On June 6, the United States Department of Justice indicted eight individuals associated with the University of Michigan “for their alleged roles in conspiracies to threaten University of Michigan leaders, law enforcement, and businesses, including the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.”
According to the Department of Justice, over the past two years, “Seemingly prompted by their perception of the University of Michigan’s and other victims’ purported financial support of Israel, the conspirators insisted publicly that they ‘must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand divestment by any means necessary.’”
The indictment states: “Their criminal activity included spray painting threats, breaking windows, and throwing glass jars filled with noxious chemicals into family homes.”
Like many other universities around the country, the University of Michigan, where I teach, has been roiled by protests since October, 2023. Although the vast majority of the protesters have been peaceful, the protest movement has also been characterized by isolated acts of vandalism and intimidation at the private homes and businesses of university leaders and by the use of rhetoric that can be interpreted as calls for violence.
After the federal indictment was announced and frightening details of the alleged campaign to intimidate university officials were revealed, it was easier to understand the tensions that pervaded campus for the last two years. Many social media posts compiled in the indictment included threatening phrases such as “you cannot hide,” and accused campus leaders of complicity in genocide.
One might have expected the leaders of the protest movement to denounce these heinous acts and condemn those who had crossed the line, which they could have done while continuing to defend their right to peaceful and legal protest.
Instead, about two dozen protesters showed up at the federal courthouse to demonstrate their support for the indicted individuals and a coalition of campus organizations issued a “joint statement of solidarity” urging the authorities to drop the charges.
“The state is seeking to criminalize the struggle for divestment in any way possible,” the statement asserts, “because the popular movement for Palestine is a threat to the neo-liberal order of the United States that relies on the support of the masses through compliance and indifference.”
Beyond protest
It is one thing to challenge the specific charge of “conspiracy to commit threats in interstate and foreign commerce” and to oppose the federal government’s targeting of legal protest in other instances. But they could have followed the example of a lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who contested the specific charges while calling the text exchanges “reprehensible” and the vandalism “indefensible.”
Each of the acts the defendants had been accused of made headlines and was duly noted by the ADL and other organizations that track antisemitic incidents on campuses. Even before these incidents, the ADL had awarded the university a grade of C in its “Antisemitism Report Card.” And in March 2025, the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights had announced that the university was one of 60 schools in the United States under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.
The Office of Civil Rights, like many other organizations around the globe, uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism, a 2016 declaration that, despite the misgivings of its lead author, has been broadly embraced.
This definition, which vaguely defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” also provides several examples linking antisemitism to certain criticisms of Israel. None of these examples, though, would decisively address any of the recent disturbances at the University of Michigan.
After all, not all the victims of the vandalism were Jewish, even though Jewish community members with ties to Israel were disproportionately impacted.
Those, like me, deeply concerned with rising antisemitism should note that while antisemitism might be a motivating factor, charges of antisemitism are not always the best prism through which to combat these incidents. Those acts that are criminal – like vandalism – should appropriately be prosecuted through the criminal justice system. Those that specifically violate university regulations should be subjected to appropriate university procedures, and the culprits should be sanctioned, if warranted.
Rights and responsibilities
The real conundrum for those of us actively combating antisemitism is responding to the acts that do not actually constitute criminal activity or specifically violate existing university regulations: the banner that flew over the April 2024 encampment reading “Long Live the Intifada,” or the professor whose university website reads “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea.”
Statements such as these may not be explicitly antisemitic – even according to the IHRA definition – but can and are often interpreted as intimidating and threatening.
These more difficult cases may instead fall under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which originally prohibited discrimination based on race, color, and national origin in federally funded programs and activities. Recent guidelines for interpreting Title VI have expanded enforcement to include discrimination and harassment of individuals based on actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.
These new definitions of protected classes more clearly include Jews and can be effectively used to protect Israeli students or Jewish students with ties to Israel without getting into debates over the meaning of antisemitism.
In the words of a May 7, 2024 letter from the Department of Education, what matters is “whether the conduct was unwelcome, subjectively and objectively offensive, and so severe or pervasive that it created a hostile environment and whether the university took prompt and effective steps to end the harassment that created the hostile environment and prevent it from recurring.”
The word “antisemitism” does not appear, and we need not determine whether the act was technically antisemitic to combat it.
In the case of the indicted individuals, it is enough to recognize that attacking the homes and property of individuals to intimidate them is a criminal activity that needs to be prosecuted.
The challenge facing us now is to ensure that these cases are adjudicated fairly, consistently, and uniformly – not something that can be taken for granted in the current environment. After all, the day after announcing it was opening the 60 investigations into violations of Title VI, the Department of Education laid off nearly half its staff.
A year later, US President Donald Trump announced his intention to eliminate the department altogether. These are precisely the institutions that we need to ensure the safety of all students on campus.
The challenge is to preserve freedom of speech while ensuring that protest does not create a hostile environment or outright discrimination against individuals of shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote in their statement on campus violence and arrests, “by acting decisively to defend protected speech while preventing violence, colleges and universities can preserve the safety and stability required for the discussion across differences they are uniquely equipped to facilitate.”■
Jeffrey Veidlinger is the director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, University of Michigan.