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An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
Graduation season is upon us, with its regalia, music, orations, crowds and controversies. This year, I’ll be attending two university ceremonies: my daughter’s graduation from Binghamton University, and the commencement at Case Western Reserve University, where I teach. As both a parent and a faculty member, I look forward to being part of the powerful ritual moment when graduates are ushered out into the world.
But I’ll also be listening with an analytical ear, attentive to what these speeches reveal about the institutions delivering them — especially in a season when the same fault lines keep opening over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and over who gets to speak and about what.
Amid financial, political and technological pressure, the question of what universities owe their students, and society, has rarely felt more unsettled or more contested. As speakers or planned speakers at the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Georgetown have drawn fire over their stances on the Middle East, it’s clear that while campus protests over Israel may have died down, the tensions provoked by the Israel-Gaza war are still defining the American campus environment.
A close reading of the biggest controversy to date, sparked by historian Derek Peterson’s address at the University of Michigan’s spring graduation ceremony, can help illustrate the dangers of that fact.
Peterson’s platform has few equals in American academic life. A MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and a Fellow of the British Academy, Peterson, among the most decorated scholars of his generation, addressed a crowd gathered in the largest stadium in the United States. He did so as a representative of the faculty, invited to the lectern to speak for those who actually taught these students.
This was a rare chance for a professor, an opportunity to publicly offer an answer to the question every student has implicitly asked for four years: what is all this education for?
In a brief oration, under six minutes long, Peterson structured his answer around a single elegant literary device, Michigan’s fight song.
He reframed a song usually understood to herald student athletes — “Hail to the victors valiant, hail to the conquering heroes” — by asserting the real victors are not athletes, but the activists who have fought for justice throughout the university’s history.
Sing for Sarah Burger, a suffragette who fought for women’s admission to the school, Peterson urged. Sing for Moritz Levi, the university’s first Jewish professor, who opened Michigan’s doors to generations of Jewish students fleeing antisemitism at East Coast universities. Sing for the Black Action Movement students who demanded a curriculum reflecting Black experience and identity.
Each of these invocations gestured toward a group that was once shut out of the university, and honored the activists who responded to that exclusion with repair. The crowd answered Peterson’s appeals with applause and cheers that grew louder with each invocation, as he skillfully built toward his climax.
At the high point, Peterson delivered the line that would reverberate far beyond Michigan Stadium: “Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists,” he called out; for those “who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
The roar that followed was the loudest and longest of the entire speech. “The greatness of this university,” he summarized, “rests on the courage and the conviction of student activists who have pushed this university down the path towards justice.”
Within hours, the university president Domenico Grasso issued a public apology, saying Peterson’s words were “hurtful and insensitive.” In response, more than a thousand faculty members signed an open letter demanding Grasso retract the apology. Peterson’s defenders insisted the controversy was manufactured from a single out-of-context clip, and Peterson himself posted the YouTube link urging those offended to watch the whole thing.
Peterson’s defenders are not wrong to insist that context is everything. But they misinterpret what the context shows. Watching the full performance, and the crescendo that greeted the pro-Palestinian invocation, it’s clear that Peterson’s statement on pro-Palestinian activism was the destination the whole speech built toward.
The first three appeals each share a common logic: expand the circle and welcome the excluded. The fourth breaks that logic. Peterson did not exhort his audience to sing for students who built relationships across lines of difference, or who forwarded a vision of peace. Instead, he urged them to sing for students who drew attention to Israeli “injustice and inhumanity,” and who offered not a plan to make room for all, but instead an accusation.
That contradiction is worth naming plainly. Peterson’s other entreaties celebrated universal inclusion — all genders, all races, all religions. Then he singled out and damned the one Jewish state in the world, immediately after celebrating Michigan’s historic welcome of Jews. The speech that began by opening doors ends by pointing a finger, and that act of condemnation was offered as the moral crown of enlightened progress.
The depressing predictability of this genre of moral performance is that it builds, with apparent generosity, through history and conscience and song, only to arrive at a hackneyed, self-congratulatory denunciation of Israel as the apex of a liberal education. With so much at stake right now on our university campuses, is this really all we can offer our students as the culmination of their years of learning?
A university education is supposed to widen the aperture through which students see the world, and to equip them with the intellectual tools to engage the world with curiosity, humility and rigor. It is supposed to send them out equipped to ask hard questions, and with the tools and habits of mind to wrestle with them.
When a faculty leader uses a significant platform to show students not how to think, but what to conclude and who to condemn, he suggests something alarming: that narrowing of minds, pointing of fingers and pronouncing of verdicts is what four years of university education has amounted to.
That is a profound loss. Not only for those Jewish graduates who felt alienated and excluded by the singling out of the Jewish state, but for every student in that stadium, who invested years of time, money and intellectual effort in the hope of emerging with something larger: the capacity to engage the world by thinking freely and curiously across difference, and by imagining what real repair might actually look like.
The post An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Why The 36 Award
Antisemitism is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the United States and around the world. Jewish people continue to experience harassment, discrimination, and violence. Antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories exacerbate the problem.
