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‘Scholasticide’ Is Creating Divisions, Not Solving Them
Graphic posted by University of California, Los Angeles Students for Justice in Palestine on February 21, 2024 to celebrated the student government’s passing an resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Photo: Screenshot/Instagram
With the Jewish community still reeling from the recent violent assaults on Jewish individuals in Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, it is deeply troubling to see ongoing efforts by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to partner and forge coalitions with the very groups who have been fueling a broader climate of incitement against Jews and Israel.
As Jewish educational professionals who have worked in academia, we are deeply disturbed by the AAUP’s decision to not only embrace anti-Israel groups, but to give them a seat at the table — to the exclusion of Jewish voices.
The latest development on this front is the AAUP’s launch of its “Organize Every Campus” campaign, including a Summer Institute at Morehouse College in Atlanta in July. While details remain vague, the exclusionary tone of earlier events, such as the April 17 “National Day of Action,” which promoted a disturbing range of anti-Israel activity, raises doubts that these programs will be welcoming to Jewish members.
At over 200+ campuses nationwide, the AAUP has turned protests against what it described as government overreach into events that marginalized its own Jewish members, many of whom view their connection to Israel as very important.
In the name of protecting academic freedom, the AAUP has partnered with organizations whose rhetoric and activism drives Jewish and pro-Israel faculty and students to the margins.
How exclusion is being built into AAUP’s machinery
Exclusion is being manifested in AAUP’s structure in several ways. First, the organization made a formal retreat from its decades-long taboo on academic boycotts.
Last summer, the AAUP abandoned its categorical opposition to boycotting academic institutions and scholars — an about-face that implicitly validated embargoes on Israeli academics and on anyone unwilling to denounce Israel. The reversal risks eroding intellectual exchange across higher education and further exacerbates the shunning of Israeli scholars.
Second, the group has presented one-sided programming that demonizes Israel. On March 6, the association promoted a webinar titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” charging that Israel aims to eradicate Palestinian education.
Five mainstream Jewish and academic bodies — ADL, AEN, AJC, Hillel, and JFNA — wrote to the AAUP leadership, urging them to host a balanced follow-up program and to train staff on antisemitism. Ten weeks later, there has not even been a courtesy acknowledgment of the letter’s receipt.
Third, AAUP is partnering with groups — including JVP, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine — whose record is openly hateful to Israelis and their supporters. In its recent campus campaign, the AAUP has demonstrated that it is only interested in engaging with virulently anti-Israel groups that, ironically, work against the very academic principles of open inquiry and academic freedom that the AAUP and its “National Day of Action” claims to champion.
AAUP placed its own logo beside these anti-Israel groups’ logos on every flyer, giving them and their stances legitimacy. The downloadable toolkit from the campaign’s website urged professors to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” stage “die-ins,” and “target any senator” deemed friendly to Israel.
Faculty who believe in Israel’s right to exist — or who simply oppose its demonization and delegitimization — were told, implicitly but unmistakably, to stay away. What’s coming this summer and fall could be even more divisive if the AAUP refuses to heed these concerns and continues down a path that sidelines Jewish voices rather than includes them.
Why this matters for scholarship
In our experience engaging with many faculty and staff members on US campuses, we have debated ideas that we strongly disliked — it was this intellectual exchange, not boycott, that has sharpened our thinking.
Israeli academics — drawn from a country of roughly 10 million people in a Middle East–North Africa region of about 500 million, barely two percent of the area’s population — contribute indispensably to physics labs, philosophy colloquia, and medical breakthroughs. Silencing their voices and preventing US-based academics from working and exchanging ideas with them impoverishes us all.
The AAUP once stood sentinel against such suppression. Today it risks becoming just another ideological guild, one that blesses intellectual embargoes as long as the target is Israel.
A constructive way forward for the AAUP would be to:
- Acknowledge the growing alienation of its Jewish and Zionist members and respond publicly to the March 6 coalition letter.
- Revisit its recent policy change regarding academic boycotts and provide opportunities for its many members who oppose these tactics to highlight how academic boycotts violate the freedom, intellectual exchange, and open inquiry that the AAUP was founded to defend.
- Better vet and screen potential coalition partners: no group that equates Zionists with Nazis or calls for Israel’s destruction should be featured alongside the AAUP masthead.
- Offer robust antisemitism education for staff and chapter officers.
Academic freedom can never truly be advanced when one community is forced to check its identity at the door to participate.
If the AAUP truly stands for intellectual freedom, it must stop enabling the ideological silencing of Jewish and Zionist faculty.
Andrew Goretsky is the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League – Philadelphia. Raeefa Z. Shams is the Director of Communications and Programming at the Academic Engagement Network.
The post ‘Scholasticide’ Is Creating Divisions, Not Solving Them first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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North London Synagogue, Nursery Targeted in Eighth Local Antisemitic Incident in Just Over a Week
Demonstrators against antisemitism in London on Sept. 8, 2025. Photo: Campaign Against Antisemitism
A synagogue and its nursery school in the Golders Green area of north London were targeted in an antisemitic attack on Thursday morning — the eighth such incident locally in just over a week amid a shocking surge of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the area.
