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A law professor worries Israel could become the next Hungary
(JTA) — Israel’s new governing coalition has been called the “most right-wing” in the nation’s history. That’s heartening to supporters who want the country to get tough on crime and secure Jewish rights to live in the West Bank, and dismaying to critics who see a government bent on denying rights to Israel’s minorities and undermining any hope for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While the far-right politics of new government ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have drawn much of the world’s attention, a series of proposed changes to Israel’s judicial system has also been raising hopes and alarms. On Wednesday, new Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced an overhaul that would limit the authority of the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court. It would put more politicians on the selection committee that picks judges, restrict the High Court’s ability to strike down laws and government decisions and enact an “override clause” enabling the Knesset to rewrite court decisions with a simple majority.
Levin and his supporters on the right justify these changes as a way to restore balance to a system that he says puts too much control in the hands of (lately) left-leaning judges: “We go to the polls, vote, elect, and time after time, people we didn’t elect choose for us. Many sectors of the public look to the judicial system and do not find their voices heard,” he asserted. “That is not democracy.”
Critics of the changes call them a power grab, one that will hand more leverage to the haredi Orthodox parties, remove checks on the settlement movement and limit civil society groups’ ability to litigate on behalf of Israeli minorities.
To help me make sense of the claims on both sides, I turned to Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, where he is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, which gathers and analyzes the constitutions of all independent nation-states. He’s also a Jew who has transformed a former synagogue on the South Side of Chicago into a cutting-edge arts space, and says what’s happening with Israel’s new governing coalition “raises my complicated relationship with the country.”
We spoke on Friday. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You have written about law in Israel, which lacks a constitution but relies on a series of “basic laws” to define its fundamental institutions. You’ve written that the Israeli judiciary had become “extremely powerful” — maybe too powerful — in imbuing the basic laws with a constitutional character, but worry that the current reforms will politicize the court in ways that will undermine Israeli democracy.
Tom Ginsburg: The proposed reforms were a campaign promise of certain elements of this coalition who have had longstanding grievances against the Israeli judiciary. The Israeli judiciary over the last decades has indeed become extremely powerful and important in writing or rewriting a constitution for Israel, promoting human rights and serving as a check and balance in a unicameral parliamentary system where the legislature can do anything it wants as a formal matter. A lot of people have had problems with that at the level of theory and practice. So there have been some reforms, and the court has, in my view, cut back on its activism in recent decades and in some sense has been more responsive to the center of the country. But there’s longstanding grievances from the political right, and that’s the context of these proposals.
A lot of the concerns about the new government in Israel are coming from the American Jewish left. But in an American context, the American Jewish left also has a big problem with the United States Supreme Court, because they see it as being too activist on the right. So in some ways isn’t the new Israeli government looking to do what American Jewish liberals dream of doing in this country?
Isn’t that funny? But the context is really different. The basic point is that judicial independence is a really good thing. Judicial accountability is a really good thing. And if you study high courts around the world, as I do, you see that there’s kind of a calibration, a balancing of institutional factors which lead towards more independence or more accountability and sometimes things switch around over time.
Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin holds a press conference at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Jan. 4, 2023. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
You mean “accountability” in the sense that courts should be accountable to the public.
Right. The Israeli promoters of these plans are pointing to the United States, in particular, for the proposals for more political involvement in the appointment process. On the other hand, in the United States once you’re appointed politically, you’re serving for life. There’s literally no check on your power. And so maybe some people think we have too much independence. If these proposals go through in Israel, there will be a front-end politicization of the court [in terms of the selection commission], but also back-end checks on the court [with the override clause that would allow a simple majority to reinstate laws struck down by the Supreme Court]. So in some sense, it moves the pendulum very far away from independence and very much towards accountability to the point of possible politicization.
And accountability in that case is too much of a good thing.
Again, you don’t want courts that can just make up rules. They should be responsive to society. On the other hand, you don’t want judges who are so responsive to society that there’s no protection for the basic rights of unpopular minorities.
What makes Israel either unique or different from some of the other countries you study, and certainly the United States? Part of it, I would guess, is the fact that it does not have a constitution. Is that a useful distinction?
They couldn’t agree on a single written constitution at the outset of the country, but they have built one through what you might call a “common law method”: norms and practices over time as well as the system of “basic laws,” which are passed by an absolute majority of the Knesset, where a majority of 61 votes can change any of those. But while they’re not formally entrenched, they have a kind of political status because of that term: basic law.
By the way, the Germans are in the same boat. The German constitution is called the Basic Law. And it was always meant to be a provisional constitution until they got together and reunified.
