TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. As the face-off between Harvard University and the Trump administration continues, we're going to talk with Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, who specializes in constitutional studies and the First Amendment. Here's what President Trump had to say last week.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They've got to behave themselves. You know, I'm looking out for the country and for Harvard. I want Harvard to do well. I want Harvard to be great again, probably.
GROSS: He went on to say...
TRUMP: And Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them. They're hurting themselves. They're fighting. You know, Columbia has been really - and they were very, very bad what they've done. They're very antisemitic and lots of other things. But they're working with us on finding a solution. And, you know, they're taking off that hot seat. But Harvard wants to fight, they want to show how smart they are, and they're getting their ass kicked.
GROSS: The Trump administration has frozen between 2 1/2 and $3 billion in Harvard grants and contracts, and President Trump intends to cancel any remaining financial contracts. The administration is also trying to stop the university's ability to enroll foreign students and to end Harvard's tax exempt status.
Harvard is facing about eight investigations from at least six agencies, including the Justice Department, the Department of Education, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. In response, Harvard is suing the Trump administration. This all began with a task force commissioned by President Trump to investigate if Harvard was doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus. During the on-campus protests against Israel's bombing of Gaza last year, some of the protesters and some of the slogans chanted were accused of being antisemitic, and many Jewish students said they felt unsafe.
Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law. He's an opinion columnist at Bloomberg and the author of 10 books. His latest is called "To Be A Jew Today: A New Guide To God, Israel, And The Jewish People." The book is about the many ways Jews can interpret what it means to be a Jew and different ways Jews think of their relationship to Israel and Israeli policies, including the war in Gaza. We recorded our interview yesterday morning.
Noah Feldman, welcome to FRESH AIR. Are you playing any official or unofficial role on Harvard's legal strategy or decision-making?
NOAH FELDMAN: No. The university follows a good policy of creating a wall between its lawyers who represent it and its law faculty who have lots of ideas about how it should be represented. So my primary role is as a constitutional scholar, analyzing the issues, writing about them, speaking about them. And that's the right job for me in this moment.
GROSS: Thanks for clarifying that. Now, Harvard had been very divided over the protests surrounding Israel's bombing of Gaza. Many Jewish students felt threatened. What was the atmosphere like on campus at the end of this semester? Had it changed?
FELDMAN: A year ago, Harvard's commencement, our graduation, was really, in a significant way, disrupted by students protesting, including some faculty protesting, marching out of the graduation, speakers denouncing the president and the corporation of Harvard, which is what we call our board of directors. This year, commencement was pretty much the polar opposite. There was literally a standing ovation for our president, Alan Garber, when all he had done was come up to the podium. And speaker after speaker hinted at the importance of supporting the university. So what's happened is that Donald Trump's assault on the university has led to a deep unification of the campus. And that's an important transformation from a year ago. I would say it's a fundamental transformation.
GROSS: The attacks on Harvard started with the task force commissioned by Trump to address antisemitism on campus. And, you know, this has led to cancellation of billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard. But didn't Harvard reach a settlement with Trump over antisemitism?
FELDMAN: No. Let me tell the story a little bit differently. I think, really, what we're facing now started with the testimony in Congress of Harvard's president and a couple of other university presidents in which they were pushed very hard on a series of hypothetical questions about how the campus manages free speech in the context of protests. That put a target on Harvard's back, and the Trump administration has been pushing very, very hard since they came into office to exploit the perception - in my view, the incorrect perception - that Harvard is some sort of hotbed of bias, antisemitism and Islamophobia in order to bring about a fundamental attack on higher education with the stated goal - this is their stated goal - of making the university align itself with the administration's beliefs and priorities, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
What's more, Harvard hasn't reached any settlement of any kind with the Trump administration. There was a lawsuit brought by a small number of students alleging that Harvard had not sufficiently protected the environment against antisemitism. And that was settled by the university before the Trump administration even came into office.
GROSS: One of Trump's justifications for canceling government contracts is that he accused Harvard as being a breeding ground - I'm quoting here - "breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination." How do you interpret that?
