Anti-Zionism on Campus: Brown University

Glimpse into the rot of Jew-hatred infecting so many campuses

[Please check out my new two-volume work, “Israel Breathes, World Condemns,” the only work (AFAIK) the fully documents and analyzes the growing trajectory of Jew-hatred on campuses that finally exploded into the open after Oct. 7, 2023. Inexpensively priced, all proceeds go to support Israel. Please spread the word. Vol. I, “The Trajectory,” is here; Vol. II, “The Aftermath,” is here.]

Something a little different today. The fine folks at Brown Jewish Alumni and Friends (BJAF), tirelessly documenting and resisting the awful Jew-hate permeating their alma matter (radiating outward from their Palestinian Studies and Middle East Studies programs), documented the recent conference there advancing “Non-Zionism,” which was of course just a code word for “Anti-Zionism,” i.e. destroying Israel. What is becoming increasingly transparent is that there truly is a global conspiracy — Protocols of the Elders of Zion style, but in the reverse direction (Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion??) — aiming to destroy Israel and ultimately the Jews, and conferences such as this one are just the latest fronts, the advanced tentacles of the conspiracy, which is well on its way to choking Jews off campus and ultimately off the global stage. They’re already planning next year’s conference on “Anti-Zionism.” Attention needs to be paid to conferences like these as they become unbelievably frequent, ubiquitous, etc. — compare the 13-lecture Hate Series underway at my own institution — and since the institutions themselves won’t do anything about them (“academic freedom,” combined with actually siding with the haters?), we might have to rely on the government, however distasteful that would be under other circumstances, to rein them in.

Anyway BJAF just released a letter they wrote to the Brown administration about the conference, documenting the hate speech that pervaded it. Know that the same views are being promulgated frequently, ubiquitously, etc., all over campuses. Please get involved, monitor your own local campus, report these things to the government — before it’s too late.

From BJAF:

February 27, 2025

Dear President Paxson and EVP Carey,

We write with profound dismay and deep concern regarding the recently held conference on “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” hosted on February 3-4, 2025 by the Cogut Institute at Brown University. Brown Jewish Alumni & Friends (“BJAF”) did not openly stand against or request that Brown cancel this conference in advance out of respect for academic freedom and the free speech ideal which we espouse. The topic itself held the potential for legitimate scholarly inquiry and academic exploration. Unfortunately, the conference blatantly crossed the boundaries of academic freedom into the realm of discrimination and harassment barred expressly by Brown policy as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and repeated Executive Order guidance.

The discourse at the meeting violated what Executive Vice President Russell Carey described in his Sept. 25, 2024 email as legitimate activity under Title VI and campus policy. The meeting veered sharply from legitimate, academic inquiry - and almost always at the hands of participating Brown University professors– into a hostile and discriminatory environment that persisted for two days unabated.

In EVP Carey’s email, he expressly stated that, “examples of prohibited conduct include: Harassing or discriminating against a member of the community for wearing a Star of David or a Yarmulke and/or for their actual or perceived Zionism (which for many Jewish people means belief in and support for the existence of the Israeli state and is a part of their Jewish identity).” Letter from EVP Carey to the Brown Community, Sept. 25, 2024 (emphasis added).

Furthermore, Title VI protects students from harassment or discrimination based on their national origin, and Executive Order 13899 clarifies the applicability of this protection to Jews as Zionists per its adoption of the IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism. Professor Adi Ophir brazenly acknowledged in the conference that, as anti-Zionists, they were not concerned with one or two policies of the Israeli government, but were advocating for the dismantling of the entire Israeli regime. He coherently verbalized his own policy violation.

University policies and legal prohibitions are not optional guidelines that community members can accept or disregard based on their politics. They must adhere to both for the sake of Jewish and Zionist students, faculty, and staff who deserve to be afforded full protections under the law as well as for all Brunonians who risk the attendant loss of federal funding and grants should the federal government seek to penalize the institution as a whole for the misconduct and transgressions of a group of activist professors who undermine the fundamental principles of inclusivity, intellectual integrity, and mutual respect that sustain the entire university. We also note that the Jewish heritage of many of these overtly anti-Zionist academics does not absolve them of their brazenly antisemitic behavior displayed at the conference.

