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Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians

(JTA) — When Rep. Rashida Tlaib joined a Zoom with 40 teenagers, she soon found herself talking about the kinds of topics — academic and otherwise — that tend to take up their days. 

There was discussion of the stress of AP exams, embarrassing dads and social media memes. She showed them pictures on Instagram of her dog at the U.S. Capitol. Everyone was on a first-name basis. 

“My son is a [high school] junior,” she said, responding to a message in the Zoom chat from one of the teen participants. “Oh my God, the SAT — I was stressed out. I’m stressed because he’s stressed. He had to take all his AP exams and stuff.”

Tlaib got personal too — talking about her grandmother, with whom she last spoke on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.  

But the conversation also turned to a question many of the teens had encountered at high school, camp, youth groups or elsewhere in their lives: Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?

As the only Palestinian-American in Congress — and perhaps the chamber’s most prominent anti-Zionist — Tlaib was in a unique position to answer. And the students on the call had a particular interest in the question as well: They were all Jewish.

The teens are all participants in a new initiative, launched last year, to expose young American Jews to Palestinian voices through video chats. Founded by Ezra Beinart, a junior at a Jewish day school in New York City, the project’s goal is to bring Palestinian perspectives to a demographic that, he says, sorely lacks them. 

“I live in a very Jewish community and most of the people around me are very educated on the Israeli perspective, but not as knowledgeable about the Palestinian side,” Beinart said in an interview. “And that’s why I decided to create the group to inform young Jews about the other side of the story, which I don’t think most Jewish students know much about.”

In her response to the question about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Tlaib again turned to her grandmother, Muftieh, whom she refers to with the Arabic term “Sity” and whom she has portrayed as the face of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. She said people were “weaponizing antisemitism” in order to chill criticism of Israel.

“My grandmother, literally solely based on the fact that she was born Palestinian, she just doesn’t have equality,” Tlaib told the teens. “Her life would be completely different if that wasn’t the case. And so, you know, for me criticizing that, if anything, is more chipping away at this form of government that does that to my Sity.”

Michigan House Rep. Rashida Tlaib speaks on stage at a concert in Detroit, July 16, 2022. (Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images)

Beinart said he wants to increase opportunities for Jewish-Palestinian interaction. So he said he has reached out to “very Jewish” communities around the country, through chat groups and progressive synagogues, to get the word out. He started out with just a handful of teens, but his numbers are growing: His session with Tlaib drew 40 viewers. 

Such interest comes at a time of political flux in Israel, and as young Jewish adults in the United States view the country less favorably than their elders. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Jews aged 18-30 were less emotionally attached to Israel than older generations, more skeptical of its efforts toward peace and likelier to support efforts to boycott it. In recent years, activist groups founded by young Jews have pushed institutions such as campus Hillels and the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah network to be more inclusive of Palestinian or anti-Zionist perspectives.  

The initiative’s format has speakers introduce themselves for five minutes or so and then take questions, which Beinart selects, for another 30 minutes. It has held about half a dozen sessions with speakers like Ayman Mohyeldin, a journalist at MSNBC, and Amahl Bishara, a professor at Tufts University. Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is its most prominent guest so far. (Her office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or for comment.)

Beinart wanted his peers to have their minds opened, as he said his was when he interned last summer at the Jerusalem Fund, a pro-Palestinian think tank and advocacy organization in Washington D.C. He noticed that a friend of his who worked there used “Palestine” as readily as he used “Israel,” and described to him how fraught traveling to the region was for her, whereas he took his ability to enter the country for granted.

“It made it much more tangible to have friends explain how Israel’s actions affect them in everyday life,” he said. “It’s different from just reading about it or seeing a video.”

If Beinart’s name is familiar, it’s because his father is Peter Beinart, the writer who was once an outspoken advocate for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, and now is a prominent Jewish voice supporting a single, binational Israeli-Palestinian state. The elder Beinart declined to comment for this article, as the initiative is his son’s project rather than his. But for a decade, Peter Beinart has been making the case that American Jews need to spend more time listening to Palestinian voices. 