FELDMAN: Well, first thing I would say is that it's wrong. You know, it's always hard to understand exactly what is meant when you're being maligned, but, you know, you know the feeling. You know the idea that even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked? Well, that's someone kicking us. One piece of relevant background here is that Harvard was one of the parties in the Supreme Court case - the SFFA case - in which the Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly 50 years, overturned the idea that racial diversity was a permissible rationale to use in college admissions. And the Trump administration, in all of its rhetoric, has been referring, subsequently, to the perfectly lawful use of diversity as it existed from 1978 and really before then, until just, you know, a year or so ago as, quote-unquote, "discrimination." I think that's the rhetorical move there.
And Harvard is no more a breeding ground for that point of view than all of the other universities in the country, essentially all, which used exactly the same admissions procedures. It's just that it's easier for Trump to make headlines by attacking Harvard over that.
GROSS: That's probably part of the reason why many other universities are worried right now.
FELDMAN: There are a lot of reasons for universities to be concerned. If Trump can go after the oldest university in the United States, one of the most significant in terms of its endowment and its academic legacy and its prestige, then he can really go after any similar university. And so all universities, I think, have very, very good reason to be concerned because going after a university is one of the things in the playbook of someone who's trying to erode democratic values and who wants to be at least dictatorial, if not a dictator.
Universities are a place for the preservation of free expression, free ideas and free beliefs. They've always been that. And so in any country where someone is trying to break that norm of freedom, the universities are a very important target, and that's been true historically.
GROSS: Say, hypothetically, that Trump is right and Harvard hadn't done enough to stop antisemitism, and it was just a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. Would the punishments that Trump has meted out against Harvard be legal, and would those punishments have been legally applied?
FELDMAN: No. The Trump administration has no consideration for following the rules. There is a federal civil rights law, Title VI, that says, effectively, that if your university or other institution receives federal funding, then you have to assure an environment where students are not subject to discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. But that same law provides procedures for how the government would go about enforcing that, including a hearing on the record in front of a judge where the government has to prove that discrimination is taking place. And even then, the punishment that the statute prescribes is targeted to the particular subunit of the university where any discrimination might have occurred. The Trump administration ignored that law entirely. More broadly, the Trump administration has no authority and no government official has any authority to tell a university that, because of the points of view that are being taught there, it can't be supported or it can't receive government grants that it won in a fair and square competition.
That is what's called an unconstitutional condition, which is the kind of fancy lawyer way of saying that if you are in receipt of a public benefit, the government can't tell you that it's going to take away that benefit unless you knuckle under and say what it wants you to say. Your free speech rights are fundamental, and the government can't use the leverage of taking away funding that you have coming to you to force you to say something that is against your beliefs.
GROSS: How specific has the administration been about curriculum-related issues?
FELDMAN: Pretty darn specific. In a letter that the Trump administration sent Harvard on April 11 of this year, the Trump administration said that it wanted to create a supervisory entity under government authority that would consider Harvard's curriculum. It would consider how Harvard admitted students. It would consider how Harvard hired faculty with the goal of achieving what the Trump administration referred to as viewpoint diversity, by which they pretty clearly mean expressing conservative views that go along with Trump's view. So they're actually demanding, as a condition of the restoration of funding, that they get to have the last say on what Harvard teaches, who it teaches it to, and who does the teaching.
And those are the core elements of academic freedom. You know, without those three freedoms - freedom to teach what you want, the freedom to choose your students, and the freedom to teach the people to teach it - you don't have a free university. You don't have the most basic component of higher education in a democracy. And so the Trump administration has been very explicit that they want to end that. And that's also a linchpin of Harvard's response in court, where Harvard has said, listen, you know, the Trump administration is explicitly on the surface seeking to violate our free speech rights, and that's unconstitutional and unlawful.
GROSS: If Trump's actions stand up in court, does that set a precedent for the type of thing you're describing?
