rule of Construction.  Nothing in this order shall be construed to alter the evidentiary requirements pursuant to which an agency makes a determination that conduct, including harassment, amounts to actionable discrimination, or to diminish or infringe upon the rights protected under any other provision of law.

Sec. 5.  General Provisions.  (a)  Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i)  the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii)  the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b)  This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c)  This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

DONALD J. TRUMP

THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 11, 2019.

In Era of Hardening Identities, Trump Order on Jews Kindles Questions Old and New

The New York Times, 15 Dec. 2019:

The president said he wanted to target anti-Semitic speech on campuses, but in the time of new nationalism, nothing is really that simple.

President Trump’s executive order targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses might be framed as a narrow legal matter, but it has touched on a defining issue of our time: Who belongs, and who decides?

The order is ambiguous as to whether it sees Jews as a distinct nationality or a minority race, but either interpretation aligns with Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with defining, and policing, the boundaries of identity.

And the order’s creation of special status for Jews, but not other religious minorities, follows Mr. Trump’s habit of welcoming some demographic groups into the rights and protections of American identity and excluding others. Tellingly, the singling out of Jews for special protection in the order left some feeling still more exposed.

Such preoccupations with identity have animated not just the Trump administration but much of the global populist backlash. Leaders and movements across the democratic world are increasingly focused on enforcing narrow national identities of the sort that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The era of hardening national identities includes the rise of far-right parties in Europe, white nationalism in the United States and a campaign for Hindu dominance in India.

Mr. Trump’s order, however narrow its intentions, underscores the degree to which the problems and contradictions of national identity — a distinctly modern invention that remade the world before almost destroying it — remain unresolved.

The dilemmas of the new nationalist era are especially surfaced by the order’s focus on Jews, whose relationship to conceptions of race and nationality has always been fraught. It touches on some of the most sensitive questions of Jewish identity — questions that are extensions of ways that national identity both made the modern world and never quite put it back together.

With Jews widely scattered, Zionists are looking to build a nation turned their sights on the biblical land of Judea.

What Is National Identity?

[...]

A Question of Belonging

Mr. Trump’s order, by treating anti-Israel protests as a form of anti-Semitism, hits on long-running Jewish debates over whether or not Israel is an extension of a shared identity.

The Israeli national narrative, of a long-forgotten homeland waiting to be rediscovered by a citizenry scattered by history, implies a Jewish identity that is innately ethnic and national. Still, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel are cooling; national fealty, for many, is a stretch.

The executive order also suggests that the government may see Jews as a distinct race. 
 
Since World War II, American Jews have been on a generational drift from Jewishness as a national identity, which no longer felt as necessary. But a series of political and cultural changes have called that postwar identity into question.

Rising white nationalism increasingly targets Jews as unwelcome outsiders. Conspiracy theories, some entering the mainstream, portray them as nationless cosmopolitans bent on undermining Western countries’ racial purity.

Mr. Trump’s order raises anew a question that has faced Jews throughout the 200-year era of national identity: whether such identities offer them security or only peril. It is an echo of late 19th-century debates, when some urged embracing national identity and forming a state, while others argued for casting it off and integrating into multicultural democracies instead.

The wider democratic world asked itself this same question in the wake of World War II. It declared old-style national identity a curse and pluralistic democracy the only path to peace, but the argument has raged off and on ever since — as it has, in parallel, for Jews.

Microcosm of a Global Moment

In a twist of history, the creation of Israel put Jews on the opposite side of the question: Now they had to decide whether a Jewish national identity had room for minorities.

Early Zionist leaders insisted that it did. But more recent Israeli leaders have promoted Israeli identity as exclusively Jewish and have imposed severe restrictions on Palestinians.

Mr. Trump’s order sharpens this matter as well, offering Jews greater protections by curbing anti-Israel activism that is sometimes animated by Palestinian demands for national self-determination.

In a sign of how much the world has changed, the new nationalists, from Mr. Orban to Narendra Modi of India, have rallied around Mr. Netanyahu as an ally and model. In a sign of how much it has not changed, all three have invoked ancient ethnic heritage in deploying distinctly modern controls on their country’s religious minorities.

Mr. Netanyahu, like Mr. Trump, has emphasized hard-line policies as necessary to preserve Jewish identity.

Perhaps as a result, intra-Jewish debates, whether over Israel’s direction or Mr. Trump’s order, have become something of a microcosm of the global nationalist moment. They have divided American Jews, like much of the world, over whether the movement toward hardened, national-style identities is the solution to their problems — or the problem itself.