To protect Jewish community members as well as the institution we love, we ask that you review the below statements made under the auspices of this Brown-sanctioned and sponsored event and take appropriate action both to prevent a recurrence of this hostile environment for Jews and Zionists and to penalize those whose actions harmed and put at risk community members and the university as a whole. It is crucial to point out that Professor Adi Ophir ended the conference by inviting Professor Beshar Doumani to co-organize “The Palestinian and Jewish Conference on Anti-Zionism” next year. Given the failure by the participants of this conference to abide by legal strictures and policy mandates, such a follow-up event must not be permitted. The antisemites on campus have been emboldened by this meeting to overtly declare anti-Zionism a legitimate topic for their next meeting; this must be stopped.

We provide below verbatim statements made by academics at this conference without commentary, as they speak for themselves. As you read them, please try to consider what an average Israeli or Jewish student, professor or staff member who identifies as Zionist might feel if she were in a room where such sentiments were being proudly espoused. Multiple Brown professors are overtly rejectionist, refusing to even identify Israel by name lest they legitimize its existence by using a proper noun. The environment created by this conference and many of its speakers was brazenly and overtly anti-Zionist and antisemitic, not euphemistically “non-Zionist.” The pervasive, hostile environment created for Zionists and Jews over the course of two full days must not be permitted to stand as a sanctioned event and attitude on campus.

What transpired under Brown’s sanction was not academically rigorous scholarship, but rather the imposition of politically motivated dogma. It is not academically sound scholarship to make normative judgments that Zionists are, a priori, amoral, racist, and genocidal. Yet, these were conclusions drawn and expressed repeatedly at the conference. Cogut Director Amanda Andersen owes answers to the Brown community. Would she allow such an event to take place regarding any other country or ethnic group? Has the Cogut Institute abandoned any pretense of separating scholarship from activism, investing a careful review of the facts, or presenting multiple sides of an issue? Why should a university committed to the production and dissemination of knowledge continue to support it?

Thank you for your prompt attention to this very concerning matter. We are happy to share with you the audio recordings we obtained to review the conference in its totality.

Sincerely,

The BJAF Steering Committee

Adi Ophir (Brown University)

● I will talk about anti-Zionism, for a change.

● Anti Zionism is an act of negation. I will discuss the act of negation and the

moral obligation at its heart.

● That which is negated - Zionism - has been an idea, a vision, a national movement,

a colonial project, and a state ideology.

● Occasional rocket attacks from Gaza are mainly in response to some Jewish

provocation in the West Bank or Jerusalem.

● Israel’s response [to October 7th] has been a war of total destruction. The aims of

the war is to take political solution off the table for good.

● The contemporary anti-Zionist differs from those who condemn the

government but do not do so by rejecting Zionism because their critique is not

limited to this or that policy. For anti-Zionists, Israel’s fault lies in the kind of

regime which these politics serve and whose contours they shape and reproduce

and with the ideology that lends this regime its name, its cognitive infrastructure, its

political imagination, and the systematically narrow horizons for its political action

vis-a-vis the Palestinians.

● Today, this Zionist regime is marked by the destruction of Gaza and must be judged

by the cruelty and inhumanity of its war against Hamas which turned into a war

against the entire Gaza strip and which, since the ceasefire, has turned into a war

against the West Bank.

● This regime must be opposed for its apartheid and for its genocidal war in the

same way that the requirement for apartheid and genocide should be opposed

everywhere.

● The moral duty is universal.

● But for an anti-Zionist who is a disillusioned Zionist like myself, the imperative

has often been experienced as a mission, for we have not only witnessed the

injustices of Zionism but have directly or indirectly benefited by them. Some of

us played various roles in institutions that made this possible. And others took

direct part in the production and distribution of Zionism’s evil.