FELDMAN: The good news is that the courts are not going to uphold Donald Trump's actions, which are so clearly and explicitly in violation of the Constitution. But you're absolutely right, Terry, that if a court were even to hint, much less hold, that the Trump administration could condition Harvard's receipt of grants that it's won on taking Trumpian views, that would be a disaster for free speech in the United States and, frankly, around the world. And it would be a terrible, terrible precedent to set, and it would set back free speech in the United States by a couple of centuries.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. My guest is Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, and author of the book "To Be A Jew Today." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman. We're talking about how the Trump administration is punishing Harvard. The Justice Department is reviewing claims of discrimination against white men at the Harvard Law Review. And the Harvard Law Review is not affiliated with Harvard, but it accused the publication of destroying evidence in an open investigation. And the administration demanded that Harvard cease and desist from interfering. And it was disclosed - The New York Times reported that there was a cooperating witness inside the Harvard Law Review, and that witness now works in the White House under Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration's domestic policy agenda, and Trump officials apparently confirm that. Now there are fears at Harvard that this will lead to criminal charges against the university. What can you tell us about that?
FELDMAN: Well, to begin with, the Harvard Law Review, as you mentioned, Terry, is an independent student publication that's existed for a long time, and it's an important part of the ecosystem of legal academic work, but it's independent of the university. Its members are current Harvard Law School students at any given moment. And the Harvard Law Review has its own procedure for choosing its members. And as far as I understand, the Trump administration's claim seems to just be that that process involved consideration of a holistic range of factors, including background, which, again, is how the Supreme Court had held that all education institutions were permitted to admit students.
And so the law review, as far as I understand, was not doing anything different than what the law had long permitted. So the allegation of discrimination that's there amounts to the allegation that somehow the Harvard Law Review was doing something that had long been lawful. So that people understand what is meant by, quote-unquote, "discrimination" against white students. I think that's the context in which we're speaking. And it's hard to avoid the perception that this investigation is just intended to make headlines that involve Harvard once again.
The selection of members of a student law review is not ordinarily a matter of national importance. These are literally second and third-year law students choosing students at the end of their first year. So, you know, it's a big deal to them, but it should not be a matter of grave national significance. And it just seems to me very substantially disproportionate to anything that might or might not have happened.
GROSS: The Trump administration wants to prevent foreign students from enrolling in Harvard, and my understanding is that includes already enrolled students.
FELDMAN: Yes. The Trump administration issued an order quickly blocked by federal district court judge here in Boston. But the original order said that Harvard could not participate in the program run by the government that basically processes student visas for international students. And everyone in that program was supposed to be - at Harvard, was supposed to be booted out of it, and no new ones were supposed to be permitted. So, yes, that would, in theory, have included currently enrolled students who wouldn't have been able to come back to school in September when school starts again.
The Trump administration had no good basis for doing this. Again, there are procedures that the government can use, by law and regulation, if it wants to say that some university has done something wrong that would disqualify it from admitting international students. The administration - the Trump administration fully ignored those procedures, said nothing about them, didn't even allege in its letter to Harvard that Harvard had violated those procedures, or didn't say why they were doing it in terms of the rules that exist. They just basically said, we don't like Harvard, and Harvard, therefore, shouldn't have this, quote-unquote, privilege. Now, it's not a privilege. It's a legal right conferred by statute and regulation. And that's why the Federal District Court judge issued a very quick order, which then turned into a temporary restraining order. And so that is blocked until and unless the Trump administration appeals it and gets it reversed above, which I think is pretty darn unlikely that they would succeed in getting.
So, I mean, it's very scary, and it led lots of people at Harvard's commencement - lots of my colleagues were wearing buttons saying Harvard would not be Harvard without its international students. Our president, Alan Garber, alluded to the presence of international students, and he said, as it should be. And I just want to be really clear that it's not only in the interests of Harvard itself to have international students, and it's not only in the interests of those students. it's in the interest of the United States of America.
Researchers I work with come from all over the world and they are among or literally the best people in the whole world. And when they come here, they contribute to knowledge. And not infrequently, if they're doing amazing and interesting research, they seek permanent positions in the United States, which is part of how the United States has maintained its leadership in science, in technology and in business. It's by attracting some of the most extraordinary people from all over the world. And if those people couldn't come and study here, we're literally cutting off our nose to spite our face. We're literally saying, oh, we would prefer that these incredibly smart, accomplished, hardworking people never come here in the first place and never spend time here and that they do their research in other places.
