Trump College Crackdown Cut Antisemitism by 66%

But the ADL is trying to take the credit

When the Trump administration began its crackdown on campus antisemitism that had proliferated when it was backed by deans and faculty members, many liberal Jewish groups were uncomfortable with the blunt confrontational style of the White House and members of Congress like Rep. Elise Stefanik. Now the numbers are in and they’re undeniable.

Even the ADL is forced to report that antisemitic incidents on campus have massively declined.

The ADL’s latest report notes that assaults nationwide were “higher than ever before” in 2025 with 6,274 incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism & assault, while at the same time campus incidents are way down.

Even while things were getting worse everywhere else, “incidents decreased most significantly on college and university campuses, by 66% (from 1,694 to 583)”, “antisemitic incidents related to anti-Israel protests, including encampments, decreased by 83%” and “vandalism and assault incidents on college campuses also dropped steeply, by 51% and 72%, respectively.”

The ADL credits itself for somehow fixing campus antisemitism accompanied by what it calls a mysterious “decline in the anti-Israel movement on campus”. The reality is that the ADL accomplished nothing on campus. What changed the game was when Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon made it clear that she would be keeping an eye on campuses for civil rights violations, when Senior Counsellor Leo Terrell called it out on X again and again, and when Rep. Stefanik dragged college leaders into Congress to answer questions.

And when that was followed with financial consequences, settlements and forced resignations, the message went out that what had been previously seen as another social justice campaign was a systemic risk to the careers of university leadership and the viability of their institutions.

The Left had realized generations ago that its members could intimidate and take college presidents and trustees hostage, threatening them and extracting concessions from them, and it became easier for most colleges to sell out free speech, campus safety, conservative faculty and eventually Jewish students to the mob. The Trump administration taught college leadership that they needed to be more afraid of the federal government than the social justice mobs.

It wasn’t pretty, liberal Jews winced, but it worked, and now the ADL wants to take credit.

Bringing in the ADL to do ‘bias training’ has put lots of money in the organization’s pockets, but has never protected anyone from anything. The closest the ADL comes to any kind of relevance is collecting incident data, like this, but the moment it starts trotting out its ‘recommendations’, which usually involve some form of bias training and institutional dialogue, they achieve nothing.

Given a choice between pleasing the ADL and entire departments on their own campus, activist deans, student mobs that will invade their offices and scream outside their homes, it will take a whole lot more than an online ‘report card’ to sway college presidents and administrators.

The ADL’s campus ‘report card’ upgraded UCLA from a ‘D’ to a ‘B’. Have things actually gotten better at UCLA? On Holocaust Memorial Day, UCLA’s student government condemned Hillel for hosting a former hostage of Hamas. The ADL offered yet another condemnation of the ‘climate’ at UCLA, but by that point it had negotiated its split of a $2.3 million payout from UCLA.

How is that money going to improve life for Jewish students and faculty at UCLA?

Last year, the ADL helped sponsor a conference on antisemitism at UCLA that featured members of organizations against Israel and supportive of Islamic terrorism against Jews. During one panel, a participant “defined Zionism as an ideology of Jewish ethnic supremacy.” The conference’s co-founder, Diane Klein Kemker, had argued that she “needed to include perspectives from people… described as ‘victims of Zionism.’”

Meanwhile the Trump administration has kept up the pressure for accountability at UCLA.

There’s more at stake here than who gets the credit. The number of incidents has dropped sharply, but still remains quite high and it’s vital to understand what works and what doesn’t.

The collaborative and non-confrontational approach taken by liberal Jewish organizations does not work because it fundamentally misunderstands modern antisemitism as an oversight by the authorities and an aberration by a handful of extremists rather than a deliberate program by groups that were once on the fringe, but have successfully radicalized establishment institutions to the extent that they are either complicit or working hand in glove with them.

The Trump administration made no such foolishly naive assumptions about the good intentions of colleges. Instead it set out to expose them as corrupt, dishonest, malicious and uncaring, and in the process it also demonstrated that liberal institutions had failed to protect Jews, whether on college campuses, as they already have in liberal cities like Los Angeles and New York City, in non-profits, in the media and the culture, and everywhere liberal Jews once felt comfortable.

The ADL doesn’t want American Jews to realize this and to divest from them. It offers false promises and obscures the trajectory of systemic antisemitism from its own leftist camp.

Even while issuing harsh criticisms of the Trump administration, the ADL has had nothing negative to say about cities and states that have provided a pass for antisemitic assaults.

When the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors stood with UCLA’s pro-Hamas rioters and announced that taxpayers would pay their legal fees, the ADL not only failed to condemn them, but later praised LA County Board Chair Lindsey Horvath, who had brought the motion to aid the pro-Hamas campus rioters, for including it in a bias training resource guide.

The ADL’s own campus numbers have shown quite clearly what works. And what doesn’t.

Accountability and pressure get results. Appeasing antisemitic leftist politicians and holding more training sessions doesn’t.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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