Remarks at Law and Antisemitism Conference | UCLA School of Law

Remarks delivered at the 4th Annual Law and Antisemitism Conference, UCLA School of Law, 3/23/25

Safety through Solidarity came out last June, but myself and my co-author Shane Burley, a journalist who covers the far-right, had been working on it since 2020. We didn’t plan for such timing– in fact, we handed in the final draft in late September 2023 and had to beg our editor to return it to us a few weeks later. 

Over the last year we have held dozens of book events around the country, many on campuses. It’s clear that many people are desperate for a new approach to understanding and countering antisemitism. We’ve heard it from Jews and non-Jews of all ages, from students, professors, university administrators, from people with a range of views on Israel/Palestine and the Gaza war. What was clear across the board- and has been clear for quite some time- is that the dominant approach to combating campus antisemitism uses protecting Jews mostly as a pretext. There is real antisemitism on college campuses, but the vocal crusade waged against it in the halls of power and the public square takes the form of a moral panic to protect Israel’s war in Gaza from criticism, even as a growing number of international human rights, legal and diplomatic bodies have warned against or accused Israel of committing genocide. And under the new Trump administration, this moral panic is used to attempt a mortal blow against the academy’s vital mandate to remain a bastion of critical thinking in an authoritarian climate.

The campus antisemitism moral panic which has gripped U.S. political discourse since October 7 serves to distract not only from Israel’s war in Gaza, but from the steady rise of antisemitism fueling, and fueled by MAGA politics. In a maddening inversion, the same actors spreading antisemitism are branding themselves as stalwart defenders of Jews as they kidnap students, put entire departments under academic receivership, hold millions in university funding hostage and dismantle equity initiatives. The Trumpist assault on Columbia is the first shot and it won’t be the last. The dire situation, of course, didn’t appear overnight.  

Like many millennial Jews, I have been a supporter of freedom and justice for Palestinians ever since I visited the West Bank and saw Israel’s occupation firsthand. In the mid-2010s I spent several years as a political organizer, and worked extensively on the issue of Israel/Palestine on college campuses. There I saw firsthand how the charge of antisemitism was wielded as a cudgel against Palestinian students who don’t want their tuition dollars invested in the weapons manufacturers dropping bombs on their families in Gaza, for example, or the Jewish students who don’t want these acts committed in their name. With the cries of ‘Jews will not replace us’ in Charlottesville, and the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the issue of antisemitism took on new urgency and I began documenting and reporting on the antisemitism fueling the alt-right. Today, I work as a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, a think tank that studies the Right, where I monitor, publish and educate the public on antisemitism and white Christian nationalism.

Our approach at Political Research Associates, and in Safety through Solidarity, understands antisemitism as an anti-democratic political project that uses conspiracy theories to explain the world through an appeal to supposed Jewish wickedness, subversion and control. The conspiracy theory of the elite Jewish cabal is a projected image of power, used by authoritarian and nationalist leaders to divert widespread anger, alienation, malaise and anomie away from the actual sources of social immiseration, and towards an imaginary, diabolic enemy instead. Antisemitic conspiracy theories offer stunted attempts to make sense of the world, easy answers to deeply felt crises of political agency. They can be seductive and appealing, lending purpose, resolve, and hope in place of helplessness. 

In times of widespread social dislocation, when millions are grasping for answers and eager for someone to blame, authoritarians use antisemitism to sow division and consolidate power, build momentum and expand their coalition by demonizing elite cabals as ciphers for progressivism, as all-powerful threats to tradition, order and the “common man.” Today antisemitism is a core component of a broader project to entrench authoritarian rule; to sweep away decades of civil rights advances in a wave of white racial backlash; to restructure the national polity and civic life around the contours of white and Christian dominance. Elon Musk and Steve Bannon are normalizing Nazi salutes; leading MAGA podcasters are platforming Holocaust revisionism and lurid tales of Israeli pedophile cabals to audiences of millions; top administration officials are sharing Leo Frank conspiracy theories and statements from the leaders of groups that marched at Charlottesville. 

