Uncategorized
Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree
When the House Education and Workforce Committee released its report on campus antisemitism last month, I learned about it from a news alert on my phone. That surprised me. The college at which I teach Jewish studies — Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts school in Bronxville, New York — is named in the report as one of five schools the committee investigated for failures to address antisemitism. Yet I never encountered anyone involved with this investigation.
I teach Jewish and non-Jewish students — bright, inquisitive young people eager to learn about Jewish history, Jewish thought and Jewish identity. I have worked with Jewish student groups. I am, professionally and personally, someone whose entire working life is oriented around Jewish life on this campus.
If this investigation was as thorough as Congress would have us believe, I probably should have heard about it at some point before it was released — or even, just possibly, been asked some questions as part of it.
That silence is not incidental. It is the heart of everything that is wrong with this report, which insists that Jewish students on campuses like mine are living under siege. The committee’s account of my institution was assembled without consulting, as far as I can tell, the faculty members best positioned to speak to Jewish life on campus or the range of Jewish students whose experiences directly contradict the report’s conclusions. What was assembled instead appears to be a file of curated incidents, selected to support a predetermined conclusion.
To be clear, antisemitism on campus is a serious problem. It takes forms both crude and subtle — casual conflations of Jewish identity with Israel, occasional slurs and social pressure on Jewish students to renounce affiliations or loyalties with Jewish groups seen as friendly to Israel. My own students have come to me with these issues, which are deeply troubling, and which campuses have yet to come up with clearly effective strategies for combatting.
But what the Education and Workforce Committee has produced is not a serious accounting of antisemitism. It is a political document dressed in the language of civil rights enforcement. It is yet more evidence that, when it comes to the federal government’s efforts against antisemitism, Jews are being spoken over, not spoken for.
Overlooked Jewish diversity
At Sarah Lawrence, I teach Jewish students who are passionate Zionists. I also teach Jewish students who are members of Jewish Voice for Peace, participate in pro-Palestinian organizing, and have complicated, evolving relationships to Israel shaped by family history, religious tradition and their own moral reasoning.
I teach students who grew up in Orthodox communities, students who grew up entirely secular, students for whom Jewishness is a daily religious practice and students for whom it is primarily an ancestral identity activated by encounters with bigotry. I teach Israeli students who came to Sarah Lawrence specifically because American higher education offered them an open intellectual environment that they value.
What these students seem to agree on — despite their many political differences — is that they do not recognize the picture of campus life being painted by this committee.
They broadly do not experience their Jewish identity as something requiring constant protection from their classmates. What many of them do experience, and what they have told me plainly, is profound discomfort at having their identity conscripted into political arguments they did not choose.
The committee’s report is such a conscription. It tells Jewish students what they are supposed to feel. It tells them who their enemies are. And it erases, wholesale, the significant portion of the Jewish campus community whose views on Israel, Palestinian rights, and the politics of campus speech do not fit the narrative the committee has advanced.
This is not how you protect Jewish students. This is how you exploit them.
The IHRA problem
The report specifically criticizes Sarah Lawrence for not adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, in a case study of this kind of overreach. As the single faculty member at Sarah Lawrence wholly committed to Jewish studies — making my scholarly expertise the most directly relevant to this question of anyone on my campus — I want to be unequivocal. The Jerusalem Declaration, which we have adopted instead of the IHRA definition, is the better tool.
The Jerusalem Declaration’s core definition of antisemitism — developed by an international group of scholars working in Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies — explains that antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence that targets Jews as Jews. It is accompanied by 15 detailed guidelines for understanding antisemitism, drawn up because the field recognized that context and nuance are not optional when identifying and addressing hatred.
This is how scholars in my discipline are trained to think, and it is the approach our students deserve.
The IHRA definition, by contrast, was drafted primarily as a data-collection instrument for European monitoring organizations. Kenneth Stern, the definition’s lead drafter, has said repeatedly that it was never intended to become part of disciplinary codes. He has even testified before Congress against legislation that would enshrine the IHRA definition as enforceable policy on campuses. Stern writes that the definition “was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.”
When the person who wrote the definition is sounding the alarm about how it is being used, perhaps Congress should listen.
The specific problem with the IHRA definition, as scholars in my field have documented extensively, is that seven of its 11 illustrative examples involve the state of Israel with language broad enough to characterize legitimate forms of political speech and academic inquiry about Israel as antisemitic.
I know from my own work that the chilling effect of IHRA on academic freedom is not theoretical.