Resistance to hearing from Palestinians, the elder Beinart wrote in 2013 in the New York Review of Books, “make[s] the organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”

Ezra acknowledges his father’s influence, albeit reluctantly. The first speaker in the series was Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist Ezra met when he accompanied Peter on a West Bank tour.

 “Yeah, obviously, but I’m going my own way with it,” Ezra Beinart said, asked about his father’s influence. “I’m connecting Israel-Palestine to what I see going on with my peers, my friends.”

In the Zoom session, Tlaib intuited Ezra’s ambivalence about bringing his father into the conversation, so she trod carefully when she quoted the elder Beinart to make a point.

“Ezra, your dad said something once — I know you don’t want me to mention your dad, you’re like my son,” she said. But she then brought up a quote by Peter Beinart to explain why she had chosen, despite considerable backlash, to host an event in the U.S. Capitol commemorating the Nakba, the word meaning “catastrophe” which Palestinians use to describe their displacement during and after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. 

Peter Beinart’s quote was, “When you tell a people to forget its past, you are not proposing peace, you are proposing extinction.”

Tlaib said, “I used [Beinart’s quote] today when I got interviewed because I love this, but when Peter says it, it’s like okay, look at this is, this is a Jewish American man speaking up about the importance of understanding history.” 

After the meeting, Ezra Beinart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he chose questions that reflected the narrative Jewish youth were exposed to in their communities. In addition to discussing anti-Zionism and antisemitism, one question was, “What is your response to those who believe that using the word ‘occupation’ is harmful?” (Avoiding accurate terminology inhibits the advance of peace and human rights, Tlaib said.)

“Jewish people, when they think about Palestinians, they think of terror, most of them,” Beinart said. “So that’s something they should hear about from Palestinians.”

Teaneck, the northern New Jersey suburb that would qualify as a “very Jewish” community by nearly any standard, is where one of the participants, Liora Pelavin, 15, lives. Her mother, who is a rabbi, saw a post about Beinart’s Zoom meetings on Facebook and thought her daughter might be interested.

“Hearing from Palestinians really humanizes them,” Pelavin, who attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade and now goes to a public high school, said in an interview.  “It makes me learn and also realize that they all have different opinions, too.”

Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an organization whose programs include facilitating dialogue between American Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, said any interaction would be welcome.

However, he was concerned that most of the Palestinians Ezra Beinart had selected were political or advocacy leaders, instead of ordinary Palestinians who might be better suited to explain everyday realities to high school students.

“There’s probably a version of a way to do this like Encounter,” a long-running program that brings American Jews to the West Bank for dialogue with Palestinians, “where you are hearing from people and learn their stories, and you are free to come to the political conclusions you want,” Kurtzer said. “But you  humanize their experience. That’s one way of doing any of this work. There’s another way to do this work, which is, ‘I want to influence the politics of your own community.’”

Jonathan Kessler — a former senior official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who now leads Heart of a Nation, a group that facilitates dialogue among Jewish American, Palestinian and Israeli teens — said he was aware of Beinart’s initiative, and that it is an example of how Gen Z may be better able to break down barriers than their elders.

“A generation that does not think of gender and sexuality in binary terms is uniquely well positioned to approach a conflict, which has for too long been defined in a binary way,” Kessler said.

Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political scientist who has spoken to Beinart’s group, said it was particularly important for Palestinian speakers to reach Jewish teens.

“Within the Jewish community, particularly in the organized Jewish community, there may be a lot of pro-Israel perspectives represented and not a whole lot of Palestinian perspectives represented,” he said. “I’m always inspired when I speak to younger people about this issue who have an interest in learning more.”

For Tlaib, it was also a forum where she had expressed views that she hasn’t otherwise voiced publicly — saying that she felt conflicted about evacuating Israeli settlers because they had lived in the West Bank for so long.

“Just the idea around taking families that — that’s been their home — it’s just completely uprooting, forcibly displacing,” Tlaib said. “It’s something I struggle with because, like, we’re doing it all over again, right? This happened during the Nakba.”

