The National Jewish Advocacy Center urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to apply a “substitution test” when evaluating claims that Jew-hatred has declined at Harvard University.
“If black students at a federally funded university were reported, by 170 members of that university’s own faculty, to be concealing identifying markers and scrubbing their names from resumes to avoid ostracism, no court would describe racial discrimination on that campus as ‘improved,’” the center told the court.
“The description would be understood, immediately and correctly, as evidence that discrimination had gone underground, and that the burden of coping with it had been shifted onto its targets,” it said. “This analysis does not change because the students are Jews.”
The center asked the court for permission to file the 25-page brief, which JNS viewed, on Monday. It supported the Trump administration, which is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the government from freezing or terminating billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard over the college’s handling of Jew-hatred.
Although there has been some decline of “open and overt” Jew-hatred at Harvard, the “metric that matters is whether a Jewish student can be visibly and identifiably Jewish at Harvard without paying for it with their physical, mental, emotional and academic safety or security,” the center said. “On the most recent evidence, from the institution’s own faculty, the answer remains no.”
Mark Goldfeder, CEO and director of the center, told JNS that he hopes running the “substitution test” will become “an easy shorthand people can use to check their own thinking.”
“Just swap out the people involved. If this were happening to another minority, would you still react the same way?” he said. “If changing ‘Jews’ to another group changes your answer, then maybe you’re not really applying a principle. You’re rationalizing a prejudice.”
“It doesn’t settle every argument, but it’s a pretty good way to uncover a double standard,” Goldfeder told JNS.