One of the definition’s most contested illustrative examples declares that it may be antisemitic to draw comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis. I regularly teach the Israeli Orthodox scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most important Jewish and Israeli thinkers of the 20th century, who warned persistently after the 1967 Six-Day War that the logic of military rule over another people would corrupt Israeli institutions and dehumanize both the occupied and the occupiers. He used the term “Judeo-Nazis” to describe what he feared that Israel risked becoming.
If Sarah Lawrence operated under the IHRA definition, my students would not have the opportunity to debate Leibowitz’s findings. Nevermind that he was eulogized by Israeli President Ezer Weizman as one of the greatest figures in the intellectual life of the Jewish people; his concern about his own country’s direction would make teaching him taboo, in turn making my students’ education in the full landscape of Jewish thought less complete.
I also couldn’t teach them about former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s 2026 claim that the ideology of Jewish supremacy now dominant in the Israeli government resembles Nazi racial theory. Or how Yair Golan, the former IDF deputy chief of staff and current leader of the Democrats party in the Knesset, has drawn parallels between trends in Israeli society and the processes that preceded the Holocaust in Europe.
These are Israeli patriots, soldiers, and statesmen engaging in exactly the kind of morally serious, historically grounded reckoning that higher education is supposed to teach students to undertake. Under the IHRA definition, my students would never have the chance to learn from them — or decide, for themselves, what they think about these arguments.
The committee’s report does not reckon with this kind of potential cost. Instead, it flatly recommends that every college across the United States adopt the IHRA definition. Conspicuously, it does not point to a single incident at any institution in its report that the IHRA definition would identify as antisemitic but the Jerusalem Declaration would not. If the committee believes IHRA is necessary rather than merely ideologically preferred, it should be able to demonstrate a gap — a real case in which alternate definitions of antisemitism failed.
The risks of chilling free speech
The absence of any such example is not a minor oversight. It speaks to the report’s failure to contend with the actual lived experience of students on campus.
In talking with students who have experienced antisemitism on my campus — American and Israeli alike — I have found they are not concerned by whether the school will adopt the IHRA definition.
They are not asking for less protection. They are asking for the right kind. What some of them have told me — and I take this seriously — is that they would find it chilling if political speech and classroom debate about Israel and Palestine were suddenly rendered even more risky.
The broader agenda behind this report is not difficult to see. Campus antisemitism is a genuine problem that has, since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, been manipulated by the American right as part of a sustained effort to delegitimize universities.
Jewish students are not the constituency this campaign is designed to serve. They have been made instruments of a broader ideological battle against the liberal values that gain purchase when people are educated in environments that reward independent thought.
Honest intellectual engagement with Jewish experience means studying the history of persecution and survival; the philosophy of identity and belonging; the ethics of memory; and the complexity of diaspora and national identity. These are not safe or comfortable subjects. They require exactly the kind of open, contested, sometimes painful intellectual environment that the House Committee professes to be protecting while actually working to undermine.
Sarah Lawrence is not a perfect institution. No college or university is. But it is one where Jewish life is visible, valued and genuinely diverse. My Jewish students learn by arguing with each other, challenging each other, and engaging across lines of political disagreement. The truth about Jewish life is almost always more complicated than people with clear-cut political aims would have us believe. That complexity is not a problem to be managed or a weakness to be exploited. It is at the very center of what a liberal arts education is supposed to be about.
The post Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government
The fact that about half of young American Jews favor replacing Israel with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state is indeed a result of anti-Zionism — but not necessarily their own.
Instead, it’s a consequence of the Israeli government’s drive to radically increase Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. By ensuring that some 5.5 million Arabs increasingly live under Israel authority, Israel’s leaders have created the demographic reality of a binational state.
We can’t blame young American Jews for just acknowledging reality. Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that a movement to undermine Zionism has taken hold within the Israeli government.
If Zionism is the movement for a secure homeland for the Jews, then any forces that reject or undermine that homeland’s legitimacy or security are anti-Zionist. That includes the people whose positions and policies actively undermine the existence of a Jewish homeland.
The democratic Jewish state enshrined in the country’s Declaration of Independence has given way to something that looks a lot more like a herrenvolk democracy, in which democratic rights apply only to the dominant ethnic group. History has many examples of such arrangements, and — spoiler alert — they don’t end well for the majority. French Algeria until 1962, Rhodesia until 1980, South Africa until 1994 — all eventually faced one of three fates: negotiated transition to full democracy, violent collapse or ongoing instability and international isolation. To date, none have stabilized permanently.
Just recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel will soon control 70% of Gaza, well beyond the 53% allotted to the country in the Gaza ceasefire framework to which Israel is still supposed to adhere.
When an audience member at his talk shouted out that Israel should take 100% of Gaza, Netanyahu responded, “First 70%. We’ll start with that.”
