Berkeley Gives Trump 160 Names Tied to Campus Anti-Semitism, Prompting McCarthyism Comparisons

The University of California, Berkeley, at the behest of the Trump Administration, has turned over the names of 160 students and faculty involved in complaints of anti-Semitism at that campus. The move provoked a backlash, including an open letter to the university from 600 faculty members involved with Berkeley from around the world, a letter pushing back from the Berkeley Faculty Association, and a denouncement of Trump from Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who has opposed Trump’s action at universities for months.

One of the key accusations leveled at the Trump Administration for these and other actions against the anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian movement likens it to McCarthyism, the movement in the 1950s aimed at rooting out Soviet Communism in the U.S. Government that involved the handing over of the names of those suspected of being spies.

Figures such as Berkeley professor Judith Butler—one of the 160 names flagged by the Trump administration—and the Muslim Public Affairs Council draw similarities between Trump’s actions and those of Senator Joe McCarthy. The administration has operated with secrecy against the accused, declining to disclose how these individuals allegedly propagated anti-Semitism, while still bringing suspects before public hearings. In this, Butler and others see echoes of the Senate subcommittee hearings during the Second Red Scare, just as today’s House Committee hearings mirror that era. Even mere accusations can ruin lives—and Butler, in particular, leaned into fearmongering about secrecy, suggesting that perhaps thousands more had been targeted on college campuses.

[RELATED: A Campus Dress Rehearsal for McCarthyism?]

So much for the self-victimizing.

Still, there are two ways the current climate resembles McCarthyism that these agitators have not highlighted. First, like in the McCarthy age, Trump is responding to a foreign threat that has infiltrated American institutions even while purporting to belong to the United States. Second, the claims against these perpetrators are substantiated, despite being defamed as baseless.

Regarding the first, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) reported in 2023, using data preceding Oct 7, that at a minimum 100 American colleges and universities had “withheld information on
approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian.” Furthermore, of those institutions that accepted funding from Middle Eastern donors, these saw a 300 percent rise in anti-Semitism on their campuses compared to those that did not accept such funds.

Clearly, not only are foreign governments meddling in the operations of American universities, but at least at some of these universities, this meddling is leading to increased anti-Semitism.

The fact that faculty from foreign universities signed a letter in response to the Berkeley administration’s decision to hand over these names only serves to underscore this point symbolically. These professors had the hubris to assume that their signing this letter would possibly influence the Berkeley administration in its dealings with the U.S. Government. But the very fact that the Trump administration has been revoking student visas should serve to prove that the government is wary of foreign interference.

It is all well and good to collaborate with universities across the world, but to act as though that faculty belongs to the campus, or to imagine that the Trump Administration should privilege the opinion of foreign faculty over Jewish American citizens who have been hurt by campus anti-Semitism, is hopelessly misguided and reflects a privileging of cosmopolitanism over Americanism.

[RELATED: McCarthyism or Simple Transparency?]

Regarding the second, while McCarthyism may be remembered as a foundationless witch-hunt, documents would later reveal in the 1990s that there were Soviet spies in America throughout WWII, and so McCarthyism actually was substantiated.

Similarly, though the majority of pro-Palestinian protests on campus may have been found to be peaceful, there certainly has been enough aggressive and/or violent anti-Semitic activity associated with them for the American government to become concerned. Hillels have been vandalized. Students have been assaulted. Campus buildings have been forcibly taken over. And these are only a small fraction of the anti-Semitic issues that the pro-Palestine movement and the faculty and students that support it have caused.

Something must be done.

It might seem, if you listen to the pro-Palestinian organizations who claim that they are being unfairly victimized, that to give over a list of names to the government constitutes a violation of the civil rights of those on the list. But that seems a small price to pay to uphold the American nature of the university, the peace of the students who attend it, and the possibility for higher education to represent education rather than agitation.

Image: “Berkeley – UC Berkeley: View from Sather Tower” by Wally Gobetz on Flickr