Beinart said he and others on the call, including Pelavin, were moved by her sentiments.

“A lot of the Jewish community thinks like, ‘Palestinians hate us, and don’t think we’re people too,’” Pelavin said. “I think that’s so wrong, and being on these calls has just confirmed that for me.”

Ezra Beinart favors a single binational state — Tlaib is the only elected lawmaker who also takes that position —  and Pelavin said her views on Israel trended left. But while much of the organized American Jewish community has historically bristled at criticism of Israel, neither teen said that they were made to feel like a pariah in their Jewish milieus. 

“They think it’s cool that I do these types of things, but I think a lot of their goal is to just stay away from this topic around me, because they don’t really want to get into an argument about it,” Pelavin said of her peers.

And Beinart said holding a minority viewpoint hasn’t been a problem for him, either. “The kids in my school know who I am,” Ezra Beinart said. “No one’s mean to me. There are kids who share my views — a few, but not many.”

Despite the weighty subject matter, the conversation had an informal, friendly feel. Tlaib also wanted to learn more about the participants, but when she asked what colleges they were planning to attend, no one spoke up — until she noticed answers to her question piling up in the Zoom chat.

“Oh look there — you guys looove the chat!” she said. She then attempted to get her dog to hop on screen, but settled for showing the teens photos. 

Ezra Beinart said he was fine with Tlaib’s cooing and kvelling about the college plans.

“I’m not going to pretend that this is a group of well-educated adults,” he said. “This is a group of kids who don’t know about this stuff as well. And that’s why that’s why I’m doing it — it’s not supposed to be for people who are experts, right?”


The post Jewish teens, led by Ezra Beinart, are gathering on Zoom to meet prominent Palestinians appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again

At the end of the 1941 school year, 13-year-old Yitshkok Rudashevski went to meet his friend from the Soviet youth movement. Their confab, and that clear summer day, was soon disturbed by the howl of a siren and the raining down of bombs.

“The street was full of smoke,” Rudashevski wrote in his diary. “It is war.”

On Sunday June 22, Nazis mobilized Operation Barbarossa and began their push toward Vilnius. That Rudashevski was determined to fight back could be credited, at least in part, to the book he had with him at the start of the offensive, which he planned to share with his comrades.

“I carry with me Der Giber in Keytn [The Hero in Chains],” the Yiddish translation of Les Misérables, Rudashevski wrote, “from which we will read together about Gavroche, the child of the Paris proletariat who fell on the barricades alongside the adult fighters.” (Gavroche died in the street fighting of the 1832 June rebellion in Paris; Rudashevski would survive Lithuania’s June uprising, and its ensuing antisemitism, to be murdered by Nazis in the Ponary massacre of 1943.)

It makes sense that Rudashevski, a dedicated Marxist and product of the Lithuanian Yiddish school system, would find a kind of role model in Victor Hugo’s gamin.

That Les Misérables in translation was popular among Yiddish-speaking socialists — it was serialized in the Forverts in our first year of publication — is itself unsurprising, given the book’s preoccupations with social justice. That its ethic was a fundamentally Christian one seemed to matter less than its overall message: a universal concern for “the wretched” and vulnerable, particularly children, women and the formerly incarcerated. This last factor may have resonated deeply with Baderekh, a Yiddish theater troupe composed of displaced persons, who staged the story in 1946 Berlin.

Les Misérables in a 1911 Yiddish edition and how it appeared in the early days of the Forward. Image by the Yiddish Book Center/Forward Archive

I’ve been reading Les Misérables for about a year now (it’s long and brimming with Hugo’s commentary on post-Napoleonic revolts, essays on the argot of the underworld and digressions on Parisian city-planning) and was successfully influenced to buy a nosebleed seat to the arena tour of the musical at Radio City last Friday. Watching the megawatt melodrama, it occurred to me that in much the same way Jews conquered the Christmas song catalogue, the Jewish creative team behind Les Miz brought Hugo’s doorstopper to the world — and arguably made it more Christian.

Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, born in France to Hungarian refugee parents who lost much of their family in the Holocaust, and the Tunisian-born Sephardic lyricist Alain Boublil created a concept album and early stage version that was Gallic in the extreme, and so more concerned with Enlightenment concepts than an enlightened human soul.

But when the show was brought to British shores, Boublil, Schönberg and original directors John Caird and Trevor Nunn reimagined the structure, adding a prologue with Valjean and the bishop, who gifts him silver candlesticks to restart his life after 19 years slaving as a convict at the shipyard in Toulon.

The revamp, which brought on journalist Herbert Kretzmer as lyricist, gave the bloodhound Inspector Javert a new solo — beloved by Ben Shapiro — where he connects his unyielding policing to the watchful stars and the God who punished Lucifer for his challenge to the heavenly order.

Valjean prays. A lot. And it ain’t the Shema.

The key innovation of the musical may well be how it sets Valjean and Javert in opposition. Whereas in the novel, Javert seems to have no God save the rigid rule of law, in the show his dogma derives from what its creatives recently, and reductively, referred to in a New York Times interview as an “Old Testament” form of justice. His foil, Valjean, the redeemed man of mercy, stands in for the New Testament’s core of forgiveness, which the show clearly favors.

If it’s odd that the presentation of this false binary was trusted to a Jew named Herbert Kretzmer, it hasn’t seemed to deter many Jews from embracing the show as they once did the novel.

A couple of years ago, I attended a virtual Rosh Hashanah service that used the musical’s final takeaway, “to love another person is to see the face of God,” as its thematic thrust. (It was a bit much for me.) It would make just as much sense — though it would be cringe in the extreme — to deploy the show for a Yom Kippur sermon on atonement.

The Jewish affinity for the material is helped by that Hugo, unlike so many — probably most — of his contemporaries is not marred by antisemitism. He inveighed against pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, warning in an English paper that “Christianity is martyrizing Judaism” and publishing a not-so-subtle allegory about the Spanish Inquisition to drive the point home. I’d say he was doing the Emile Zola thing before it was cool, but it was never particularly popular to speak out in this way in the French Third Republic.

While Kretzmer was born in South Africa to refugees from a later wave of Tsarist pogroms, he and the other Jewish writers of the Les Miz musical do not seem to have been particularly observant. The strongest hint of the cultural inheritance is in the klezmeresque intro to “Master of the House,” a theme of the penny-pinching innkeeper Thénardier. (If that’s problematic, Thénardier later makes an antisemitic remark when the tune is reprised, implying he’s not Jewish himself.)

The show nonetheless points to universal values legible to Jews and, indeed, the world. Like Fiddler before it, Les Misérables is a global phenomenon not on the merits of its specificity, but for how it draws on a common humanity. The Yiddish left of the 20th century read the book; protesters in Hong Kong and China can now be heard singing the musical’s anthem of angry men.

As Hugo wrote in his introduction to the book, “so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.”

It may be immodest, but history, and his own adapters, have proven him right.

The post How Jews made ‘Les Miz’ Christian again appeared first on The Forward.

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When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense

What happens when individuals — and societies — lose their grip on reality, sanity, truth, or all three at once?

Af Mila L’Ima, or “Not a Word to Mother,” a play, running now at Beit Lessin in Tel Aviv, is a window into the mental state of the State of Israel right now. Like much of great Jewish literature, it combines comedy with tragedy.

Written by Noam Gil, and directed by Udi Gottschalk, the play opens with an air-conditioner repairman who finds himself summoned to the home of a woman he does not know. But she hasn’t called him there to fix her air conditioner.

After a few awkward — and very funny — minutes, the lady spits it out: Four days ago, she found out that her husband is having an affair with the air conditioner repairman’s wife.

“No,” he says. “Not my Galya.”

The woman can prove it to him, she says. She asks the repairman to hide, lie in wait for the two philanderers —and then attack her cheating husband with a rolling pin.

