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The World Upside-Down: The World Upside-Down: Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies

The World Upside-Down
The World Upside-Down: Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies
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“The World Upside-Down: Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies” in “The World Upside-Down”

The World Upside-Down

Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies

Emmaia Gelman

Author’s note: Just before this article went to print, the Israeli state launched a genocide in Gaza. As of this writing, it has dropped twenty-two thousand U.S.-provided bombs, killed over eighteen thousand Palestinians, wounded fifty thousand, displaced 90 percent of the population, and left two million without water, food, shelter, or medical care. In North America and around the world, many millions of protesters, often led by Palestinian and Jewish groups, have called for an end to the genocide, an end to racial citizenship (reflected in the often-heard chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free”), and a reckoning with Israel’s colonial history. Zionist organizations and civic leaders have characterized those calls as “antisemitism,” “hate,” “supporting terror,” and, perversely, “calling for genocide.” The U.S. Congress and the Biden administration have adopted their rhetoric; under the banner of protecting Jews, they have implemented a wide-ranging, fast-moving push for militarism and repressive action, including attacking universities, escalating policing, and tripling aid to the Israeli military. The stakes of clarifying how Zionist politics leverage “rights talk” to implement materially repressive projects, and collectively refusing those efforts, are incredibly high.

In January 2021, the conservative online Jewish magazine Tablet published an alarming headline: “California Is Cleansing Jews from History.”1 The headline stoked fears about the spread of antisemitism, particularly given that white nationalist groups have, in recent years, propagated antisemitic revisions of history.2 It seemed strangely dissonant, then, that Tablet did not identify white nationalists as a threat but instead made common cause with them in attacking antiracist education policy. The article’s target was California’s K–12 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC), then embroiled in a contentious public-comment process. This essay analyzes the offensive against ethnic studies: a campaign that serves right-wing goals but also complicates the liberal/conservative binaries in which contemporary U.S. politics are often narrated. Key antagonists in these battles have been Zionist organizations, meaning organizations whose purpose is support for the Israeli state and demobilization of Israel’s critics.3 Distinct from other Zionist political advocates, those attacking ethnic studies misleadingly present themselves as social justice advocates in terms that mask their conservative allegiances and the centrality of Zionism to their work. Using the language of antiracism, antihate,4 opposing antisemitism,5 and civil rights, they espouse Trump-era white nationalist arguments against critical race theory (CRT), targeting ethnic studies as a defining feature of their platform. Through these conceptual distortions, they project militarism, repression, and colonialism as the work of protecting minority rights, as I explain in this essay. Ethnic studies, which interrogates imperial power structures and the ways they have been naturalized, directly threatens a central Zionist claim: that Zionism and Israel are projects of racial liberation. So, too, do the community coalitions that have risen in support of ethnic studies. Zionist institutions have responded with a series of moves aimed at recapturing the moral turf of antiracism. They suggest that their strategy, which has recruited California’s governor and education officials to a wide-ranging assault on the field of ethnic studies as well as K–12 teaching, should be replicated in other states.6

Ethnic studies pedagogy enables students to critique and transform systems of oppression.7 It originated in the 1968 Third World Liberation Front student strikes that demanded California public universities teach liberatory knowledge to students of color rather than reproducing the systems that repressed them. With its emphasis on praxis, ethnic studies reconceives education as a means of transforming structural conditions in communities grappling with experiences of colonialism: Black, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Native American communities.8 In 2016, in response to decades of grassroots organizing and nearly half a century after student strikes inaugurated ethnic studies, California passed a law requiring the Department of Education to create an ethnic studies framework and model curriculum for use across the state.9 The state assembled an advisory committee of leading scholars and educators to develop it.

