Cornell University (Photo: Jeffrey M. Vinocur/Wikimedia)
Charges of antisemitism are currently abound at U.S. colleges and universities. These charges have resulted in a nationwide crackdown on free expression on these campuses. Charges of antisemitism require us to consider what is meant by “antisemitism.”
In recent years there has been a conflation of the definition of classic antisemitism, as articulated in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (“Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews [or Jewish institutions as Jewish]”) with anti-Zionism and political critiques of Israel, as articulated in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition.
The current charges of antisemitism on campuses are aimed not at attacks (rhetorical or literal) on the Jewish people but at students, faculty, and staff protesting the state of Israel’s massive assault on the civilians in Gaza since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli soldiers and civilians in which 250 Israeli civilians were taken hostage and 1,139 people were killed.1 But we should note, in condemning this attack, that the major U.S. media and university administrations, following the government, have completely erased the historical context of the attack in which from 1948 to the present Israel has continued to violate human rights and international laws in its ongoing colonization of Palestine.
Elaborating this context, on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, including its settlements there, illegal.
Within the erasure of this historical context, the current nationwide charges of antisemitism constitute a “weaponization of antisemitism” that has been very effective at forcing colleges and university administrators to change open-expression policies to ones that limit freedom of speech, academic freedom, and any credible form of shared governance between faculty and administrations. This is contrary to the fundamental policy of institutions of higher learning that commits to the free exchange of all ideas. Such an exchange is necessary to a free society.
In sum, the expansion of the definition of historic antisemitism to include anti-Zionism and criticisms of Israel has led to charges of antisemitism that are weaponized to shut down any form of pro-Palestinian protest aimed at ending what the ICJ terms the “plausible genocide” in Gaza.
What are Cornell University values?
Cornell University emphasizes social justice through its institutional commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This manifests in their historic “any person, any study” founding principle, which promotes educational accessibility. The university supports this mission through various initiatives including research centers focused on inequality, identity-based resource centers, DEI programs, and support for underrepresented students.
They integrate social justice into their curriculum and engage with community challenges through public service. While Cornell actively promotes these values, like many institutions, they continue to work on fully implementing them in response to ongoing student activism and feedback.
For the last two years, the administration of Cornell University, where I teach, has been in the process of establishing a policy on “Expressive Activity.” Most recently, after the administration first promulgated a set of “interim” policies in the academic year 2023-2024, this process has been in the hands of a committee of faculty, staff, and students picked predominantly by the administration.
According to the Cornell Chronicle of August 22, 2024, “The Committee on Campus Expressive Activity is charged by university leadership with making recommendations for the formulation of a Cornell policy that both protects free expression and the right to protest, while establishing content-neutral limits that ensure the ability of the university community to pursue its mission.” The committee, then, is only empowered to make “recommendations” and there are no provisions for “consent” to be given by the constituted university assemblies, which represent the constituents impacted by the policy: the Faculty Senate, the University Assembly, the Student Assembly, the Employee Assembly, and the Graduate Student Union.
The conflation of political critique with the classic definition of antisemitism has been legitimized by the definition of antisemitism formulated by the IHRA. The IHRA definition of antisemitism was as of 2021 already incorporated by 30 universities across the nation. Congress is currently voting to incorporate the IHRA definition in H.R.6090 – Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, passed by the House and currently being considered by the Senate.
National effort to weaponize antisemitism
While the policy promises to have “content-neutral limits,” the national and local context for this policy, to which I have referred and will elaborate in what follows, suggests that far from “content-neutral,” these policies are the direct result of the “weaponization of antisemitism” promulgated by the Congress of the United States in hearings beginning on December 5, 2023 by the Committee on Education & the Workforce chaired by Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina. These hearings came in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas. But the hearings, held shortly before the charge of Israeli genocide in Gaza was brought to the ICJ by South Africa on December 29, 2023, erased what the ICJ, as noted, termed the “plausible genocide” by Israel against the people of Gaza.2
At the Foxx hearing, the members of the Committee on Education & the Workforce listened to the testimony of the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay), the University of Pennsylvania (M. Elizabeth Magill), and MIT (Sally Kornbluth). President Gay’s testimony was entirely deferential to the Committee’s mandate, thanking it “for calling this hearing on the critical topic of antisemitism.” She continued: “Our community still mourns those brutally murdered during the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on October 7. Words fail in the face of such depravity, the deadliest single day for the Jewish community since the horrors of the Holocaust.” Then Gay went on to acknowledge “a dramatic and deeply concerning rise in antisemitism – around the world, in the United States, and on our campuses, including my own.” But she never mentioned the already disproportionate civilian Palestinian deaths caused by Israeli carpet bombing of Gaza, and she only gave a nod to “a rise of incidents of Islamophobia at Harvard and in “the world, our nation, and our campuses.” “In response,” she continued, “I have sought to confront hate while preserving free expression” and briefly elaborated this position in general terms.