If you don’t have a written constitution, what’s the source of the legitimacy of judicial power? What is to prevent a Knesset from just passing literally any law, including ones that violate all kinds of rights, or installing a dictator? It has been political norms. And because Israel has relied on political norms, that means that this current conflict is going to have extremely high stakes for Israeli governance for many decades to come.
Can you give me a couple of examples? What are the high stakes in terms of democratic governance?
First of all, let me just say in principle that I don’t oppose reforms to make the judiciary more independent or accountable in any particular country. But then you obviously have to look at the local context. What’s a little worrying about this particular example is that several members of this coalition are themselves about to be subject to judicial proceedings.
Including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Right. And for example, they need to change the rules so that [Shas Party chairman] Aryeh Deri can sit in the cabinet despite his prior convictions. That indicates to me that maybe this isn’t a good-faith argument about the proper structure of the Israeli, uncodified constitution, but instead a mechanism of expediency.
Any one of these reforms might look okay, and you can find other countries that have done them. The combination, however, renders the judiciary extremely weak. Right now, it’s a multi-stakeholder commission that nominates and appoints judges in Israel, and the new coalition wants to propose that the commission be made up of a majority of politicians. We know that when you change the appointments mechanism to put more politicians on those committees, the more politicized they become.
Think about the United States process of appointing our Supreme Court judges: It’s highly politicized, and obviously the legitimacy of the court has taken a big hit in recent years. In Israel, you’d have politicized appointments under these reforms, but then you also have the ability of the Knesset to override any particular ruling that it wanted. Again, you can find countries which have that. It’s called the “new commonwealth model” of constitutionalism, in which courts don’t have the final say on constitutional matters, and the legislature can overrule them on particular rulings. But I think the combination is very dangerous because you could have a situation where the Knesset — which currently has a role in protecting human rights — can pick out and override specific cases, which really to me goes against the idea of the rule of law.
You mentioned other countries. Are there other countries where these kinds of changes were enacted and we saw how the experiment turned out?
The two most prominent recently are Hungary and Poland, which are not necessarily countries that you want to compare yourself to.
Certainly not if you are Israel.
Right. There’s so much irony here. When the new Polish government came in in 2015, they immediately manipulated the appointment system for the Constitutional Court and appointed their own majority, which then allowed them to pass legislation which probably would have been ruled unconstitutional. They basically set up a system where they were going to replace lower judges and so they were going to grow themselves into a majority of the court. And that’s led to controversy and rulings outside the mainstream that have led to protests, while the European Union is withholding funds and such from Poland because of this manipulation of the court.
In Hungary, Victor Orban was a really radical leader, and when he had a bare majority to change the constitution he wiped out all the previous jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. I don’t think the Israeli government would do that. But still there is this kind of worrying sense that they’re able to manipulate interpretation of law for their own particular political interest.
Another thing I want to raise is the potential for a constitutional crisis now. Suppose they pass these laws and the Israeli Supreme Court says, “Well, wait a minute, that interferes with our common law rules that we are bound by, going back to the British Mandate.” It conflicts with the basic law and they invoke what legal scholars call the “doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendments,” which is basically saying that an amendment goes against the core of our democratic system and violates, for example, Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic society. Israel has never done this, but it is a kind of tool that one sees deployed around the world in these crises. And if that happened, then I think you would have a full constitutional crisis on your hands in Israel.
Supreme Court President Aharon Barak speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a ceremony in the Supreme Court marking 50 years of law, Sept. 15, 1998. (Avi Ohayon)
What does a constitutional crisis look like?
Suppose you have sitting justices in Israel who say, “You know, this Knesset law violates the basic law and therefore it’s invalid.” And then, would the Knesset try to impeach those judges? Would they cut the budget of the judiciary? Would they back down?
When you compare Israel’s judicial system to other countries’ over the years, how does it stack up? Is it up there among the very strong systems or is it known for flaws that might have maybe hobbled its effectiveness?
It’s always been seen around the world as a very strong judiciary. Under the leadership of Aharon Barak [president of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006] it became extremely activist. And this provoked backlash in Israeli politics. That led to a kind of recalibration of the court where it is still doing its traditional role of defending fundamental rights and ensuring the integrity of the political process, but it’s not making up norms left and right, in the way that it used to. This is my perception. But it’s certainly seen as one of the leading courts around the world, its decisions are cited by others, and because of the quality of the judges and the complex issues that Israel faces it’s seen as a strong court and an effective court and to me a balanced court.
But, you know, I’m not in Israel, and ultimately, they’re going to figure out the question how balanced it is or where it’s going to go. I do worry that an unchecked majoritarian system, especially with a pure proportional representation model like Israel, has the potential for the capture of government by some minorities to wield power against other minorities. And that’s a problem for democracies — to some degree, that’s a problem we face in the United States.
