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What is antisemitism? At a Jewish studies conference, scholars use the archives as a guide — and a warning

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — Did a New York City coffee shop’s workers quit over the owner’s pro-Israel stance? Was the library at Cooper Union barricaded to protect Jewish students inside from an angry pro-Palestinian mob?
Ten weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, these are the kinds of stories fueling angry debate on social media, with Jews charging bigotry and critics of Israel saying antisemitism is being weaponized to silence them.
These weren’t the kinds of events being debated — at least formally — at the 55th annual convention of the Association for Jewish Studies, held this week in San Francisco. Some 1,000 scholars gathered to network and share their latest research, which in the case of historians, Bible scholars and philosophers tends to look backwards, sometimes by centuries.
But the war weighed heavily during the conference, turning historical issues into debates very much of the moment. A presenter would be discussing, say, Jewish attitudes about contraception in the 1950s and be asked why Jewish concerns about safety are ignored by campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. At a session on what it’s like to be one of the few Jewish studies scholars at small or Christian colleges, panelists commiserated about being expected to speak for all Jews about the turmoil in the Middle East.
At one session — it had the seemingly uncontroversial title “Hurdles in the Archive: Pinpointing Antisemitism” — the moderator even warned that the panelists would be discussing the challenges of researching historical antisemitism in various archives, not current events. “So although we are, all of us, very conscious of issues around antisemitism now,” said Deborah Dash Moore, the acclaimed historian at the University of Michigan, “this is looking back.”
Good luck with that. Even discussing antisemitism in the mid-20th century, the presenters were foreshadowing the current discourse around events like those at the coffee shop and Cooper Union. Who gets to define antisemitism? If Jews call it antisemitism, must you believe them?
Riv-Ellen Prell, like Moore a force in Jewish studies for the last four decades, described her research at the University of Minnesota into an incident of alleged antisemitism at the dental school in the late 1930s. Three Jewish women in the dental hygiene program were told by an administrator — “for their own good,” according to the archive — that the school couldn’t guarantee them jobs once they graduated because many dentists wouldn’t hire Jews. The women took this as an unsubtle hint to quit, and a local Jewish newspaper editorialized against a “system set against Jews.”
In 2019, when the university was thinking about renaming buildings named after alleged segregationists and antisemites, a regent said Prell’s interpretation of the documents unfairly tagged the dental school as antisemitic. The regent insisted that the dental program administrator was a product of her time, thought she was being helpful, and wasn’t a Nazi or a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
This exasperated Prell, who said it’s a historian’s job to read primary documents and interpret them in context.
“Various administrators at the university believed they were entirely innocent of anti-Jewish behavior,” she said. “They believe that all Jews they encountered were grateful to them.”
Customers line up outside Caffe Aronne in the Upper East Side after reports that the staff members quit due to the store’s pro-Israel activities, Nov. 7, 2023. (Luke Tress)
Ari Kelman, of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, was similarly asked to comb the university’s archives for evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination in the 1950s. There was a document quoting an administrator who was worried that if the school weren’t careful, there would be a “flood of Jewish students” from two heavily Jewish high schools in Los Angeles, Fairfax High and Beverley Hills High. But did Stanford ever act on his bias, the way the Ivies once imposed quotas on Jewish students?
Kelman’s archive search came up empty until he found a tally of high schools represented at Stanford in the years after the administrator’s remarks. Sure enough, enrollments from the two “Jewish” high schools dropped dramatically. The university ultimately apologized for discriminating against Jewish students.
Kelman called the tally a “smoking gun,” but one that only made sense in — here’s that word again — “context.”
“How do you identify antisemitism when you see it, especially when it doesn’t look like Brown Shirts [Nazi paramilitary], or nobody’s using the language of ‘communists’ or other sort of coded terms for Jews?” he asked. “How do you know what it looks like?”
Brittany P. Tevis, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, said that rather than asking whether something is antisemitic, it may be more useful to ask “whether or not Jews’ rights have been infringed upon. Because unlike a metaphysical concept, like antisemitism, rights are definable and they have been legally defined.”
Tevis, who will soon offer what Moore called the first course about anti-Jewish discrimination and the American legal system to be taught in an American law school, described her research into a workplace discrimination claim in 1940s Massachusetts. Although the evidence of antisemitism is “murky,” she, like Prell and Kelman, defended the historian’s right to name antisemitism when they see it.
