Goldberg: When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say?

2023/11/06 Leave a comment

Good discussion of the players and the issues:

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to nearly 200 college presidents urging them to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for potential violations of federal and state laws against providing material support to terrorism. As evidence for these very serious accusations, the ADL and the Brandeis center offered only the student group’s own strident rhetoric, including a sentence in its online tool kit, which praised Hamas’s attacks on Israel and said: “We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of the Palestinians on the ground.”

Under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has also ordered state universities to shut chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. Citing the same tool kit, DeSantis said, “That is material support to terrorism, and that is not going to be tolerated in the state of Florida, and it should not be tolerated in these United States of America.” Virginia’s Republican attorney general has opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine, a national group that, according to the ADL, helps coordinate the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine, “for potentially violating Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws, including benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations.” Several Republicans, including Donald Trump, have called for revoking the visas of pro-Palestinian student activists.

Ever since Hamas’s slaughter and mass kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7, there has been mounting fear and fury over the mistreatment of Jews at American colleges and universities. The Homeland Security, Justice and Education Departments are all taking steps to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional resolutions have condemned it. But while plenty of pro-Palestinian students have behaved in appalling ways, many also feel besieged, and for good reason.

For Palestinian and Muslim students, the invocation of terrorism law is especially frightening. Attempts to curtail anti-Zionist activism are not new; about 35 states have laws targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. But now advocates for Palestinian rights describe a new level of repression. “The ADL is calling for the mass violation of students’ rights in a manner that’s reminiscent of the post 9/11 environment, but with a more intensely Palestinian twist,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at the civil rights organization Palestine Legal. She predicts that if federal and state governments follow through on the ADL’s demands, Palestinian activists will be subjected to an increase in surveillance, infiltration and investigation, even though their groups “pose zero threat and have done nothing but engage in speech 100 percent protected by the First Amendment.”

Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, a pre-eminent historian of Palestinian history, readily acknowledged a rash of recent antisemitic incidents on college campuses. But he drew a distinction between interpersonal harassment and an institutional crackdown. “Both sides have feelings of being victimized,” he told me, but the forces arrayed against them are not the same. “The Patriot Act may be mobilized to shut down speech” deemed supportive of Palestinian terrorism. “That’s the difference.”

No one should underestimate how awful the campus climate is for many Jewish students, who’ve experienced a surge in violence and abuse. At Cornell, an engineering student was arrested after threatening to shoot up a kosher dining hall and calling for Jews to be raped and murdered. Demonstrators at a rally in support of Palestinians assaulted Jewish counterprotesters at Tulane; one student had his nose broken. In October, Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean of at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an opinion essay headlined, “Nothing Has Prepared Me for the Antisemitism I See on College Campuses Now.” In it, he told of a student who insisted that she would feel safe on campus only if the school got “rid of the Zionists.”

This hostile environment stems, at least in part, from the nearly vaunted role played by the Palestinian cause in the left’s understanding of global dispossession. Because America helps underwrite Israel’s military occupation, Palestinians are often viewed as singular symbols of imperialist oppression. For decades, radical Black activists in America have seen, in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a mirror of their own subjugation, and that identification was supercharged during America’s 2020 racial justice protests, when a mural of George Floyd appeared in Gaza City. In some social justice circles, then, support for Israel is viewed as something akin to support for the K.K.K.

This contempt for Zionism has only accelerated with the pulverizing bombing of Gaza and its thousands of civilian casualties. And too often, on hothouse campuses full of young people with half-formed ideas and poor impulse control, anti-Zionism segues into hatred directed at Jews.

For some Jews on campus, the vituperation against Zionism has been particularly disorienting because, for years now, they’ve been trained in exquisite sensitivity to identity-based slights.

Not all Jews identify with the state of Israel, of course, and activists from Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. But many Jews see their relationship with Israel as an essential part of their Jewishness, and even some fierce critics of Israel’s government were shaken by the widespread demonization of the country so soon after Hamas’s atrocities. When they say that the campus climate makes them feel unsafe — a rhetorical trump card in other contexts — they expect official action.

On Wednesday, the presidents of several Israeli universities wrote a letter to their international colleagues calling on them to accord Jewish and Israeli students and faculty members “the same respect and protections as any other minority.” Citing principles of safety and inclusivity, the letter said, “Just as it would be unthinkable for an academic institution to extend free speech protections to groups targeting other protected classes, so too should demonstrations that call for our destruction and glorify violence against Jews be explicitly prohibited and condemned.”

But this demand for protection can collide with the First Amendment rights of Zionism’s critics, and with academic freedom more broadly. “I wouldn’t compare this with the internment of the Japanese Americans in World War II, but the point I’m making is that there are times when people get really upset about what’s happening in the world and do things that are unwise at best and really harmful to people and democracy at worst,” said Kenneth Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate and author of “The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate.”

Stern occupies a unique position in this profoundly polarizing debate. He’s a liberal Zionist and an expert on antisemitism, as well as a committed civil libertarian who critiques the way mainstream Jewish groups wield institutional power to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices.