Antisemitism does not exist in isolation; it both reflects and accelerates the erosion of democratic norms, institutions, and trust, emerging alongside other forms of hate and prejudice that collectively weaken the social fabric and the shared commitments on which all communities depend.
And while naming antisemitism and its impact is necessary, what truly matters is our shared responsibility to confront it.
This is a moment to push back collectively, within and beyond the Jewish community. No single organization, community, or ideology can meet this challenge alone. The pursuit of solutions requires acknowledging what we do not yet know, remaining open to learning, and committing to the collective effort.
Nathan Cummings Foundation (NCF) approaches this work as part of a broader justice journey and our commitment to Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice (REEJ). As an institution rooted in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world, our commitment to social justice and Jewish values has long guided our work across our focus areas, which includes being in partnership with leaders across REEJ.
We believe that our pursuit of justice is incomplete if it does not also address antisemitism. Antisemitism is oppression and is inseparable from broader struggles against bigotry, exclusion, and threats to democratic life. Addressing it strengthens movements, deepens solidarity, and reinforces the conditions necessary for collective progress.
Recognizing and engaging this challenge is essential to building a more just, inclusive, and democratic society and advancing our pursuit of REEJ.
With all of this in mind, NCF, in collaboration with the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and supported by a growing coalition of partners across the country, created The 36 Award. The award takes its name from a powerful concept in Jewish tradition: the belief that in every generation there are 36 righteous individuals whose actions help sustain the world.
Across the country, there are people confronting antisemitism in ways that do not always attract headlines. They are building relationships across lines of race, faith, geography, and ideology. They are helping communities navigate difficult conversations. They are creating new models, narratives, and pathways toward understanding. In many cases, they are demonstrating that combating antisemitism and advancing broader justice are not competing goals but mutually reinforcing ones. The 36 Award is designed to find those individuals and elevate and support their work.
The challenges before us are significant. Yet history reminds us that lasting progress often begins with people willing to see possibilities others overlook. The search for those people is what The 36 Award truly represents.
We believe that new ideas matter and that solidarity can be built through courageous leadership, which often emerges where few are looking. We are excited to announce the inaugural winners of The 36 Award. Please visit 36award.us to learn about these inspiring individuals.
Sincerely,
Rey Ramsey, President & CEO
Amy Sorensen Ben-Dov, Chair, Board of Trustees
Nathan Cummings Foundation
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The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism
Myrieme Churchill, Executive Director of Parents for Peace (P4P), has been named an inaugural recipient of The 36 Award, honoring a decade of work building what may be the first confidential intervention program in the world focused specifically on antisemitism.
Churchill leads P4P, a national public health organization serving families, schools, and communities across the United States and Canada. Through its Antisemitism Intervention and Recovery (AIR) Program, P4P brings together licensed psychologists, peer interventionists, and a team that includes former neo-Nazis and former jihadists. Its central argument once sounded unlikely to many in the field: extremism is not just a security issue, but a public health crisis that demands early intervention, education, and community-based support. The need has grown sharply. P4P says it saw a steep rise in anti-Jewish hatred after October 7, 2023, both in its own caseload and across society. In 2025, 70 percent of its helpline cases involved antisemitism, spanning far-right white nationalism, jihadist networks, and far-left movements.
Churchill’s path to this work began in Morocco. The daughter of a Black Moroccan Muslim father and a white French Christian mother, she grew up biracial and rarely felt she belonged anywhere. As a child, she was excluded and targeted by other children who misidentified her as Jewish and often used the word “Jew” to insult her.
“That history gives me a deep appreciation for how identity, exclusion, and belonging shape people’s lives,” Churchill said.
Those early experiences left her with questions that have stayed with her ever since: Why do people hurt one another? Where does hate come from? Why have Jews so often been made the scapegoat? The questions led her to a career as a therapist. Her early work took her to the streets of Marseille, where she worked with young immigrants targeted by traffickers, and later to Boston, where she treated people with mental illness and addiction. Both jobs, she said, taught her how vulnerable people are at risk for abuse, self-destruction, and harming others.
Over years of clinical work in addressing addiction, Churchill began to notice a pattern. For some people, extremism seemed to work the way a drug does, offering relief from pain along with a sense of identity and purpose. People could get hooked on hate the way others get hooked on substances.
That insight became the foundation of the P4P model. Rather than treating extremism of any kind, including antisemitism, as a set of beliefs to argue with, the organization treats it as a maladaptive way of coping with grievance, isolation, and trauma. In P4P’s framing, extremism works like a psychological addiction, offering belonging at the cost of truth, safety, and humanity. Instead of relying on shame, public condemnation, or debate, P4P helps families recognize warning signs and assess escalating behavior, and helps their loved ones build healthier sources of identity, belonging, and purpose, while working with public safety resources when necessary. The goal is to replace hate with resilience, education, and genuine connection.
AIR, which P4P bills as the world’s first antisemitism helpline, builds on the organization’s existing public health approach and helpline model. It offers free, confidential support from trained interventionists to worried families, educators, and community members, as well as to people who are trying to step away from anti-Jewish beliefs themselves. P4P is also developing trainings for families, schools, and religious organizations on recognizing early warning signs, navigating online risks, and responding with evidence-based intervention.