GROSS: Since you're a law professor, have a lot of your international students come to you for advice on what they should do? Because the situation remains unclear, and we really don't know how this is going to end up and if you're an international student, you don't want to be deported, and you don't want to pay tuition to then be thrown out of the country. It's all very confusing. So are people coming to you for advice and do you see a lot of confusion among your students now?
FELDMAN: When the first announcement came from the Trump administration, lots of students - and it's not only students; there're also visiting scholars and fellows who do research who are affected - lots of them were very confused and the university did what it could to give clear guidance on its website. What happened is that very quickly, in less than 24 hours, the federal court blocked the Trump administration's order. And so we were able to advise students, you - your visas as of now are valid, and you will be able to return.
There have been some people - I had one person who had been scheduled, happened to be in London and was scheduled for a visa interview the day that the Trump administration had announced this freeze, and she was turned away at the U.S. consulate there at the U.S. - you know, the U.S. Embassy on the grounds that Harvard wasn't in the list of universities, pretty scary. But you know, we advised her to make another appointment. And fingers crossed, if there are appointments, she will be able to get her appointment and she will be able to come to Harvard in the fall, as will all of the students, again, unless an appeals court reverses the preliminary injunction issued by the district court.
GROSS: So what do you think Trump's attacks on Harvard are really about?
FELDMAN: Donald Trump usually has a kind of short-term self-interest objective and then a broader-term aggrandizement objective. In the short term, his self-interest is to make a headline, to make a populist headline that says, Donald Trump is going after those liberals at Harvard University, which might please some of his supporters and, probably more important to Donald Trump, is intended to shed fear or to cast fear on everyone in higher education and, more broadly, everyone who doesn't agree with his policies. You know, it's part of the idea that every day we should wake up and listen to the radio or look at the newspaper and discover that the Trump administration has gone after some opponent in some way that makes it really hard to stand up to Donald Trump. So I think that's the short-term objective.
The longer-term objective, though, is part of Trump's overall assault on our democratic values and institutions. And you can see that the institutions that he likes to go after are places like universities, institutions like the press and the courts, which are institutions that are all devoted to independent judgment and independent thinking. We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts. And Trump doesn't like independence because independent institutions can say no to him. And the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who's also the author of the book "To Be A Jew Today." We'll talk more after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to our discussion about the face-off between the Trump administration and Harvard and about antisemitism today. The administration has cut nearly $3 billion in grants and contracts and is trying to prevent foreign students from enrolling in Harvard and end the university's tax-exempt status. My guest, Noah Feldman, is a Harvard Law professor, a Bloomberg opinion columnist and author of 10 books, including his latest, "To Be A Jew Today: A New Guide To God, Israel, And The Jewish People." The book is about the many ways Jews can interpret what it means to be a Jew and different ways Jews think of their relationship to Israel and Israeli policies, including the war in Gaza. We recorded our interview yesterday morning.
How did Harvard decide not to give in, but to sue the Trump administration instead and go head-to-head?
FELDMAN: The initial letter that was sent to Harvard and made public made it sound like it was at least possible that the Trump administration wouldn't ask for Harvard to compromise its inherent academic independence, and that the Trump administration would then move on. So, you know, that letter, among other things, said, you know, maybe Harvard should have a single disciplinary system instead of a disciplinary system that's spread out over all of its many schools. And, you know, fair is fair. That's a reasonable worldview. It's not how Harvard's done it, but you could imagine a university doing that and wanting to consolidate discipline and not thinking that that in some basic way violated its academic freedom. And so I think Harvard's view - this has been reported in the press - was, OK, we're listening. Is there really something here which we could do that is consistent with our academic values?
And you can also see that in the lawyers that Harvard initially hired who had ties to the Trump administration in one way or another, and at least one of whom had been very effective in settling the Trump administration's initial moves against one of the big law firms. But when the Trump administration sent its letter on April 11, you know, a week or 10 days later to the university, it made it very explicit in that letter that there was no deal to be made that wouldn't require Harvard compromising its core academic freedom of what to teach, who teaches it, and who it teaches it to. There is no way that Harvard as a university could conceivably have agreed to the demands in that letter.