As the Trumpist project corrodes the foundations of the post-war order that has brought stability and prosperity to generations of Jews, the steady creep of open antisemitism into the MAGA mainstream augurs a new era of communal precarity and uncertainty. And crucially, this antisemitism rarely travels solo– it is imbricated in an intersecting web of xenophobia and Othering. 

When MAGA mobs attack Black Lives Matter rallies, they believe they are waging war against the minions of Soros. When they harass Drag Queen Story Hour events, or take over school board meetings condemning ‘gender ideology’, they believe they are defending their children from ‘cultural Marxist’ overlords. When they clamor for a border wall or for ICE to roundup their undocumented neighbors, they believe they are defending their civilization from the “globalist cabal” and its scheming machination of mass migration. When mass shooters target Black, Latinx and LGBTQ community spaces, they explain in their manifestos that a Jewish hand lurks behind these proximate enemies— and when they target a synagogue, they weave anti immigrant xenophobia into their murderous act . 

The campus moral panic has led too many to relativize this threat from the Right under the aegis of a bankrupt ‘bothsidesism’. Antisemitism is not just a generic, depoliticized symptom of societal breakdown, an indiscriminate illiberalism liable to manifest equally across the political spectrum. It carries a political valence and a weight; it ‘knows which side it’s on’. Antisemitism does show up on the Left, but it structures the Right; it weakens the Left, but it strengthens the Right; it diverts the Left from its goals of freedom and equality, but it helps the Right pursue its goals of exclusion and domination. Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet who is actively dismantling the federal government, holds immeasurably more power than any undergraduate or college professor. It is clear where the greater long term, foundational threat to Jewish safety and thriving lies.

Tracing the intersection of antisemitism with other forms of oppression gives Jews a stake in standing with Others, and Others a stake in standing with Jews.  It grounds the particular fight against antisemitism in a universal project. This means that promoting a robust democracy, and working to end economic and social inequality are itself important means of fighting antisemitism at its root, by chipping away at the structural dispossession, desperation and alienation that motivates people to grasp for conspiracy theories and scapegoats. This means that ending antisemitism is everyone’s business, not only out of moral concern for Jews but also because it is essential to building a more just world for everyone. 

We work with Jewish organizations across the country who are fighting antisemitism by conducting municipal campaigns in coalition with other groups to combat hate crimes not with expanded policing and incarceration, but with greater investment in preventive anti-bias education, restorative justice programs, mental health services and other forms of community resilience. They develop grassroots community safety networks to show up and defend each other’s synagogues, mosques and community spaces from the risk of attack, and educate their movement partners on what antisemitism is, what it looks like, and how to avoid it in activism around Israel/Palestine, economic and housing justice, or any other cause. They prioritize horizontal relationship-building, where political alignment on every issue is not expected, but unconditional commitment to curiosity and care is.

Unfortunately, much of today’s American Jewish communal leadership, as well as many of the anti-antisemitism organizations well represented at this conference take the opposite tack. They prioritize ‘vertical alliances’ to wield top-down administrative or state power to define, regulate and prosecute antisemitism, which they overwhelmingly associate with criticism of Israel, using tools like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and Title VI complaints all the way to, more recently, calling for the deportation of students, the shuttering of DEI departments and much more. 

This approach is methodologically flawed. It compartmentalizes antisemitism into a series of discrete, measurable speech acts or incidents isolated from other forms of bigotry. It pursues what author Michael Richmond called “anti-racism as procedure”, the task of purging institutions of a “few bad apples”, eschewing any broader horizon of social transformation. Of course, addressing antisemitic speech acts and incidents remains necessary, but it is no substitute for political mobilization against the broader anti-democratic project which nourishes antisemitism. Underpinning this is a whole web of signification that rips antisemitism apart from any social, political or historic context–  antisemitism as an “eternal hatred” plaguing humanity since time immemorial; as a virus, an infection, a plague, or some other “natural” phenomenon; as merely a form of “hate”, a private prejudice of the heart; or a kind of “extremism” at the societal fringes, rather than an ideology foundational to Western thinking. 

