Rep. Tim Walberg’s weaponization of antisemitism neatly fulfills his donors’ agenda against unions and public education.
By Derek Seidman ,
October 22, 2025
Chairman Rep. Tim Walberg speaks as Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer appears for a House Committee on Education and Workforce hearing on Capitol Hill on June 5, 2025, in Washington, D.C.Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
In late 2023, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina made headlines when she used her position as chair of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce to stage something akin to a show trial. Committee members berated the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania about their failures to confront alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In the fallout from the hearings, both Penn’s and Harvard’s presidents resigned.
No longer the committee chair, Foxx now has a successor in Rep. Tim Walberg, a hard right Michigan Republican who has wasted little time carrying on Foxx’s work. Under Walberg’s leadership, the House Committee on Education and Workforce has continued weaponizing charges of antisemitism to attack labor unions and universities.
And just like Foxx, whom Truthout profiled in early 2024, Walberg is backed by a slew of wealthy donors who have long worked to undermine the labor movement, remake higher education, privatize public schools, attack teachers unions, and bolster support for Israel. These donors range from former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, to a former president and current board member of AIPAC who is one of Michigan’s top political donors, to Marc Rowan, the private equity billionaire who has played a critical role in the ongoing assault on higher education and Palestine solidarity.
Mapping out key figures in the donor network behind Tim Walberg makes one thing clear: Supporters of the labor movement, defenders of universities and public education, and people who care about freedom and justice for Palestinians have common opponents in Walberg and the nexus of conservative and corporate power backing him.
Committee Hearings
Under Walberg, who is serving his ninth term in Congress and represents Michigan’s 5th district, the House Committee on Education and Workforce has launched investigations and hearings into alleged antisemitism at universities and public schools and within labor unions. Its investigations often draw on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which can be wielded to equate any criticism of Israel and Zionism with hatred toward Jewish people. This distorted definition has been weaponized to repress expressions of solidarity with Palestine against the backdrop of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.
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In late 2023, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina made headlines when she used her position as chair of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce to stage something akin to a show trial. Committee members berated the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania about their failures to confront alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In the fallout from the hearings, both Penn’s and Harvard’s presidents resigned.
No longer the committee chair, Foxx now has a successor in Rep. Tim Walberg, a hard right Michigan Republican who has wasted little time carrying on Foxx’s work. Under Walberg’s leadership, the House Committee on Education and Workforce has continued weaponizing charges of antisemitism to attack labor unions and universities.
And just like Foxx, whom Truthout profiled in early 2024, Walberg is backed by a slew of wealthy donors who have long worked to undermine the labor movement, remake higher education, privatize public schools, attack teachers unions, and bolster support for Israel. These donors range from former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos, to a former president and current board member of AIPAC who is one of Michigan’s top political donors, to Marc Rowan, the private equity billionaire who has played a critical role in the ongoing assault on higher education and Palestine solidarity.
Mapping out key figures in the donor network behind Tim Walberg makes one thing clear: Supporters of the labor movement, defenders of universities and public education, and people who care about freedom and justice for Palestinians have common opponents in Walberg and the nexus of conservative and corporate power backing him.
Committee Hearings
Under Walberg, who is serving his ninth term in Congress and represents Michigan’s 5th district, the House Committee on Education and Workforce has launched investigations and hearings into alleged antisemitism at universities and public schools and within labor unions. Its investigations often draw on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which can be wielded to equate any criticism of Israel and Zionism with hatred toward Jewish people. This distorted definition has been weaponized to repress expressions of solidarity with Palestine against the backdrop of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.
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Virginia Foxx uses her position of influence to amplify the GOP’s war on universities through congressional hearings. By Derek Seidman , Truthout March 9, 2024
For example, the committee held hearings in September titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” that focused on the United Electrical Workers and United Auto Workers, which were among the earliest unions to back a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel. One of the testifiers at the hearings was a longtime staff attorney with the Koch-aligned National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is dedicated to crushing the labor movement and helped argue the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME case in which the Supreme Court ruled that government workers aren’t required to pay dues to unions that represent them in bargaining.