● To be or not to be a Zionist is today’s Jewish version of the Jewish question. To

take a position on this question is a moral duty for anyone who identifies as

Jewish.

● Not their actions, but Israel’s Zionist discourse is what makes Jews responsible.

Their support of Israel is projected on them a priori. If they don’t reject this

projection, they are complicit. Their silence is likely to be interpreted as a sign

of tacit consent. To not let this happen, they should take an anti-Zionist

position, at least for a while, then they can be non-Zionist.

● Universal anti-Zionism should not be called antisemitic, even if she questions

Israel’s right to exist.

● The architects of the new world order granted recognition to the last settler colonial

state in modern times and to the first one in the Middle East.

● The questioning of the state is a civic duty, not a privilege, and the critique of its

current regime is a moral imperative. Dismantling Israel’s current regime is the

ultimate state of the anti-Zionist struggle.

● Being Jewish today means being caught in a constellation of two distinct

formations of power – past and present – and two different orders of evil

associated with them – Nazi totalitarianism and Jewish, Zionist settler

colonialism, and there are different orders of evil.

● Anti-Zionists grasp Jewish settler colonialism for what it is: a brutal dynamic of

battery, dispossession, and catastrophization.

Omer Bartov (Brown University)

● It was obvious that Zionism was not only a response to antisemitism, but it was tied

to antisemitism and it internalized core elements of antisemitic stereotypes.

● In discussing Klemperer’s equation of Zionists with Nazis, Bartov stated, “we may

think of him as naïve and deluded, but maybe we can say that in his rantings against

Zionism, he also perceived an important truth, namely that the Jewish

nationalism, born of persecution, humiliation, and genocide, may take on the

very traits of those who tried to annihilate Jewish existence.

● The book that I’m writing, [Israel: What Went Wrong?], tries to sketch what I call the

tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European

Jewry and liberate it from oppression and persecution into a state ideology of

ethnonationalism, increasingly focused on the exclusion and violent domination of

Palestinians under Israeli rule.

● Israel stands today credibly accused of perpetrating large scale war crimes,

forcible displacement of civilian populations, and crimes against humanity.

● Not even eight decades after the Jewish state was established in 1948, the same

year in which the Genocide Convention was adopted by the United Nations in direct

response to the Nazi extermination of European Jewry, Israel appears to be

engaged in a genocidal undertaking with almost total impunity from the very

international, legal regime set up after WWII in order to prevent and punish this

crime.

● And how do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being

conducted with wide support laced with denial and indifference by most of its

Jewish citizens? And of course we have to say that’s half of world Jewry.

● Some would argue that what we are watching at the moment with shock and horror

is the inevitable consequence of Zionist settler colonialism.

● What makes it ever more tragic is the process seen as inevitable only in retrospect

whereby a hopeful albeit increasingly desperate appeal to humanitarianism and

tolerance, the rule of law, and protection of minorities that characterized the

beginning of Jewish self-emancipation, gradually acquired all the traits of the

relentless, remorseless, and increasingly racist ethnonationalism from which

Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry.

● Zionism envisioned the jews religious and mythical ancestral land as the site

where a newly declared Jewish nation would be resurrected.

● The holocaust and the Naqba must be situated in the larger context of colonialism,

population policies, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

● The Holocaust was part of the Nazi endeavor to create a German living space from

which the jews would be removed as a rootless and landless people. The Naqba, for

its part, was the culmination of colonial views of Palestine as an empty space where

landless jews could regain their roots resulting in the displacement of the

indigenous Palestinian population by displaced Jews from Europe.

● Instead over time, the singular focus of Zionism determined that in the competition

between being Jewish and democratic, the state tilted increasingly toward the

former, first in the ethnonationalist sense then also in the theological one and

eventually in an increasingly exclusionary, racist, violent, and authoritarian

sense.

