“Does calling for the genocide of Jews,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) asked at a congressional hearing last week, “violate [the university’s] rules or code of conduct. Yes or no?”
The hearing, organized by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, was titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” and featured three college presidents — Harvard’s Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sally Kornbluth — as the hearing’s witnesses.
Puzzlingly, all three presidents seemed to struggle with Stefanik’s question. In the days that followed, a GOP-led campaign was created to force the presidents to resign after their alleged failure to respond to antisemitism had crested into a fever pitch on campuses. President Magill tendered her resignation on December 10; President Gay issued an apology, amid calls for her resignation.
It seems odd (and others have pointed out) that Stefanik, an election denier — and dabbler in the antisemitic, white nationalist “great replacement theory” — could get away with claiming the moral high ground on antisemitism. But the sentence spoken just before Stefanik's now viral question gives a clue as to how the polished, well-paid leaders of the country’s most prestigious universities were so easily backed into a corner: Stefanik began with, “You understand that this call for ‘intifada’ is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally?” To which Gay responded, “That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.”
The word “intifada” literally translates to uprising, though there is debate about what intifada means in context. In the context of the current carpet bombing and suffocation of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, it has been used as a rallying cry by many who are aghast at the massive civilian casualties.
From start to finish, the underlying assumption of the congressional hearing was that the rise of antisemitism on campuses has been caused by, and is perhaps even synonymous with, the rise of pro-Palestine activism. The hearing opened with Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) introducing a short video “that shows what [Jewish] students are facing.” The video was a montage of Palestine protests across different campuses, featuring chants like “Free, free Palestine!” and “Long live the intifada!” complete with menacing background music.
After the university presidents signed on to the idea that calls for Palestinian freedom can broadly and seamlessly be equated with calls for the genocide of Jews, they walked themselves right into that futile corner. One that made it even more difficult to have a productive discussion about the very real threat of antisemitism on college campuses and across the country.
Just outside of Capitol Hill’s Rayburn building, where the hearings were being held, dozens of students from Harvard, UPenn, MIT, and other colleges stood in the chill for an hour and a half, as they took to the bullhorn one by one to decry the congressional hearing taking place inside.
“I don't think this country gives a rat's ass about Jewish safety” is how one Brown University student put it. Rita, who requested only her first name be used, is a Jewish Israeli-American, and a cofounder of Brown’s Jews for Ceasefire Now. She was among students from eight different schools who traveled to Washington, DC, to hold a press conference on Capitol Hill on December 5.
Students like Rita can be forgiven for feeling skeptical that confronting antisemitism was sincerely on the hearing agenda. To start, the congresspeople leading the charge to stamp out antisemitism, it seems, are mostly right-wing Republicans, Trump supporters, and “students of the [presumably Christian] bible,” as one congressperson self-identified. These are members of the same party that refused to organize a similar hearing on campus discrimination in 2017, when white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” Just days after the hearing, Stefanik was all smiles in a photo with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, apparently unperturbed by his recent Hitler-like comments.
Thus Representative Rick Allen (R-GA) declared during the hearing, “Let me tell you how serious this issue is. In 1885 BC… the Bible says, talking about Israel, ‘I will bless those that bless you. And whoever curses you, I will curse.’” He continued. “That is a serious, serious promise!”
Tuesday’s hearing was presided over by Rep. Foxx, the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and who, in 2019, opposed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act over its aim to include LGBTQ+ people under existing hate crime laws.
After the college presidents gave their opening remarks at the hearing — each going out of their way to prove themselves critics of Hamas and campaigners against antisemitism — Foxx returned to ask a question: “Foundational to this issue [of antisemitism],” she said, “is the denial of the right of Israel to exist. So I want to ask each of you: Do you believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish nation?”
“I agree that the state of Israel has the right to exist,” answered Gay.
“I agree, Chairwoman Foxx, the state of Israel has the right to exist,” answered Magill.
“Absolutely, Israel has the right to exist,” answered Kornbluth.
The hearings had a not-too-subtle whiff of the 1950s-style McCarthyism witch hunts, when citizens were called up to the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” The question, no matter the answer, was meant to be a trap.
Antisemitism is indeed spiking across the country, including on college campuses. And it deserves to be challenged head on, as the Jewish students that gathered outside of the hearings made clear. The coalition of organizations that came together on Tuesday released a statement that read, in part:
Jack Starobin, a University of Pennsylvania student, argued: “Let's be clear: Antisemitism is real. It's important to take seriously. This year, Jewish spaces on Penn's campus have been vandalized, and incidents of violence against Jewish people are on the rise in the US and around the world.”
But, he went on, “antisemitism is not a term to use to satisfy a political wish list, to censor students, or to justify a genocide. In the past two months, donors and politicians across the political spectrum have disregarded the gravity of the term antisemitism. They have conflated legitimate criticism of Israel with hate, and the University of Pennsylvania has caved to the pressure.”
Starobin has felt the force of that pressure directly: He is a cofounder of Penn Chavura, a Jewish club on campus that organized itself as a space outside of the university’s pro-Israel Hillel for Jewish students to have a home, regardless of their position on Israel. A planned and approved screening of Israelism, a film about American Jews whose unconditional support of Israel was shaken by a visit to the occupied West Bank, hosted by Penn Chavura was canceled suddenly and inexplicably by the campus administration after October 7.
One of the challenges posed by conflating instances of antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel — a nation-state currently engaged in an assault on Gaza that has claimed more than 20,000 lives, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures — is that it becomes impossible to track where and how antisemitism is actually growing. The Anti-Defamation League, an organization that tracks the rise of antisemitism, equates broad criticisms of Israel with antisemitism, and Jewish organizations calling for a ceasefire, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have been among those labeled antisemitic “hate groups.”