In September 2025, Walberg sent a letter to the National Education Association stating that the House Committee on Education and Workforce was investigating the union for alleged “antisemitism,” and announcing it as an investigation into the NEA’s “Jew-hatred” on his website. Walberg’s letter noted “serious concerns that antisemitism has infected the nation’s largest teachers’ union,” citing, for example, the vote by the NEA members to break with the Anti-Defamation League, which has been criticized for inflating its tally of antisemitic incidents by including criticism of Israel and Zionism, and for targeting the anti-Zionist left and equating criticism of Israel with far right, white supremacist extremism.
The committee is also targeting universities and medical schools. Their investigations and hearings also cherry-pick extreme and outlying examples as means for broadly attacking universities, labor unions, and Palestine solidarity.
Walberg’s investigations and hearings exist within a wider constellation of efforts to instrumentalize charges of antisemitism toward a converged assault on labor unions, higher education, public education, the Palestine solidarity movement, and the U.S. left, ranging from the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther to attacks by billionaire-backed groups and Zionist organizations on unions like the Massachusetts Teachers Association and United Teachers Los Angeles.
Far Right Politics and Israel Support
Walberg has taken a host of far right positions. He backed the December 2020 effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan and voted to overturn the 2020 election results immediately after the January 6, 2021 capital insurrection.
Walberg is a staunch proponent of school “choice” and weakening of federal oversight of education, and was “delighted” by Trump’s executive order closing the Department of Education. Walberg’s own constituents haveprotested his education policies. He also backs federal and state right-to-work laws and has supported efforts to incapacitate the National Labor Relations Board.
Speaking about climate change in 2017, Walberg said that “if there’s a real problem, [God] can take care of it.” Walberg’s top corporate donors have included utility and fossil fuel giants like DTE Energy, CMS Energy, and Koch Industries.
Walberg faced major backlash when he spoke at Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast in early 2024 and appeared to endorse the country’s draconian anti-homosexuality law, though Walberg subsequently tried to distance himself from the comments.
Walberg is also a staunch backer of Israel. Speaking at the University of Michigan in 2019, he praised the “moral clarity” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. “In his presence, I understand very clearly he knows good from evil, right from wrong, success from failure,” said Walberg.
The Michigan Daily reported that “a large reason” Walberg “is adamant about the United States supporting Israel is because he believes God supports Israel.” Before joining Congress, Walberg was a division leader of the Moody Bible Institute, a conservative evangelical private college.
Walberg made headlines in March 2024 when he told constituents that “[w]e shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid” in Gaza and that “[i]t should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
One of Walberg’s top backers is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose PAC channeled $60,656 to Walberg between April 2022 and August 2025. AIPAC was the top donor to Walberg’s campaign committee during the 2021-2022 and 2023-2024 election cycles.
Pro-Israel and Anti-Palestine Solidarity Donors
Walberg’s donor network is dominated by wealthy elites dedicated to attacking unions, privatizing education, and advancing corporate interests. Key donors are also influential with the pro-Israel lobby.
One major Walberg backer is Edward C. Levy Jr., a construction company magnate who once called Henry Kissinger a “close friend” and is one of Michigan’s most prolific political donors. Levy Jr. and his wife Linda Dresner Levy have given at least $77,600 to Walberg since 2006, including $47,200 since 2020.
A 2010 profile of Levy Jr. noted that “a love for Israel drives him.” Levy Jr. recalled visiting Israel in 1951, where his father, Ed Levy Sr., had built a rock quarry and crushing plant, to train Israelis to operate the equipment. “They’re great at killing Arab enemies, but they’re also great at killing machinery,” Levy Sr. told his son.
Levy Jr. joined AIPAC in the 1960s and rose to become AIPAC’s president in 1988. Today, he remains on AIPAC’s board of directors. He and his wife are enormous donors to AIPAC, giving over $1.1 million to three AIPAC-tied PACs since 2020 alone.
Walberg celebrated the centennial of Levy Jr.’s company, Edw. C. Levy Co., in the Congressional record in 2017.
One of Walberg’s most noteworthy infusions of new donations has come from Marc Rowan, the billionaire head of Apollo Global Management, a top private equity firm.
Rowan has helped spearhead attacks on the campus Palestine solidarity movement over the past two years. He is a big donor to the University of Pennsylvania and chairs the board of Penn’s Wharton Business School. In late 2023, he led a donor revolt over a Palestinian literary festival held at Penn and drove the successful effort to oust Penn President Liz Magill.
