Uncategorized
The Quiet Antisemitism: My Experience as a Jewish College Professor
There are plenty of examples of blatant antisemitism and attacks on Jews that have occurred over the past 10 months. It seems that every day, we read about a synagogue being attacked, a Jewish student being spat on or assaulted, or the all too mainstream protester chants calling for Intifada or for Jews to go back to Poland — and the list goes on.
Perhaps less obvious — but more frequent — is the antisemitism that’s happening under the radar: things that are circumstantial and much harder to prove.
I’m not talking about Jewish writers having their lectures cancelled out of concern “for their safety” — it’s clear to everyone (except the organizers) where the motivation comes from.
No, this is the kind of discrimination that Black people and others experienced before the Civil Rights movement — and even after: being rejected as a tenant on a lease to an apartment, passed over for a job or promotion based on the color of their skin , or — as in my case — perhaps not having a contract renewed at a college after speaking out against their policies regarding “free speech.”
Do I have proof that me being Israeli or Jewish had anything to do with my dismissal?
Absolutely not.
But are the circumstances suspicious? Yes.
Two years ago, I accepted a Visiting Assistant Professorship in the English Department of a private Midwestern college in the United States. It was a one-year contract, and following the first year, the Chair of the Department notified me how much he appreciated my work — noting the anonymous student evaluations that gave me high marks, that a large number of students requested to take a second class with me, and that I helped raise the visibility of the college through public performances by my students. He also informed me that there was restructuring going on in the English Department, which would result in some of the classes I was teaching being offered only periodically.
In short, he asked me if I would be interested in remaining affiliated with the school, and return either every other semester, or, for instance, if another English teacher took a sabbatical. That suited me fine, as it allowed me to continue teaching, but also gave me time for my own creative endeavors back in Los Angeles, where I was commuting from every week.
On October 7, I was not teaching on campus. But like so many other colleges, a segment of the student population rose up to protest Israel. And even though I was a thousand miles away, I received an email from a student member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) notifying all faculty that the group was calling for a one-day strike to protest, accompanied with a list of atrocities Israel had allegedly committed, even listing the bombing of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza two weeks earlier, which had already been attributed to a stray missile from Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
How was it possible for one student to access the entire faculty and student body to spew their propaganda?
I contacted the Provost and Dean of the college to inquire. She replied that this was a recent policy change put into place two years earlier to encourage freedom of expression. I asked how this policy might play out if I rebutted the student’s charges through the college-wide email system, only to have another student rebut my defense, and so on and so on?
She replied that if it got out of hand, the school would shut it down.
I replied that the situation had already gotten out of hand, and trusted I wouldn’t be receiving anymore emails from such organizations.
The student newspaper got wind of this, and contacted me for my opinion. Here’s what they wrote in their article:
Safdie, who is of Israeli and Syrian Jewish descent, found sections of the message antisemitic and questioned why he received the email. “I’m all for freedom of expression, but I’m not sure this decision was able to foresee such a situation where students might abuse the privilege and create a hostile work/study environment for other members of the community.”
Fast forward several months, when I returned to campus for the Spring semester. Within a week of arrival, I received an email from the new chair of the English Department (who was also the associate Dean of the Race and Ethnic Studies program). She wanted to set up a Zoom meeting with me — even though our offices were 10 feet apart.
In a carefully worded statement that sounded like it was crafted by an attorney, she got to the point. Although the college was extremely pleased with all the work that I’d done, and that all my students loved my teaching, the college was making budget cuts and were not going to be able to renew my contract.
When I tried to explain to her my prior arrangement with the previous Chair, she simply replied that she’d be happy to write me a letter of recommendation.
Something about the Zoom call and her demeanor felt suspicious.
On a whim, I did an Internet search on my new Chair.
The first thing that came up on her Twitter Feed was a statement on the masthead of a literary magazine she edited, condemning the alleged mass killing and displacement of Palestinians in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks.
As I explored further, I discovered other parts of the statement:
The Israeli military—with the support of the U.S. government—has bombarded Palestinian civilians relentlessly, in violation of international law, and deprived Palestinians of food, water, fuel, and electricity.
