BY THE COALITION FOR ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
On Tuesday this week, a subcommittee of the House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism.” Subcommittee Chair Rick Allen (R-GA) began the meeting with the following remarks:
Today we will hear about how unions like the United Electrical Workers and a United Auto Workers affiliate, A Better NYLAG, would rather defend union members who engage in disruptive, discriminatory, and antisemitic behavior than fulfill their duty to fairly represent all the workers they represent. We will hear today about how their unions are selling them down the river, even though Jewish workers have supported unions and been leaders in the labor movement for generations.
The hearing featured carefully curated witnesses who testified to the creation of a “hostile antisemitic atmosphere” in American unions, alleged that union members were forced into a “Jewish ghetto,” and relayed anecdotal reports of being “traumatized” by pro-Palestinian advocates in the workplace.
The subcommittee hearing is an all-too-clear sequel to the Trump administrations’ ongoing attempts to weaponize antisemitism to discipline, punish, silence and control institutions of higher education. The committee members included Elise Stefanik (R-NY) who spearheaded the House Committee on Workplace and Education which grilled University Presidents from Penn, Harvard, Columbia and other institutions on the grounds that their campuses were not protecting Jewish students. In addition, a key witness at the hearing was David Rubenstein, a Ph.D. candidate in History at Cornell. Rubenstein has filed a lawsuit against Cornell’s Graduate Student Union claiming religious objection to paying dues to the union. Rubenstein is Jewish and claims discrimination based on religious viewpoint.
That the House hearing was about much more than antisemitism was revealed as Rubenstein’s case unfolded. Rubenstein is being supported by the National Right to Work Legal Foundation. NRWLF has claimed that Rubenstein and a second plaintiff should win the case based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination, including on the basis of religion.
In support of Rubenstein NRWLF attorney Glenn Taubman testified that federal labor laws give unions “unique privileges granted to no other private organization in America,” saying, “Unions’ actions that are overtly hostile to Jews are coddled and protected by federal law,” due to the broad view of “protected concerted activity” taken by the National Labor Relations Board under President Biden. As reported by the publication JNS, Taubman told the panel that Congress ought to redefine graduate students as “students,” rather than “employees,” and strengthen Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act “to better protect employees of faith from unions’ antisemitism and radical ideologies.” Taubman testified:
These would be small steps to restore individual employees’ right to not be part of a forced collective that takes hateful, pro-Hamas views on foreign events happening more than 5,000 miles away from the workplace. What could be more American than that?
Indeed. The House hearing makes clear that the new McCarthyite front against “un-Americanism” in the Trump administration’s war on its own people is the weaponization of antisemitism to destroy the American labor movement. Anti-laborism and weaponized antisemitism are logical and willing partners. Trump’s regime is committed to smashing all sectors of civil society where opposition might live. Organized labor, a critical feature of a healthy democracy, is one of those sectors, and weaponized antisemitism is the state’s hammer. The weaponization of antisemitism is also being used to advance Trump’s overall authoritarian program, undermining democratic processes and principles.
But it is the conjuncture of right-to-work advocacy with support for the Israeli-U.S. genocide which should compel our deeper attention. Attacks on unions as spaces of workers’ rights and organizing is a necessary step for the far right in advancing a logic of unfettered capitalist power. Attacking unions as agents of collective bargaining, workplace protections, and solidarity has been a fundamental dream of the free-market far right as long as neoliberalism has existed. Taubman’s calls for graduate workers to lose their status as employees is a scorched-earth effort to eradicate the very basis of unions: their members.
We can see now that the state’s interest in protecting the genocide, defending oligarchy, and advancing authoritarianism is at root anti-worker, anti-union, and anti-democratic.
Historians of fascism will have no trouble recognizing this conjuncture: in both Italy and Germany, the assault on trade unions was a key first step in the elimination of opposition to fascist government. That’s why trade unions made the cut in Pastor Martin Neimöller’s famous poem “First They Came”:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
So what should the American trade union movement be doing today in the face of these facts?
The first thing is speaking out against them. It is important that union leaders in all sectors denounce the House hearings for what they are: the new McCarthyism.
Second, trade unions should continue to use all available resources, including the law, to expose what Judge J. Alison Burroughs’ called the “smokescreen” of antisemitism in attacks on American institutions of higher education, now applied to the labor movement. The courts are not likely to end the state’s attacks on labor, but they should be used where appropriate to push back.
Third, the American labor movement should divest itself of support for genocide. Claims that speaking up on behalf of Palestinians will “divide” the labor movement are a harmful myth. The American Association of University Professors has added more than 6,000 new members in the past year while also speaking out about genocide and scholasticide and while opposing attempts to re-define and weaponize anti-semitism. More leadership of that kind is needed across all sectors of the labor movement.
Fourth, we need a labor movement that protects the First Amendment rights of its members to speak on public issues whatever they may be, without fear of retaliation or recrimination. Labor leaders using their own voices to condemn the new McCarthyism would help set an example for the rest of the movement.
Finally, we need a labor movement that leads the fight against and denounces racism of all kinds, including anti-semitism. As scholar Benjamin Balthaser has noted, the American labor movement has a proud tradition of leading fights against racism in the name of protecting the rights of all workers.
No one at the House hearing talked about the fact that neo-Nazis violently attacked peaceful pro-Palestinian protestors at UCLA in the Spring of 2024, some of whom were members of United Autoworkers 4811. Indeed the UAW has filed an unfair labor practice lawsuit against the University for failing to protect them. Instead, the House subcommittee alleges that the UAW is itself “antisemitic.” This disquieting fact demonstrates the ongoing alignment between far right and white nationalist forces in the U.S. willing to give a free pass to fascism, while condemning its victims.
It was in response to just such threats against higher ed workers that in 2023 the Coalition of Action in Higher Education was formed. An alliance between the American Association of University Professors, Higher Education Labor United, and the Debt Collective, CAHE organized a national Day of Action for Higher Ed on April 17, 2024 and 2025. In 2025, more than 200 campuses held demonstrations signaling the need to protect the right to unionize, to strike, as well as the need to protect the right to dissent, including academic freedom. CAHE has mounted a strong defense of DEI and supported the Sanctuary Campus Network movement to protect vulnerable migrant and international students:
Since the April 17th Day of Action, the Coalition has formed three caucuses taking up key issues facing higher education in the current moment: challenging the power of Boards of Trustees and governing bodies; organizing for Palestine in Higher Education, and an Anti-Fascism Caucus. We also, as one of us put it in Truthout, “nurture our collective capacity to imagine a very differentuniversity than the one we inhabit today.”
The Coalition is in planning for its 2026 Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17th. On that day it will affirm the rights of higher ed workers to unionize, to protest, to strike, to speak, and to speak for Palestine. We invite readers here to join us. You can email us at DayOfAction@proton.me.
The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed (CAHE) consists of rank and file organizers and academic workers focused on higher ed and cross-sector coalition-building.
