Kenneth Marcus

Kenneth Marcus is the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Washington-based legal advocacy organization he established in 2011 that has become the most focused institutional force for applying Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to antisemitism on college and university campuses — a legal strategy that, if fully realized, would give Jewish students the same federal civil rights enforcement mechanisms available to students facing racial or ethnic discrimination. Marcus earned his undergraduate degree from Williams College and his JD from UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), and built his career in civil rights enforcement within the federal government, serving as Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2004 to 2008. From 2018 to 2020, he served as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights in the Trump administration — the most senior civil rights enforcement position in the federal government's education apparatus — where he reversed an Obama-era interpretation that had excluded Title VI coverage of antisemitism and directed the Office for Civil Rights to investigate antisemitism complaints at universities under the same framework applied to other protected groups.

Marcus's legal theory — that Jewish students experiencing antisemitism rooted in anti-Zionism can have claims recognized under Title VI when the antisemitism targets them as Jews even if expressed through criticism of Israel — has been one of the most contested and consequential legal arguments in civil rights enforcement in the post-October 7 period. The Trump administration's aggressive use of Title VI and Title IX enforcement against universities over campus antisemitism in 2025-2026 drew directly on the legal framework Marcus and the Brandeis Center had developed over more than a decade of case filing, scholarship, and regulatory advocacy. The Brandeis Center has filed or supported complaints against dozens of universities, produced legal scholarship on the Title VI coverage question, and trained a generation of Jewish civil rights lawyers in the tactics and doctrine of campus antisemitism litigation.

Beyond Title VI, Marcus has written extensively on what he terms the "new antisemitism" — the form expressed through anti-Zionism and delegitimization of Israel — and has been a consistent advocate for treating anti-Zionist harassment of Jewish students as a civil rights violation rather than a protected form of political speech. His book Tribal Stigma examines the psychological and sociological dimensions of antisemitism, and his law review articles have shaped how civil rights lawyers and federal enforcement agencies think about Jewish identity and discrimination. At Rank 95, Marcus is the legal architect who has spent over a decade building the doctrinal and institutional framework for turning Title VI into a genuine enforcement tool against campus antisemitism — whose work in government and in the Brandeis Center has made the legal battle for Jewish students a serious civil rights cause rather than a political talking point.