Then there’s the West Bank, where settlers tried to expel 2,000 Palestinians from a village south of Nablus earlier this month, and where settlers and an IDF soldier wounded nine Palestinians on a June 5 rampage through Hawara.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has established at least 59 new illegal outposts in the West Bank — compared to an annual average of seven in the preceding three decades. It has appropriated a record amount of land, and displaced more than 8,700 Palestinians through demolitions and settler violence.
There’s also East Jerusalem, where some Israeli Jews are actively trying to remove 20,000 Palestinians from the Silwan neighborhood.
Each act of seizure, harassment and expulsion is anti-Zionist. These Palestinians will not fade into Egypt or Amman or Los Angeles. Mass expulsion isn’t happening, and neither is mass immigration. A Jewish state is giving way to a state that is effectively equal parts Arab and Jewish — except the Jews have all the rights. As the anti-Zionists in the Israeli government seize control of more Palestinian land, they undo all of Zionism’s hard-fought gains. A nondemocratic Jewish state will be neither safe nor secure.
If this sounds like diasporic Jewish garment-rending over morality and Jewish values, it’s not. The people who live in a fantasy world are not those who point out the necessity of finding a way toward coexistence, but those who think Israel can survive and flourish if it trashes its founding principles and its democracy.
Logic and history are not on Israel’s side. No minority- or bare-majority-rule system over a large disenfranchised population has proved durable. I know from my many conversations with my fellow Jews who support a “Greater Israel” incorporating Gaza and the West Bank — or just want to ignore or get rid of Palestinians — that they think time, power or God will bend the iron laws of demography in Israel’s favor. History would beg to differ.
But what about the Palestinians, you might ask: don’t they bear responsibility? For decades of rejectionism and terror? For elevating kleptocratic and ineffective leaders? For glorifying violence and cheering on Hamas in its slaughter, kidnapping and rape of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023? For wanting, as many of them do, an end to Jewish sovereignty in the land?
Yes. Palestinian rejectionism and embrace of violence has been a disaster for Jews, as well as for generations of Palestinians. But those facts don’t change the demographic reality.
Of Americans Jews under 35, 51% support a binational state, according to a recent Jewish Voters Research Center poll. What they see is that there are 15 million people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. About half of them are not Jews, much less Zionists, and one government is not just intent on holding and controlling all that territory, but well on its way to doing so. If a binational state already exists in practice, the best hope for the region, these young people are saying, is to accept that fact, and direct all our efforts toward making that state just.
They may be completely mistaken about the chances of that happening peacefully or even in their lifetimes, but they’re not the ones who got us to this point. The ongoing settlement of territories with a vast non-Jewish majority was the most anti-Zionist thing Israel could have done, and continues to do, and yet here we are.
The Jewish communal obsession with policing who is and isn’t a Zionist misses the larger point. The State of Israel exists. What’s in question is its character — whether it will be democratic and secure, or calcify into something modern history has repeatedly shown the world rejects.
Land comes with people, and demographics is destiny. A government intent on holding and controlling all the territory between the river and the sea is undermining Zionism from within.
The post The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you
The short film Odessa begins with what its director Harald Swinkels calls an “empathy trap.”
The film opens with a German couple and their young son hiking across the Dolomites; the woman seems anxious, the man much more energetic. They approach a church, where they are greeted suspiciously by the twins who take care of it, until they say the passcode: “Odessa.” They later try the codeword again with an innkeeper — but this time they are sent running as she calls on the village to attack them. It’s a heart-pounding scene as the family the viewer has been so closely tied to runs for their lives from a loud, angry mob.
Interspersed through the scenes of the family’s flight are blurry white and black clips of a hazy figure approaching a camera. Even with the obscured shot, the viewer can make out train tracks and recognize the setting as a concentration camp, a flashback to the world they’re leaving. It feels like your typical Holocaust film, showing the risks Jewish refugees faced at every turn and the way the trauma of the camps haunted them.
At the end of the film’s 20-minute run, however, the shadowy figure finally comes into focus. It’s the husband, but not in the striped clothes of a camp prisoner: He’s wearing an SS uniform and ordering twins to be placed in a separate line. He’s Josef Mengele.
“People take first impressions as character,” Swinkels told me in an interview. “That’s not character. You should look behind that.”
Contemporary politics inspired Swinkels, the founder of the Dutch production company Exosphere, to make the film.
“One of my most conservative friends started arguing that ‘these people’ should be kept in their own region, as he called it, and certainly not taken in by us,” Swinkels said, of debates over Syrian immigrants in the Netherlands. “And then we had this discussion about if you would feel the same about these refugees, if they look like him and me.”