“No,” the repairman says, but soon a car is in the driveway, and the woman and the repairman dive behind the curtains.

It’s not who they think it is. Corinne, the woman’s teenage daughter, arrives with her crush,  Nadav. The girl proceeds to discuss her mother in uncharitable terms. “I would kill myself if I turned out like her,” the girl says.

After a few minutes, another car arrives in the driveway.

This time it is the woman’s husband and the repairman’s wife, and they’re all over each other.

Just as they rip each other’s clothes off on the coffee table, the teenage daughter, dressed in her Scouts uniform, opens a door, and sees it all.

The repairman and the woman from the first scene emerge from their hiding places.

The horrified and traumatized teenage daughter has filmed the coffeetable make-out scene on her phone. And worse, she recognizes her father’s mistress; it’s her high school teacher.

The teenage daughter threatens to put the video up on TikTok. The adults panic. The situation spirals out of control; after catching his wife in the act, the seemingly peaceful repairman bloodies the nose of the woman’s husband. And Nadav, who can’t leave the apartment because no one will give him the keys — in Israel you need keys to leave the house —loses it.

“P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi! P’sichi, ” he yells. Psichi means “psychotic” or “crazy” in contemporary Israeli slang.

A poster for Noam Gil’s play. Photo by Aviya Kushner

But this play is not just about one family’s petty, “psychotic” mess; these characters are each a type of mess in which the audience might recognize themselves: a philandering bal t’shuvah husband, talking big to his mistress about opening up new restaurants when he’s really bankrupt; a woman who has convinced herself she deserves a man with gigantic ambitions; a self-sacrificing, middle-aged mother who has given up on her own dream of writing a play to care for her husband and children; a teenage girl who claims to hate her own mother. Each character is trying to find a way of surviving this mess.

“When you live in a place that is psychotic, everything is normal,” one character observes. The entire audience laughed knowingly.

This line gains resonance as the play zooms out from the “psychotic” behavior of the four adults and the two teenagers to take a look at the place they are all living in: Israel.

In a chaotic household in a chaotic country, the characters look to Jewish tradition to try to stabilize themselves. “Ridfu shalom,” the air conditioner repairman keeps telling the screaming spouses around him, riffing off Psalms 34:15. “Pursue peace.”

But can you always pursue peace?

This play acknowledges that in some situations, that’s not possible. In that way, it looks straight at the belief of many Israelis that now, after everything — the Oslo Accords, the Second Intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, and finally Oct. 7 — the two-state solution may simply not be something that can be pursued.

And maybe that’s why everyone has gone psychotic, and why so many theatergoers packed the house, to laugh in a time of tragedy — and, to use an American idiom, to “feel seen.”

As I was writing this in a Tel Aviv coffee shop, a young man came over and asked if he could ask me something. I said sure, expecting to be asked for money.

But he sat down and said he was a lochem, a fighter, and was just released, and needed to talk with somebody. Would I be willing to speak with him for a few minutes?

I said of course.

He wanted to be heard. He said his name was Tom, he was the second of six children and hoped to study business administration. We talked about where we grew up, how being a second kid feels like being inside a sandwich, and the difference between a mandatory draft in Israel and selective service in the US. And then he apologized. He said he had to keep walking to stay calm.

If he were to walk over to the Beit Lessin theater, he would find the benches on Dizengoff Street covered with bumper stickers memorializing young men lost in battle. Not far away, there is a fountain that memorializes those killed on Oct. 7.  But these memorials do not provide answers. What’s sanity? What’s insanity? What’s “p’sichi” and what’s just a normal reaction to pain?

There are no easy answers. I waved to Tom as he walked on.

The post When a country has gone insane, a ‘psychotic’ Israeli play like this makes total sense appeared first on The Forward.

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It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints.

As major universities across the U.S. strike deals with the Trump administration over antisemitism complaints, a handful of small liberal arts colleges have been quietly settling cases of their own.