And so, as I understand Harvard's position, it was from the beginning, you know, if there are problems at our university, we're happy to look seriously at them. If there are things that the administration is seeking for us to do that are consistent with our academic freedom, we're open to listening to them, at least. But if it turns out otherwise, as it has, in fact, turned out, then we're going to go to court, and we're going to stand up for our freedoms because we don't have any other choice.
GROSS: So I want to get back to Trump and his accusations about Harvard having not done enough to prevent antisemitism on campus. And it's been pointed out that after this week's attack on a peaceful demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, to bring home the Israeli hostages, Trump's initial reaction was to highlight that the alleged attacker was here illegally. But Trump didn't initially mention antisemitism. He just highlighted the attackers' immigration status. And the attacker is here on an expired tourist visa. He was born in Egypt. He lived in Kuwait for about 17 years, then moved to Colorado on the tourist visa, which had expired. And he's being charged with several crimes, including a hate crime. He said - and this came out on Monday - he said he wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead. This is according to papers filed in federal court.
Did you notice that he hadn't mentioned antisemitism, but just the illegal immigration status?
FELDMAN: I did. Look, antisemitism is a real and dangerous phenomenon. The attack you're describing in Boulder is horrific and is clearly antisemitic under any definition of the term. Similarly, the shooting and killing of two employees of the Israeli embassy, at least one of whom was an American, in Washington, D.C., just a short time ago. So these are real violent attacks being made on Jews. These are terrorist attacks motivated by antisemitism. And the Trump administration seems not at all interested in addressing those forms of antisemitism, which are actually real and dangerous. Instead, it's focused on this all but made-up idea that Harvard is some kind of a hotbed of antisemitism.
And the truth is, I would like to say that that idea is completely fabricated, but I don't want to say that there's no antisemitism on Harvard's campus. You know, our president, Alan Garber, has said himself that he's experienced some antisemitism here, but it's not really what's motivating the Trump administration. And everybody on campus knows this, including people who - like me, who care a lot about combating antisemitism. That's not what this is about at the most fundamental level. And you see that when Trump stops mentioning antisemitism, even in regard to Harvard, which he's done a few times. And when he and the people who work in his administration instead say, well, Harvard is un-American. Now, that's language that we should all remember from the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
And it's always a sign of bias and the attempt to suppress points of view that Trump doesn't like. When he says Harvard is un-American, what he means is Harvard doesn't support Donald Trump, and for the most part, that is in fact the case. Although, of course, we have pro-Trump people on our campus, like you'd have on any campus. But the university as a whole, no, is not committed to any political viewpoint, and it's definitely not committed to Trump's point of view. And that seems to be what's really motivating Trump. And the antisemitism charge with respect to Harvard is - it's just essentially a red herring.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. My guest is Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, and author of the book, "To Be A Jew Today." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman. We've been talking about how the Trump administration is punishing Harvard, and also talking about antisemitism. His latest book is called "To Be A Jew Today."
NPR had an investigative report in mid-May that was headlined Multiple Trump White House Officials Have Ties to Antisemitic Extremists. And, you know, even by pardoning all of the January 6 people who were convicted, those include white nationalists who are, kind of, by definition, antisemitic.
FELDMAN: I think you're entirely right that the Trump administration is being hypocritical in claiming that it cares about antisemitism. The Trump administration wants to go after Harvard and other universities like it's going after the press, like it's going after the federal courts because they're independent and they express a point of view that he doesn't like. And he needs an excuse. And antisemitism can be used as such an excuse, though it's not a plausible excuse, and I don't think too many people take that terribly seriously as an excuse in this context. And the fact that the Trump administration has long had a complex relationship with the far right in the United States and that the far right is often extremely antisemitic in the United States is just a good proof that that's not what the Trump administration really cares about here.
GROSS: Who decides what antisemitism is? I mean, clearly, the attack on Boulder was antisemitic. Setting Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's house on fire - antisemitic.
FELDMAN: On Passover, by the way.
GROSS: Just...
FELDMAN: Just so you don't think it's they didn't like Josh Shapiro.
GROSS: Right.
FELDMAN: It was on Passover evening when he and his family had been having their Seder.
