By now, most of us have heard of Project 2025, created in 2024 by the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-right Christian nationalist group. Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for the establishment of a United States government imbued with so-called biblical principles and overseen by a president who holds sweeping executive powers.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts begins the book by spotlighting the fortification of “our God-given individual rights to live freely” against a “woke” threat.
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“Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism,” warns Roberts without providing any evidence. “They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”
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“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” he argued. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
I’m still confused about how taking away these terms of identity protects First Amendment rights.
Though Trump claimed he knew nothing about Project 2025 during the campaign, he has hired several of its authors to serve as department heads and advisors.
He signed numerous executive orders to fulfill its mandates, such as dismantling the Federal Department of Education; ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within educational institutions and private industries that receive federal funding; attacking the rights of transgender people; and further restricting reproductive freedom and women’s healthcare.
Trump has threatened to investigate colleges and universities over their alleged failure to protect Jewish students during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that swept across campuses last spring. This threat came on the heels of the administration revoking visas and directing universities to “monitor” and “report” the activities of international students and staff.
This chilling effect has already resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian refugee and graduate student whose green card was revoked over his involvement in demonstrations at Columbia University, though he was not charged with a crime.
Additionally, two foreign-born academics with visas to work at Georgetown and Brown universities were detained over homeland security concerns. Another Columbia student and Fulbright scholar left the country after she was told she faced deportation as part of Trump’s crackdown on international students.
And masked I.C.E. officials arrested Turkish Tufts University Ph.D student and Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozturk – who was studying legally in the U.S. – and shipped her from Massachusetts to a holding facility in Louisiana without due process of law.
Her alleged “crime” was posting an op-ed in her campus paper that criticized the university administration’s response to the Tufts Senate’s resolutions about the “Palestinian genocide.”
By singling out allegations of antisemitism on campuses throughout the nation, the Trump administration uses fraudulent and hypocritical concerns for the safety of Jewish students as justification for its draconian assaults on higher education. Trump exploits Jewish students as his political pawns in his attempts to ban free speech and academic freedom.
So, why would Trump force the elimination of other initiatives, like DEI, African American Studies, Latinx Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Asian and Pacific Islands studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies, while concerning itself with its purported “protection” of Jewish students and the elimination of antisemitism specifically?
On October 7, 2024, the Heritage Foundation released Project Esther, named after the Jewish Torah’s Book of Esther (Megillat Esther). She is the heroine of the Purim story of the survival of Jews who lived about 1500 years ago within the expansive Persian Empire.
Esther saved her people from the Persian King Ahasuerus’s Prime Minister, Haman’s evil plot to murder the Jews. This epic drama depicts the Jewish people’s victory over their enemies.
Though the Heritage Foundation brands Project Esther as “a national strategy to end antisemitism,” it is something far different. It is not about Jews protecting Jews, but rather, it is a patronizing, self-serving far-right program promoting Christian nationalism.
Project Esther’s Executive Summary lays out its rationale: “The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement inside the United States are exclusively pro-Palestine and—more so—pro-Hamas. They are part of a highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN) and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.”
While the campus protestors are justifiably concerned with the perennial and current suffering of the Palestinian people, and they are not all supportive of Hamas as a ruling authority, nor are they all calling for the dismantling of the state of Israel.
In addition, the Project depicts youth and particularly college and university students as naïve and as conducive to brainwashing as impressionable children who are being led by a radical Pied Piper into a mountain cave from where they will never be seen again.
“As their ends align, the HSN and its nihilist supporters indoctrinate the gullible into supporting Hamas and hating Israel to create the street mayhem that serves their ends,” states the Project. “Its members hope to achieve their goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community’s complacency.”
It also indicts the entire system of education: “The U.S. education system fosters antisemitism under the guise of ‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology.”
The rhetoric employed in Project Esther could have come directly from the mouth of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the so-called anti-Communist Red Scare and the anti-homosexual Lavender Scare of the 1950s.
“The HSN and its affiliated HSOs,” argues Project Esther, “are likely in every state in the Union, are active on most university and college campuses, are likely connected by both ideology and other tangible ties, and have managed to extend their influence into the highest reaches of the United States government. Moreover, the indispensable support network of activists and financial supporters that allows the HSN to succeed in its operations has a parallel goal of eliminating capitalism and democracy.”
Project Esther purports that “foreign money from wealthy supporters of the Palestinian cause flows freely into U.S. academic institutions as a way to influence curricula against Israel and Jews.”