As he describes in his book, in 1982, he resigned from the left-wing National Lawyers Guild rather than face what felt like a purge for refusing to sign onto a strictly pro-Palestinian line. Years later, he became the in-house antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee, but eventually left in part over concern that, in its ardent defense of Israel on college campuses, the group was forsaking a commitment to academic freedom. He helped draft an internationally adopted definition of antisemitism that includes some forms of anti-Zionism. He’s also inveighed, in opinion essays, congressional testimony and in his 2020 book, against the use of that definition, put out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, to traduce the free speech of Israel’s critics.

“The complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict should make it an ideal subject to teach critical thinking and how to have difficult discussions,” writes Stern. “Instead, it is being used as a toxin that threatens the entire academic enterprise.”

As with the conflict between Israel and Palestine more broadly, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning free speech organization, shared data with me showing that, since 2002, there have been more attempts made to de-platform pro-Palestinian campus speakers than pro-Israel ones. But attempts to shut down pro-Israel speakers, by disinviting or disrupting them, are more likely to be successful.

Both sides, then, have credible stories to tell about being censored and intimidated. The difference is where that intimidation is coming from. For supporters of Israel, it largely comes from peers and, in some cases, professors. For supporters of Palestine, it comes from powerful outside institutions, including the state.

There is little reason to think that the pressure brought to bear by these outside institutions is making Jewish students any safer. One result of the denunciatory mood that overtook many progressive spaces toward the tail end of the Trump years was to give reactionary ideas a rebellious frisson. You could see this in the little subculture of New York scenesters who adopted the trappings of conservative Catholicism as a rebuke to liberalism, but also in more significant cultural phenomena, like the popularity of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast and the right-wing radicalization of Elon Musk. Among young people, the appeal of right-wing heterodoxy was limited by the fact that relatively few want to give up either a commitment to human equality or premarital sex. Anti-Zionist activism, by contrast, offers something that’s been missing from left-wing politics for years: the chance to stand up for the downtrodden and scandalize elites.

“By trying to censor anti-Israel remarks, it becomes more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma,” Stern writes in his book. “The campus debate is changed from one of exposing bigotry to one of protecting free speech, and the last thing pro-Israel advocates need is a reputation for censoring, rather than refuting, their opponents.”

Of course, Israel’s partisans already have that reputation. “What can you say about what settlers are doing in the West Bank?” asked Khalidi. “What can you say about ethnic cleansing in 1948,” the year of Israel’s founding? “How can you defend any of those things? They don’t have an argument. They have to shut down debate.” Those who disagree with him might try to prove him wrong.

Source: When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say?

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ADL Says Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Students Disagree. – The Forward

2018/03/07 Leave a comment

Good nuanced analysis of the various campus antisemitism reports:

The Anti-Defamation League recently released the results of its annual anti-Semitism audit. The findings were staggering.

Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged nearly 60% this past year, driven in part by an increase in such cases in schools and on college campuses. ADL found 1,986 cases of harassment, vandalism or physical assaults against Jews and Jewish institutions in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016.

But these results conflict with those of other surveys. Two recent reports — one from the Research Group of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford and one from the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis — found that, by and large, Jewish students do not feel threatened on campus.

This raises questions: Is anti-Semitism a perennial menace on American college and university campuses that increasingly threatens Jewish students around the country? Or is campus anti-Semitism a negligible issue that has been overhyped by overzealous Israel supporters?

The answer is, it’s anti-Semitism, but many younger Jews are reluctant to use the term in that context. And the less affiliated they are with organized Jewish life, the more that seems to be the case.

The Stanford report employed in-person interviews with 66 Jewish students on various California campuses who were either “unengaged or minimally engaged in organized Jewish life,” since these students “represent the vast majority of Jewish college students.” Most of them felt comfortable on their respective campuses, both in general and as Jews, and traced any discomfort they felt to the “strident, inflammatory, and divisive” tone of the campus discourse on Israel.

The Brandeis report grew out of a finding from a 2016 Steinhardt Institute study, which surveyed students on 50 campuses about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment and found wide variance between students’ experiences on different campuses.

The more recent Brandeis study focused on only four schools (Brandeis, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania), and was distributed to both Jewish and non-Jewish respondents. The survey concluded that “the majority of Jewish and non-Jewish students… disagreed that their campus constituted a ‘hostile environment toward Jews.’” Some felt that there was a “hostile environment” toward Israel, but the majority did not agree.

Both of these studies seem to support the conclusion that campus anti-Semitism is a negligible phenomenon.

But this reading is oversimplified. One issue that affects both studies is the narrowness of the student populations surveyed. The Stanford report’s focus on unaffiliated students is particularly troubling, because removing Jewishly engaged students clearly skewed the findings. In fact, the two Brandeis studies as well as an earlier study from 2015 all agreed that those most strongly identified with the Jewish community and Israel are more likely to report hostility on campus. In other words, the Stanford study removed those most prone to experience — or, at least, to report — anti-Semitism.