When the first draft framework was published in 2019, the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and several Zionist groups began to attack it, as well the experts whom the state had assembled to develop it, and the field of ethnic studies as a whole. The attack was precipitated by their objections to including Arab American studies within the Asian American studies section rather than any shift in ethnic studies. Specifically, they objected to the inclusion of Palestine and Palestinian experiences of colonization, which are a meaningful referent in Arab American experience. For instance, they denounced as “denigrating and discriminatory” the inclusion of Palestinian rap lyrics that expressed a wish for an end to colonization, and they deliberately misinterpreted a lyric about Israeli media erasure of Palestinian voices as promoting antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of the media.10 (As the American Association of University Professors notes, conflating the Israeli state with Jewish people, such that criticizing Israel is framed as anti-Jewish, constitutes the “weaponization of antisemitism.”11) The legislative caucus denounced the focus on the four groups central to ethnic studies practice as a reflection of “the political bias of the drafters” and made the same claim as Tablet’s jarring headline, claiming the draft curriculum “erases the American Jewish experience.”12 This initial salvo awakened a broader set of critics who then joined Zionist groups in articulating long-standing hostilities to studying racism and state power. Crystallizing their objections, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Seth Brysk denounced field-leading education scholars as “fringe activists . . . highjack[ing] the model ethnic-studies curriculum for California high schools in the service of radical political goals.”13 Critics freely mixed the rhetoric of Zionist and anti-CRT movements with liberal multiculturalism. They charged that ethnic studies was exclusionary of groups not covered by the field and objected to ethnic studies’ focus on structural racism, which they described as “minimizing racial progress.”14

Despite the headline, Tablet’s complaints did not center antisemitism; they posed a larger objection to antiracist and anti-imperialist education. In fact, its litany of charges against ethnic studies drew directly from conservative assaults on critical race theory. The anti-CRT movement, whose manifestations have varied from ridiculing antiracism trainings to protesting the teaching of U.S. history, was initiated in 2020 by then Fox News pundit Christopher F. Rufo.15 In turn, it draws on the long-standing racist politics endemic to conservatism: white grievance, which ideologically positions white people as purported victims of antiracist policies, and Cold War fears that view antiracist movements as a Marxist assault on American culture and economy.16 Using familiar anti-CRT arguments, Tablet conflated the study of repressive systems with “targeting” students, claimed the curriculum taught that white students (including white Jewish students) were personally culpable, and charged that ethnic studies was “neo-Marxism.” “There is a straight line from 1968,” Tablet proclaimed, pointing to the fact that the late 1960s student movements that gave rise to ethnic studies made common cause with Third World decolonial movements.17

Threaded throughout with Cold War anti-Marxism and white grievance, Tablet’s charges of antisemitism in broad strokes established Israel, Jews, the United States, capitalism, and democracy as one side of a Manichean battle, conflating Israel and Jews in the process. In opposition, it presented scholars and supporters of ethnic studies as an array of Cold War enemies, including Marxists, Black Panthers, Palestinians, Arabs, antisemites, and those who disrespect the American flag. For instance, Tablet targeted a glossary entry in the proposed model curriculum that listed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.”18 This entry, Tablet and its sources charged, obscured an antisemitic agenda and introduced students to what it (erroneously) called “a foreign movement, whose target was another country.”19 BDS, which is modeled on the international solidarity movement that ended South African apartheid, is both Palestinian-led and necessarily international. It has significant momentum in its U.S. campaign, so much so that Israel lobby groups have sought to pass laws in forty-two states curtailing Americans’ right to engage in boycotts.20 In keeping with the mode of white grievance, Tablet objected that “Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group.”21 its insistence that Jewish Americans were being “erased” disregarded the fact that ethnic studies focuses on communities’ experiences of colonization and on groups historically left out of curricula. It disregarded, too, the fact that Jewish experiences and the study of antisemitism are found across K–12 curricula.22

