Hello and welcome to the March 2025 edition of the Documensch Newsletter.
March was, in short, madness. Columbia University continues to be a flashpoint for the tensions between the Trump Administration, academic freedom, definitions of antisemitism, peaceful protest, freedom of speech, immigration, and due process. The Jews have ended up at the center of this churn of issues and animosities. Biden Administration Antisemitism Envoy Deborah Lipstadt rejected an offer to teach at Columbia, while Menachem Z. Rosensaft felt called to continue his teaching, saying in JTA that his students from many backgrounds “deserve to be taught that antisemitism was the malignant cause of the Holocaust just as anti-Muslim bigotry caused the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, and just as ethnic hatred caused the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.”
Then, the Trump administration threatened Columbia with the withholding of $400 million in Federal funds for its purported inaction in the face of the mistreatment of its Jewish students. Columbia would lose the funds if it didn’t meet a list of demands detailed by the White House. The demands included banning face masks, the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership. Our colleague Lila Berman at NYU wrote on MSNBC’s website that the Title VI statute the Trump Administration cites as being violated by Columbia is the same statute the Trump Administration is attempting to defang by putting every DEI program in higher ed on aggressive notice. Joel Swanson of Sarah Lawrence College expressed his frustrations, noting that the scrutiny on curriculum made it harder to teach his Jewish Studies courses. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, two Jewish professors laid out the case that “Trump doesn’t give a damn about Jews.” Nonetheless, Columbia met the administration’s demands even after a former student was extrajudicially kidnapped, the first of many disappearances of non-citizens. Madness.
Columbia has been a flashpoint, but there are many fires burning in the American Jewish landscape. Next month, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will greatly impact religious freedom in this country. We spoke with Rachel Laser, CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to get an update and to understand how this case might specifically impact Jews. Her clear-eyed responses are a must read. Also, a lot of new Jewish research dropped this month, so we have a research roundup featuring Jews and AI, Jews on Wikipedia, St. Louis Jews, and new stats on the Jewish diaspora.
As always, reach out with feedback, suggestions of articles we should consider sharing, or ideas for documents we should consider archiving. We can be reached at bermanarchive@stanford.edu.
-Ari
Ari Y Kelman, Director, Berman Archive
Church, State, Jews
The separation of church and state has been a cornerstone of the American experience, but like so many things in this country, long held beliefs and practices have been under threat. The public funding of religious schools has been off limits in this country. But a set of cases coming before the Supreme Court next month could upend this separation and allow, in these cases, Christian schools to be funded by taxpayers. The implications of this ruling will be far reaching. We wanted to better understand the case and its implications for American Jews, so we reached out to Rachel Laser, CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Here is that interview:
Berman Archive: Can you tell us about your role and your connection to the American Jewish community, personally and professionally?
Rachel Laser: Personally, I was raised as a Reform Jew at KAM Isaiah Israel, the oldest synagogue in Chicago, where I had my bat mitzvah and was also confirmed. I adored my childhood rabbi, Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, who delivered probing and provocative sermons and encouraged my peers and me to ask questions about our religion and to be civically engaged with our communities. I raised my three kids at a Conservative Jewish synagogue in Washington, D.C., because of my husband’s religious background and also the synagogue’s generosity in letting us join for free in our mid-twenties shortly after my husband’s grandpa passed away when he was looking for some (Jewish) solace.
Professionally, my first and only time working officially inside the Jewish community was from 2012 through 2015, when Rabbi David Saperstein recruited me to be the deputy director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. In that role, I ran many interfaith campaigns, including one against gun violence and one to support working families. Before that, I led a project at the center-left think tank Third Way bringing together evangelical Christians and progressives, including some Jewish leaders, on some of the most divisive culture issues of our time, like abortion rights and LGBTQ+ equality.
My role at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which began in 2018, connects profoundly to my Judaism. America’s promise of religious freedom, which enabled my own relatives to flee religious persecution and thrive here (like many American Jews), is dependent on our country’s commitment to the separation of religion and government. Church-state separation enables American Jews to make personal decisions about our own bodies according to our own moral and religious beliefs, to send our children to public schools knowing that they will not be taught a religion different from our own, and to worship or not freely, according to our own belief system. It has been critical to the advancement of full equality for Jewish Americans.
BA: There are two big cases coming before the Supreme Court—Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond—what should American Jews know about them?
RL: On April 30, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in these consolidated cases about whether Oklahoma can create the nation’s first religious public charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. It would be a dangerous sea change for public education, our democracy, and for American Jews if the Court allows public schools to be religious.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court correctly ruled last summer that charter schools are public schools that must be secular and open to all students. But Christian Nationalist organizations urged the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case because they see religious public charter schools as a next (giant) step in their crusade to indoctrinate the next generation of Americans into their beliefs. Their two-pronged campaign, which we are seeing take effect across the country, includes infusing Christianity in public schools and funneling more taxpayer money to private religious schools.
If public schools can be religious schools, Jewish families in many locations could find themselves with no options other than (public or private) schools that favor Christianity, putting their children at risk of being taught a religion that’s not their own, of being bullied or ostracized based on their religion, and of being in an unfavorable learning environment.
Research Roundup
March saw another surge of new research on American Jewish communities. Below are some highlights. An evergreen reminder: our role here is not to weigh in on which studies we find credible and which we wished were stronger. We find all of these documents insightful both for what they reveal and what they say implicitly about the concerns of American Jewish organizations and American Jews more generally.
ADL on Technology: This month, the ADL released two reports focused on technology. The first was an in-depth analysis of Wikipedia entries and editors with an emphasis on the ways a small group of editors are purportedly pushing an anti-Jewish agenda across many entries. The second sought to identify anti-Jewish bias in responses by large language models (basically the leading AI chat tools). We’re still waiting on the ADL’s analysis of the anti-Jewish bias implicit in certain hand gestures.
Institute for Jewish Policy Research released a new study offering a statistical analysis of the modern Jewish diaspora. Spoiler alert: the US has the most.
2024 Greater St. Louis Jewish Community Study: Brandeis researchers provided a snapshot of today’s Jewish population in Greater St. Louis and considered trends and developments in Jewish life and engagement.