And:
Because we work to “bring our readers into the living moment, not as tourists, but as engaged participants,” we believe that Palestinians need space to speak directly, whether from siege in Palestine or in diaspora. So too do others who bear witness to the ongoing settler-colonial violence in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Two days after the Zoom meeting, I figured I might as well take the Chair up on her offer to write me a letter-of-recommendation; it was March, and I could still apply to other universities for employment the following year. (Universities can be suspicious if you leave a position after just two years, so a letter would be crucial to securing a position.)
After a week of email silence, the Chair wrote me back, saying that she wasn’t familiar with my teaching and requested to attend one of my classes to observe my skills. I invited her the following week to attend a class, which fit her schedule, but she did not show, and didn’t even write to give an explanation.
I followed up with an email to offer her another opportunity, followed by a second and third, but there was nothing but email silence.
I should also mention that, at the one faculty meeting we had, she stayed as far away from me as possible, and if I approached, she would quickly engage in discussion with another professor. The topic that day was adding a requirement for English Majors to take an anti-Racism class. One of the new offerings for the following year was focused on racism against Palestinians.
By the end of April, I decided to contact the Associate Dean of Humanities who oversaw the English Department, and sure enough, within an hour of my email, I finally received an email back from the Chair of the English Department, offering to attend my class, but letting me know that she was too busy to write me a letter of recommendation until the end of May — well past the end of the semester, and too late to help with a teaching application for the following year.
If there was ever a thought of going to the administration to complain about my treatment, that was quickly extinguished following an SJP demonstration that demanded that the college divest from Oracle. Apparently, Oracle’s website had stated support for Israel, and the Head of Financial Aid for the college felt the need to apologize for the school’s actions.
A response from the school’s administration read thus:“The business strategy or public statements from Oracle do not represent the viewpoints of the College. Due to the College’s contract with the business and the cost it took to make such major system changes, the College does not have any feasible or affordable alternative.
It also went on to assure protesters:
Less than 0.5 percent of the College’s investments are tied to Israeli companies and that none of these investments are directly held by the college.
As the semester ended, on another whim, I searched the Human Resources page of the college, and sure enough, there was a listing for a new English professor. The skills they were looking for were for someone who taught poetry as well as Race and Ethnic studies courses — none of which I was qualified to teach.
Was the college looking to shift away from courses like Screenwriting, Playwriting, and Non-Fiction — three popular courses I had taught that were always in high demand and had long waiting lists?
I guess I’ll never know.
Oren Safdie is a playwright and screenwriter.
The post The Quiet Antisemitism: My Experience as a Jewish College Professor first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
Uncategorized
250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.
When I moved from Belgium to the United States for graduate school in the early 2000s, international-student orientation warned me about three areas in which I would experience culture shock: doctors, dating, and food. They were right: I am still looking for good chocolate. But what nobody mentioned was that culture shock can also work in the other direction: you can encounter something so different in a good way that it, too, takes time to understand. For me, that was American Jewish life.
The Judaism I had grown up with in Belgium was timid and a little subdued; it felt to me as though it did not quite dare to put down roots or imagine itself as fully Belgian. American Judaism bewildered me at first by its sheer pluralism: so many denominations, and within them so many people experimenting with what it meant to be and do Jewish in this country and in this world.
Even more surprising was its creativity — the music, the intellectual life, the social activism, the constant invention of new institutions, rituals and communities. It was also loud and argumentative. American Jews tangled about Judaism, politics, Zionism and one another. The old story about two Jews having three opinions was not a joke here but a reality.
I loved it. Not because I agreed with all of it — I certainly did not — but because even the arguing seemed to me evidence that American Jews did not feel they had to hide or be discreet, not even about their disagreements.
Of course, Jewish success in the United States did not mean that America offered the same possibilities to everyone. Jewish integration took place in a country whose deepest structures of exclusion targeted Black Americans. That inequality is part of the American Jewish story and complicates any account of its success.Nor was the American Jewish experience free of prejudice: American Jews encountered social ostracism, quotas in higher education, exclusion from neighborhoods and country clubs, and violence.
And yet, over 250 years, Jews in the United States became deeply woven into the political, cultural and civic life of the country. How the encounter between Jewish traditions brought from many parts of the world and the particular freedoms, tensions and possibilities of American life produced a distinctively American form of Judaism is a question that has stayed with me ever since, and America’s 250th anniversary seems like a good moment to return to it.
