2 May 2025
The following statement published in Academe Blog by three Jewish American academics (Professors Meyerhoff and Schneider pictured) sets out in clear, unambiguous language the unchallengeable truth that what public authorities and the mainstream media endlessly label antisemitism in their references to student and faculty campaigning for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine is not antisemitism but anti-Zionism or simply criticism of Israel’s actions against Palestinians.
It’s Not Too Late to Tell the Truth About Antisemitism on Campus
BY BROOKE LOBER, ELI MEYERHOFF, AND EMILY SCHNEIDER
The climate on American university campuses is dangerous. Administrators ban protests for Palestinian rights. Immigration and Customs Enforcement snatches students off the streets. The Trump administration revokes hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research. And all this is done in the name of protecting Jewish students against a so-called culture of antisemitism. Last April, Claire Shipman, the current acting president of Columbia University, told a congressional committee the university had a “specific problem . . . rampant antisemitism.” If that claim were true, it would constitute a crisis. But it’s not true. Instead, Trump and the Right are weaponizing false claims of antisemitism to attack pro-Palestinian protesters, and they’re using this lie as a smokescreen for destroying higher education and other public goods.
Last year, a student movement arose to protest Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. When Shipman sold the story of “rampant antisemitism” to Congress, she was subscribing to a big lie that both fails to tell the real story and uses isolated incidents of prejudice to smear and discredit an entire protest movement. That big lie is now being used to justify an all-out war on US universities. The big lie has put researchers who devoted their careers to bettering humankind out of work, and it has subjected Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and a growing list of others to immigrant detention and potential deportation.
It’s time to come clean about this big lie and start telling the true story.
We are Jewish academics who have devoted our lives to teaching and research on college campuses. If there were a pervasive culture of antisemitism on campuses, we would know about it, and we would fight it. But we have observed no such thing. Instead, defenders of Israel have spread a lie to distract from and crush dissent over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
The “big lie” is a technique of political propaganda that involves repetition of extreme assertions that grossly distort the truth. The most infamous historical example is the Nazi Party’s propagation of a lie about an international Jewish conspiracy instigating World War I—a big lie that Nazi propagandists used to justify their extermination of Jewish people.
For generations, pro-Israel organizations have normalized the idea that the Palestine solidarity movement is antisemitic, calling criticism of Israel the “new antisemitism.” Since 1979, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has produced an annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, using a flawed methodology that includes criticisms of Israel, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, and anti-Zionist Jewish rituals as antisemitic incidents. Since Israel’s assault on Gaza after October 7, 2023, the ADL and aligned organizations have used these inflated statistics to present a false narrative about increasing antisemitism, especially on college campuses. But criticism of the state of Israel is not antisemitic.
A report from the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University found that nearly half of Jewish students consider the phrase “Israel violates the human rights of the Palestinian people” to be antisemitic. But the fact that Israel has violated and continues to violate the human rights of the Palestinian people is undeniable. The state of Israel was born through a mass expulsion of Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of 1948, known as the Nakba. This was followed by decades of military occupation and the imposition of apartheid and siege; now, in a genocidal assault, Israel has killed more than sixty thousand Palestinians and continues to starve two million people in Gaza. We should thus be asking ourselves which political forces have led so many Jewish students to misinterpret such factual and necessary criticisms of the Israeli state as antisemitism. As the 2023 documentary Israelism shows, this mischaracterization of political speech, especially by young Jewish people, is the intended outcome of Zionist organizations’ effort to manufacture consent for Israeli injustice.
The last eighteen months have seen a large, diverse protest movement against Israel’s assault, not against the Jewish people. As academics, we want a model to explain prejudice and antagonism toward all of our students. The big lie relies on an inaccurate account of the data: focusing only on the harassment of pro-Israel Jewish students while ignoring the harassment of others, including Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Jewish students who are protesting Israel’s genocide. At UCLA, administrators allowed a pro-Israel mob to physically attack students, as campus security and police watched. At the UC Santa Cruz encampment, police physically beat students, and administrators banned student protesters from the university. At Columbia, Arab and pro-Palestinian students were harassed and assaulted. Jewish students and faculty protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza have been doxed, harassed and assaulted by Zionists. At times, academic institutions have themselves performed acts of antisemitism like destroying anti-Zionist Jewish students’ ritual objects. Now, the Zionist organization Betar is sending the federal government lists of students to deport.
A better model—and a more honest story about campus climate—would look at the larger context of the war and how it has increased tensions across the board. On October 7, 2023, Palestinian militant groups staged a revolt against the seventeen-year blockade. They attacked the infrastructure of occupation and kidnapped and killed Israelis, among others. As the US and Israeli media dehumanized Palestinian people and repeatedly characterized this politically motivated attack as “senseless violence” or motivated by “antisemitism,” they paved the way for Israel’s disproportionately harsh retaliation; unsurprisingly, harassment and violence toward Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims ensued. Israel responded to the attack with a genocidal campaign, while marking their conquered territory with holy Jewish symbols and justifying their assault in the name of collective Jewish safety. It is this violent instrumentalization of Jewish identity, a longstanding project of the Israeli state, that has provoked renewed harassment of Jews around the world.
Instead of telling a nuanced, responsible story about all that has happened, the Trump administration and the far right, like the Democratic administration that preceded them, have spread the reductive story that the campus tensions are caused by antisemitism. This lie distorts the causes of the campus conflicts and legitimizes the violence facing students like Mahmoud Khalil.
It’s time to call out the big lie for what it is: an effort to silence dissent and smear protesters. Pro-Israel advocates have aligned themselves with the forces of repression. Resistance to such forces is not about the hatred of Jews. Our people’s long history of antifascism drives our rejection of both Zionism and the weaponizing of charges of antisemitism. Cloaking right-wing commitments to racism under the guise of fighting antisemitism will never keep us safe. We call on everyone to reject the big lie, and to commit to a fight for Jewish safety based on the liberation of all people.
Brooke Lober is a lecturer in gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley.
Eli Meyerhoff is a fellow with the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
Emily Schneider is assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northern Arizona University.
