At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater. Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to “sing” for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Peterson’s address was a historian’s invitation to every student and parent in the Ann Arbor stadium to recognize that the fight for Palestinian rights shares roots with our greatest movements for justice, including the struggle against antisemitism.

The backlash, predictably, was swift. The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable.

But to me, Peterson’s speech was a reminder of one of the most important lessons I took away from my time at the University of Michigan: that questioning Zionism is a necessary part of any Jewish life that aims to center justice.

I graduated from Michigan in 1989, and spent much of my last year in Ann Arbor ensconced at Hillel, where I edited a magazine for Jewish students. I’d grown up going to Young Judaea summer camps and had spent a college semester in Israel, where I’d witnessed the beginning of the first Intifada. I returned to find a shanty in the middle of campus that had been erected, a student organizer told our magazine, “to bring the uprising to the community. It is to show the conditions of the Palestinians and the brutal oppression of the Israeli army.”

The shanty evoked those then prevalent on campuses everywhere to symbolize the struggle of Black South Africans against settler colonialism and apartheid. The new shanty on our campus asserted that these words also applied to Israel.

While I was strongly against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — where Israel would not remove any settlements until 2005 — I was distressed and confused by the shanty’s silent, everpresent message about Israel’s past and present. Is Israel an apartheid state, I wondered?

So I put that question on the cover of our magazine.

The Hillel director called me into his office and somberly expressed his concern. But Hillel International had not yet officially clamped down on student activities that question Israel and Zionism.

So our cover story ran and we dropped our magazine in bundles across campus. At the time, I thought of myself as a liberal Zionist, and I secretly rooted for the student who tried to disprove the devastating charge. But as young journalists, my fellow magazine staffers and I were committed to exploring the views of those who erected the shanty, no matter their hostility to Zionism. We didn’t code the hostility as danger. No one thought we should report our ideological opponents — the kids who fell asleep on their books in the library just like we did — to the dean or to the government for arrest or deportation.

Over my time as an undergraduate, I’d come to recognize in these kaffiyeh-clad Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students the same history-minded, righteous hope that animated me.

Decades later, in the spring of 2024, we all watched as pro-Palestinian student activists — including many Jewish students — set up campus encampments around the country to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. At Michigan, the encampment was set up on the Diag, the university’s public square, where on the day of my own graduation I’d protested the university’s military research. As the mother of a recent college grad, I was humbled by the determination of these kids, who put up tents, organized teach-ins, and then suffered as police turned off their bodycams and used pepper spray against them. They were lawfully protesting for the university to divest from Israel as it bombed the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza — which is now home to the largest number of child amputees in modern history.

What I understand, and Professor Peterson understands, is that the student activists that he lauded at the commencement are fighting not against Jewish life but for Palestinians’ right to survive daily, as people, and as a people. These activists have asked us to understand, finally, that Zionism is what it does.

“It has been hard work to examine my own mind,” Tzvia Thier, a Jewish Israeli mother, wrote in an essay in the 2021 collection A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. As a child, Thier immigrated to Israel from Romania in the wake of the Holocaust. In 2009, Thier accompanied her daughter to “protect” her while she joined an action to fight the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Thier was 65, and realized that it was the first time in her life that she had had conversations with Palestinians. She understood then that “it was not my daughter who needed to be protected, but the Palestinians.”

“Many questions leave me wondering how I could have not thought about them before,” she wrote. “My solid identity was shaken and then broken. I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty, and hatred by ‘my’ people toward the ‘others.’ And what you finally see, you can no longer unsee.”

When that shanty went up on Michigan’s campus in the late ’80s, I began to question all that I’d learned about Israel’s founding. I began to question the very idea of an ethnostate — in the name of any people, anywhere — that enshrines the supremacy of one group of people over another.

By the time I became a mother, I’d become anti-Zionist. I understood — with a grief that does not abate — that, as Jews, our history of oppression has become an alibi for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

We must reject the bad faith accusations of antisemitism that have emptied the word of meaning and enabled authoritarian repression. When students on campuses today charge Israel with apartheid and genocide, they are echoing reports from B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization. I ask the parents of my generation to read these reports and do as Thier did — to allow themselves to see what we have not wanted to see.