The synagogue and Jewish nursery were smeared with excrement in an antisemitic outrage echoing a series of recent incidents targeting the local Jewish community.
“The desecration of another local synagogue and a children’s nursery with excrement is a vile, deliberate, and premeditated act of antisemitism,” Shomrim North West London, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group, said in a statement.
“This marks the eighth antisemitic incident locally in just over a week, to directly target the local Jewish community,” the statement read. “These repeated attacks have left our community anxious, hurt, and increasingly worried.”
Local law enforcement confirmed they are reviewing CCTV footage and collecting evidence to identify the suspect and bring them to justice.
This latest anti-Jewish hate crime came just days after tens of thousands of people marched through London in a demonstration against antisemitism, amid rising levels of antisemitic incidents across the United Kingdom since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In just over a week, seven Jewish premises in Barnet, the borough in which Golders Green is located, have been targeted in separate antisemitic incidents.
According to the Metropolitan Police, an investigation has been launched into the targeted attacks, all of which involved the use of bodily fluids.
During the incidents, a substance was smeared on four synagogues and a private residence, while a liquid was thrown at a school and over a car in two other attacks.
As the investigation continues, local police said they believe the same suspect is likely responsible for all seven offenses, which are being treated as religiously motivated criminal damage.
No arrests have been made so far, but law enforcement said it is actively engaging with the local Jewish community to provide reassurance and support.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters, condemned the recent wave of attacks and called on authorities to take immediate action.
“The extreme defilement of several Jewish locations in and around Golders Green is utterly abhorrent and deeply distressing,” CST said in a statement.
“CST is working closely with police and communal partners to support victims and help identify and apprehend the perpetrator,” it continued.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) also denounced the attacks, calling for urgent measures to protect the Jewish community.
“These repeated incidents are leaving British Jews anxious and vulnerable in their own neighborhoods, not to mention disgusted,” CAA said in a statement.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the United Kingdom has experienced a surge in antisemitic crimes and anti-Israel sentiment.
Last month, CST published a report showing there were 1,521 antisemitic incidents in the UK from January to June of this year. It marks the second-highest total of incidents ever recorded by CST in the first six months of any year, following the first half of 2024 in which 2,019 antisemitic incidents were recorded.
In total last year, CST recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents for 2024, the country’s second worst year for antisemitism despite being an 18 percent drop from 2023’s record of 4,296.
In previous years, the numbers were significantly lower, with 1,662 incidents in 2022 and 2,261 hate crimes in 2021.
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Germany to Hold Off on Recognizing Palestinian State but Will Back UN Resolution for Two-State Solution
German national flag flutters on top of the Reichstag building, that seats the Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, in Berlin, Germany, March 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Lisi Niesner
Germany will support a United Nations resolution for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but does not believe the time has come to recognize a Palestinian state, a government spokesman told Reuters on Thursday.
“Germany will support such a resolution which simply describes the status quo in international law,” the spokesman said, adding that Berlin “has always advocated a two-state solution and is asking for that all the time.”
“The chancellor just mentioned two days ago again that Germany does not see that the time has come for the recognition of the Palestinian state,” the spokesman added.
Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Belgium have all said they will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly later this month, although London said it could hold back if Israel were to take steps to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and commit to a long-term peace process.
The United States strongly opposes any move by its European allies to recognize Palestinian independence.
Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the US has told other countries that recognition of a Palestinian state will cause more problems.
Those who see recognition as a largely symbolic gesture point to the negligible presence on the ground and limited influence in the conflict of countries such as China, India, Russia, and many Arab states that have recognized Palestinian independence for decades.
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UN Security Council, With US Support, Condemns Strikes on Qatar
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani attends an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, following an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, at UN headquarters in New York City, US, Sept. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
The United Nations Security Council on Thursday condemned recent strikes on Qatar’s capital Doha, but did not mention Israel in the statement agreed to by all 15 members, including Israel‘s ally the United States.
Israel attempted to kill the political leaders of Hamas with the attack on Tuesday, escalating its military action in what the United States described as a unilateral attack that does not advance US and Israeli interests.
The United States traditionally shields its ally Israel at the United Nations. US backing for the Security Council statement, which could only be approved by consensus, reflects President Donald Trump’s unhappiness with the attack ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Council members underscored the importance of de-escalation and expressed their solidarity with Qatar. They underlined their support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Qatar,” read the statement, drafted by Britain and France.
The Doha operation was especially sensitive because Qatar has been hosting and mediating negotiations aimed at securing a ceasefire in the Gaza war.
“Council members underscored that releasing the hostages, including those killed by Hamas, and ending the war and suffering in Gaza must remain our top priority,” the Security Council statement read.
The Security Council will meet later on Thursday to discuss the Israeli attack at a meeting due to be attended by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.