GROSS: So who decides what antisemitism is? I mean, there are official definitions of it. Those official definitions differ. And I'd like you to explain what definition Harvard is using to define antisemitism and what definition the Trump administration is using - if they have one - to define it.
FELDMAN: As part of its settlement with a group of students who sued Harvard before Donald Trump became president - and the settlement was also reached before Donald Trump became president - Harvard agreed to use the definition of antisemitism that's promulgated by an organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. That definition is mostly unobjectionable. I think almost nobody would disagree with most of it. It basically says that antisemitism is a certain attitude towards Jews that treats them as lesser or as evil, etc. However, the contentious part of that definition is there's a list of examples that's given in the IHRA definition. And that list of examples includes situations where somebody, for example, denies the right of the Jews to have a national homeland in Israel while simultaneously saying that other peoples are entitled to their own national homelands. And that's the part that has been controversial. And the reason it's been controversial, just to sum it up, is that there are plenty of people who criticize Israel's policies. And it's, of course, logically possible to criticize Israel's policies, including vociferously, without being antisemitic.
And some people want to go further and criticize Israel's very right to exist. And again, it should, in principle, be possible to express that point of view without being an antisemite. You know, there are some Jews, not only progressive Jews, but also very, very traditionalist, ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Hasidic Jews who believe that there shouldn't be a state of Israel until God has ordained one, and they don't believe that that has happened, and so they don't believe the state of Israel is legitimate. And that viewpoint, though it may be wrong, is not inherently antisemitic. What makes this, you know, very complicated is that there can be criticism of Israel that's completely legitimate in and of itself and is not antisemitic that can then cross into antisemitism. And when it happens in the real world, we have to note it, and we have to be honest about acknowledging that it's one thing to criticize Israel, even to question Israel's right to exist. It's another thing to commit violence against Jews who are, as in Boulder, Colorado, gathering to call for the return home of the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza. So that's why this is complicated and it's contentious. But I would like to say that notwithstanding that complexity, it shouldn't actually be all that difficult to disentangle what is antisemitism from what is legitimate criticism of Israel because it's totally reasonable for people to take positions in conversation or in protest marches where they criticize Israel's policies in Gaza, even where they question, you know, Israel's very right to exist without then saying that Jews are in some fundamental way responsible for what's going on or attacking Jews, literally, or, as in Boulder, as in Washington, D.C., or figuratively.
GROSS: You mean blaming all Jews for what's happening in Israel and Gaza.
FELDMAN: Yes. Saying that all Jews are responsible for what Israel is doing is...
GROSS: Or saying that all Jews are Zionist.
FELDMAN: Yes, absolutely. Not all Jews are Zionists. There are lots of Jews for whom Zionism is core to their Jewish identity. And so it's understandable that those Jews would look at criticisms of Zionism itself and say, well, if you're criticizing Zionism, then you're criticizing my Jewishness. And so, from their subjective position, even just being anti-Zionist can feel like antisemitism. But from the standpoint of analyzing whether a statement is really antisemitic or not or an action is really antisemitic or not, you have to ask, is it really a cover for an argument about the Jews being inherently too powerful or inherently too violent or whatever other position that the antisemite holds, or is it just a way of saying, look, we think that Palestinians are human beings and that they have fundamental human rights and that they deserve protection, and we're angry and upset with Israel's actions in Gaza, or even more broadly, with Israel's approach to the Palestinian population that's not citizens of Israel.
GROSS: Is wearing buttons or scarves in support of Palestine antisemitic? Because I think the Trump administration implied that it was.