I think part of the answer lies in the American idea of hyphenated identities. In a country of immigrants from many parts of the world, the hyphen suggested a social architecture, albeit imperfect, that allowed for multiple communities to coexist within a larger whole. By contrast the Europe in which I grew up remained more attached to myths of national homogeneity that made Jewish belonging harder.
But today, across the political spectrum, people are asking what America as an idea and a national community stands for. Historically, such moments have often made Jews a test case for the limits of inclusion. To those who imagine the nation as a homogenous family, Jews are strangers; to those who imagine it as a universal community, Jews often seem too particularistic.
Amid rising antisemitism, the aftermath of Oct. 7, turmoil on university campuses and intense political polarization, it is not surprising then that many American Jews are feeling anxious about the future. The pessimists believe something fundamental is broken and wonder whether it is time to keep a packed suitcase ready. The optimists insist that America remains different, even exceptional, and that American institutions and laws are strong. This too shall pass, they say.
As a historian, I am skeptical of both positions. The past is full of moments that look inevitable in retrospect because, once we know what happened, it becomes harder to imagine other outcomes. But in the moment, multiple futures are always possible. History cannot tell us which one will become ours, but it can broaden the range of possibilities we are able to see.
That is one reason I created a new public course at Brandeis this fall, America and Its Jews at 250. I wanted to see what becomes visible when the questions troubling American Jews today are placed against that much longer historical horizon. Over the course of the semester, 28 scholars and public thinkers will examine the relationship between Jews and America from the colonial period to the present. At a moment when so much attention is understandably focused on Israel, I also wanted us to look more closely at the American Jewish experience and what Jews built here.
Doing this at Brandeis is especially meaningful. Many of America’s oldest and most influential universities grew out of Christian religious communities. Brandeis represented something different: the possibility that a university could be rooted in American Jewish life while being as intellectually ambitious and universal as any of them. A course about America and its Jews belongs in that tradition because these are not two histories that happened in parallel; they are intertwined.
Time has cured most of my culture shock, but I have not forgotten the surprise I felt 26 years ago at the vibrancy and pluralism of American Jewish life. Much of our discussions, in this anniversary year, focus on the country’s uneven path toward more justice and equality, and rightly so. But that should not obscure the immense creativity that this messy and contested American experiment made possible. American Jews embraced its possibilities with a vitality that produced forms of Judaism few of their forebears would have recognized, yet that remain deeply connected to what came before. That dynamism also produced disagreements and fragmentation, and anxiety about what still holds Jews together.
Culture and creativity depend on the soil in which they develop. Protecting American jewish life therefore means not only to fight for Jews and Judaism, but also for the pluralistic republic that allowed them to flourish. Perhaps one day historians will give this entanglement of Judaism and America a name. But for now it remains unnamed because it is still being made, and because its future, I hope, is still in our hands.
The post 250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining issue of his campaign in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. On Sunday, as the party’s nominee, El-Sayed explained why he supported sending American military aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia but opposes sending aid to Israel as it fights Hamas and other armed groups in the region.
“In Ukraine, you’re talking about attacks from a leader of a neighboring sovereign country, who clearly violated international law in attempting to breach the sovereignty of the Ukrainian public,” El-Sayed said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That is conditional on that circumstance.”
As for Israel, he argued, the United States has “been offering unconditional foreign military aid to Israel independent of the circumstances for years and years and years.”
The distinction comes as El-Sayed tries to draw a clearer line around his position on Israel aid as he moves into the general election, following a narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens, who was backed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel Jewish groups.
Since his primary win, El-Sayed said in media appearances that his opposition to unconditional military aid — including funding to the Iron Dome defense system — goes beyond Israel. He pointed to Egypt, where his parents were born, as well as to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, saying those U.S. allies should not receive unconditional American military support either.
“It’s not just Israel,” El-Sayed said, adding, “It’s about the conditions.”
When pressed on whether there was any scenario in which he would support military aid to Israel, El-Sayed said he could consider supporting it if Israelis and Palestinians reached an agreement that guaranteed, as he described it, the “Palestinian people and Jewish Israeli people” equal rights to “peace, dignity, and self-determination.” During the primary, El-Sayed stopped short of explicitly backing a two-state solution.