The point made in Project Esther of a supposed “complacency” by Jewish people comes directly from the antisemite’s playbook of timeless tropes representing Jews as meek victims of oppression. If this were so, why would the Heritage Foundation title its report as a commemoration of a Jewish upstander, Esther, against oppression?
The Project blames the American Jewish community for failing to demonstrate “a unified resolve against the HSN… and their program of Jew-hatred and America-hatred” and claims that “significant components of the [Jewish] community remain disengaged.”
“Some may be blind and deaf to the manifestation of HSN-inspired antisemitism at home,” Project Esther continues. “Some may be in such disbelief that they cannot even acknowledge the threat. More likely, many simply do not know what to do and are waiting for leadership to guide them…[T]he American Jewish community remains relegated to singular, large, ineffective bursts of symbolic activity with no support from other special-interest groups.”
So, does the Heritage Foundation truly believe that Jews are waiting for white Christian nationalist saviors to rescue us from antisemitism and from ourselves?
This representation of the Jewish community is patently untrue. It is not only patronizing and extremely offensive, but it is also antisemitic. Jewish organizations and our allies have been fighting the continual scourge of antisemitism for literally centuries in the United States, and we have been on the front lines in the fights to defeat the many ruthless and tyrannical forms of bigotry.
To be clear, the Heritage Foundation is a far-right Christian nationalist organization. It does not represent Jews or the Jewish community per se. Members primarily ignore and violate most of the precepts of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). They do not adhere to the 613 Jewish laws or commandments enumerated in the Hebrew Bible.
Many conservative Christians like themselves and their followers would prefer that Jews (and members of other religious groups) convert to conservative Protestant denominations. They do not generally act in ways protective of Jewish rights and they do not support the separation of their “church” and state.
Project Esther was developed as a smokescreen to hide the actual reasons for Christian nationalist and white supremacist attacks on higher education, which include defunding and privatizing these institutions and reducing government funding to make the administration’s tax cuts to Donald Trump’s wealthy friends and their corporations a permanent entitlement to the very rich.
Let’s be real, the so-called DOGE cuts were never meant to bring about a more efficient system of government.
It is about a far-right Heritage Foundation empowering a far-right Trump regime to support and encourage a far-right Israeli government to continue its oppression, bombing, land theft, and ultimate deportation of the Palestinian people from their homeland and from any possibility of achieving their rights as a sovereign people.
This backing by a U.S. presidential administration, even more so than under the Biden administration, further justifies the Israeli government’s refusal to engage in good-faith negotiations in ending the Israeli-Hamas war and the return of captured Israeli hostages.
Yes, antisemitism exists and is rampant on many college and university campuses. I experienced this myself as an Associate Professor at a large midwestern university until I felt I could no longer remain.
But all forms of prejudice and discrimination continue on these campuses, as well as within other social, religious, business, and governmental institutions.
The purpose of Project Esther “… is to provide a strategic blueprint to all Americans who are willing to counter antisemitism in the United States so that they can protect not only American Jewry, but the sanctity of the core values derived from our Founding documents that ensure the security and prosperity of all Americans.”
Why does the Heritage Foundation not construct and offer a blueprint to defeat Islamophobia, racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, ethnocentrism, extreme nationalism, classism, and all the other forms of systemic oppression? And how much does this far-right Christian nationalist organization really care about “the core values derived from our Founding documents”?
In particular, it seems quite evident that Project 2025 combined with Project Esther does not value our Constitution. In its attempts to enlarge and expand the power of the Executive branch of government according to Article II, the Heritage Foundation is attempting to upset the balance of powers between the three separate branches.
By highlighting only the safety of Jewish students, Project Esther follows the Machiavellian playbook of “divide and conquer,” which actually places Jewish students at greater risk for antisemitic attacks, including violence. As I have written elsewhere, Trump has committed antisemitic actions so many times that I have lost count.
These assaults on freedom of speech, association, redress of grievances, and academic freedom in higher education jeopardize not only our nation’s economic and technological development and our reputation as a leader of higher learning worldwide, but they also seriously challenge our values of democracy and reliance on Constitutional law.
And Trump’s assaults are not limited to higher education. With his student props looking on, Trump signed what many Constitutional scholars see as an illegal executive order dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. This agency is charged with administering federal funds for students with disabilities, upholding school health mandates (including vaccinations) and free meals programs for students from low-income households and distributing Pell Grants for undergraduate students.
When colleges and universities are targeted for promoting First Amendment rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition for redress of grievances, no students, including Jewish ones, are protected. Higher education must remain a place where free speech and academic freedom is upheld.
Project Esther does a great disservice to Jews and to our heroic queen.
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