Which brings us to the café and Cooper Union cases. In both incidents, initial reports suggested pretty clear cut instances of antisemitism, or anti-Zionism bordering on Jew hatred. In the case of the café, the Israeli owner reported that his pro-Palestinian employees quit and, according to his lawyer, tried to “force it to close in retaliation for proudly displaying the Israeli flag.” When word of the incident got out, supporters flooded the place.
But a New York Times followup suggested the story was more complicated: Workers complained that they hadn’t signed up for the owner’s pro-Israel activism at a fraught time, and some of the workers, especially the women, were uncomfortable when some customers began questioning the café’s pro-Israel stance. They denied they were antisemitic.
The Times also dug into viral allegations surrounding an Oct. 25 incident at Cooper Union’s campus in Manhattan. Initial reports, and a six-second video, suggested that Jewish students were trapped in a school library by pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanting, “Free, free Palestine.” The Jewish students said they felt threatened, although campus police said they were on the scene and saw no cause to intervene. A protester said, “in no way was this an attack on Jewish people.”
It’s hard to know how historians will describe these incidents in decades to come, especially when they remain murky in the moment. Should people “believe Jews” when they say they feel threatened as Jews? Is anti-Zionism antisemitism — and do such distinctions matter when protesters are pounding on a library door? “At no time were they yelling out that they wanted to kill people,” the Cooper Union Police Department later said of the library protesters. A fair distinction, or a pretty low bar?
In her response to the AJS panelists, Lila Corwin Berman of Temple University gingerly suggested that historians can go too far in finding evidence of antisemitism when other explanations might suffice. “Sometimes I feel like when there’s a desire to name a very particular force and determine that this is what was happening, there tends to be a politics of not wanting to ask some of the more interrogating questions,” she said — for example, what were the Jews’ motivations in reporting these incidents as antisemitism, and what are the motivations of institutions that commission historians to investigate their archives.
“I get that,” Prell later replied. “But what complicates that is [the question], how do you analyze power?”
In her presentation, Prell said she is interested in the policies and processes that prevent people from holding those in authority responsible for antisemitism.
”Our moment demands that we insist that without understanding the mechanisms and lived experience of racism and antisemitism, no document, whatever it states, will ever speak for itself,” she said. “Archives will otherwise be repositories for historical evidence to be dismissed, minimized and ridiculed as falling short of the elusive definition of, in this case, antisemitism.”
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Trump Eyes Bringing Azerbaijan, Central Asian Nations into Abraham Accords, Sources Say

US President Donald Trump points a finger as he delivers remarks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, DC, US, July 31, 2025. Photo: Kent Nishimura via Reuters Connect
President Donald Trump’s administration is actively discussing with Azerbaijan the possibility of bringing that nation and some Central Asian allies into the Abraham Accords, hoping to deepen their existing ties with Israel, according to five sources with knowledge of the matter.
As part of the Abraham Accords, inked in 2020 and 2021 during Trump’s first term in office, four Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel after US mediation.
Azerbaijan and every country in Central Asia, by contrast, already have longstanding relations with Israel, meaning that an expansion of the accords to include them would largely be symbolic, focusing on strengthening ties in areas like trade and military cooperation, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Such an expansion would reflect Trump’s openness to pacts that are less ambitious than his administration’s goal to convince regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia to restore ties with Israel while war rages in Gaza.
The kingdom has repeatedly said it would not recognize Israel without steps towards Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.
Another key sticking point is Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbor Armenia, since the Trump administration considers a peace deal between the two Caucasus nations as a precondition to join the Abraham Accords, three sources said.
While Trump officials have publicly floated several potential entrants into the accords, the talks centered on Azerbaijan are among the most structured and serious, the sources said. Two of the sources argued a deal could be reached within months or even weeks.
Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, in March to meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Aryeh Lightstone, a key Witkoff aide, met Aliyev later in the spring in part to discuss the Abraham Accords, three of the sources said.
As part of the discussions, Azerbaijani officials have contacted officials in Central Asian nations, including in nearby Kazakhstan, to gauge their interest in a broader Abraham Accords expansion, those sources said. It was not clear which other countries in Central Asia – which includes Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – were contacted.
The State Department, asked for comment, did not discuss specific countries, but said expanding the accords has been one of the key objectives of Trump. “We are working to get more countries to join,” said a US official.