Tablet’s objections might not be unexpected to those who know it as a right-wing publication. Yet it is part of a spectrum of Zionist institutions whose use of liberal or even seemingly progressive positioning to pursue right-wing aims has gone undertheorized. Indeed, the primary antagonists to ethnic studies have been Zionist institutions that proclaim they are standing up for inclusion and antiracism, and even that they support “a version” of ethnic studies, yet echo white nationalist arguments to oppose ethnic studies teaching and scholarship.23 These institutions have organized legislators, media, civic groups, and public commentators, forming a significant bloc that opposes ethnic studies and celebrates the settler colonial structures that ethnic studies interrogates.24 Among them, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) often operate as liberal organizations in the public sphere and engage in many varieties of political work, including legislation and advising elected officials. The ADL especially is viewed by legislators and media as an authority on Jewish, Black, Muslim, LGBTQ, immigrant, and other civil rights. This has often placed the ADL in conflict with the communities for which it has claimed to speak. In spite of communities’ objections, though, the ADL’s reputation has been durable because it rests on that organization’s widely publicized history of civil rights litigation and legislation, its programs of surveillance of white nationalists, and its ongoing antibias programming in schools across the United States.25 Within the landscape of anti-ethnic-studies organizing, other key players include StandWithUs and the AMCHA Initiative, both readily identifiable as conservative and Islamophobic, although they frame their Israel advocacy in terms of “combating hate” and pursuing civil rights.26 Another is JIMENA, one of few U.S.-based Zionist organizations for Jews of color. As Michal David and Shahar Zaken point out, JIMENA is situated to the right of other organizations of Jews of color in its positions on Zionism.27 The California Legislative Jewish Caucus has played a key role in supporting these groups’ access to legislators. This confusing set of actors, self-declared as watchdogs against the supposed bigotry of California’s ethnic studies framework, has mounted an epistemological attack on antiracism. Using ethnic studies battles as terrain, they construct Israel and Jews, the United States and the West, and capitalism and democracy as inextricably connected and collectively beleaguered.28

As we contend with the long reach of white supremacy in the present era, public attention is often focused on the spectacle of overt, right-wing moves like the anti-CRT movement’s recent effort to ban a children’s story about Martin Luther King Jr. and the grotesque reinvention of Cold War anti-Left terms like “woke totalitarianism.”29 However, struggles over ethnic studies illustrate the need to pay attention to liberal-coded attacks on antiracism, and reassertions of the liberal Cold War logic that opposing (racial) capitalism and colonialism is “illiberal”30 and therefore extremist.31 Even as public awareness of racism has been heightened by social movements, efforts to address racism can be co-opted by these reframings of capitalism and colonialism as egalitarian. Paying attention to liberal routes of attack also demystifies the central role of Zionist institutions in attacks on ethnic studies: rather than antiracism, both their Zionism and their civil rights politics draw on Cold War notions of Western supremacy.

This essay examines the destructive role of organizations often viewed as supporters of civil rights, antibias, and racial equality in targeting California’s state-sponsored ethnic studies curriculum from 2019 to the present and their reanimation of Cold War imperatives to defend the West against antiracist movements.32 Their strategy so effectively gutted the first ESMC’s antiracist pedagogical framework that all of the scholars and educators who developed it demanded their names be removed.33 It also ushered in policy guardrails that place hostile institutions in a position of surveillance over the teaching of ethnic studies. It has further jumped venues into the lawfare realm with a sweeping lawsuit that seeks to use an antidiscrimination claim under civil rights law to destroy community groups and scholars of color.34 Insofar as California has served as a testing ground for ethnic studies, educators and organizers anticipate that such “support and destroy” attacks will be replicated elsewhere.35 In the remainder of this essay, to explain the dense interleaving of Cold War anticommunism and Zionism in the attack against K–12 ethnic studies education, I offer a historicization of the conservative origins of the ADL and its formulation of new antisemitism. Returning to the present, I frame the ethnic studies fight as a bid by Zionist organizations not only to co-opt the moral authority of ethnic studies on antiracism and minority rights, and not only for the purpose of advocating for Israel and Zionism, but also to disable powerful antiracist, anti-Zionist, and Palestinian resistance to U.S. regimes of militarism and surveillance—resistance that overlaps substantially with organizing for ethnic studies.