How correctable are these reforms? I am thinking of someone who says, “These are democratically elected representatives who now want to change a system. If you want to change the system, elect your own majority.” Is the ship of state like this really hard to turn around once you go in a certain direction?
This is an area in which I think Israel and the United States have a lot of similarities. For several decades now, the judiciary has been a major issue for those on the political right. They thought the Warren Court was too left-leaning and they started the Federalist Society to create a whole cadre of people to staff the courts. They’ve done that and now the federal courts are certainly much more conservative than the country probably. But the left didn’t really have a theory of judicial power in the United States. And I think that’s kind of true in Israel: It’s a big issue for the political right, but the political left, besides just being not very cohesive at the moment, isn’t able to articulate what’s good about having an independent judiciary. It is correctable in theory, but that would require the rule of law to become a politically salient issue, which it generally isn’t in that many countries.
How do you relate to what is happening in Israel as a Jew, and not just a legal scholar?
That’s a great question, because it really raises my complicated relationship with the country. You know, I find it to be a very interesting democracy. I like going to Israel because it’s a society in which there’s a lot of argument, a lot of good court cases and a lot of good legal scholars. On one level, I connect with my colleagues and friends there who seem very demoralized about this current moment. And I honestly worry about whether this society will remain a Jewish and democratic one with the current coalition.
The rule of law is a part of democracy. You need the rule of law in order to have democracy function. And I know others would respond and say, “Oh, you’re just being hysterical.” And, “This isn’t Sweden, it’s the Middle East.” But the ethno-nationalist direction of the country bothers me as a Jew, and I hope that the court remains there to prevent it from deepening further.
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How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I.
Denise Blumenfeld’s AI learning tool doesn’t have all the answers — or at least it’s not so eager to give them away. Instead, Blumenfeld, a second-year student at the Orthodox women’s seminary Yeshivat Maharat, has customized ChatGPT to answer her with questions with a question.
I watched recently as Blumenfeld fed a paragraph of Talmud into the module, aptly named Socrates Havruta (its surname is Hebrew for study partner). Its response tested her reading comprehension: Based on the first line of the text, what is the basic obligation around candlelighting? Blumenfeld typed in an answer, which Socrates affirmed before asking another.
She knew ChatGPT could simply summarize the text, but would that really help her learn it? On the other hand, responding to questions could help someone figure things out on their own. And to keep herself honest, she’d set a rule: “I always try to read the authentic source first,” she told me.
Blumenfeld is part of the first generation of rabbinical students who are training with artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini at their disposal — and hoping to avoid those tools becoming a crutch. But the beit midrash, or study hall, is just one of many contact points they have with an invention that may be changing not only what it means to be a student or a rabbi, but also what it means to be Jewish.
To get a sense of how AI is helping shape the next generation of the rabbinate, I interviewed students from five U.S.-based rabbinical schools about how use and think about AI in relation to their work. Their attitudes ranged from guarded enthusiasm to flat rejection. But their comments — and the boundaries they had each set around their personal use — revealed the deep influence AI is already having on their professional and religious outlook.
This was true even for students who did not use generative AI at all. Adrian Marcos, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, listed moral reasons he avoided it, among them its exploitation of stolen data, its environmental impact, and the digital literacy crisis it was accelerating. Yet Marcos admitted that the burden of explanation fell on AI’s detractors, not its enthusiasts.
“A lot of people are very into AI, and as a rabbi, whether or not you end up in a pulpit, you have to converse with those people,” said Marcos, a second-year student at the Conservative seminary. “And as the technology evolves, the conversations around it are also going to evolve.”
Hacking the sermon
ChatGPT can seemingly draw on the entire digitized Jewish canon, translate it from Hebrew if necessary, and draft new content about it. For students pursuing the rabbinate because of their passion for seeking and sharing knowledge themselves, the question was whether a tool that lightened the load was really helping.
Aiden Englander, a fourth-year at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, engages ChatGPT for on-call intellectual companionship. Upon finding an interesting commentary on the week’s Torah portion, he’ll ask ChatGPT for secular variations on the idea. It might spit out Nietzsche, he said, or a recent news story.
Knowing ChatGPT can make such a connection unlocks a different level of rhetorical ambition — serving as a kind of academic force-multiplier — but it forecloses the possibility of, well, sorting out his concept without it. It also raises the question of what makes a sermon “better,” and whether literature you’ve only learned about via ChatGPT summary is any less suitable for a sermon than a volume you’re still working through on the page.
