Adam Milstein: The Harbinger of DEI’s Dangers to Jews

Since President Trump took office on January 20, 2025, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government have been in his crosshairs to dismantle. On day one of his presidency, he issued a sweeping executive order banning any and all diversity programs across the executive branch. DEI office staffers were put on paid leave, DEI webpages were taken down, and all trainings and DEI-related contracts were halted. Federal workers have even been encouraged to report any DEI-related activities to the Office of Personnel Management. 

On January 27, 2025, Trump issued another executive order banning DEI programs in the military. Pete Hegseth, his pick for Secretary of Defense, has declared that “the era of DEI is gone at the defense department.” Despite a razor-thin confirmation margin, with Vice President Vance breaking the tie in his favor, Hegseth enters the defense department with a mandate from President Trump to rid the military and defense bureaucracy of any race-based preferential treatment. Going forward, military leaders will be chosen based on “colorblind and merit-based” parameters only.

Many institutions, such as the ACLU, see these efforts as regressive and harmful, undoing “decades of federal anti-discrimination policy, spanning Democratic and Republican presidential administrations alike.” Trump’s knee-jerk reaction to blame DEI, without evidence, for the tragic January 29 airliner crash in Washington, D.C., was interpreted by many liberals as representative of the longtime conservative vendetta against such programs. What seems to be missing from both Trump’s breakneck dismantling of DEI and its defense by liberal institutions is an explanation of the complex reasons why DEI programs have become so problematic for so many groups. 

Adam Milstein, a Los Angeles-based venture philanthropist and American of Israeli descent, has written tirelessly on this subject, especially as it relates to the marginalization of Jews in every sphere where DEI is prevalent. Milstein is the co-founder of the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation, a nonprofit in Los Angeles founded with a mission to support a network of organizations that strengthen American values, support the U.S.-Israel alliance and combat hatred and bigotry in all forms. These organizations work on a range of issues, such as antisemitism education on college campuses, monitoring the media for anti-Israel bias, promoting U.S. interests in the Middle East and combatting the delegitimization of Israel.

Milstein has been sounding the alarm on the dangers to Jews of progressive frameworks like DEI and Critical Race Theory (CRT) since well before Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and the anti-Israel reactions of American progressives that immediately followed. After the attack, he explained in a piece for the Washington Times why these reactions were such a shock to many Jews: 

[L]iberal American Jews have long supported progressive causes. From supporting the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s to fighting for LGBTQ rights to supporting critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in education, liberal American Jews have often been at the front lines of promoting progressive causes. Instead of condemning the terrorists who slaughtered, tortured and kidnapped our people, [our political leaders and fellow activists] called us colonizers.

The labels “colonizer” and “settler-colonialist” originate from the trendy anti-colonial, anti-imperialist bent that academia has taken on in recent years in an effort to lift up historically marginalized peoples and voices from their “oppressors.” It’s no surprise that DEI emerged from this same worldview. Milstein describes DEI as a framework that, in theory, was “supposed to foster inclusive environments that welcome those of all racial and religious backgrounds.” In an article for The Jerusalem Post, Milstein stated that “[t]he asserted goals of DEI are positive: to promote the representation, participation, and fair treatment of historically marginalized groups.”

However, DEI measures have been aggressively implemented in universities, government, cultural institutions and the corporate world in such a way that they often have the opposite effect: marginalizing groups who need its advocacy, most notably Jews. Milstein argues that DEI propagates an “‘us vs. them’ mentality” that “promote[s] victimhood.” He believes that DEI: has been deployed to advance a radical agenda that undermines fundamental American values by promoting equality of outcome over equality of opportunity, collective identity (race, gender, etc.) over individual character, censorship of opposing viewpoints over freedom of speech, and a victim culture that crudely bifurcates society into oppressors and the oppressed.

Thus, Jews are not “the right kind” of minority to DEI proponents, Milstein says.

They and the Jewish state, he laments, are “maliciously portray[ed]” as “vicious oppressors” in the DEI mindset. Because Jews can pass as white and because many of them have found financial and cultural success, they are seen as oppressors and colonizers of other, less fortunate groups.

“This line of thinking has allowed antisemites to come out of the shadows under the guise of righteousness, and it sets an incredibly dangerous precedent,” Milstein says.

Tabia Lee, a former DEI department head at Silicon Valley’s De Anza College, wrote in a New York Post article that she was told by colleagues she “shouldn’t raise issues about Jewish inclusion or antisemitism” because “Jews are ‘white oppressors’ and our job as faculty and staff members was to ‘decenter whiteness.” She pushed back against this and was eventually fired. In this same vein, Milstein cites a Heritage Foundation study which shows that DEI staffers’ social media accounts “exhibit a remarkable level of virulence against the State of Israel” compared to positive feelings towards China, whose human rights abuses are well-documented.

Across several articles over the last year, Milstein has made clear that the ideology that fuels DEI is a threat to Jews because of the pernicious antisemitism it breeds. Though haphazard, President Trump’s dismantling of DEI in government and the military could be a positive step toward its reform nationwide, but only if those who immediately come to its defense understand its flaws. Once President Trump is out of office, the political pendulum may very well swing back to the left, with DEI programs widespread in academia and our cultural institutions once more. Should that happen, Jews and non-Jews alike must advocate for a DEI that does not demonize certain groups in order to lift up others. As Milstein has said countless times, this strategy is nothing less than an insult to the liberal values America was founded on.