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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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The post What is antisemitism? At a Jewish studies conference, scholars use the archives as a guide — and a warning appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Egypt Rejects Israeli Opposition Leader’s ‘Egyptian Solution’ for Gaza
Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader, presents his Gaza plan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC, Feb. 25, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Egypt has rejected any responsibility for governing the Gaza Strip after the Israel-Hamas war, reiterating its opposition to a proposal by Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, who suggested Cairo take over reconstruction efforts.
“Cairo rejects any proposal to manage the Gaza Strip,” the Saudi television channel Al-Hadath quoted sources as saying. “Gaza will be managed by the Palestinians and in coordination with them. Cairo is committed to rebuilding Gaza without displacement.”
At an event hosted by the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank on Tuesday, former Israeli Prime Minister Lapid, who currently serves as the leader of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, presented “The Egyptian Solution” as his alternative plan for reconstruction efforts in Gaza after the war, proposing that Egypt take over administration of the enclave for 8-15 years in exchange for the cancellation of its $155 billion external debt.
“Egypt is a key strategic partner and [has been] a reliable ally for almost 50 years,” Lapid said. “A strong, moderate, pragmatic Sunni state, a crucial player in the region.”
According to the Egyptian state news agency MENA, Foreign Ministry spokesman Tamim Khalaf declared that any proposals contradicting Egypt and the Arab world’s established stance on Gaza are “rejected and unacceptable,” asserting that the territory must be under “full Palestinian sovereignty and management.”
Cairo has also previously rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave, while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Egypt has advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lapid explained on Tuesday that his plan aims to strengthen Israel’s security in the south, which borders Gaza, by enabling reconstruction and administration without Hamas’s involvement, ultimately resulting in a complete “divorce” from Gaza.
“Down the road, 10 years from now, the best solution is for Israel to separate from the Palestinians in a way that contributes to Israel’s security,” he said.
Under Lapid’s plan, Egypt would be responsible for demilitarizing Gaza and stopping weapons smuggling during its control. In return, he proposed that the international community and regional allies pay off Egypt’s massive debt to support Gaza’s management and reconstruction.
“The situation whereby a terrorist organization controls a country or territory and leaves it for others to manage the civilian affairs – like Hezbollah in Lebanon – is unacceptable,” Lapid said.
He added that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the countries that normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords could play a role in gradually integrating the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority into governing Gaza. “But that must be done in coordination with Israel and the United States, and with a constant focus on Israel’s security needs,” he emphasized.
Last week, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi met with leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, and Qatar to discuss his country’s alternative to Trump’s plan and urged the global community to support rebuilding Gaza without displacing its residents.
During a press conference in Madrid alongside Spain’s prime minister, the Egyptian president reiterated that the international community must support reconstruction efforts without displacing Palestinians.
“We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians — I repeat, without displacing Palestinians from their lands,” he said.
On March 5, Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit to discuss what it described as “dangerous” developments for Palestinians, according to a statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry. The statement also said the summit was being called in response to a Palestinian request.
The post Egypt Rejects Israeli Opposition Leader’s ‘Egyptian Solution’ for Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Zionist Group Occupies Barnard College Building
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) members occupying an administrative building on Feb. 26, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The anti-Zionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) has occupied the Milbank Hall administrative building at Barnard College in New York City to protest recent disciplinary sanctions imposed on student activists.
The highly anticipated action comes one day earlier than CUAD advertised on Monday, when it announced its intention to hold a demonstration on Thursday. In preparation for the event, which many feared would be disruptive of normal campus operations, college officials have spent the last several days tightening campus security — forbidding, for example, non-students from accessing campus, unmasking people who conceal their identities with masks or other garments, and performing random searches of “backpacks, purses, luggage,” and other effects.
Barnard College vice president of strategy Kelli Murray formally announced the measures, first reported by The Columbia Spectator, on Tuesday in an email to the campus community. However, by taking over Milbank Hall on Wednesday, when the college’s guard was down, CUAD has claimed an advantage in what could be a hotly contested struggle for control of the building.
Posting on Instagram during the late evening, CUAD said its members are “flooding the building despite Barnard shutting down campus. Barnard expelled two students and hundreds more rise up!”
Since then, a staff member has been assaulted, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
CUAD’s demonstration gives expression to its fury over Barnard’s expelling two students who last month stormed Columbia professor Avi Shilon’s course on modern Israeli history and proceeded to distribute antisemitic literature and spew pro-Hamas propaganda.
This week, CUAD resorted to promoting antisemitic tropes to mobilize its supporters for the event, alleging that “Zionist billionaires” influenced the administration’s decision to expel the students.
