JTA — As head of the nonprofit Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Kenneth Marcus was early — critics would say premature — in using aggressive legal tactics to fight antisemitism on college campuses and other public spaces.

The former assistant secretary for civil rights in the first Trump administration, Marcus remembers when other Jewish organizations said his organization’s tactics —  which include suing universities for not adequately addressing antisemitism and challenging educators and universities under the Education Department’s Title VI civil rights statute — was counterproductive and, in conflating anti-Israel rhetoric with antisemitism, targeted speech protected by the First Amendment.

The liberal Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which includes a number of Jewish groups, opposed his nomination to the administration post, saying he used the Title VI complaint process “to chill a particular political point of view.”

Others objected to the center’s tone. An American Jewish Committee official internally called an op-ed he wrote about campus antisemitism in 2022 “inflammatory.”

Nowadays, more than a year into Israel’s war with Hamas and amid widespread complaints about anti-Israel activism on college campuses and antisemitism in the streets, he is seeing a shift.

“It is my consistent sense that my approach to campus antisemitism is shared by a very wide swath of the Jewish community, including Jewish communal organizations from center right to center left,” he said in an interview. “There was a time some years ago where that wasn’t necessarily the case.”

In a profile earlier this year, calling him “The Man Who Helped Redefine Campus Antisemitism,” the New York Times wrote that “his tactics have been widely copied by other groups.”

Among the groups that in the past year have partnered with the Brandeis Center (which has no affiliation with Brandeis University) are the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel International, the Jewish Federations of North America and the AJC — the very group that circulated an internal memo criticizing Marcus in 2022.

Marcus isn’t alone in seeing a change in what American Jews see as ideologically mainstream. With the incoming Trump administration promising a crackdown on the kind of campus activism that left many students, parents and observers feeling alienated and isolated, a historically liberal Jewish community is increasingly embracing goals and tactics often seen at odds with historically liberal positions.

“I think that we [Jews] became alarmed at some of the initiatives happening in universities, happening in other settings, and are moving to figure out a way to limit that movement,” said Steven Windmueller, emeritus professor of Jewish communal studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. “And in the process, it has also shifted the debate and context of where we are on free speech.”

And it’s not just free speech, said Windmueller. Jews who felt burned by the left’s harsh criticism of Israel since the start of the war are questioning the wisdom of joining coalitions with groups with whom they have been traditionally aligned, on issues like civil rights, immigration, LGBTQ rights and abortion. Jews who historically have embraced diversity at elite universities — in part owing to memories of having been........

© The Times of Israel