Letters / On “The Perils of Universities’ Unscholarly Antisemitism Reports”

As a Jewish professor who studies antisemitic tropes, I am just the kind of faculty member whom Peter Beinart argues should have been included in my university’s recent antisemitism task force, but whose expertise was sidelined. I welcome Beinart’s analysis of this issue, but I am dismayed by his framing of the problem. We need to interrogate not only the composition of such task forces but also their core, underlying objectives—in other words, the reality that they are part of a larger project intended to manufacture fear regarding the safety of Jewish students, and to discredit calls for a ceasefire and institutional divestment from Israel. In contrast to Beinart, I do not believe, even theoretically, that “these investigations are a good idea.” Rather, as I have witnessed on my own campus and on others across the country, they fulfill one function: to pressure universities to adopt increasingly punitive systems to police and restrict expressions of support for Palestine. Accordingly, the selection of committee members who lack expertise on antisemitism is a feature, not a bug: If these committees were in fact stacked with experts, I imagine those members’ scholarly expertise would lead them to question the very legitimacy of these investigations.

Beinart also reproduces some of the committees’ analytic errors by asserting that antisemitism “appears to be rising.” The JTA article he shares about FBI data on reported hate crimes that were categorized as “anti-Jewish” in 2023 stipulates that “Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel sparked a spike in antisemitism worldwide.” But there is no empirical basis for this claim, because increased reporting of antisemitic incidents only tells us that people are calling the police more; it doesn’t tell us anything about the context of these incidents, the intent behind certain acts, or what would be decided in a court of law. Moreover, browsing the last 16 months of JTA’s reporting on “campus antisemitism,” or the special sub-section dedicated to campus antisemitism that The New York Times created soon after October 7th, it strikes me as impossible to disentangle what we know about the state of antisemitism in the US from the media campaign to create the impression that anti-Jewish violence is rampant on campuses—not to mention the politically-motivated changes in antisemitism reporting by the ADL and other Jewish institutions. As Beinart suggests, these biased reports are then redirected back at universities to justify donor, alumni, and political pressure to effectively abolish pro-Palestinan protest.

The examples of “genuine incidents of harassment” that Beinart cites are, indeed, genuine incidents of harassment, which any university’s discrimination protocols would recognize as such. There does not exist a climate in which universities are failing to recognize stalking and slurs, two of the types of harassment against Jewish students that Beinart lists, as forms of assault and discrimination, respectively. Such cases of antisemitic harassment should be adjudicated in the same, already active university forums that examine instances of racism, Islamophobia, sexism, and other types of discrimination on campus. The problem—according to those seeking to criminalize pro-Palestinian students’ expression—is that the existing harassment guidelines do not cover categories of constitutionally-protected action and speech that they would like to see eliminated. It is not the rise in “genuine incidents of harassment” that moves universities to create antisemitism committees, but the rise in reporting of incidents that do not fall under university harassment and discrimination guidelines, which do not include “Zionist” as an explicitly protected class. Likewise, it is not Jewish students’ feelings of distress that motivates committees to evaluate whether Zionism should have protected class status. Instead, weaponizing Jewish students’ feelings serves a bipartisan effort to buttress Zionism’s cracking hegemony, resulting in increasingly draconian campus regulations to silence and criminalize dissent. While Beinart’s piece acknowledges the problems with moving to classify Zionism as an identity, it does not capture the degree of bad faith driving such efforts.

Among the members of the antisemitism committee at my university, there are some experts in the field, though they are not the majority. However, the invitation of more experts, myself included, would do nothing to interrupt the basic anti-intellectualism of a project that is predicated on refusing to ask some very basic questions: How does “bias-incident reporting” work in an environment in which all speech issued in support of Palestinian liberation is a priori “felt” to be motivated by anti-Jewish animus? How can such a committee operate in a context where claims that are categorically libelous, such as the idea that students or faculty are paid by Iran or members of Hamas, are taken with the utmost seriousness and used as justification for further tightening controls on speech?

This crackdown affects a wide swath of faculty and students, including Jews. Indeed, campaigns directed against a number of Jewish faculty members on my campus have undermined their ability to do their jobs, resulted in financial loss, and have taken incredible emotional and psychological tolls. Unfortunately, it is because of this climate that I cannot give my real name here, as this would likely result in the further targeting of my family.

In light of this climate, and especially in the wake of Trump’s frightening calls to deport student protestors, we must acknowledge the dynamics of power and political interest that lie at the heart of university committees allegedly established to combat antisemitism. Asking such bodies to adopt scholarly best-practices cannot redeem their fundamentally bigoted political projects or mitigate their failure to protect students and faculty—and, in some cases, carry out tangible harm against them.