A growing number of Jewish staff and faculty in higher education are speaking out against what they say is the federal government and their own institutions weaponizing accusations of antisemitism in order to silence dissent, punish those who criticize the Israeli government and exert more control over the U.S. education system.

On Wednesday, at least 40 such staff at the University of Virginia signed on to a statement in The Cavalier Daily, the school’s student paper, warning against the “exploitation of the term antisemitism deployed in an effort to harass, expel, arrest, deport dox and defame students, faculty, staff and other academic workers across the country.”

“Politically disfavored speech is disingenuously being labeled ‘antisemitism.’ This misrepresentation makes Jews the face of political repression and the face of the suppression of speech – this itself is a form of scapegoating. This makes Jews less safe,” the letter read.

The faculty note in the letter that they’ve heard the term “antisemitism” used more in the last 18 months than in the immediate aftermath of President Donald Trump calling the neo-Nazis who marched on campus in 2017 “very fine people” during his first term.

A spokesperson for the University of Virginia did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Jewish students and staff across the country have been making similar statements since October 2023, when Israeli forces responded to Hamas’ deadly attack by essentially flattening all of Gaza, rendering it uninhabitable for Palestinians and preventing outside humanitarian assistance from entering the territory. The tension on U.S. campuses grew after many schools responded to mostly peaceful antiwar protests last year with violence and accusations of antisemitism.

“Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity. This conflation betrays a woefully inaccurate understanding – and disingenuous misrepresentation – of Jewish history, identity and politics,” Jewish staff at Columbia University and Barnard College wrote in an April 2024 statement in The Columbia Spectator when the schools invited police to respond to the protests.

“It erases more than a century of debates among Jews themselves about the nature of a Jewish homeland in the biblical Land of Israel, including Israel’s status as a Jewish nation-state,” it continued. “It dismisses the experiences of the post-Zionist, non-Zionist and anti-zionist Jews who work, study and live on our campus.”

Since the protests and Israel’s ongoing military escalation in Gaza, which many in the international community now describe as genocide, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have painted college campuses as unsafe for the Jewish community due to students and staff who speak out against the state of Israel.

After Trump launched his second presidency, universities began facing funding threats and increased backlash from the federal government if they did not dismantle certain programs and ban certain speech under the guise of combating antisemitism. University of Virginia President Jim Ryan, known for championing diversity and inclusion on campus, was essentially coerced into resigning last month to help settle a Justice Department inquiry into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“We write to affirm that there is no rampant crisis of antisemitism on our campuses, despite prolonged attempts by the current administration to persuade the public that there is one,” Jewish staff from the City University of New York, the University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University wrote in a statement on Tuesday, when leaders of those schools testified before the GOP-led House about antisemitism in higher education.

“To defend the Palestinian right to live is to defend the shared life of all people to survival, persistence and flourishing. It is the embodiment of the Jewish principle of tzedek (justice). These are principles that can be called ethical, religious or legal. In each case, they are not antisemitism,” the statement continued.

“To say otherwise is to imply that Jewish people as a whole support the horrific death-dealing of the Israeli state, a false and antisemitic idea advanced by the current administration and those organizing this Congressional hearing,” they added.