Englander’s calculus was straightforward. “When you’re able to quote a book that someone is familiar with, they’ll remember it more,” he said.
Though an avid user, he harbors doubts about AI’s reliability. “It will just completely make up a Gemara,” he said, and in his view its knowledge is especially shallow in matters of Jewish law. Yet what ChatGPT can do is what makes Englander, who is 24, most cautious. In a creative pinch, he’ll ask it to bullet-point some possible themes to explore from that week’s Torah portion to write a sermon about. But that’s a muscle he’s conscious about developing, so he tries to desist.
Yet a theological question about AI use persists underneath the utilitarian concerns. Is a ChatGPT-generated d’var torah a bad idea because it’s likely to spew cliches or degrade one’s writing ability — or because the very notion of a computer recommendation defeats the purpose of the exercise, which is to bring human experience to bear upon the Torah and vice versa? Major Jewish denominations have been as quiet on the religious questions around AI as rabbinical schools have been on the practical ones, leaving students to work out both problems on their own.
“An LLM doesn’t have autobiography — it’s not having a faith experience,” said Dani Pattiz, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College. “It can come up with these brilliant syntheses of other people’s ideas. But at the end of the day, it can’t genuinely glorify God, or speak to people’s souls in an authentic way.”
A changing pulpit
As they navigated their own use of AI, rabbinical students were pondering how it would reshape the lives of their future congregants, and in turn, their own work.
On a recent trip to Washington, Micah Glickman, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, visited a synagogue where a number of congregants had been laid off in DOGE’s federal job cuts. AI’s impact on employment, he realized, could be exponentially greater. If that were the case, it was not merely that more people would be facing financial and emotional vulnerability. It was also that a universal source of human fulfillment might have an expiration date.
“It seems like the promise of this technology is to basically do anything that a person can do, and do it better than that person can,” Glickman said in an interview. “And I wonder how that will affect a congregation of people who maybe derive a sense of meaning and purpose from their accomplishments in life.”
It would fall on rabbis and other faith leaders, Glickman said, to shepherd their communities through this change. “There’s some impending spiritual crisis that we’re on the verge of,” he said. He was helping organize a symposium at HUC to consider these and other AI-related issues — seeking a spiritual solution, he said, to a spiritual problem.
Meanwhile, he was already encountering ChatGPT-written bar mitzvah speeches from the students he tutors. That put him in the position of his HUC professors: Should he discourage kids from using it, or — conceding to inevitability — try to steer them towards using AI responsibly?
It was a theme across interviews: The future rabbis I spoke to were more worried about how the generation after them would learn than they were about their own trajectories. Today’s students, after all, largely passed their studies prior to rabbinical school without ChatGPT; they were wary of atrophy only because they knew they had muscles to begin with.
Even Blumenfeld, the Maharat student, was not sure she would recommend her Socrates bot to younger students. “Because I had experience learning and teaching before AI, I know what the result I’m looking for is, and know how to ask the right thing,” she said, whereas kids at that age hadn’t yet developed those skills. “As teachers,” she added, “we need to learn how to teach.”
They also need to teach how to learn, and why to learn. YU’s Englander recalled a thought experiment shared decades ago by the university’s former president Rabbi Norman Lamm: If you could implant a microchip into your brain that gave you complete knowledge of the Torah, would you ever have to learn? Lamm’s opinion was that learning in fact had primacy over knowledge — that the toil of studying the Torah was not just a means to an end, but a form of worship in and of itself.
“This might be a little bit more of a mystical notion, but from the standpoint of accessing Hashem, it’s only accomplished through learning the text and struggling with it, not being told what the text says by a third party,“ Englander said. The reason he could generally detect when ChatGPT was hallucinating the Talmud, he added, was because he had put in the hours studying it himself.
The post How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I. appeared first on The Forward.
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Belgium Joins South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel at UN Court
A general view inside the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at the start of a hearing where South Africa requests new emergency measures over Israel’s operations in Rafah, in The Hague, Netherlands, May 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Belgium officially became the latest country to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the United Nations’ top court on Tuesday, as international pressure mounts on the Jewish state despite a US-backed ceasefire that has so far paused the two-year conflict in the Gaza Strip.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced that Brussels has requested to join the South African case by filing a declaration of intervention, allowing it to participate without being the original plaintiff.
Belgium joins several other countries in the case, including Brazil, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Cuba, Libya, Bolivia, the Maldives, Chile, and “Palestine.”
Earlier this year, South Africa vowed to continue its genocide case against Israel despite the ceasefire in Gaza, the most significant effort yet to halt the two-year Middle Eastern conflict.