● Instead of recognizing Zionism had accomplished its goal in 1948 in creating Israel,

Zionism became the driving force of an increasingly militaristic, centralized,

expansionist, and intolerant ethno-national state.

● Created as a haven for Jews from antisemitic violence, Israel began to perceive

itself as always being threatened with extinction, even as its regional military

superiority became increasingly unchallenged. This fear of Auschwitz always

lurking behind the corner also provided license for exercising disproportionate

violence against anyone who threatened the state.

● At the moment, 7 million Jewish citizens control 7 million Palestinians, of

whom 2 million are citizens whose rights are restricted in myriad ways by the

state, while 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and 2 million in Gaza have

practically no rights at all.

● At the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged or the boastfulness that

has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of the country, and

slowly but surely it proceeds toward savagery. This is the process we have

seen in Israel.

● Zionism could have been discarded in 1948. It accomplished what it did, whether

we like it or not. It created a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and it did it through

fire and sword, it did it through ethnic cleansing.

Beshara Doumani (Brown University)

● There is an elephant in the room. We are having a conversation in the midst of

genocide and ethnic cleansing.

● Global Palestine has become a moral compass for a new, shared world. At the

same time, there is a Global Israel, and it has become the North Star of the rise

of fascism all over the world, of might is right.

● I agree with Adi Ophir’s position that in order to pursue liberatory imagination of

what it means to be a Jew, the first move is to become an anti-Zionist. If you

don’t do that, it’s just a waste of time. That is the first prerequisite. That’s the

way to get out of the mental prison, the hypnosis that some people mentioned,

the colonized minds that some other people mentioned of those who founded

the Zionist movement. I should say political Zionism, because it is, of course, a

child of antisemitism.

● What has to be added in order to have this conversation, I would add that one does

not only have to be anti but one has to be pro and pro-Palestinian rights, and that is

to say, the floor of the discussion should be, should involve freedom for the

Palestinians, that’s the floor, that’s where you begin. That is not the product of this

conversation.

● And so what we are witnessing in Israel, it’s not so much different from the United

States, not so much different from many countries in Eastern Europe, and dare I say

places outside as well, and this is a global phenomenon.

Ariella Azoulay (Brown University) (She read a letter she composed to her mother about how Zionism ruined their relationship.)

● Decades before this atrocious genocide in Gaza started, I resigned.

● Ima - It took me a long time to understand that you were barely 17 when in 1948 you

were kidnapped to be a child of empire, an Israeli, no longer a Palestinian Jew.

● Ima, you were not born in Israel, but in Palestine. When Palestine was destroyed, it

was taken from you, too. It was robbed of its centuries of Jewish imaginaries and

prayers, of our Jews that held it like a jewel close to their heart. It was turned into a

land to destroy and grab, and we were made the thieves.

● Centuries before Zionism, some of our ancestors went to Palestine to be buried

there…If he could have predicted that Zionism would follow his death, he would

have turned in his grave, as you like to say. None of this migration, though, was part

of the Zionist movement that substitutes the love for Tzion with an evangelical

settler colonial death drive implanted in Jews’ hearts.

● They engineered the Hebrew to fit their settler colonial project.

● I still feel the pain every day of how our mouths were colonized.

● Ima, Zionism tore us apart, not because you were a Zionist, you were never Zionist.

But because in 1948, the Zionists baptized all the Jews who lived in Palestine. If you

had been allowed to know your own history, to hand it on to your children, to love

them in Ladino and Bulgarian, to encourage Abba to love us in Arabic, in Derija, in

French, and in liturgical Hebrew, you could have known that my anti-Zionism is

something for you to be proud of, a continuation and recognition of our family

legacy.

● Ima, I cannot help but think about this huge gap in our family history, about how, as

children, we experienced ourselves in this racist country as naked subjects

(racist country, the Zionist colony in Palestine known as Israel) as if we came

from nowhere.”

