The Perils of Universities’ Unscholarly Antisemitism Reports

Almost a year after pro-Palestinian encampments filled campus lawns across the country, their demands remain largely unmet. No major American university has cut its ties to the Jewish state. What many college presidents have done instead is to restrict and punish student activists in the hopes of ensuring that protests don’t overtake campuses again—and, relatedly, to establish task forces to study antisemitism on campus. At several leading universities—Columbia University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the University of Washington—these committees have now issued their reports.

In theory, these investigations are a good idea. In an era in which antisemitism appears to be rising alongside other forms of bigotry, it’s worth asking how Jewish students feel and what can be done to keep them safe. The reports chronicle genuine incidents of harassment, and even violence: slurs, swastikas, physical assaults. Columbia’s antisemitism report details Jewish students “having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls” and being “followed, stalked, and subjected to ethnic slurs and hateful statements.” Universities should examine their culture and procedures to try to prevent such abuse.

But the reports also classify as antisemitic many statements that aren’t directed at Jews per se, but simply challenge the legitimacy of Israel and Zionism. And that conflation reveals a basic methodological flaw. Understanding the relationship between antisemitism and pro-Palestinian activism requires understanding the experience not only of Jewish students who feel threatened by that activism, but of Palestinians—an experience that shapes the way pro-Palestinian activists of all backgrounds, including Jewish ones, talk about the Jewish state. The reports make no such effort. They are profoundly unscholarly documents. Reading them, one might think that America’s leading experts on the relationship between Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, and Jew-hatred reside not at universities like Columbia, Penn, UCLA, and the University of Washington, but at pro-Israel advocacy groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And by preferring those organizations’ analysis of antisemitism to the analysis of actual scholars, the task forces help enable the repression that the American Jewish establishment desires.

The reports start from the assumption that one need not possess any knowledge about Gaza, or Israel-Palestine more generally, to determine whether last year’s Gaza protests were antisemitic. In 32 pages, Penn’s report does not mention the word “Gaza” once. (The word appears a single time, in an appendix that reproduces the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemism). Columbia’s two reports, which total 100 pages—not counting appendices—mention Gaza only twice. The first notes “the tragic loss of civilian life in Gaza”; the second cites “the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza.” Neither acknowledges that this tragedy was caused by the State of Israel, or that students might reasonably respond to Israel’s actions by questioning the ideology that guides the state.

Behind this absence is another: None of the task forces include the leading scholars of Palestine, Israel, or antisemitism on the university’s own campuses. Columbia’s was co-chaired by a tax lawyer, an expert on New York City, and an acclaimed journalist who focuses on politics, economics, and society in the United States. It included several distinguished Jewish studies scholars, none of whom focuses on Israel-Palestine. But it did not include professor emeritus Rashid Khalidi, America’s foremost historian of the Palestinian people; Mark Mazower, who this fall is publishing a book that is literally entitled On Antisemitism; Michael Stanislawski, author of an influential history of Zionist thought; or Yinon Cohen, who holds the university’s chair in Israel studies and has written extensively on the sociology of Israeli Jews.

That same pattern recurs elsewhere. The chair of Penn’s task force was the dean of its dental school. The committee included a number of Jewish studies professors, but none who work primarily on Israel-Palestine. It didn’t include Penn’s Ian Lustick, one of America’s most prominent political scientists studying the region, who has published dozens, if not hundreds, of books and articles on Israel and Palestine over the past 50 years. To lead its task force, UCLA appointed a specialist in real estate finance. The committee included not a single scholar who works primarily on Israel-Palestine, even though UCLA employs Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies who has published academic articles on the relationship between Israel-Palestine and antisemitism; David Myers, one of America’s foremost historians of Zionism; and Saree Makdisi, an expert on colonialism and the Palestinian experience. For the chair of its task force, the University of Washington chose an expert on COVID—bypassing the historian Liora Halperin, who teaches courses like “History of Modern Israel/Palestine” and “Readings in Israel/Palestine Studies.”

The problem with spurning these scholars is that, in their assessments of what constitutes antisemitism, the task forces make many assumptions about Israel-Palestine—assumptions that aren’t rooted in scholarship. Often, they’re cribbed from pro-Israel advocacy groups. The UCLA report, for instance, declares that “Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland” and that it “has been equated falsely to racism.” For a committee assessing Jew-hatred among pro-Palestinian protesters, this is no small conclusion. If Zionism is merely a movement for Jewish self-determination, then what could explain anti-Zionist activism on campus except animus toward Jews? But as UCLA’s own Waxman has noted, Palestinians and their supporters “oppose Zionism not because it is a Jewish national movement, but because it has resulted in Palestinian dispossession and the denial of Palestinian rights.” The UCLA report never acknowledges that the Zionist movement created a state by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, or that, since 1967, that state has held millions of Palestinians as permanent non-citizens under military law. Indeed, it never examines Zionism’s impact on Palestinians, nor does it cite a single academic work on that subject.