The 2016 Brandeis report explained that this could be because those students are more likely to be targeted, or because they are more sensitive to the issue, or because students who experience anti-Israel sentiment might begin to feel more connected to the Jewish State, or some combination of all of these factors.

This does not mean that the Stanford survey is wrong; it merely emphasizes different data than other, earlier surveys and is thus more compelling if you feel that that campus animosity — at least when it is connected to Israel or Zionism — is not a serious issue, and less compelling if you disagree.

In other words, there’s data to reinforce your confirmation bias, whichever direction that might skew.

The focus on four randomly selected campuses in the 2017 Brandeis study also seems to indicate that campus anti-Semitism is not a serious problem. However, critics argue that four campuses are not a representative sample, and that the report merely amplifies a point from the earlier study: that there is wide variance from campus to campus in students’ perceptions of overall hostility toward Jews and Israel.

The 2016 Brandeis report found that some individual campuses and regions of the country are seen as more continually problematic on a year-to-year basis and referred to some campuses as relative “hotspots.” The report also found that one of the strongest predictors for perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews is “the presence of an active Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group on campus.”

This finding is corroborated in the later Brandeis study. “The majority of Jewish and non-Jewish students at all four schools disagreed that their campus constituted a ‘hostile environment toward Jews,’” the study found. Students were more likely to agree that there was a hostile environment toward Israel on their campus than that there was a hostile environment toward Jews, but most students — except for those at Michigan — still disagreed that there was hostility to Israel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, in November 2017, one month before the study was released, the student government at University of Michigan passed a BDS resolution, its first successful BDS campaign after 11 previous attempts dating back to 2002.

Additionally, the students addressed in the Kelman study did not deny that there was a toxic discourse connected to Israel on their campus; they acknowledged the problem but assigned equal responsibility for the issue to both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps, a natural response for those who are alienated and feel rebuffed by the political stances or tactics of both sides. They used words such as “unsafe,” “discomfort” and “threat” to describe some of their campus experiences and were concerned that their Jewishness allowed them to be stereotyped as holding certain views.

Despite these issues, students were reluctant to use the word “anti-Semitism.” The study explains that this shows the students’ “understanding of the difference between Israeli politics and Jewish people,” and this may ring true for those who agree with that distinction.

And yet, some of the behaviors that the students described witnessing, such as ascribing stereotypical “dual loyalty” to the Jewish people, or holding people who happen to be Jewish responsible for actions taken by others who are also Jewish (or Israeli), or the fear of losing social status because of support for Jewish issues (or Israel), are all classic examples of anti-Jewish animosity, regardless of the students’ reticence.

In other words, the unaffiliated students at these colleges are redefining what counts as anti-Semitism, choosing to rule out behaviors that older generations of Jews — like those who run ADL — see as anti-Semitic.

The Stanford report also refers to “exaggerated claims about the tone of campus activism and misrepresentations of student experience.” The researchers conclude, ”Such claims do far more harm than good by heightening tensions and reinforcing divisions.”

But imputing to all other studies emphasizing the presence of anti-Semitism on campus a common agenda or method is itself misleading and elides their significant differences. Moreover, despite greater emphasis on the presence of anti-Semitism, some of these other reports — including an ADL report in 2015 — also describe the daily experience of most Jewish students on American college and university campuses as largely comfortable, despite the presence of anti-Semitic incidents. The Stanford report’s conclusions are perhaps not entirely a revelation.

Research suggests that Jewish students, for the most part, feel comfortable on campus, but the story is more complex than the main findings publicized in recent surveys. It seems that there is only one issue these surveys clarify unambiguously: that we do not agree on a standard definition of anti-Semitism, and this makes assessing its overall impact on American campuses much more difficult.

via ADL Says Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Students Disagree. – The Forward

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Jewish Students Feel Wide Anti-Semitism, Online Study Says

2015/07/30 Leave a comment

US Antisemitism campuses - BrandeisInteresting studies and charts:

According to the Brandeis University study released Tuesday, a few schools, among them Canadian universities and schools in the California state system, have “particularly high levels of hostility toward Jews or Israel.”

The online survey of over 3,000 North American college students who have applied for a Birthright Israel trip — but have not yet taken the 10-day journey — found that one-third of respondents reported having been verbally harassed during the past year because they were Jewish. Nearly three-quarters said they had been exposed to at least one of six anti-Semitic statements, including the claims that Jews have too much power and that Israelis behave “like Nazis” toward the Palestinians.

More than one-quarter of respondents described hostility toward Israel by their campus peers as a “fairly” or “very big” problem, while nearly 15 percent reported the same level of hostility toward Jews.

Jewish Students Feel Wide Anti-Semitism, Online Study Says – Breaking News – Forward.com.

Antisemitism and the College Campus – Brandeis University

2014 Anti-Semitism Report – Jewish Virtual Library

Brandeis - Israel

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