I stand with the more than 2,000 University of Michigan faculty, staff, students and alumni who have condemned the university’s response to the commencement address heard round the world.

For the sake of all of our children, I ask that we each do all we can to open our community’s heart to Palestinian history and humanity. That we each join the urgent struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

This is the way that our Jewish college kids will find the deep and true safety of community: by leaving hatred, fear, and isolation behind; by honoring Jewish history by standing in solidarity with all who are oppressed; and by roaring in a stadium for freedom and justice, along with their entire generation.

The post I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there appeared first on The Forward.

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.

Demonstrators gather at The George Washington University in Washington, DC on March 21, 2025, to protest the war in Gaza. Photo: Bryan Dozier via Reuters Connect

George Washington University said this week that it was investigating a shocking report that someone possibly poisoned a Jewish student by placing contaminated “vials” near the site of an Israel Fest event held there last month.

“At least one student was injured by the incident, which is now under an investigation that will examine among other things whether individuals were targeted based on their Jewish faith,” the university, which sits just blocks away from the White House, said in a statement on Tuesday. “The university condemns this reprehensible and criminal action. Acts like this have no place in our community, which is a safe and inclusive space for individuals of all backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.”

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University (GW), wrote on his website that Israel Fest “is a celebration of Israeli food, music, and culture.”

“The event often draws protesters,” he continued. “I have spoken to Jewish students about their fear of attending, including visiting the popular camel brought to campus each year. Others have told me how students in classes for weeks have been bad-mouthing the planned event and have described those attending as ‘supporting genocide.’”

This latest threat against the Jewish community comes amid an epidemic of antisemitic violence in the US. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest annual audit of US antisemitic incidents, assaults against Jews increased 4 percent in 2025, and perpetrators are more often resorting to using “deadly weapons” in the commission of their crimes. That raises the likelihood that their actions result in severe injury or death.

The advocacy group noted that the upward shift was reflected in the shocking murders of Jews in antisemitic attacks in the US for the first time since 2019. Two Israeli embassy staffers — a young couple set be engaged — were shot dead in Washington, DC last May, and weeks later a firebombing in Colorado claimed the life of an octogenarian. In both crimes, the alleged killers cited anti-Zionism as their motivating ideology.

Other incidents which stopped short of the worst possible outcome continue to create a sense of insecurity for American Jews. Over the past year, for example, The Algemeiner has reported on a public-school principal’s inveighing against “Jew money,” an attempted arson at the Hillel International chapter in San Francisco, California, and the movement of some conservative students into the far-right ecosystem of antisemitism — a path cleared by Nicholas Fuentes, Candace Owens, Kanye West, and troops of social media influencers.

“Behind every one of these incidents is a real person: a family threatened at their synagogue, a rabbi attacked on the street, a student harassed on campus,” ADL senior vice president Oren Segal said in a statement regarding the organization’s latest statistics on antisemitic violence and discrimination. “The safety of Jewish communities depends on our collective willingness to meet this moment with urgency, which is what we’re doing every day at ADL.”

George Washington University has allegedly been a microcosm of societal antisemitism, as reported by various claims described in court documents. One ongoing lawsuit alleges that the university enabled an eruption of antisemitic discrimination on campus by declining to intervene in a slew of incidents in which anti-Zionists threw rocks at Jewish students, vandalized the campus office of Hillel International, and uttered slurs such as “filthy k—ke.” Meanwhile, The Algemeiner has reported extensively on the activities of its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which once threatened a Jewish professor and continues to spread antisemitic tropes about Israel.

“Given the history of antisemitic protests on campus, the [latest Isael Fest] incident is chilling for many on our campus,” Turley wrote.

However, rising hatred will not stop the campus Jewish community from being visible and unafraid, the school’s Hillel proclaimed in a statement issued on Wednesday.

“We are grateful to GW officials and security personnel for their swift response,” the group said. “Incidents like this will not deter our community. GW Hill will continue to support our students so they can proudly be Jewish.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.