So, on what basis does the task force determine that Zionism is not racist? It cites three sources: a definition of Zionism from the Jewish Virtual Library, which is a project of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise that exists “to strengthen the U.S.-Israeli relationship”; a primer on Zionism from the ADL; and a glossary on antisemitism by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). One can only imagine how Waxman, Makdisi, or any other UCLA professor teaching about Zionism would grade such work if it were submitted in their class.

Given its definition of Zionism, it’s hardly surprising that the UCLA task force deems popular anti-Zionist slogans to be antisemitic. On the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the UCLA report acknowledges, “Some argue that the phrase simply calls for a binational democratic state in Palestine.” But it dismisses this benign “interpretation” because it is “decontextualized” and “does not reflect the interpretation of the phrase held by the majority of Jews.” Its source: the AJC. In fact, it’s the report that is decontextualized. The phrase “from the river to the sea” is a product of Palestinian politics. It stems from a decades-long discourse, in which Palestinian activists have imagined non-Zionist futures for the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By ignoring that context completely, the report suggests that what Palestinians and their supporters mean by the phrase is irrelevant because it’s considered antisemitic “by the majority of Jews.” Only their opinions count.

Columbia’s report makes the same assumption. “With other groups, faculty and administrators often defer to the group’s definition of what is painful and hateful,” the report declares. “But with Jews and Israelis, there has been no such deference. Instead, others have tried to dictate what does and does not constitute antisemitism.” The implication is clear: It doesn’t matter what Palestinians and their allies think they mean when they chant a slogan like “from the river to the sea.” This formulation suggests a Jewish consensus that Columbia’s task force itself admits doesn’t exist: Some of the Columbia protesters chanting phrases like “from the river to the sea” were Jews themselves. But more importantly, analogizing the relationship between Jews and Palestinians to the relationship between, for example, Black and white Americans is absurd. Palestinians are not the equivalent of white Americans, who have long benefitted from state-sponsored racism. To the contrary, Palestinians in Israel-Palestine live under a system that the world’s leading human rights groups say constitutes apartheid, while those in the US have long been dehumanized and excluded from public discourse. And if it makes no sense to cast Palestinians in the role of white Americans, nor should Jews in Israel or the US be compared to Black Americans. Israeli Jews, after all, enjoy legal supremacy, and American Jews enjoy far greater governmental protection than Palestinians.

How Jews interpret a phrase like “from the river to the sea” certainly matters. But how Palestinians interpret it matters too. By suggesting it doesn’t, the Columbia task force perpetuates the lack of “permission to narrate” that the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, himself a member of Columbia’s faculty, famously decried decades ago.

This erasure of Palestinians pervades all the antisemitism reports. Penn’s report says that “Jews who identify with Zionism see within it an expression of collective self-determination or cultural creativity.” Columbia’s defines Zionism as the belief that “Jews should have a national homeland in Israel,” and goes on to explain the religious inheritance and the experience of European oppression that led many Jews to embrace that idea in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Neither of these statements are wrong. But they’re wildly incomplete. No university course on Zionism worth its salt would ignore Said’s famous call to consider how the movement looks “from the standpoint of its victims.” Yet that’s exactly what these reports do. In an appendix, Columbia’s offers a short bibliography of “scholarship on antisemitism.” Tellingly, of the 25 books and articles cited—many of which deal with Israel and Palestine—none is authored by a Palestinian. Even still, some of the scholarship listed in the bibliography would undermine the report’s own analysis: It cites two articles by Waxman, who insists that Zionism cannot simply be defined as the belief that “Jews should have a national homeland in Israel” because this definition excludes the Palestinian experience.

Because the reports ignore academic research on the relationship between antisemitism and Israel-Palestine, they end by proposing that universities advise students to do the same. The University of Washington proposes “targeted training that addresses the particular toxicity of the settler-colonial/oppressor-oppressed narrative when applied to Jews.” But the University of Washington’s own Halperin, who holds a chair in Jewish studies, employs settler-colonial theories in her work on the Zionist past. A report chaired by an epidemiologist with no scholarly background on settler colonialism is advising the university to tell students that it’s toxic to learn from its foremost historian of Israel and Palestine. In a similar vein, Penn advises creating antisemitism trainers and “sensitizing” them “to different kinds of antisemitic discourse, including blatant exterminationist rhetoric (e.g., calling for Israel’s destruction).” But as “calling for Israel’s destruction” is defined by groups like the ADL and AJC, one of the people doing it is Penn’s own Lustick, who several years ago urged turning Israel-Palestine from a Jewish state into one based on legal equality. Penn’s report, chaired by a dentist, can be read as proposing that students be sensitized to the antisemitism of the university’s own leading scholar of Israeli and Palestinian politics.

This is what happens when universities abandon their own stated principles for acquiring knowledge and seeking truth. The Columbia, Penn, UCLA, and University of Washington antisemitism reports don’t only denigrate the academic study of antisemitism and Israel-Palestine—they help justify an assault on academic freedom. In late January, Donald Trump’s White House announced that it would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” By characterizing pro-Palestinian protesters as antisemites, the reports have made Trump’s work easier. Their authors are complicit in the repression that has already blighted America’s campuses, and in the even worse abuses that are likely to come.