This approach holds dire consequences in our political moment. In the name of defending Israel’s horrific war from criticism, leading lawfare and communal defense organizations have hitched the cause of Jewish safety to the spear’s tip of authoritarianism. In the name of fighting antisemitism, the Trump administration is weaponizing anti-terrorism, immigration and other lawfare to erode free speech and civil liberties, playing into the MAGA strategy to roll back democracy and cement authoritarian rule. Fighting antisemitism is merely the first pretext. Similar lines of attack against universities and other pillars of open society will be carried out under the guise, for example, of combating ‘anti-white’ or ‘anti-Christian’ bias. 

Instead of working from the interdependence of Jewish, Muslim and Palestinian safety, these fearmongering campaigns are scapegoating Muslim and Palestinian students (and increasingly, Jewish critics of Israel) as fifth columns and civilizational enemies, while actually making Jews less safe. They isolate Jews from potential allies, and shred the liberal, pluralist civil society that is crucial for the full thriving of Jews and other marginalized groups. When powerful leaders bombastically tweet ‘Shalom, Mahmoud’ as they launch indiscriminate attacks on civil liberties, it can misleadingly reinforce the false equation between Jewishness and power at the heart of antisemitism. Initiatives to enshrine Zionism as a protected identity category under anti-discrimination law, similarly, end up reinforcing the very identification of Jewishness with Israel which in other contexts, advocates correctly insist is antisemitic. Both of these tactics risk fueling the very antisemitism they claim to combat, and conscripting Jewishness itself into defense of a state whose actions are increasingly indefensible.

These campaigns also fail at actually fighting the real antisemitism that can exist among some pro-Palestine activism. Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic; quite the contrary, it is often motivated by values of justice and equity. Often the accusation is spurious and flimsy at best, cynical malicious at worst. But some forms of anti-Zionism can mobilize antisemitism, knowingly or not, when fantastical portrayals of outsized, shadowy “Zionist” power take the place of grounded criticism of Israel’s injustices, or concrete assessment of the actual political influence wielded by the state or its supporters. In a few highly-publicized instances, Palestine solidarity protesters have seemed to indiscriminately target Jewish individuals or institutions to express generalized rage at Israel; subject Jews to political litmus tests; or couch anti-Zionism in the mold of Christian anti-Jewish demonology, for example. Other times, protesters have lapsed into vulgar campism by uncritically cheering on Islamist nationalist movements as vanguards of liberatory resistance, or by mobilizing oversimplistic binaries that caricature all Israelis, Zionists or Jews as monolithic oppressors.

In some of these cases, the antisemitism is clear-cut; other times, what we’re seeing may be a reductive, callous and counterproductive brand of ultraradicalism, and understanding this as inherently antisemitic tends to obscure, rather than clarify, the political dynamics at play. Initiatives like the JDA and Nexus can help offer the kind of rigorous, contextual evaluation we need to parse these distinctions. What is lost in the din of media hysteria and overzealous lawfare is precisely this capacity to think critically in public. It is possible to have open, honest and tough conversations about antisemitism within the Palestine solidarity movement– that is one goal of our book. But the indiscriminate, authoritarian crackdown makes this incredibly harder, fostering a siege mentality among its targets, provoking activists to double down and bristle with defensiveness and distrust.

How can campuses chart a different path in this authoritarian climate? Instead of addressing antisemitism in isolation, pair it alongside equally robust initiatives against anti-Palestinian bigotry and Islamophobia. Promote more speech, not less- whenever possible, foster spaces for robust dialogue including the full range of voices and perspectives within and across Jewish, Palestinian and other campus communities. Publicly commit to rigorously protecting free speech, while continuing to uphold pre-existing policies against hate speech and discrimination. Most of all, engage as many stakeholders as possible in figuring out how to turn your university into a bulwark against the authoritarian pressure at your gates, even when this pressure claims to come in the name of Jewish safety.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. From Hungary to the US, universities are in the crosshairs of the assault on democracy because they are bastions of free and critical thinking. The capitulation of Columbia is a frightening bellwether, but its spread is not inevitable if we move together with courage and conviction.