The model was tested on the very first call to the AIR helpline in 2016. A mother had found several rifles under her son’s bed, along with a manifesto describing his plan to attack a synagogue. She was terrified and reluctant to contact law enforcement. Churchill stayed on the line and worked to earn the mother’s trust enough that she would call 911. The FBI later confirmed that the guns had been confiscated and that the young man had been hospitalized for treatment of psychosis.
“Courage sometimes means entering the worst moment of someone’s life and not looking away,” Churchill said.
P4P says its early intervention work has since helped prevent potential attacks on synagogues and violence against Jews, and has helped hundreds of people repair relationships, return to school or work, and rebuild lives no longer governed by extremist ideology.
Sagit Sade Attia, a member of the P4P board, described that work as a deliberate moral choice. “Rather than writing off people consumed by hate as beyond redemption, Myrieme has chosen the far more difficult path of engaging directly with individuals and families affected by radicalization, while never losing sight of the needs and safety of those targeted by hate,” she said.
The choice has not always been easy to explain. When Churchill first began describing extremism as an addiction, she recalled, people looked at her as if she had three heads. Public health framing has since moved closer to the mainstream, but an approach that begins with compassion for people who hold antisemitic views can still invite skepticism at a moment when Jewish communities feel under threat. Churchill answers by pointing to outcomes like the hundreds of families supported.
P4P doesn’t do this work alone. It has partnered with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the ADL, the American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as Bangladeshi and other immigrant communities. It has worked with the Harvard School of Public Health and Georgia State University to evaluate its work and to train former extremists as interventionists. Churchill has spoken at Eradicate Hate following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, briefed Congress as part of a bipartisan effort, and testified before the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, where she urged antisemitism trainings in schools. Churchill puts it simply: “Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem alone; it is an all-of-us problem, and everyone pays the price when it spreads.”
The post The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism
David Brody, founder of the Alliance of Jewish Americans, has been named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. Brody has spent his career in courtrooms and coalitions confronting hate, and he believes Jewish safety in the United States depends on standing with every community that white nationalism targets.
Brody traces his commitment to his family and to the South. “As a Jew from Georgia, my Jewish identity was defined against the backdrop of the Black-Jewish shared struggle in the South,” he said. His great-grandmother fled pogroms, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor with no English or education, and became a union organizer. His father registered voters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spent four decades researching how poverty and discrimination affect the health of rural Black families. “My family taught that being Jewish in America means fighting for social justice,” Brody said.
Before launching the Alliance in 2026, Brody founded and led the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the first tech policy program at a legacy racial justice organization. There, he built the first case applying public accommodations law to online harassment, representing Taylor Dumpson, the first Black woman to serve as student government president at American University, against a neo-Nazi website’s publisher who targeted her. Brody co-led the team representing Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C., in its case against the Proud Boys after the group vandalized the church. He helped draft and championed what became the AI Civil Rights Act of 2025, which more than 80 civil rights, privacy, consumer, and labor groups have endorsed. His nominator, Erin Simpson of the Ford Foundation, said Brody coined the phrase “privacy rights are civil rights” at a time when many did not yet see the connection. She described him as “the engine that powered an entire community of racial justice and technology policy organizations.”
Brody said Jewish civil society is robust but has lacked a dedicated national legal organization, similar to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or Lambda Legal. The Alliance is meant to fill that gap. It uses open-source investigative techniques to collect and preserve evidence of civil and human rights violations and white nationalist threats, with the goal of making that evidence admissible in court.
From his years litigating against white supremacists, Brody saw that few organizations take on litigation against white nationalism systematically, and that most investigative work in the field produces research reports rather than evidence that can stand up in a legal proceeding. He argues that white nationalism, which has motivated deadly attacks ranging from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 to a Buffalo grocery store in 2022, poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety in the United States in generations.
The Alliance’s work includes both near-term and longer-term legal investigations. Part of this work involves leveraging AI tools responsibly, such as using them to accelerate needle-in-a-haystack investigations of white nationalist activity or other threats that would not be cost-effective for human researchers. Other work is meant to provide evidentiary foundations for long-term efforts to research, document, and seek accountability for rights violations in the U.S. Brody said he is focused on what the field needs now and what it will need in five years.
Brody’s approach to coalitions is grounded in patience. He spent six years drafting model bills, persuading allies with different priorities, and testifying twice before Congress in support of privacy protections. In 2024, when a bipartisan privacy bill in Congress was stripped of its civil rights protections, Brody gathered signatures from more than 50 organizations on an opposition letter in under 24 hours, and the bill died. “Those groups did not sign because I told them what to do,” he said. “They signed because I spent years working with them, earning their trust, and advocating for their interests.”
Brody credits the courage of his clients for putting their names and faces on high-profile cases against violent white supremacists. He arranges his work so that, by the time a moment of risk arrives, “we have friends at our side.” He resists the idea that this takes a special method. “Building bridges does not require a special approach,” he said. “One should show up for everyone, listen with empathy, and do the work.”
The post Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism appeared first on The Forward.