Both Presidents Magill and Kornbluth, with similar deference to the Committee, repeated President Gay’s positions on antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the Hamas attack, without, like Gay, mentioning the ongoing massacre in Palestine. Like Gay, the two other presidents also emphasized the need to respect freedom of speech. President Kornbluth, who noted she was Jewish, stated: “Those who want us to shut down protest language are, in effect, arguing for a speech code. But in practice, speech codes do not work. Problematic speech needs to be countered with other speech and with education, and we are doing that.”
President Magill referenced the U.S. Constitution, that is, implicitly the First Amendment, as the framework within which Penn’s expressive policies are located. In its ignoring of viewpoint discrimination (content-based restriction on speech that targets specific views or ideologies), specifically interdicted by the First Amendment, The House Committee on Education & the Workforce clearly showed no regard for that amendment whatsoever even though members of Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In fact, under the guise of exposing antisemitism, in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy crusade against communism in the 1950s, the Committee’s purpose, ironically, appears to be an attack on the First Amendment, which is the foundation of liberal education.
What should strike us immediately about both the Committee’s charge and the university presidents’ responses is that “antisemitism,” the supposed focus of the hearings, is never defined. That is, Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth never ask the Committee to define the key term in the hearings and the Committee never bothers to define it. However, what is clear in subsequent developments up until the present moment is that the definition the Committee was using is one (the IHRA definition) that incorporates criticism of Israel and/or Zionism into the classic definition of antisemitism as stated in the Jerusalem Declaration, signed by 350 scholars of Jewish studies and middle eastern history. The IHRA definition delegitimizes specific political speech upheld by the First Amendment’s interdiction of viewpoint discrimination.
In official circles (the government and university administrations), as student protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza continued to proliferate across the country, the definition of antisemitism continued to expand to include any support for Palestinian rights. Thus, some Jewish students could claim to feel “unsafe” (a motif of the Committee and the testimony) not because they were physically threatened (reports of which are minimal) but because they were in the vicinity of legitimate First Amendment protests on behalf of Palestinian rights, many of them joined by Jewish students who were members of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Jews themselves, then, including Jewish faculty like myself who support these protests, are, ironically, accused of antisemitism.
These protests, largely peaceful (until in some of them university administrations called the police) are educational. They are intended to bring to the attention of campus communities and beyond international and human rights law, which Israel is violating according to the ICJ and major human rights organizations including B’tselem of Israel. Thus, the suppression of the protests violates principles of academic freedom, which is the bedrock of university governance. This governance, intended in American Association of University Professors (AAUP) standards to be shared by faculty and administrations, has over the last 40 years been eroding on the faculty side in conjunction with the eroding of tenure and tenure-track teaching jobs, which now comprise only 25% of faculties across the nation. This means that the job security provided by tenure has been eroded so that most teaching jobs are now contingent, and these jobs lack the protections that at least provide a relatively safe space for protest.
At the conclusion of the hearings, on December 13, 2023, the House passed “H.Res.927, Condemning antisemitism on university campuses and the testimony of University Presidents to the House Committee on Education & the Workforce.” The conclusion of the resolution stated:
Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) strongly condemns the rise of antisemitism on university campuses around the country; and
(2) strongly condemns the testimony of University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, Harvard University President Claudine Gay, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth and their failure to clearly state that calls for the genocide of Jews constitute harassment and violate their institutions’ codes of conduct.
It should be emphasized that at the student protests, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no “calls for the genocide of Jews,” as the Committee’s use of the present tense suggests, although in the upper echelons of the Israeli government there have been explicit calls intimating the genocide or calling for the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Once again there is no definition of antisemitism in the resolution; and if one reads the entire resolution, one finds that the only authorities for the “rise of antisemitism” are the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Hillel International, both adamantly pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli organizations.
