# NEWS: Trump's DOJ Sues Harvard for Antisemitism — While Silently Defunding Holocaust Education

### Courts have already ruled the administration's campaign against Harvard was illegal, yet the lawsuits keep coming — suggesting this was never about Jewish safety and always about political control.

[Kahlil Greene](https://substack.com/@kahlilgreene)

Mar 21, 2026

Yesterday, Trump’s Justice Department sued Harvard University. Again.

The charge: failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitism on campus. The remedies being sought: freeze existing federal grants, claw back billions already awarded, force Harvard to call police on protesters, and install a federal government monitor to oversee compliance.

Read that again. The federal government wants to appoint its own monitor inside Harvard University to make sure it’s policing student protesters the right way.

This is not a civil rights action. This is a takeover dressed in civil rights language.

### A judge already said this out loud.

This isn’t even the first time. Trump’s administration already froze more than $2.6 billion in Harvard research funding last year over campus protests — and a federal judge ordered those cuts reversed, calling the antisemitism rationale a **“smokescreen”** for unconstitutional retaliation against Harvard’s refusal to adopt the White House’s political line.

They lost in court. And instead of changing course, they filed a new lawsuit.

That’s not how good-faith civil rights enforcement works. That’s how political retaliation works.

### “Holocaust education” — but only the version they approve.

At the same time, DOGE hearings on education policy have pushed to strip Holocaust education materials that center enslaved women and other marginalized victims. Instead of expanding Holocaust education to include sexual violence, colonialism, and the experiences of Jewish women prisoners, officials redirected funding to a conservative Jewish organization tasked with teaching “Western values” and a narrow version of Jewish history.

So it’s not that they want more education and awareness of Jewish history. They want _a specific kind_ of awareness and education on Jewish history. They want Holocaust education that doesn’t make people ask uncomfortable questions about what our own government is doing today.

That’s propaganda.

### And then there’s what happened at Columbia, which almost nobody covered.

In January 2024, during a pro-Palestinian protest on Columbia’s Low Library steps, students reported being sprayed with a foul-smelling chemical weapon, documented to be used by the IDF. Some were vomiting. Some sought medical treatment. The university and NYPD opened an investigation, describing it as potentially “serious crimes, possibly hate crimes.”

Where was the national outrage?

Where were the congressional hearings? The funding threats? The DOJ lawsuits?

When Jewish or Israeli students face harassment (or, at least when those students aren’t supporters of the pro-Palestine protests themselves), Trump officials call elite universities “willful participants” in antisemitism and threaten their funding into submission. When Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students are chemically attacked, the administration has almost nothing to say.

If this were truly about protecting all students from hate, that silence would be impossible to explain.

### This is what’s actually happening.

This administration isn’t defending Jewish safety as such. It’s defending a specific political project: punish universities that tolerate pro-Palestinian activism, narrow which Jewish voices count as legitimate, and erase Palestinian and Muslim vulnerability from the civil rights conversation entirely.

The judge saw it. The pattern is obvious. But mainstream coverage will report each of these stories in isolation — the Harvard lawsuit here, the DOGE hearings there, Columbia somewhere else — and almost nobody will connect the dots.

That’s what I’m here to do.

## Here’s the truth about this newsletter.

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## Sources

1. Brasch, Ben, and Maham Javaid. "NYPD Investigates Alleged Chemical Attack on Pro-Palestinian Protesters." _The Washington Post_, January 24, 2024.

2. American Council of Learned Societies, American Historical Association, and Modern Language Association. "Discovery Released in Lawsuit by Humanities Groups Reveals ChatGPT-Powered Process by DOGE in Cancelling Grants." _PR Newswire_, March 7, 2026.

3. "Lawsuit: DOGE Used AI to Tag Jewish-Themed Grants 'DEI.'" _J. The Jewish News of Northern California_, March 10, 2026.

4. Bebinger, Martha. “Federal Judge Rules That Trump Administration Unlawfully Cut Nearly $3 Billion of Harvard’s Research Funding.” _The Boston Globe_, September 3, 2025.

5. “Federal Grant Cuts at Harvard Illegal, Judge Rules.” _Harvard Magazine_, September 18, 2025.

6. Associated Press. “Trump Administration Sues Harvard Over Antisemitism Allegations in Latest Targeting of an Elite University.” _NBC News_, March 20, 2026.

7. Lorin, Janet, and Zoe Tillman. “DOJ Sues Harvard Over Alleged Antisemitism on Campus.” _Bloomberg_, March 20, 2026.