The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $10 million grant to the Tikvah Fund, a Jewish think tank and educational institution, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to battle anti-Semitism.

The grant should set at ease the minds of those who feared that the new direction of federal humanities grants would leave minorities behind, or that it would ignore the president’s promises to combat Jew-hatred in education.

But that did not happen with the mind of one Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, another think tank focusing on Jewish issues. Kurtzer sees Tikvah as an ideological competitor to his own organization, and he is distraught, bizarrely and rather shamefully, at the support for “Tikvah’s ‘Jewish Civilization Project,’ which will examine Jewish history, culture, and identity in the broader context of Western history, with the goal of countering the pathology of anti-Semitism through greater understanding of the enduring moral, religious, and intellectual contributions of the Jewish people to the Western world and, in particular, to the United States of America.”

Kurtzer says the grant to Tikvah must be understood within “the framework” of authoritarianism on the part of the Trump administration.

He says he is concerned about the distortion of the “marketplace of ideas,” in which, he says, Trump is pulling funding from programs he is ideologically opposed to in order to benefit his “friends and boosters.”

This is sheer projection. The project being funded by this grant surely is a worthy goal and well-targeted to address the concerns of the Jewish community, if one is an intellectual, as Kurtzer claims to be. That is, unless you just don’t like Tikvah. And that seems to be guiding principle of Kurtzer’s post.

Kurtzer is not, for example, against any federal funding of the Jewish corner of the humanities. Indeed, he laments that money from the NEH was taken “from Jewish Studies scholars” earlier this year only to be reallocated to other programs. Some of the rescinded grants, for example, would have boosted Yiddish-language programs through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Nor is he opposed to groups accepting federal grants. “Organizations dependent on philanthropy will raise and take money as they see fit, and most organizations have to be opportunists when presented with this kind of windfall,” he writes.

Instead, Kurtzer returns time and again to his theme of “authoritarianism.” Trump’s efforts to boost Jewish education through non-left-wing causes are, to Kurtzer, problematic merely for partisan reasons. “Jewish vulnerabilities are real after October 7,” he writes, “which make Jews desperate to have our fears affirmed and for powerful allies to fight on our behalf; and as a result, many of our leaders and our people are embracing these authoritarian power plays under the morally misguided approach that the ends justify the means.”

So it’s authoritarianism if Trump funds Tikvah—but democracy if Trump funds Yiddish-language studies. Got it.

Rather than the dark night of fascism descending upon America and its Jews, there is a more realistic explanation of the funding shifts. October 7 and its aftermath showed the need for some new ideas on fighting anti-Semitism and boosting Jewish education. The “market,” to use Kurtzer’s terminology, is crying out for programs that are proudly Jewish and Zionist while deeply rooted in a reverence for America’s founding ideals. Tikvah seeks to meet that need, and the organization has a record that offers reasons for optimism. Kurtzer’s objections are petty and personal and partisan, not to mention hypocritical. There’s a Tikvah course or two he could take that would have him thinking more clearly, if that were possible.