Wanting to make a film about Northwestern Europeans fleeing led Swinkels to think about World War II. After an election in Denmark resulted in a right-wing shift in politics, he also became interested in exposing how charisma can hide someone’s darker nature.
Swinkels had long been interested in Josef Mengele, but when he discovered the Nazi’s duplicitous relationship with the kids in Auschwitz — survivors have testified that Mengele would bring them candy in order to gain their trust — that solidified him as the main character. The film features a quote from a Jewish prisoner forced to work for Mengele, Miklós Nyiszli, stating that the doctor “was capable of being so kind to the children” as he prepared to torture them and send them to their deaths.
“Arendt once called it the banality of evil,” Swinkels said. “But with Mengele, it’s even more dangerous because it’s the charm of evil.”
The bread crumbs leading to the family’s true identity are there for history buffs. Over the course of the film, we slowly learn their names — Josef, Irene, and Reif. “Odessa” was the American name for Nazi’s underground escape networks, although there is no historical consensus that this term was used by the Nazis or was an actual organization.
But the clues are easy enough to miss — by the time the audience learns these details, we have already formed assumptions that the protagonists of the story are likely Jews or members of another group persecuted by the Nazis.
The fact that Mengele had darker features and his wife had fairer ones adds another misleading layer. At one point, the wife abandons the journey and insists that it’ll be safer for the son to stay with her while the husband flees. It seems as though this is because she is Aryan and the husband isn’t. But, as it turns out, it’s because he is a wanted war criminal.
The short film also nods to a few other historical figures. One of the brothers at the church is named Alois, in reference to Alois Hudal, an Austrian Catholic Bishop who was a Nazi sympathizer and aided in the escape of several Nazi leaders, including Adolf Eichmann. He did not have a twin brother in real life, but this detail alludes to Mengele’s fascination with twins.
The inn-keeper who sets the village after the family, Frau Scholl, is named after Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose Nazi-resistance group, hinted at by white roses outside of her house in the film. They even shot the film in the Dolomites, the same mountain range Mengele crossed during his escape.
Swinkels noted that details like this can be easy to miss. “But I think you can still feel it, that we put so much detail in the film to make all these kinds of historical references,” he said.
He hopes that the film makes viewers think more carefully about charismatic figures.
“History has taught us that monsters don’t come dressed as monsters,” Swinkels said. “They come as protectors, visionaries, or loving fathers. And by the time we find that truth, it’s most often too late.”
“If a viewer walks out of Odessa and looks a little bit harder at the next person who charms them, and even better at the next person they’re about to vote for, then the film will have fulfilled its purpose.”
The short film Odessa is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 13.
The post ‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine
(JTA) — Graham Platner, the anti-Israel progressive who took Maine’s political establishment by storm this spring, has officially prevailed in his state’s Democratic Senate primary.
Multiple news outlets called the race within 90 minutes of the polls closing, with only a fraction of the votes counted.
The victory was seen as a foregone conclusion after Platner’s primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Still, the final tally suggested that not all Mainers had embraced the political neophyte whose campaign was dogged by controversies, including the revelation that Platner had a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades until he drew criticism for it on the campaign trail. He denied knowing it was a Nazi symbol.
Mills, who remained on the ballot, drew about one in five votes in the first 10% of ballots counted, according to the tally published by The New York Times.
The result sets Platner up to face off in November against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who has received substantial support from pro-Israel donors. The latest polls suggest a tight race.
“I’m humbled and proud to officially be your Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to take on Susan Collins and the billionaire class she represents. Together, we will win this seat back for working Mainers,” Platner tweeted on Tuesday night. “Thank you, Maine.”
While Democratic leaders officially threw their support behind Platner after Mills halted her campaign, many of them remained circumspect about him. Their balancing act grew more delicate in the final days of the primary race, as Platner drew allegations of antisemitism over his characterization of donations channeled to Collins by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and as he faced new allegations of misconduct toward women. (He said he had been a “far from perfect boyfriend” during some periods of his life but denied engaging in misconduct.)
Now, top Democrats will have to decide how hard to gun for Platner, who has become a standard-bearer in the party’s anti-Israel shift at a time when the chamber is narrowly divided.
They are already facing pressure to disavow him. “Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America, and every Senate Democrat propping up Platner’s campaign, should be ashamed,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement after the polls closed. “Their continued support of Graham Platner, who wore the symbol of Hitler’s SS on his chest for 18 years is an outrage. Schumer must withdraw his support immediately.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner, anti-Israel progressive, locks up Democratic Senate nomination in Maine appeared first on The Forward.
