Top US professional associations for academics have allowed antisemitism to “flourish unchecked” by excluding Jewish members and promoting antisemitic and biased anti-Israel narratives in their work, according to a new report.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday published the new study, which found that 42 percent of Jewish faculty feel that these organizations, including the Middle East Studies Association, alienate Jews intentionally if they publicly align with Zionism.

According to the data, 25 percent resort to concealing their Jewishness due to the hostile environment, and another 45 percent say their colleagues lectured them on what does and what does not constitute antisemitism.

The report “reveals alarming, patterns of marginalization, leadership failures, and systematic exclusion of Jewish members from their professional communities and academic homes,” the ADL said in a statement.

Some academic bodies, such as the American Philosophical Association and the American Political Science Association, were conferred high ratings based on Jewish faculty not reporting any “major incidents,” while others, including the American Anthropological Association and several others, were labeled as “major concerns” requiring significant remedial action.

“Antisemitic biases in progressional academic associations are widespread and reveal a problem that goes far beyond traditional scholarly circles,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “When antisemitism and biased anti-Israel narratives are normalized within these influential spaces, they seep into curricula, research, and public discourse, quietly but profoundly shaping how students and future professionals interpret the world.”

He added, “By assessing these associations and how they are responding, we are delineating a path forward to ensure that academic spaces remain intellectually rigorous, inclusive and free of antisemitism, and accountable to the public they serve.”

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), which was categorized as a group with “major concerns,” has a long history of alienating Jewish members and politicizing the discourse of a field of study which explores some of the most nuanced and complex subjects in all of academia.

In March 2022, it endorsed the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The association’s president, Eve Troutt Powell, later said that its members clearly decided “to answer the call for solidarity from Palestinian scholars and students experiencing violations of their right to education and other human rights.” MESA’s board would seek to “ensure that the call for an academic boycott is upheld without undermining our commitment to the free exchange of ideas and scholarship,” she added.

Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects ‘right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country comprehensively with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students who seek to study in Israel.

An overwhelming majority of Middle East scholars support boycotting Israel, according to a survey published in November 2022, which shows that only nine percent of 500 responding experts from MESA and the American Political Science Association (APSA) would “oppose all boycotts of Israel.” A striking 91 percent said they “support at least some boycotts,” and 36 percent responded they favor “some boycotts” but not against Israeli universities.

In 2023, the American Anthropological Association, established in 1902, endorsed BDS. It had considered doing so before, but the idea was rejected in November 2015, when a measure similar was defeated by razor thin margin of 39 votes, with 4,807 total votes cast.

Another academic association, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which has promoted anti-Zionism through its work and expressed support for academic boycotts, was not named in the ADL’s report, but The Algemeiner has covered its activities extensively.

In October, the AAUP, the largest and oldest US organization for defending faculty rights, picked a fight over the University of Pennsylvania’s efforts to combat antisemitism, arguing that a range of faculty speech and conduct considered hostile by Jewish members of the campus community are key components of academic freedom.

In a letter to the administration regarding antidiscrimination investigations opened by Penn’s Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests (OREI), the group charged that efforts to investigate alleged antisemitism on campus and punish those found to have perpetrated can constitute discrimination. Its argument reprises recent claims advanced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) group, notorious for its defense of Sharia law and alleged ties to jihadist groups such as Hamas, in a lawsuit which aims to dismantle antisemitism prevention training at Northwestern University.

Additionally, the AAUP described Penn’s efforts to protect Jewish students from antisemitism as resulting from “government interference in university procedures” while arguing that merely reporting antisemitism subjects the accused to harassment, seemingly suggesting that many Jewish students who have been assaulted, academically penalized, and exposed to hate speech on college campuses across the US are perpetrators rather than victims. The group also argued that other minority groups from “protected classes,” such as Arabs and African Americans, are disproportionately investigated for antisemitism.

The AAUP had defended allegedly antisemitic speech before.

In 2014, for example, it accused the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign of violating the tenets of academic freedom when it declined to approve the hiring of Steven Salaita because he uttered a slew of antisemitic, extramural comments on social media, such as “Zionists transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948,” “Every Jewish boy and girl can grow up to be the leader of a murderous colonial regime,” and “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic s—t in response to Israeli terror.”

An AAUP report that chronicled the incident, which mushroomed into a major controversy in academia, listed those tweets and others but still concluded that not hiring Salaita “acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” and “cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected.” At the same time, the AAUP said that it was “committed to fighting systemic racism and pursuing racial justice and equity in colleges and universities, in keeping with the association’s mission to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.