JVP, for its part, has clarified that “antisemitism is discrimination, targeting, violence, and dehumanizing stereotypes directed at Jews because they are Jewish… We have also seen the use of Jewish stereotypes and conspiracy theories as part of racist ideologies.” On the Left, any “blaming [of] Jewish people for the actions of the Israeli government” is also antisemitic, and has no place in the movement. The organization has pointed to growing incidents of white nationalist antisemitic violence, such as the murder of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the synagogue shootings at a Chabad Synagogue in Poway, California, in 2019, and Nazi symbols at the January 6, 2021, US Capitol insurrection.
From behind the bullhorn, MIT student Gabriella Martini recounted her own family history, which has been haunted by the Holocaust, and the toll that it took on her great-grandmother, who lost her entire family in Poland. Understanding the fear and trauma carried by many Jewish families, which has been reignited by the brutality of Hamas’s October 7 attack, she argued:
“I acknowledge that some students, faculty, and staff who are still reeling from the Hamas attack have felt deep discomfort, confusion, and alienation when encountering protests criticizing the actions of the Israeli government before and after October 7. But to claim that the existence of these protests has made MIT a place that is unsafe for Jews is, in effect, weaponizing their grief to dehumanize the protesters…. The point of these claims is not to ensure Jewish safety but instead to silence the voices of those who criticize the state of Israel. In doing so, they also silence the voices of a growing number of Jews who draw on their own history when fighting for Palestinians.”
Across campuses there are Jewish students like Martini expressing deep discomfort with the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Among the student banners was a massive canvas that read: “Anti-Zionism =/= Anti-Semitism.” Demonstrating the extent to which these terms are being contested, that same day, the House of Representatives also passed a resolution that “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Many of the Jewish students I have spoken with believe that, ironically, the conflation serves to stoke, not eradicate, antisemitism. University presidents like Gay, Magill, Kornbluth, and others have arguably pitted Jewish students against other groups on campus by giving preferential treatment to antisemitism over other oppressions, particularly at a time when Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestine students are also being harassed, doxxed, and assaulted on campuses. They have set up task forces on antisemitism and have sought out the perspectives and experiences of pro-Israel, Jewish students, while ignoring complaints by Arab and Muslim students, as well as pro-Palestine Jews.
Furthermore, equating Judaism with the state of Israel — at a time when that state is engaged in what human rights organizations are calling war crimes — has the effect of painting Jews as a monolithic group that supports the unrelenting bombing, trapping, and starving of another people.
As Harvard professor Sara Roy told me, “When you single out antisemitism this way, you’re exceptionalizing Jews again,” rather than confronting antisemitism as “part of a larger, inclusive intersectional battle against all forms of prejudice and discrimination.” Roy, who is a Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, adds, “That is really bad for us.” Antisemitism has a long history of being used at moments of crisis to single out and scapegoat Jews, and to pit them against other oppressed groups.
As historian Aurora Levins Morales has written, Jews historically “were the shock absorbers of Europe's class societies, ‘Middle Agents’ drafted into being the local representatives of distant and definitely Christian ruling classes who alternately exploited and persecuted them while squeezing the life blood out of Europe's peasants and workers.” Antisemitism was a strategy of the ruling classes to create a “vulnerable buffer group,” kept separate, with few rights, but some material privileges — a perfect scapegoat when the time came.
Today the definition of antisemitism has become muddled by design. It has been politicized at a time when the US establishment has pledged unwavering support for Israel as it carries out a deeply unpopular and horrific assault on Gaza. In the face of complete destruction, pleading doctors and images of dead babies are being streamed and viewed by millions on social media, and redefining antisemitism has become a tool of last resort to shut down criticism of Israel. College campuses have been ground zero in that battle.
Among the phrases picked out to “prove” the antisemitic content of Palestine protests are the previously mentioned “Intifada,” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which has caused controversy with different groups interpreting and using the phrase in very distinct ways. Some Jews interpret it as a call to erase Israel by claiming all its land for Palestine. But many anti-war, pro-Palestine protesters mean it as a call for the freedom of the Palestinian people, across geography and experiences— including Palestinians that live under occupation in the West Bank, suffocation in Gaza, and apartheid laws within the boundaries of Israel. Read in good faith, neither phrase takes aim at Judaism as a religion, nor Jews as a people, the vast majority of whom have no power or sway over the actions of the Israeli state.
Lastly, politicians like Foxx have fixated on whether protests have called into question “Israel’s right to exist.” But bound up in the insistence to recognize Israel’s right to exist is a demand to accept the character of the Israeli state as an ethno-nationalist Jewish state, which must maintain a permanent demographic Jewish majority. It is therefore a demand to limit the population growth of Palestinians living within Israel, a demand to give up the Palestinian right of return to their land (a right recognized by international bodies like the United Nations and supported by statutes in the Geneva Convention), and a demand to allow for ongoing dispossession of those Palestinians that remain.
For the Jewish students who are organizing on campuses alongside Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and other activists, there is another answer to antisemitism: It comes from solidarity. As Martini put it, “I believe that the struggle for Jewish liberation from racist, white supremacist ideologies is inextricably bound up with the struggle for the liberation of all persecuted, oppressed, occupied, colonized, and subjugated people. There is no safety in oppression, in apartheid, in occupation, in colonial expansion, in the dehumanization of other people. Not for Jews, not for anyone.”
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