ACLU lawyers now cite affirmative-action opinion the organization denounced
“Trump’s Big Achievement: Making the New York Times Care About Antisemitism” was the headline over a piece I wrote more than nine years ago for the Algemeiner.
The point—that New York Times concern about anti-Semitism is highly conditional on whether it can be blamed on the Trump administration—holds up pretty well, alas.
The latest example of this phenomenon comes with the Times’s unusual solicitousness to concern about potential persecution from a Jew at the University of Pennsylvania. The Times begins its article from the point of view of a student, Jacob Naimark. Naimark’s big fear? Not the keffiyeh-clad anti-Israel students marauding around the campus, but a federal investigation into anti-Semitism.
“Jacob Naimark, a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, has worried ever since he learned that Trump administration investigators had demanded that his school turn over the names of many Jewish people on campus,” the Times news article begins.
The Times article goes on, “‘It was disturbing,’ said Mr. Naimark, a co-president of the school’s Jewish Law Students Association, adding, ‘We know very well the history of governments assembling lists of Jews does not end well.’”
Naimark, who federal campaign finance records not mentioned by the Times indicate donated to the Biden campaign against Trump for president in October 2020, “is interested in studying the relationship between climate change and migration and hopes to use the law to protect immigrants impacted by environmental hazards,” according to a profile of him on the Penn website.
The Times could just have easily begun its article with some government antidiscrimination lawyer, worried ever since he learned that Penn was refusing to produce documents needed for the investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We know very well the history of institutions invoking secrecy to avoid government civil rights oversight, and it doesn’t end well.
Yet in the inverted world of the New York Times, it’s the antidiscrimination investigation, not the anti-Semitism, that’s the threat to the Jews. The choice to begin the article with Naimark’s perspective makes the spin clear. It’s also not even accurate that “the history of governments assembling lists of Jews does not end well.” A Japanese government diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, assembled lists of Jews during World War II for the purpose of saving them from being killed by the Nazis. A Swedish government diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, also made lists of Jews to save.
Maybe Naimark is under the mistaken impression that Trump is a Nazi because he gets his news from the New York Times? The Times imposed a total news blackout on Trump awarding the Medal of Honor this month to Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who put his own life at risk in January 1945 in a German POW camp. As the Army recounts it: “Edmonds was appointed the senior noncommissioned officer in charge of the American barracks. That evening, the Germans announced that only American prisoners who were also Jewish would fall out for roll call the following morning under threat of execution. Edmonds understood that segregating more than 200 Jewish prisoners of war from the larger group would likely result in their persecution and possible death, so he directed his senior leaders to have all 1,200 American prisoners present themselves for roll call. The following morning, the Nazi officer became incredulous after realizing that so many Americans were standing in formation. Edmonds said to him, ‘We are all Jews here,’ and reminded the officer about the rights afforded to all prisoners under the Geneva Convention. Enraged, the officer removed his pistol, pressed it hard against Edmonds’ forehead between his eyes and demanded that he order all American Jewish prisoners to step forward or he would be shot. Instead of conceding, Edmonds warned the officer that executing him would lead to prosecution for war crimes after the war. The officer lowered his weapon and returned to his office without further attempts to segregate the Jewish prisoners from the larger group.”
Fox News covered that medal. The Associated Press covered it. The New York Sun covered it. But the Times is too busy depicting the U.S. military as destroyers of a school in Iran and Trump as some sort of Nazi-like figure. Trump giving a medal to the “We are all Jews here” sergeant, and telling his son, Chris, who attended the ceremony, that “today your father gets the honor he so courageously earned” was news the Times did not find fit to print. Maybe A.G. Sulzberger can recover some of the newspaper’s honor by ordering a make-up editorial the way the Times did the last time it was embarrassed to miss covering the award of a Medal of Honor.
In addition to onesidedly highlighting the claims of Naimark, the Times article is flawed for omitting crucial context. There’s an extensive treatment of “Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.” Yet the Times doesn’t mention that, as the fourth report of Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism put it, “the AAUP consistently and categorically opposed academic boycotts. In August 2024, the AAUP changed its position, declaring ‘academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.’ Although it wasn’t mentioned by name, Israel and its universities were clearly the object of this new policy.” The AAUP today is functionally a group defending a boycott of Israel; the idea of them riding to the rescue of Jews at Penn against the Trump administration is laughable. There’s no reason the Times should treat them seriously.
Another character in the Times article is “Penn’s lead litigator, Seth P. Waxman, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Bill Clinton.” The Times does not mention that Waxman’s law firm, WilmerHale, prepped both Penn and Harvard’s presidents for their disastrous, presidency-ending congressional testimony before Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx. Or that the same firm unsuccessfully tried to get Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum’s discrimination case against Harvard thrown out of federal court, only to be met with a ruling from Judge Richard Stearns that “Harvard failed its Jewish students.” Waxman signed a federal court filing in that case that twice misspelled the name of Louis D. Brandeis—an 1877 graduate of Harvard Law School—as “Brandies.” He also accused Harvard’s Jews of being unreasonable, writing in a court filing that Harvard’s Jewish students, who took off their yarmulkes and hid under desks as an anti-Israel mob rampaged disruptively through the campus, did not “describe an environment in which an objectively reasonable person would fear physical violence.” Waxman and WilmerHale also represented Harvard—and billed millions of dollars that weren’t covered by insurance, because Harvard failed to give the insurer notice—in the university’s ultimately losing effort to defend the constitutionality of its use of race as a factor in its college admissions.
That case, Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, surfaces in the legal filings in the Penn case in a somewhat ironic way. A February 18, 2026, filing cites the case to support the idea that “government action that classifies individuals based on a suspect characteristic is subject to heightened scrutiny” and that “the existence of an assertedly benign motive does not relax constitutional scrutiny.” The comedy comes from the fact that the filing is from the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania; when the case was being litigated, the national ACLU was arguing to the court that “strict scrutiny must take fundamental differences into account” and that “not every decision influenced by race is equally objectionable.” When the opinion was handed down, the ACLU complained that it was “restricting universities’ ability to fully address systemic racial inequalities that persist in higher education.” Now, suddenly, the case is convenient to wield against the Trump administration as it seeks to combat anti-Semitism at Penn.