Just over a month after Magill’s resignation, which came days after Virginia Foxx staged the “antisemitism” hearings with Magill and other university presidents on December 5, 2023, Rowan and his wife donated $13,300 to Foxx and soon hosted a fundraiser for her.
Now, Rowan is showering donations on Foxx’s successor as House Committee on Education and Workforce chair. After never donating to Tim Walberg, Rowan and his wife Carolyn gave him $21,000 on March 19, 2025, a few months after Walberg was elected the committee’s chair. The PAC for Apollo Education Group, which Apollo owns, gave another $5,000 to Walberg in June 2025 and $2,500 in September 2024.
Rowan has been revealed as a key architect behind Donald Trump’s effort to strongarm “compacts” with universities tied to federal funding. A recent investigation into the Anti-Defamation League also suggested that Rowan has helped drive the group’s attacks on the pro-Palestine “radical left.”
Union Opponents and School Privatizers
Billionaire Betsy DeVos and her family are also longtime backers of Walberg, having donated at least $76,700 to Walberg since 2007.
The DeVoses, whose family fortune is derived primarily from their privately-owned corporation, Amway, are power players in Michigan, consistently ranking among the state’s top donors to right-wing candidates and causes.
DeVos has long attacked public education, and as Trump’s education secretary from 2017 to 2021 — a stint applauded by Walberg — she scaled back civil rights protections, reversed support for student borrowers, and pushed “school choice.”
The DeVoses are part of the Koch-aligned donor network that pushes an anti-regulatory, pro-privatization agenda. They’ve poured millions into trying to make Michigan a right-to-work state and repealing the state’s prevailing wage laws.
In 2019, DeVos called campus BDS efforts a “pernicious threat,” adding that “we all know that BDS stands for anti-Semitism.”
Real estate baron Ron Weiser has worked in close alliance with the DeVoses in pushing anti-labor legislation in Michigan.
Weiser has served three stints as the chair of the Michigan GOP and has given big to Trump. He’s a board director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has celebrated the crackdown against pro-Palestine student protesters and the arrests of Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri.
Like Levy Jr. and the DeVoses, Weiser is a powerful figure in Michigan’s ruling class. He’s showered tens of millions of dollars on the University of Michigan and served on the Board of Regents from 2016 to 2024.
As Regents’ chair, Weiser referred to graduate workers engaged in collective bargaining as “hired student hacks” and faced a range of other controversies, including calling Michigan’s top women political leaders the “three witches.”
Weiser and his spouse have given $147,035 to Walberg since 2006, including almost $75,000 since 2021. Weiser also gave $50,000 to AIPAC-aligned PACs in 2024.
Shared Opponents, Common Cause
Richard (Dick) and Ethie Haworth have used their furniture business fortune to support conservative efforts in Michigan, giving huge sums to DeVos-aligned, pro-school privatization, and anti-union PACs and groups like Michigan Families United, Let MI Kids Learn, and Michigan Freedom Network.
The Haworths are also trustees of the Eagle Feather Foundation of the National Christian Charitable Foundation, a donor-advised fund that has channeled donations to Christion Zionist groups like Christians United for Israel, Christian Friends of Israel, and Israel Allies Foundation, as well as nearly two dozen organizations labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.
The Haworths have given Walberg at least $87,700 since 2024 and $132,500 since 2007.
The donor money and political efforts of the DeVoses, Haworths, and other rightwing backers of Walberg converge on the Mackinac Center, a rightwing think tank that is Michigan’s only affiliate of the Koch-backed State Policy Network.
The Mackinac Center runs a legal foundation that takes anti-union cases. Dick Haworth and Levy Jr., recently honored by the Mackinaw Center, both serve on its board.
The billionaires and multimillionaires atop Walberg’s donor list have long supported attacks on labor, public education, universities, and Palestine solidarity. Now, Walberg is continuing Virginia Foxx’s strategy of staging hearings and investigations that weaponize antisemitism to advance those attacks. But for movements defending these causes, there’s also a strategic takeaway in mapping out Walberg’s donor base: They have common cause in their shared ultra-wealthy, far right opponents.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Derek Seidman
Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York. He is a regular contributor for Truthout and a contributing writer for LittleSis.
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