The ADL definition of antisemitism, in sync with the IHRA definition, notes that antisemitism “sometimes targets Jews not as individuals but as a collective – whether that’s Jewish organizations, movements like Zionism or the Jewish State of Israel,” while Hillel International in partnership with the ADL has produced three videos on the history of antisemitism with the third one representing antisemitism on college campuses today. While this third video appears to base its definition on the IHRA definition of antisemitism there is no explicit reference to it.
But what is more telling, perhaps, is that while the video focuses the Hamas attack of October 7 in relation to what it understands as antisemitic attacks on student Zionists, it makes no reference whatsoever to the Israeli decimation of Gaza; indeed, the video, just as the Congressional resolution, never mentions the Palestinian people at all. History is erased in both representations so a critical discussion of Zionism is necessarily erased as well. These historical erasures echo the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its spreading throughout the region.
At this moment, as noted, the House has already passed H.R.6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, which states in summary:
“This bill provides statutory authority for the requirement that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take into consideration the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) working definition of antisemitism when reviewing or investigating complaints of discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. According to the IHRA’s working definition, antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
Neither bill, of course, mentions that the IHRA definition conflates at points political criticism of Israel with classic antisemitism.
As we know, the result of the Congressional hearings, which led to the Act noted above, was the forced resignation of presidents Gay and Magill reflecting the power of pro-Israeli donors and politicians to suppress academic freedom on campuses across the nation, including my own institution, Cornell. If one is attuned to irony, as I am, one might speculate that President Kornbluth retained her job because she is Jewish—the anxiety of firing a Jewish president in a time of “rising antisemitism” in spite of the fact that the Committee on Education & the Workforce in effect found her guilty of condoning antisemitism.
The attack on free speech at Cornell
The speech codes at Cornell are representative of the suppression of speech across academia, which, as I have been arguing, specifically target those who are protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. If one considers the timing of the Congressional resolution and acts on antisemitism, they provide an alibi for the Israeli genocide and the structure of its apartheid government, which the US has supported wholeheartedly. Moreover, the weaponization of antisemitism appears as part of a broad-based attack from the Right on liberal education.
This attack includes book-banning in public schools, the Supreme Court’s rollback of Affirmative Action, and the attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in academic and non-academic institutions. There is a dark irony in seeing the condemnation of antisemitism, however corrupt this condemnation is, being wielded to attack policies of inclusion.
The “interim expressive activity code” at Cornell imposes in specific cases determined by the administration what is termed “temporary academic and non-academic suspensions.” The former results in the immediate removal, without due process, of a student from classes and thus effectively erases a semester’s attendance and credits. The latter, again without due process, interdicts a student’s presence on campus except for attending classes, thus blocking a student’s use of campus resources and activities.
These temporary suspensions, which deny a student’s right to due process, are supposed to be applied only when a student poses a threat of violence to people or activities on campus. They are being applied as I write. But in my twenty years of teaching at Cornell, I have never witnessed a violent protest. So, we must ask how “violence” is being defined not only by the Cornell administration but by college and university administrations across the nation.
Further, these arbitrary punishments are entirely selective, applied indiscriminately. At a recent disruptive but essentially non-violent protest targeting arms manufacturer Boeing at a job fair, about 20 students out of close to 100 were selected for temporary suspensions without being informed about how that selection was made.
On the information posted outside of the Office of Student Life, which administers violations of the Student Code of Conduct, we read the following: “The code focuses on a restorative and educational approach and offers support to both the students involved and the community impacted.” I teach restorative justice in my capacity as a professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. But the system of “justice” being administered here is punitive not restorative or educational. Restorative justice is based not on alienating and isolating members of the community who may have broken certain rules but on including them in a dialogue that determines sanctions if any by subjecting the rules themselves to critical scrutiny.
The punitive paradigm being used to suppress these protests places the students in the position of being virtual criminal subjects. In this regard, we should remember that the largely nonviolent protests taking place across the country are taking place within educational institutions. As noted, their purpose is educational, to inform the community about the context of what the protesters believe, with significant justification, is the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
That is, these protests should be viewed as an extra-curricular part of the curriculum. In a university or college education should not be contained within the walls of a classroom. Thus, treating the protestors as criminals contradicts and undermines what should be a central purpose of a university/college education, that is, to define social justice. In criminalizing students protesting the absence of justice in Israel/Palestine, this punitive treatment does real damage to what is left of our democracy.
Source: mondoweiss