“This is the first official expulsion of a Columbia affiliate over a protest against the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of Palestine by israel [sic],” CUAD said on Monday in an Instagram post. “Barnard’s decision to expel two students marks a serious escalation in the crackdown against students advocating for divestment from the israeli war machine…Barnard’s arbitrary timing and level of punishment is heavily influenced by external pressures from billionaires, donors, and government officials.”
Spinning conspiracies of Jewish control, it continued, “Numerous articles have exposed how billionaires have pressured Columbia administrators to suppress campus activism for Palestine. Zionist networks have specifically targeted the Palestine class disruption activists for harassment, doxxing, and school discipline as part of a coordinated wave of repression against Palestinian activism.”
Columbia University has struggled to contain CUAD — which just last month committed an act of infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete — and plug the stream of negative publicity and scrutiny it draws. In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In April 2024, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unauthorized gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During the ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
CUAD demonstrated again the challenge it poses to the university’s security apparatus when it attacked SIPA. Numerous reports indicate the action was the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students. However, security officials were unable to amass any intelligence on the group’s plan before it unfolded.
Barnard College has said that it will not tolerate CUAD’s behavior, a statement it reinforced by suspending the protesters who invaded Professor Shilon’s class.
“Barnard will always take decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives, individuals feel sage, and higher education is celebrated,” college president Laura Rosenbury said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Monday. “This means upholding the highest standards and acting when those standards are threatened.”
She continued, “When rules are broken, when there is no remorse, no reflection, and no willingness to change, we must act. Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but so too is our commitment to respect, inclusion, and the integrity of the academic experience. At Barnard we fiercely defend our values. At Barnard, we always reject harassment and discrimination in all forms. At Barnard, we always do what is right, not what is easy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionist Group Occupies Barnard College Building first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Australian Nurse Charged for Threatening Israeli Patients as Spy Chief Flags Antisemitism as Top Concern
Members of the Jewish community and supporters gather for a protest rally against rising antisemitism at Martin Place in Sydney, Jan. 21, 2025. Photo: AAP Image/Steven Saphore via Reuters Connect
An Australian nurse working at a hospital in Sydney has been charged with making threats after saying in comments caught on video that she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them.
The latest legal step comes amid law enforcement’s scramble to combat a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months that Australia’s spy chief has called his agency’s top priority.
On Tuesday night, 26-year-old Sarah Abu Lebdeh was arrested and charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass, New South Wales (NSW) Police said in a statement. If convicted, she faces up to 22 years in prison.
The arrest follows an incident at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney, in which Abu Lebdeh and her fellow nurse, Ahmed Rashid Nadir, were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night-shift discussion with Israeli influencer Max Veifer.
The footage, which circulated widely, showed Lebdeh stating she would refuse to treat an Israeli patient and instead kill them, while Nadir used a throat-slitting gesture and claimed to have already killed many.
“It’s Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of s—t,” Lebdeh told Veifer.
“One day your time will come, and you will die the most disgusting death,” she added in a sentence riddled with obscenities.
After reviewing patient records, the hospital found no evidence that Lebdeh or Nadir had harmed patients.
NSW’s Health Minister Ryan Park confirmed that both nurses had been suspended and would be permanently barred from employment within the state’s health system.
According to the NSW Police statement, Lebdeh was released on bail and is set to appear in court on March 19. At this time, Nadir has not been charged.
The incident is the latest in a surge of antisemitic acts across Australia since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October 2023, with Jewish institutions targeted in arson attacks and businesses defaced.
Law enforcement in Sydney and Melbourne, home to the majority of Australia’s Jewish population, is actively investigating hate crimes, including the recent discovery of a trailer containing explosives and a list of potential Jewish targets.
In a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, said that antisemitism is now the agency’s top priority.
“In terms of threats to life, [antisemitism is] my agency’s number one priority because of the weight of incidents we’re seeing play out in this country,” Burgess told the Senate. “Antisemitism and significant antisemitism acts are prominent in our investigation caseload at this point in time.”
In a recent 2025 threat assessment declassified by ASIO, Burgess warned that the surge in antisemitic attacks across Australia could escalate, as extremists are increasingly self-radicalizing and “choose their own adventure” toward potential terrorist activity.
“Threats transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship, and prominent figures,” he said. “I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”
After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, several Jewish sites in Australia have been relentlessly targeted with vandalism and even arson.
A recent report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) found that antisemitism in Australia quadrupled to record levels following the outbreak of the Gaza war, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024.
Burgess also described how narratives originally centered on “freeing Palestine” have expanded to include incitements to “kill the Jews.”
During the Senate hearing, Burgess praised the “strong law enforcement responses,” stating that the police “have done exceptionally well.” However, he also addressed criticism over delays in arrests and responses to antisemitic incidents, saying investigations take time and are necessary to fully grasp the problem.
The post Australian Nurse Charged for Threatening Israeli Patients as Spy Chief Flags Antisemitism as Top Concern first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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