● These Zionist agents stole your history, Ima, and they tried to steal our inheritance.

● I don’t envy you, becoming a young mother five years after the Zionists destroyed

Palestine and proclaimed the establishment of Israel.

● Ima, if children born in the Zionist colony in Palestine were not kidnapped by the

state, they could have devoted themselves to healing the genocidal wounds Europe

inflicted upon their ancestors in Europe and its colonies and resisted the cares of

being made agents of genocidal violence against Palestinians every day in Gaza

and the entire Palestine.

● They invented us as Jews. Jews were never one people. It’s Europe who

invented us in Europe and later on in the colonies.

● And what I try to say in my letter to my mother is, if we see young Israelis today

being the agents of this horrible genocide, it is because they were deprived of

their histories and their memories, and they were prepared to be agents of

empire. It’s not an excuse to what they are doing. It’s just an attempt to

understand what is the meaning of creating a Zionist colony in Palestine,

human factories where you raise children with history that is not theirs.”

● Part of the creation of the new world order post WWII was the creation of the UN

which actually mandated the recognition of the Zionists as representative of all

Jewish communities, mandated to destroy all Jewish communities all over, and to

destroy Palestine and create their Zionist State.

Shaul Magid (Harvard Divinity School)

● Over the course of the next few days, we are going to hear a variety of lost voices,

lost causes, forgotten stories that Jewish nationalism intentionally erased from

collective memory. Are we doing this as disinterested scholars? My answer would

be no. We are here because we are most interested scholars. Most of us come here

because we agree that, with all that has been accomplished, something has gone

very wrong with the Jews today. With the dogma of Jewish nationalism, with the

state of affairs as it relates to the project of Jewishness and Judaism in the 21st

century.

● The problem is Zionism also harbored the illusions of enlightenment, that of

normalization to be like all other nations, itself an iteration of emancipation. This

was a prelude to another catastrophe, not upon them but upon its victims.

● Jews were hypnotized by European nationalism and adopted, assimilated into it,

thinking it would solve the Jewish question, making Jews free, when it really just

made them a part of the very destructive nature of nationalism.

● Nationalism poisoned the well of Jewish nature.

● Jews must “sober up from the hypnosis of nationalism that pervades the world.”

Sarah Hammerschlag (University of Chicago)

● It has become almost second nature on a certain line of liberal rhetoric to treat

Zionism in all its forms as an extension of settler colonialism.

Max Weiss (Princeton College)

● Zionism has impacted jews of different backgrounds in different ways. This panel

introduced that violence, empire, colonialism, specifically settler colonialism

are fundamental to not only our understandings of the nature of the Zionist

project, but its myriad effects, for the most part dramatically, in this case

intimate, in this case intellectual, in this case political, across the region.

David Myers (UCLA)

● Zionism is a civil religion for jews in the US, almost a default culture for Jewish

education. That civil religion has become a religion insofar as it’s now

protected under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It has the effect of mistaking what

is essentially a political idea – Zionism – an act of political speech. It’s confusing

political speech and discriminatory speech.

Asli U. Bali (Yale Law School and MESA President)

● It’s in the context of genocidal violence that’s innovated words like

“scholasticide” and “educide” that we’re having this conversation today.

● Some universities have gone so far as to specifically prohibit words in Arabic, words

like “intifada,” citing the claim that Title VI somehow means that the use of those

words produces and atmosphere of threat and that therefore students who use the

word are to face discipline.

● The congressional inquisitorial interrogations of university presidents against this

backdrop produced a massive shift across the country from what had been the lead

defense of some principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom based

on ordinary constitutional protections in a rule based, law-based society to a

complete and total retreat with university leadership agreeing to censor and

abrogate the academic freedom of students and faculty in response to a campaign

of intimidation driven not just by government actors but even more so by private

actors along the lines that Mari described in her presentation [about Jewish

Federations, the ADL, and other Jewish communal organizations].

● The real risk is university overcompliance in advance.