A look at ‘Project Esther’ and Trump’s approach to combat antisemitism on campus
PBS News Hour - Segments
PBS NewsHour
4.1 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The Trump administration has launched numerous investigations into colleges and universities |
| 0:05.0 | and withheld billions of dollars in funding, accusing the schools of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism on campus. |
| 0:12.0 | About 60 schools have been notified of possible investigations. |
| 0:16.0 | Last week, Columbia University settled with the administration in a major deal that could be a blueprint for other battles, or rather battles with other schools. |
| 0:25.4 | Ali Rogan looked into one of the key players behind the administration's approach. |
| 0:30.4 | This is all part of a broader push that the White House says is meant to get elite schools to better address anti-Semitism. |
| 0:36.9 | But how did this effort start? |
| 0:38.7 | To help answer that question, we're joined by Arno Rosenfeld, an enterprise reporter for the |
| 0:43.3 | forward, where he's also the author of the anti-Semitism decoded newsletter. Arno, thank you so much |
| 0:48.1 | for joining us. First of all, how does this administration define anti-Semitism and how is it that |
| 0:53.2 | it's become so central to its |
| 0:55.4 | targeting of universities? So the administration's understanding of anti-Semitism is really |
| 1:00.9 | rooted in hostility toward Israel, so be that anti-Zionism or these other sort of protests, |
| 1:06.6 | it sort of lumps that in with what they consider to be support for terrorism, you know, support for Hamas. |
| 1:11.6 | But I would say that they go a little bit further than that in kind of limiting their focus to what you might consider left-wing anti-Semitism. |
| 1:19.6 | But not really saying as much about anti-Semitism on the right. |
| 1:22.6 | Correct. I mean, you know, sometimes they give a little bit more or less rhetorical attention to that, |
| 1:27.7 | but in terms of substance, it's not their focus and there are a number of people in the administration |
| 1:31.3 | with ties to right-wing anti-Semites or who have expressed anti-Semitism themselves of sort of the right-wing variety. |
| 1:37.8 | You've reported on one of the blueprints of the administration's efforts on this. |
| 1:42.0 | It's called Project Esther. What is it and who's behind it? |
| 1:45.7 | So Project Esther was created by the Heritage Foundation, which also created Project 2025, another blueprint |
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