Speaking before parliament in Cape Town, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa affirmed that the US-backed peace deal “will have no bearing” on the ongoing legal proceedings against the Jewish state.
Ramaphosa promised to continue seeking “justice for the people of Gaza,” while reiterating false accusations that Israel committed genocide under international law during its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Israel has strongly rejected all allegations of genocide, calling South Africa’s case “baseless” and “politically motivated.”
Ramaphosa’s continuing push comes amid ongoing international pressure, with the US, South African political leaders, and the local Jewish community all expressing opposition to his government’s actions, accusing it of pursuing an anti-Israel campaign instead of addressing the country’s own pressing issues.
Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community have lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.
Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, which may take years to go through the judicial process, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign.
Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide. The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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US Professor Who Was Suspended After Calling for ‘War on Israel’ Requests Reinstatement in Lawsuit
Illustrative: A student puts on their anti-Israel graduation cap. Photo: Angelina Katsanis via Reuters Connect
A University of Kentucky professor who is serving an interim suspension for promoting an antisemitic petition which called for “Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean See” on Friday asked a US federal judge to reinstate him even as an investigation into his remarks is ongoing.
The instructor, Ramsi Woodcock, teaches at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. In July, he shared a petition which implored “every country in the world to make war on Israel until such time as Israel has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine.” Using a variation of the “from the river to sea, Palestine will be free” slogan that has become a signature of anti-Zionist groups around the world, he echoed language that has been widely recognized as calling for the destruction of Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state.
Woodcock also self-identifies as an “antizionist scholar of law and economics” on his website, where he introduces himself as a scholar “who recognizes that my country is currently committing a genocide of Palestinians through the colony that we maintain in Palestine called the ‘State of Israel.’” The academic goes on to state, “I oppose the genocide and the existence of that colony. I believe that the international community has a moral and legal duty to go to war to liberate Palestine and end Israel.”
The University of Kentucky responded to the incident in July by suspending Woodcock and banning him from campus, citing his “disturbing conduct” and “calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin.” In reaching a decision, the university drew from state guidance based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as well as its own principles.
“We condemn any call for violence and the views expressed online certainly do not represent the institution’s views. They express hate,” university president Eli Capilouto said in a statement. “While someone in his or her personal capacity may be free to express themselves, the university is also free to make clear that the individual’s personal views are not those of our community.”
Citing the university’s obligations under Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act, he added, “Let me be clear: the views expressed by this employee, if accurately attributed, are repugnant. Importantly, too, if such individual expressions threaten the safety and well-being of the university’s students and staff, we are obligated to act to protect our community and our people.”
Woodcock sued the university in November, arguing that the decision to suspend him violates his First Amendment rights and “degrades the quality of education the University of Kentucky.”
In his latest legal action, Woodcock, testifying on Friday at the US District courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky during an evidentiary hearing, demanded to be allowed to teach during this upcoming spring semester and denied the allegations against him. For its part, the university continues to pay his salary but maintains that he must remain inactive until it concludes its investigation into his alleged misconduct.
The judge presiding over the case, Danny C. Reeves, did not issue a ruling, as he is awaiting the filing of two additional motions calling for the lawsuit’s dismissal or abeyance, pending the outcome of the university’s investigation. According to the Kentucky Lantern, he did say in court that Woodcock’s team has failed so far to show a “nickel’s worth of harm.”
Following the hearing, the university said, “We were pleased to defend the university’s decisions to investigate Professor Woodcock and to reassign him during the investigations.”
Woodcock is not the first professor to face disciplinary sanctions for using the campus as a platform for calling for violence against Jews.
In September, Cornell University canceled the course of a professor who according to the school violated federal anti-discrimination law when he expelled an Israeli student from class. Later, the professor reached an agreement with the administration which allowed him to retire rather than serve out his punishment.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), university faculty and staff have exacerbated the antisemitism crisis on US college campuses by politicizing the classroom, promoting anti-Israel bias, and even discriminating against Jewish colleagues.
The actions by faculty provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists have perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, according to the survey, released in September.
The survey of “Jewish-identifying US-based faculty members” found that 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed their colleagues engaging in antisemitic activity, and a significant percentage named the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) group as the force driving it. Of those aware of an FSJP chapter on their campus, the vast majority of respondents reported that the chapter engaged in anti-Israel programming (77.2 percent), organized anti-Israel protests and demonstrations (79.4 percent), and endorsed anti-Israel divestment campaigns (84.8 percent).
Additionally, 50 percent of respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, an education nonprofit, published a groundbreaking study which showed that the FSJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on a college campus increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.