Uncategorized
How Colleges and K-12 Schools Are Marching Forward with an Anti-Israel Agenda
A pro-Hamas activist wears a keffiyeh while marching from the City University of New York to Columbia University. Photo: Eduardo Munoz via Reuters Connect
Universities continue to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to expunge DEI and rein in costs, while receiving help from Congress, which has restored funding to schools. Scientists in particular have resumed their complaints regarding Federal budget cuts and increased oversight, while the media have resumed stories about the economic and social impacts of cuts on sciences, states, and individuals.
The place of antisemitism in the priorities of the higher education industrial complex were reflected at the American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting. In contrast to the many sessions on DEI and artificial intelligence, only one was devoted to antisemitism, which was paired with the topic of “Islamophobia.”
In a sign that senior university leaders have simply decided to wait out the administration regardless of appearances, Georgetown Law School appointed Elizabeth Magill, former University of Pennsylvania president, as dean. Magill resigned her position after a disastrous appearance before Congress, where she failed to stand up to hate against Jewish students. The committee that appointed her at Georgetown was comprised largely of leading Democratic donors.
University pushback against pro-Hamas students continued at a lower rate in February. American University suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which promised “resistance.” Students at Northwestern University who had rejected antisemitism training on the basis that it discriminated against them as Palestinians and Arabs — and who were subsequently suspended by the university — dropped their lawsuit.
Several court cases have challenged university efforts to discipline pro-Hamas protestors. In one, a district judge ordered the University of Massachusetts to lift the suspension of a student who organized a campus protest, arguing that his First Amendment rights had been breached. A judge also blocked the deportation of pro-Hamas activist and professional student Mohsen Madawi on procedural grounds. A Federal court also ordered the release of Tufts University graduate student and Hamas supporter Rümeysa Öztürk.
More positively, the New Jersey Superior Court has rejected Fairleigh Dickinson University’s effort to quash a lawsuit by a Jewish chaplain who had been disciplined for opposing an anti-Israel event on campus. Notably, the court rejected the university’s claim regarding precedent in a recent case involving MIT, in which a court held that antisemitic conduct motivated by “anti-Zionism” was protected as academic freedom.
Finally, a report from the Department of Education noted that Qatar had tripled its contributions to American universities in 2025. Some $1.2 billion was given to American universities, with Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Northwestern, being the largest recipients.
Faculty Support for Hamas Remains High
Faculty support for Hamas remains high despite administration efforts to persuade or force fewer expressions of enthusiasm.
There was a presentation at the CUNY Law School entitled “The Underground in Gaza,” which claimed that Hamas tunnels used for terrorism are part of “resistance to colonization” and “decolonial land use.” This will be followed by a conference at CUNY Graduate Center on “Palestinian History Between Past and Present” featuring a number of prominent anti-Israel scholar-activists.
One notable development in February was a report detailing how the Mellon Foundation has reshaped humanities and social sciences faculties towards social justice and “scholar-activism.” The report noted that as Federal funding for the humanities was reduced over the past two decades, the Mellon Foundation, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, had offered institutions funding to adapt research, courses, curriculums, and entire mission statements to comport with the foundation’s social justice emphasis. In doing so the foundation pushed scholarship which emphasized race, class, gender, and inequality, with an anti-Western bias.
The report, and another on humanities funding from the American Enterprise Institute, complements those showing how the Qatar Foundation has inserted itself into university operations including personnel decisions, particularly with respect to DEI, as a condition for grants.
Unsurprisingly, another report on the University of California found that while students are the most visible actors, faculty and academic departments are key institutional drivers of the hostile environment. At UCLA alone, some 155 faculty members have publicly endorsed BDS and dozens of departments issued statements in support of pro-Hamas encampments.
Seemingly cognizant of the perception of Middle East studies as the focal point for campus anti-Israel agitation, a Columbia University provost released a report recommending adding additional faculty and courses in Israel studies. At the same time, reports indicated that the leading candidates for the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies were all scholar-activists with minimal publication records who had expressed support for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
One result of relentless antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus is a widening crisis for Jewish faculty. A new poll indicates that 40% of faculty felt compelled to hide their identities, while a similar figure were considering leaving academia.
Student Attacks Against Jews Continue, If Down Slightly
On campus, harassment of Jewish and Israeli students appears to have declined somewhat as a result of restrictions on pro-Hamas protests. Off campus protests continue, as in the case of an anti-ICE event outside of Columbia University which featured the same students and faculty who had supported Hamas in 2025 and 2024. Anti-ICE protests organized by groups such as Students for a Democratic Society and others such as SJP chapters which had been at the center of pro-Hamas protests, have been noted at many campuses including the University of Minnesota, Cornell, and Columbia.
A serious incident took place at a cafe near DePaul University where Jewish students attending a Hillel event were harassed and eventually driven out by pro-Hamas students and staff. The university president later expressed outrage at the incident, which was another in a series which have taken place at the institution.
The Princeton SJP chapter canceled the appearance of anti-Israel speaker Norman Finkelstein and stated he might appear at another time. The university noted it had not barred Finkelstein.