FELDMAN: The answer from a First Amendment perspective has got to be that it's protected speech. If I'm wearing a button or a scarf, pointing out my views, that is core to my free speech rights. So I think that's the first and most important thing to say. Now, it's also, you know, true that I have a free speech right to express antisemitic views if I want to. What I don't have a free speech right to do is to discriminate against Jews in a way that's antisemitic. And on a university campus, we would extend that to harassing or bullying Jews on the basis of their being Jewish as also unlawful. But it's possible - to be clear, it's possible to express a view that's antisemitic and still have that be protected speech. In my own view, you know, wearing a keffiyeh or wearing a button that supports Palestine is not antisemitic. It's an expression of identity, it's an expression of solidarity. In practice, in the real world, there can be moments where protests that are not antisemitic cross over into antisemitism. And we actually saw that at Harvard a little more than a year ago when student protests crossed over. There was a drawing - an effigy of our president, Alan Garber, as the devil seated on a toilet seat, and, you know, in context of the history of depiction of Jews, this was very clearly antisemitic and, I think, appropriately experienced that way by President Garber. But it came as part of a series of protests that also included criticism of Israel and of its policies that would not be appropriately qualified or described as antisemitic. So it can happen at the margin and then that margin can become more central under some circumstances. And then, sadly, that can even lead to physical attacks as it has in Boulder, Colorado, and in Washington, D.C.
GROSS: As you point out in your book, many Jews who identify as progressive believe that to be Jewish is to embrace the ideal of social justice, to pursue the right and the good. And they believe that means opposing the ongoing bombing of Gaza and the blockades of food that's happened, how hard it is to get food, the children who are starving. In some ways, I think what you're suggesting is that a lot of Jews see protesting Israeli policy as their responsibility as Jews.
FELDMAN: Absolutely. For progressive Jews, the obligation coming from the biblical prophets to repair the world and achieve social justice is a universal obligation on everybody, but especially on them as Jews. And it means standing up for everybody who is endangered or who is being killed. And we see this in progressive Jewish protests against Israel's actions in Gaza and its policies, which are openly and explicitly Jewish. You know, you'll see people wrapping themselves in their prayer shawls to identify as Jews while they criticize Israel. And that's a legitimate expression of a legitimate form of Jewish belief. It's a Jewish way of criticizing Israel, and it's increasingly common in the United States and especially increasingly common among a younger generation of Jews.
GROSS: I think it's fair to say that the war in Gaza and some of Israel's policies in Israel have divided a lot of Jewish families.
FELDMAN: I couldn't agree with you more. And, you know, one can see this at Jewish holidays or really just any time that Jewish families get together with each other, that there's deep divisions. And a lot of those divisions are generational. And what you're seeing is a younger generation of Jews, Gen Z Jews and younger millennials, saying to the people in their parents' generation, Gen Xers like me, or to their grandparents, boomers, listen, we understand that you guys taught us important social justice values, and we still have those values as Jews. But you guys, you older folks, think that those values are compatible with support for Israel, and we're having trouble seeing it or we don't see it at all or we think that we have to oppose Israel actively as part of those social justice values. And then for the older generations, there's a kind hard cognitive dissonance problem where people say, well, look, it's complicated, and Israel found itself in this situation, and the attacks of October 7 were horrific and real. And, of course, Israel must have the right to defend itself. And we, too, are troubled by Israel's policies in Gaza. And then the young folks say, well, that's not good enough. You know, where's your full-throated condemnation of Israel and the older generation says, it's complicated.
And I think that's a stylized version of what the fight can look like, and it's real. And it's also expressing itself at a broader level in the American Jewish community because around two-thirds of American Jews voted for Kamala Harris. And that's a very substantial, you know, majority or even super majority. But that also means that something close to a third of Jews voted for Donald Trump, and a high percentage of those folks - not all, but a high percentage - come from the more Orthodox strands of Jewish life, and their politics tend to be more mainstream Republican. And so that's yet another division that's emerging in American Jewish life.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here.
My guest is Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, and author of the book, "To Be A Jew Today." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Harvard law professor Noah Feldman. We've been talking about how the Trump administration is punishing Harvard and also talking about antisemitism. His latest book is called "To Be A Jew Today."
In your new book, you write, (reading) Jews are trying to figure out whether to think of themselves as Jewish and if so, how and how much. Explain what you mean by that.
FELDMAN: Historically, it was often impossible for Jews to be anything other than Jews because the government or the culture wouldn't let you forget it. But happily, we don't live in that world anymore. If someone wants to be a Jew and identify as a Jew, that's a choice. And so in that context, anyone who wants to identify as Jewish or is considering it has to ask, what makes me Jewish? Why am I Jewish? What's the whole point of this? And, you know, should it affect who my friends are? Should it affect whom I marry? Should it affect my political beliefs? These are genuinely challenging issues that every thinking person of any background might find themselves thinking about, and Jews in particular have found themselves thinking about. And the point of the book is to help people think through those kinds of questions.