The Azerbaijani government declined to comment.
The White House, the Israeli foreign ministry and the Kazakhstani embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
Any new accords would not modify the previous Abraham Accords deals signed by Israel.
OBSTACLES REMAIN
The original Abraham Accords – inked between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – were centered on restoration of ties. The second round of expansion appears to be morphing into a broader mechanism designed to expand US and Israeli soft power.
Wedged between Russia to the north and Iran to the south, Azerbaijan occupies a critical link in trade flows between Central Asia and the West. The Caucasus and Central Asia are also rich in natural resources, including oil and gas, prompting various major powers to compete for influence in the region.
Expanding the accords to nations that already have diplomatic relations with Israel may also be a means of delivering symbolic wins to a president who is known to talk up even relatively small victories.
Two sources described the discussions involving Central Asia as embryonic – but the discussions with Azerbaijan as relatively advanced.
But challenges remain and there is no guarantee a deal will be reached, particularly with slow progress in talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The two countries, which both won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have been at loggerheads since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh – an Azerbaijani region that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population – broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
In 2023, Azerbaijan retook Karabakh, prompting about 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee to Armenia. Both sides have since said they want to sign a treaty on a formal end to the conflict.
Primarily Christian Armenia and the US have close ties, and the Trump administration is wary of taking action that could upset authorities in Yerevan.
Still, US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump himself, have argued that a peace deal between those two nations is near.
“Armenia and Azerbaijan, we worked magic there,” Trump told reporters earlier in July. “And it’s pretty close.”
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Trump Reaffirms Support for Morocco’s Sovereignty Over Western Sahara

A Polisario fighter sits on a rock at a forward base, on the outskirts of Tifariti, Western Sahara, Sept. 9, 2016. Photo: Reuters / Zohra Bensemra / File.
US President Donald Trump has reaffirmed support for Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, saying a Moroccan autonomy plan for the territory was the sole solution to the disputed region, state news agency MAP said on Saturday.
The long-frozen conflict pits Morocco, which considers the territory as its own, against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, which seeks an independent state there.
Trump at the end of his first term in office recognized the Moroccan claims to Western Sahara, which has phosphate reserves and rich fishing grounds, as part of a deal under which Morocco agreed to normalize its relations with Israel.
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, made clear in April that support for Morocco on the issue remained US policy, but these were Trump’s first quoted remarks on the dispute during his second term.
“I also reiterate that the United States recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and supports Morocco’s serious, credible and realistic autonomy proposal as the only basis for a just and lasting solution to the dispute,” MAP quoted Trump as saying in a message to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.
“Together we are advancing shared priorities for peace and security in the region, including by building on the Abraham Accords, combating terrorism and expanding commercial cooperation,” Trump said.
As part of the Abraham Accords signed during Trump’s first term, four Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel after US mediation.
In June this year, Britain became the third permanent member of the U.N. Security Council to back an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty for the territory after the U.S. and France.
Algeria, which has recognized the self-declared Sahrawi Republic, has refused to take part in roundtables convened by the U.N. envoy to Western Sahara and insists on holding a referendum with independence as an option.
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Israel Says Its Missions in UAE Remain Open Despite Reported Security Threats

President Isaac Herzog meets on Dec. 5, 2022, with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi. Photo: GPO/Amos Ben Gershom
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday that its missions to the United Arab Emirates are open on Friday and representatives continue to operate at the embassy in Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai in cooperation with local authorities.
This includes, the statement underlined, ensuring the protection of Israeli diplomats.
On Thursday, reports appeared in Israeli media that Israel was evacuating most of its diplomatic staff in the UAE after the National Security Council heightened its travel warning for Israelis staying in the Gulf country for fear of an Iranian or Iran-sponsored attacks.
“We are emphasizing this travel warning given our understanding that terrorist organizations (the Iranians, Hamas, Hezbollah and Global Jihad) are increasing their efforts to harm Israel,” the NSC said in a statement.
After signing the Abraham Accords with Israel in 2020, the UAE has been among the closest regional allies of the Jewish state.
Israel is concerned about its citizens and diplomats being targeted in retaliatory attacks following its 12-day war against Iran last month.
Earlier this year, the UAE sentenced three citizens of Uzbekistan to death for last year’s murder of Israeli-Moldovan rabbi Zvi Cohen.