BDS resolutions continue to be proposed in student governments despite the fact that they are opposed almost uniformly by administrations and trustees. Examples in February include:
- The University of Maryland student government passed its fourth anti-Israel resolution of the year. Student government at Maryland has been dominated by pro-Hamas activists for several years despite the school’s large Jewish population;
- A resolution in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln student government calling for divestment from weapons manufacturers passed after language specifically naming Israel was removed.
Campus disruptions of speakers deemed insufficiently hostile to Israel continued in February. One example was the disruption of a talk by left-wing journalist Ezra Klein at Sarah Lawrence College. Klein was called a “Zionist pig” and signs held by protestors included “Nazi” and “Sarah Lawrence, we know you; you protect Zionist Jews.” Sarah Lawrence president Cristle Collins Judd sat next to Klein on stage and did not intervene, but reportedly commented to him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
Judd’s emailed condemnation of the incident elicited protests for the SJP chapter who accused her of “blatant lies wielded to vilify students and manufacture consent for disciplinary charges” and claimed Sarah Lawrence was attempting to “suppress dissent against Zionism and imperialism at any cost.” The group threatened retaliation if disciplinary procedures were taken.
A talk entitled “Being Jewish in America Today” at the University of Virginia Jewish studies program by writer Adam Kirsch was similarly disrupted by student protestors “resisting the Zionist speaker.” Neither Sarah Lawrence nor Virginia have taken disciplinary measures against students.
A new AJC/Hillel survey indicated that 42% of American Jewish students have experienced antisemitism on campus. Half reported feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, while 34% indicated they had refrained from displaying their Jewish identity. Some 69% stated that Israel was an important part of their identities and 80% of parents indicated that antisemitism was part of their decision where to send children to college.
What’s Happening in K-12 Schools
One notable development in February was the involvement of outside groups such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation in training and organizing student walkouts and anti-ICE protests. These groups have shifted from pro-Hamas to anti-ICE protests and make the explicit equation of “Gaza” with “Minneapolis.”
The same groups, along with the Sunrise Movement, Code Pink, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and others, are working with the DSA and teachers unions in cities like Dallas to celebrate Palestinian “resistance” and oppose the US government.
Teacher training remains a focal point for radicalization, particularly in connection with mandated ethnic studies curriculums. The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium was awarded a contract by San Jose (CA) schools to train teachers. Lesson materials include materials on “Stolen Land” and “Youth Incarceration and Resistance in Palestine.” The leadership of the consortium include University of California ethnic studies faculty connected with the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
The school system also paid teachers to attend the Xicanx Institute For Teaching and Organizing (XITO) Summer Institute which presented materials on “Teaching Border Imperialism From Turtle Island to Palestine: Ethnic Studies as a Tool For Liberation” and “Transformative Teaching: Interactive Read-Alouds and Art as an Entry Point For Teaching Palestine in K-5.”
The addition of Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) as a pedagogical foundation and legal enforcement mechanism in Canadian schools, effectively enshrining the Palestinian narrative as unquestionable truth and criminalizing expressions of support for Israel and even visible expressions of Jewish identity, has cemented radicalism. Canadian journalists investigating APR trainings for teachers in Hamilton (ON) have been denied access to materials on the grounds that sharing it publicly would be a “Danger to Safety or Health.”
To complete the equation, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has hired the anti-Zionist group Independent Jewish Voices to provide antisemitism training for teachers. The group “firmly rejects the use of IHRA, which distorts the definition of antisemitism to conflate political criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism” and will be “including anti-Palestinian racism tools into the training.” Unsurprisingly, antisemitic acts in Ontario schools increased dramatically after October 7th.
Individual teachers also continue to instigate dramatically antisemitic incidents. In one case a Muslim San Diego teacher was fired after posting a video in which she accused Israel of “hijacking protests in order to do the same BS that they’re always doing — which is just stealing from people. And that includes everything from goods and services all the way down to the livers and kidneys and eyeballs.”
Conversely a teacher at the elite UN International School in New York was fired after complaining about harassment from Muslim teachers who made statements regarding how “Jews are driven by money.” The school, which educates children of UN officials, received a Qatari pledge of $60 million in 2023.
A newly filed lawsuit against the State of California on behalf of Jewish parents and children accuses the state of failing to address systemic antisemitism in local school districts including Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Campbell Union, Fremont, and Oakland. The suit alleges that Jewish students were subjected to antisemitic harassment from teachers and peers with administrators taking no action or supporting their attackers. The trajectory of California schools reflected in the lawsuit appears to match that of British schools, which have been overwhelmed by horrific antisemitism towards the relatively small number of Jewish students.
Finally, a new campaign by left-wing and pro-Hamas groups in Canada has targeted Jewish summer camps for their support of “genocide.” The effort seeks to strip accreditation from at least 17 camps across Canada “because they encourage support for a genocidal, settler-colonial state.” The groups include the Palestinian Canadian Congress, Just Peace Advocates, the Ontario Palestinian Rights Association, and PAJU Montreal. Jewish groups condemned the campaign, which the Ontario Camps Association called “discriminatory and antisemitic in nature.”
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.
Uncategorized
Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
Uncategorized
UK Police Charge Two Men in Connection with Filming Antisemitic TikTok Videos
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
British police have charged two men with religiously aggravated harassment offenses after they were alleged to have traveled to a Jewish area of north London to film antisemitic social media videos.
The two men, Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, are due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court, a statement from the Crown Prosecution Service said on Saturday.