The Jewish voter test
El-Sayed’s position on Israel is becoming a test of whether he can unite Democrats for the general election in one of the nation’s most important swing states. Many Jewish Democrats remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty” — even as the party needs their support to defeat Republican Mike Rogers and improve its chances of winning back the Senate.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, which backed Stevens and said its volunteers made nearly 100,000 calls on her behalf, said that the “razor-thin margin” in El-Sayed’s victory is evidence that pro-Israel Democrats remain an important electorate within the party.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s chief executive and a Michigan native, said in a Substack post Friday that Jewish Democrats are standing “on a political fault line” after El-Sayed’s victory. “Jewish voters’ concern with El-Sayed and other far-left candidates is rooted in concern for our safety and security given rising antisemitism and antisemitic violence, including when Jews are blamed for the actions of Israel,” she wrote.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan, but they could still prove decisive in a close race. Michigan has been decided by narrow margins in recent elections: Donald Trump won the state in 2016, Joe Biden flipped it in 2020, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate race in 2024 even as Trump carried the state in the presidential race.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, which spent more than $30 million in the primary, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Rogers. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street — a progressive alternative to AIPAC — urged El-Sayed to take a different approach to the Jewish voters who opposed him. Ben-Ami wrote in a Substack post that El-Sayed should spend significant time listening to Jewish Michiganders and their concerns about vulnerability and antisemitism, while making clear “in words and in actions” that Jews who care deeply about Israel have a place in his coalition.
‘I love and revere Judaism’
In the Sunday interview, El-Sayed sought to reassure Jewish voters who remain skeptical of him.
Asked to respond to President Donald Trump’s comments that El-Sayed “hates” Israel and Jewish people “with a passion that burns in his heart,” El-Sayed said, “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people. I believe they’re a light unto the world.”
El-Sayed recalled growing up in Bloomfield Hills, a metro Detroit community with a large Jewish population, and being invited to Passover Seders, synagogues and bar and bat mitzvahs. “I’m really honored for what I learned and got to share with my Jewish sisters and brothers,” he said. “But they are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.”
The candidate also disavowed some remarks by Hasan Piker, the popular pundit and streamer who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail. El-Sayed said Piker’s statement that “America deserved 9/11” was “dumb,” though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
The test in the coming months is whether El-Sayed can win over skeptical Jewish and moderate Democrats without moderating his views on Israel or losing the progressive and pro-Palestinian voters who propelled him to victory.
The post El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Nakba exhibit and the importance of historical context
By NOAH STRAUSS When I went to the Nakba Exhibit, I was shocked, not by the contents of the exhibit but by its size. The exhibit was tiny in my eyes, and I thought the amount of outcry was excessive for an exhibit that is less than 500 words. It felt like every other day the National Post had an article about the exhibit, criticizing different aspects of it. But then I had a realization: the exhibit was never criticized because it was “too” big, but because of the contents of it. When I was toured by the curator, I actually asked her, “Where is the rest of it?” I was confused because I had been misled by the media to believe the size of the exhibit was massive.
I believe that every human being should be able to live a free life. No human should be bullied for who they are. That is not okay, and to some credit, the Nakba exhibit does cover this. But where my problem now comes into play is the fact that the museum fails to portray the full history surrounding the Nakba.
The museum is publicly funded; our taxpayers’ dollars go there. It is supposed to represent our nation and our beliefs, not take a side on history. The Museum did exactly that. It took a side, and guess what? It caused chaos.
Whenever asked why it does not show the other side of history, the museum would always say something along the lines of: our space is limited, the focus of the exhibit is solely the Nakba, etc. But to me, these are excuses, and I will call that out.
For context, the Nakba was an event that occurred around 1948 after the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The Nakba continued until about 1949. During this time, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were either forced out or left what is now Israel.
The Museum is contributing to concerns surrounding the rise of antisemitism. The Museum has failed to mention that during the same era as the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were displaced from Middle Eastern and North African countries, with many forced to leave because of their religion.
Context matters. Yes, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, but what happened during the same era also left hundreds of thousands of Jewish people without homes. When a visitor with no historical context walks in to see what the “Jewish” people did to the Palestinians, of course they’re going to blame the Jews. Because it makes me, a Jewish person, look terrible.
In my view, the exhibit contributes to concerns about growing antisemitism by presenting an incomplete historical narrative.
But then, as Jewish people, we need to know when it’s time to move forward. We need to focus on how we can positively portray the Jewish community and show the world who we are, rather than allowing others to define us through a one-sided historical narrative.
Noah Strauss is a 15-year-old Gray Academy student