GROSS: Have you done a lot of thinking about that over the years, and how has your own thinking changed?
FELDMAN: I've done more thinking than I'd like to admit about those topics. And honestly, my views have evolved a lot over the course of a lifetime. I think at different points in my life, you know, I was raised in a modern Orthodox Jewish home and then I stepped away from that Jewish practice. I've rediscovered certain aspects of it in recent years in a transformational way that's more open to feeling and emotion and mysticism.
And I think I've held almost every possible position you could hold about Jewish life over the course of a lifetime. But I would say the biggest change has been opening the door to feeling and understanding that how you feel and experience the divine and connection to the Jewish people and to God is a really fundamental part of what it means to be Jewish, and we sometimes act as though it's got nothing to do with being Jewish, and that's not quite right.
GROSS: What does God mean to you? - the word God. What do you think of when you think of the word God?
FELDMAN: I think of the specifically human attempt to comprehend something grander, bigger, deeper and more fundamental than just us passing through life. And we all try to make sense of that in different ways, including people who would say, well, I'm absolutely an atheist. They, too, are interested in classically and bigger, grander things, whether that's nature or the laws of science or some other feature of the universe. To me, God incorporates all of those features. And God is also experiential. When we talk about God, we're talking about a feeling or a knowledge or an experience or a sentiment of faith or of disbelief which can feel very powerful and can motivate us in different ways in our lives that aren't necessarily just based on logic and reason.
GROSS: You've said something that really got me thinking in that, in terms of, like, the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, that that God is - often seems like a very angry, punitive God. And you say that in some ways, like, that reflects, like, your average family, in the sense that most families have some element of dysfunction. And if you read the Bible, so many of the families in the Bible have, like, terrible dysfunction. I'd like you to talk about that a little bit and how you interpret that.
FELDMAN: Sure. I think that the right way to think about Jews is as a large, loving and somewhat dysfunctional family, and the Bible already does depict the patriarchs and matriarchs in exactly that way. You know, there's no good relationships, really, between parents and children. If there's one parent loves one child, the other parent loves the other child, and then the children are at odds with each other. You know, if there's a polygamous relationship, you know, one person gets more love than the other, but doesn't have children and suffers. The Bible is full of stories like this, and I think they model the fact that the family is the first place we experience love and the family is also the first place that we experience struggle.
It's also true that the God of the Hebrew Bible profoundly loves the children of Israel and is profoundly enraged with the children of Israel pretty much at the same time. You know, the Hebrew Bible compares that relationship to the relationship of a husband with an unfaithful spouse. And the Israelites are the unfaithful spouse, and they get punished for their lack of faithfulness. And yet because they're loved, they also return. And, you know, I'm not making this up. This is just the explicit teaching of the Bible all over. And it can be very, very dramatic in the Bible's description.
And, yes, the God of the Hebrew Bible describes himself as capable of rage and of zeal and of jealousy and of always loving the children of Israel, but always being angry with them and being prepared to punish them. So I think, you know, you might ask, why would anyone want to hold such - hold beliefs or be attracted to a world like that? And I think the short answer is the Hebrew Bible is depicting the divine in a way that's relatable. You know, it's the divine through emotions that we as human beings are capable of understanding, and that includes love, and it includes struggle and pain.
GROSS: Noah Feldman, thank you so much for talking with us.
FELDMAN: Thank you so much for having me, Terry. I really appreciate it very much.
GROSS: Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard. His latest book is called "To Be A Jew Today: A New Guide To God, Israel, And The Jewish People."
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins us to discuss his new novel, "The Emperor of Gladness." Set in a fictional town in Connecticut, it follows a 19-year-old grappling with addiction and despair who forms an unexpected bond with an 82-year-old widow living with dementia. Together, they navigate memory and survival. I hope you'll join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering today from Charlie Kaier and Diana Martinez (ph). Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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