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What is Project Esther?

 In early September, the now-former Northwestern University president Michael Schill resigned his post,  even though  his colleagues praised his leadership, which spanned the last three years and saw hundreds of staff layoffs due to the loss of federal funding.
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But resigning at that critical moment was not really his idea. Schill was forced to resign when pro-Israel groups — the Anti-Defamation League, StandWithUs and the Brandeis Center — claimed he had failed to do enough to protect Jewish students at Northwestern from anti-Semitism. The organizations also attacked him for negotiating with students involved in a pro-Palestine encampment, and agreeing to fund two temporary positions for Palestinian faculty members, pay for the education of five Palestinian students and explore how the university was investing its money.

This makes Schill, who is Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors, the latest victim of Project Esther, a rightwing policy formulated by the Heritage Foundation, the same group of Trump allies who created Project 2025.

While Project 2025 lays out plans to round up and deport immigrants, take over federal agencies and install right wing allies as their directors and roll back the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, Project Esther specifically targets pro-Palestinian activists, especially in colleges and universities.

The policy takes its name from the Book of Esther in the Old Testament, which relates the story of a Jewish woman named Esther who married the king of Persia in the fourth century BCE and, from her prominent position, saved the Jews of Persia from being killed by the followers a man named Haman.

Project Esther disguises itself as “a blueprint to counter anti-semitism in the United States,” and claims that the pro-palestinian movement in the US is “part of a highly organized global Hamas support network, and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.” By using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel, Project Esther labels supporting Palestinian rights as a form of antisemitism. It also says this alleged Hamas Support Network “benefits from the support and training of America’s enemies overseas”
— whoever they might be.

Never mind that the pro-Palestinian movement in the US is primarily non-violent and largely grass roots and underfunded Schill, the most recent university president to lose his job over allegedly supporting antisemitic actions, defended himself in an oped in the Chicago Tribune saying, “I am a proud Jew who practices many of our rituals, and grew up with a love for Israel, which remains today. My family has experienced antisemitism, and so claims that I
have collaborated with antisemitic people feel like personal affronts.”

So much for Project Esther’s so-called mission to protect Jews.

Written by non-Jews, who unlike Schill, have no interest in Judaism, Project Esther is clearly just another hammer in the right wing’s toolbox for destroying the rights granted to people in the US by the Constitution and making it acceptable to quash protest against the policies of the federal government.

Professor Barry Trachtenberg, head of Jewish history studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and a member of the Academic Advisory Boards at Jewish Voice for Peace, said, “The architects of Project Esther aren’t interested in fighting antisemitism, even in this moment of rising white nationalism — instead, they’re building a machine to crush dissent by any means necessary.”

You can find more information about Project Esther on the Jewish Voice for Peace website or by listening to an interview with Professor Trachtenberg on KBBF’s Speaking of Palestine.

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​Lois Pearlman is a local theater artist, journalist and social justice activist

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