The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on Thursday that would cut off federal student aid to colleges and universities engaged in boycotts of Israel, in a vote that split largely along party lines but drew a notable bloc of Democratic defectors.
The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act, sponsored by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), passed 237-169. Thirty-three Democrats broke with their party leadership to support the bill, while only two Republicans, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), voted against it.
The bill requires colleges and universities to certify annually that they are not engaged in a “nonexpressive commercial boycott” of Israel in order to remain eligible for federal student aid. Schools that fail to certify will be listed publicly by the Department of Education. The legislation also bars institutions receiving Title VI international education funding from academic boycotts, requiring reciprocal academic exchange instead. The measure applies to boycotts of Israel and of companies and institutions operating under Israeli law, including in Judea and Samaria.
Gottheimer framed the bill as narrowly targeted at institutional discrimination rather than speech. “No student, no professor should be shut out of research, study abroad opportunities, or academic partnerships, or feel unwelcome in the classroom because of where they’re from or what religion they practice,” he said ahead of the vote. “Yet that’s exactly what the boycott-divest-sanction movement seeks to do — targeting one country and one religion: Israel and Judaism.”
Foxx was more direct in describing the bill as a response to campus unrest since October 7, 2023. “The antisemitic rot that has corroded college campuses must be eradicated — enough is enough,” she said. “Today, the House sent a clear message: if an institution of higher education chooses to capitulate to the caustic BDS movement, there will be consequences.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) rejected the bill as a “poorly-written Republican bill” that would hand President Trump “the power to punitively launch political attacks on our colleges and universities,” while pledging that a Democratic majority would advance what he called “unifying legislation” against antisemitism.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), co-chair of the House Jewish Caucus, offered a more layered objection. Nadler said he “strongly” opposes the BDS movement and believes it “can veer into antisemitism,” but voted no on First Amendment grounds. “No matter how strongly I oppose the BDS movement, I also believe that those who engage in BDS have a First Amendment right to do so,” he said, calling the bill “a direct and gross violation of the First Amendment.” He also objected that the bill “treats the entire West Bank as part of Israel, erasing the Green Line and undermining efforts to promote a two-state solution” — an objection that, notably, treats Jewish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria as the problem rather than the solution.
The Green Line Nadler invoked is not a negotiated border. It is the 1949 Armistice Line, drawn at the end of Israel’s War of Independence to mark where fighting stopped between Israeli and Jordanian forces. The armistice agreement itself, in Article II, states that the line was established “without prejudice to future territorial settlements” and was “not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary.” No subsequent treaty, including the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, restored it as a sovereign border. Describing the bill as “erasing” the Green Line therefore assigns legal weight to a line that was never intended, by the parties who drew it, to carry any.
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, circulated a memo urging Democrats to oppose the bill on similar free-speech grounds, citing opposition from J Street and the American Federation of Teachers. The Jewish Democratic Council of America also opposed the measure.
On the other side, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Combat Antisemitism Movement all backed the bill. AIPAC called it protection for “pro-Israel students from discriminatory boycotts and efforts to deny them the ability to study in Israel or learn from Israeli professors, while fully protecting First Amendment rights.” The Republican Jewish Coalition noted that university adoption of BDS was “the key demand campus protesters confronted university administrators with during the period of antisemitic violence and unrest that swept American campuses after October 7, 2023.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations called the bill “a blatant attempt to hold American students’ financial futures hostage in order to shield the Israeli government and entities operating under Israeli law from peaceful economic pressure.” The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee raised First Amendment objections as well, with its president, Jenin Younes, arguing that “the Supreme Court has made clear that the government cannot condition its funding on suppression of First Amendment-protected activity.”
The 33 Democrats who voted for the bill included Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Ritchie Torres (D-NY), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Haley Stevens (D-MI), Kathy Castor (D-FL), Josh Riley (D-NY) and Dina Titus (D-NV), among others — a mix of members with substantial Jewish constituencies and members who have positioned themselves as centrists within the caucus.
The bill’s Republican and Jewish-organizational supporters treated the target of BDS as inseparable from antisemitism rather than a separate, purely political stance. That framing tracks the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, adopted by the U.S. State Department and dozens of governments and universities, which lists among its examples “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” BDS, under that definition, is not simply criticism of Israeli policy but a movement whose stated aims — the “right of return” for descendants of 1948 Palestinian refugees and the end of what it calls “occupation” — would functionally dissolve Israel as a Jewish-majority state, which is why Jewish groups across the political spectrum, including some who oppose this specific bill on First Amendment grounds, describe BDS as at minimum adjacent to, if not constitutive of, antisemitism.
Gottheimer’s and Foxx’s supporters pointed to a documented surge in campus antisemitism since October 7, 2023 as the backdrop for the bill. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, released in April 2025, recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents nationwide, the highest total since the organization began tracking in 1979 and a 344 percent increase over the preceding five years. Incidents on college and university campuses rose 84 percent from 2023 to 2024, reaching 1,694 cases and accounting for 18 percent of all incidents nationwide, the largest share campuses have made up in the audit’s history. For the first time since the audit began, a majority of all antisemitic incidents, 58 percent, involved Israel or Zionism, with roughly half occurring at or near anti-Israel rallies; ADL tracked more than 5,000 such rallies in 2024, of which 2,596 contained antisemitic messaging in signs, chants or speeches. The spring 2024 encampment movement, which spread to dozens of campuses, drove much of the campus increase and led to congressional hearings before the House Education and Workforce Committee that preceded the resignations of university presidents at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where it has no companion legislation and faces an uncertain path to passage before the end of the current congressional term.
