Colleges and universities around the country are cracking down on what their professors are saying about Israel, Palestine, and Hamas. There have been suspensions of professors and student groups amid the privileging of pro-Israeli viewpoints, and a political push by to define any criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
A professor at Texas Tech University suspended Jairo Fúnez-Flores, an assistant professor of curriculum studies and teacher education, calling several angry posts to X (formerly Twitter) “hateful, antisemitic, and unacceptable,” equating what should be protected speech on an outside platform with harassment and direct discrimination, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported March 5.
Supporters of these actions paint them as a defense of vulnerable students and faculty, but they are a chilling inversion the First Amendment protections of free speech, assembly, and religion, and a direct threat to academic freedom and the role of higher education in our culture.
I teach at Rutgers University. I am a journalist and a Jew. I am sensitive to the rise in antisemitism, and its history. It remains a pernicious, ingrained, and dangerous set of beliefs. Jews have been murdered, assaulted, spit on. Synagogues and Jewish schools have been defaced, threatened with bombs or fire. The number of antisemitic incidents — like nearly all categories of bias incidents —has been rising over the last eight years, though the numbers are not reliable. Only about four in five local agencies submit data to the FBI, which issues an annual report on all forms of bias, and flawed and competing definitions pushed by organizations with skin in the game like the ADL and AIPAC.
Consider numbers released earlier this month by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office: The number of reported bias incidents jumped 23% — with antisemitic acts accounting for nearly half of the increase. Overall, reported anti-Jewish incidents jumped 59% (from 446 to 708). These numbers might seem alarming. But the vast majority of reported incidents were categorized as harassment or intimidation, vague categories that rely on our ability to define what constitutes bias in the first place.
This is the crux of the debate in the New Jersey Legislature, where two bills are on the table that would codify a problematic definition into state law and align the state with Republican-led states like Indiana, Florida, South Dakota, Georgia, and Arkansas. The bills, which were pulled from a hearing on April 1, but are far from dead, use a definition developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (and that is under consideration by the US Department of Education) that is overly broad, and accompanied by contradictory examples that equate Jews with the state of Israel even as it says that Jews, as a people, should not be judged by Israel’s actions.
This kind of legislation calls out Jews, says they are exceptional, says they require special protections above and beyond what already exists in the law. Jews are separate, this kind of legislation says, and — to the extent that these bills equate antisemitism with pro-Palestinian criticism of Israel — codifies a longstanding antisemitic trope (dual-loyalty) into law. They say ,essentially, that to be truly Jewish, one must support the state of Israel, to show a special brand of loyalty to Israel, and to criticize it is to be less than Jewish, to be what Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy have called an “un-Jew.”
Many Jews were rightly horrified by former President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Jewish Democrats, who he accused of disloyalty both to the United States and to Israel. These Jews, he said, “hate their religion.”
Trump’s comment — not the first of this kind he has made — equates Jews and Israel, erases any distinctions that exist, any variation in Jewish opinion in the United States. It arrogates to Trump the right to say who is a good Jew and who is not. Most Jews, I think, would see this — and yet, they somehow ignore ways in which the IHRA definition does the same, while also infringing on protected speech.
As the ACLU writes into its letter to the US Department of Education, the IHRA “definition of antisemitism conflates protected political speech with unprotected discrimination, and enshrining it into regulation will chill the exercise of First Amendment rights and risk undermining the agency’s legitimate and important efforts to combat discrimination.” Basically, codifying this definition will make it easier to silence critics of Israel, while doing nothing to prevent real antisemitic acts or protect Jews.
Hank Kalet is a journalist in New Jersey and lecturer of journalism at Rutgers and is a member of the executive committee of Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union. Email grassroots@ comcast.net. His blog, Channel Surfing, is at www.kaletblog.com. Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet.
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024
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