In the past week, Oregon’s Reed College and Pennsylvania’s Haverford College have both settled complaints accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Pomona and Occidental Colleges, both in southern California, settled complaints in late 2024 and 2025, respectively.

At least nine other small liberal arts colleges — which unlike universities mainly focus on undergraduate and interdisciplinary education over research  — are still locked in disputes.

These include Sarah Lawrence and Union in New York; Swarthmore and Lehigh in Pennsylvania; Middlebury in Vermont; Whitman in Washington; Wellesley and Williams in Massachusetts; and Scripps in California.

All colleges declined the Forward’s requests for comment.

“Institutions are failing to effectively respond to anti-Zionist conduct targeting Jews, as they’re legally obligated to do,” said Denise Katz-Prober, special counsel of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the civil rights of the Jewish people. “Most, if not all, of the measures that would apply to a larger institution also apply to a small liberal arts school.”

In most cases, Jewish legal advocacy organizations such as the Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, or StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ) have leveled the accusations by filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Jews at Haverford, a group of Jewish students, faculty, parents and alumni of the Pennsylvania school, opted for a different tactic, filing a civil lawsuit against the college.

The Trump administration launched investigations of 60 colleges and universities, including small liberal arts colleges. But it has not taken the same drastic measures with them as it did with larger universities, where it used federal funding as leverage. While some schools agreed to the federal government’s demands and reached multi-million dollar financial settlements, others like Harvard did not, and were subsequently hit with lawsuits. A judge dismissed the lawsuit against Harvard on Thursday.

Most complaints have been filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and allege that colleges didn’t take sufficient action when Jewish students complained they were discriminated against. The complaint against Reed College alleged that the school’s inaction after a student claimed she was harassed for being a Zionist created an environment where, soon after, the mezuzah on her doorframe was destroyed and a rock was thrown at her through her dorm window.

At Lehigh, a Jewish student’s mezuzah was stolen, according to the complaint, and, shortly after, a “Stand With Palestine” sticker was placed outside the same door. Lehigh police conducted and closed a brief investigation, the complaint says, but when the student identified who admitted to placing the sticker, the college declined to discipline them or increase security surveillance in the dormitory. Because of this, the complaint says, the Jewish student requested alternative housing for his own safety.

“This is outrageous and blatantly unequal treatment,” reads the complaint, filed by StandWithUs.

The lawsuit against Haverford accuses the school of being too permissive with pro-Palestinian protesters, who occupied the school’s main administrative building in December 2023. According to the suit, protesters would perform chants “quoting from the Hamas Charter,” which calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews. The suit also accused the president of saying she would take “no punitive action” against the protesters.

At Wellesley, a student resident assistant sent an email to the underclassmen in her dorm saying, “there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community,” according to the complaint filed by the Brandeis Center.

The RA sent an apology letter to residents, according to the complaint, but soon after posted on her social media that she stood by her statement, sent the apology because she “had a gun to [her] head,” and called students who objected to her message “some weak bitches fr.” The Title VI complaint against Wellesley alleges that the school didn’t do enough to address this issue.

As part of their settlements, Reed, Pomona and Occidental agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism. The schools also agreed to include education to fight antisemitism in their bias training, and to strengthen the rules for campus demonstrations with regard to time, place and manner.

Haverford also agreed to adopt the IHRA definition, which states that claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” or comparing “contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” can be antisemitic.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and an advocate for free speech on college campuses, fears that adopting this definition will stifle that freedom.

“I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it freely and openly we’ll never get a good purchase on it.”

Katz-Prober of the Brandeis Center said the IHRA definition does not restrict or censor speech.

“The IHRA definition specifically and explicitly states that criticism leveled against Israel, similar to that leveled against any other country, is not antisemitism, and also requires context,” she said.

“Antisemitism cannot be effectively addressed without first being able to understand and recognize it and the IHRA definition is the most effective and widely accepted tool for doing just that.”

The post It’s not just Harvard and Columbia. Small liberal arts colleges are quietly settling antisemitism complaints. appeared first on The Forward.

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