“Inverted Reality” and the Co-optation of Race Consciousness

Following the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, white ethnic groups in the United States began to revive stories about their immigrant pasts and newly construct group identities around struggle and marginalization. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson writes, “The sudden centrality of black grievance to national discussion prompted a national move among white ethnics to dissociate themselves from monolithic white privilege.”36 Ethnic identity offered othered roots in histories of immigration, poverty, and discrimination, without diminishing their present status.37 “Like race” narratives were adopted in subsequent decades by a range of groups formulating political power through identity politics. This morally freighted simile proposed that each group’s demand for rights and protection was analogous to the civil rights movement’s demand to end anti-Black discrimination and argued that a justice-oriented society should defend them.38 In the past two decades, even as popular understandings of racism have become more complex and discussion of structural racism has become commonplace, white appropriations have accrued destructive power by wielding race-conscious language while distorting its meanings.39 Recent research documents such appropriations by white students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). In interviews, the students borrowed strategies to argue their own marginalization, including by mirroring common stories about Black people’s experiences in white-dominated spaces. For instance, students cited HBCUs’ focus on Black history and culture as exclusionary and a mode of erasure.40 They narrated their stories in the narrow frame of campus life, omitting the global context in which they held race privilege and in which HBCUs are rare institutions that center Black students’ history, culture, and achievement. Researchers found that the students not only thought of themselves as an oppressed group but also concluded that “BIPOC [held] false ideas about racism and white supremacy.” In turn, they conceived of antiracist policies as unjust and understood themselves to be persecuted by antiracism.41 Uma Mazyck Jayakumar et al. note that this practice of inverting oppression and domination is highly counterinsurgent, meaning that it uses racial justice language to actively negate racial justice practices and recruits those who intend to oppose racism.42 This clear modeling helps explain how inverted civil rights narratives have been instrumentalized against ethnic studies. Attacks on ethnic studies have similarly constructed themselves as antiracist and sympathetic, demanding support from those who want to “fight racism and build understanding among ethnic groups” for conservative logics that actually derail antiracist projects.43 Following the Tablet article, Zionist organizations and assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (Democrat) of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus held a briefing broadly endorsing its critiques and demands. Professing concern for greater diversity, inclusion, and care, they described their policy advocacy as aimed at an “inclusive” version of ethnic studies. They argued that inclusion meant adding modules on groups not covered by ethnic studies, for instance, Mizrachi and Sephardi Jews. As evidence of their multicultural intentions, they took pains to highlight collaborations with Black, Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander elected officials.44 What this multiculturalist language cloaked, though, was Zionist organizations’ pitched battle against the scholarship and communities behind ethnic studies.

Through this inverted framework, Zionist groups were able to position themselves as rescuers, helping California officials to avoid accidentally approving a racist curriculum.45 The terms of rescue invoked ever more inversions. For instance, the ADL draped itself in the mantle of expertise, referencing itself as a “global leader in exposing extremism [and] delivering anti-bias education,” able to defend the state from the danger of “hijacking” by education scholars—whom it had labeled extremists—and to guide the state to safe alternative programming.46 The ADL did not mention the relationship of its Zionist advocacy to its opposition to ethnic studies or its hostility to California community movements whose long struggles had led to the passage of the ethnic studies law. StandWithUs also narrated itself as an antihate, Jewish civil rights organization in the register of grassroots organizations working to remedy their communities’ erasure.47 In practice, StandWithUs (established as the Israel Emergency Alliance) is neither a civil rights organization nor grassroots.48 It was launched in the jingoistic ferment of late September 2001 to “be strong advocates on Israel’s behalf” while advancing Islamophobic policy in the United States and Palestine.49 It quickly amassed a multimillion-dollar budget and focused much of its programming on U.S. students and faculty.50

By strategically flexing minority rights, StandWithUs and the ADL were able to enter state discourse as moral authorities over the scope and meaning of ethnic studies, leaving the field’s decolonizing commitments to the side. The ADL and StandWithUs approached California education officials to offer repairs to the first ESMC draft that decentered the decolonizing politics of the four groups. Proposing that antisemitism and the Nazi holocaust were “overlooked histories,” the ADL offered the state its own materials to fill the gap.51 In fact, California has long required holocaust education52 and lists the ADL as a teacher resource.53 However, the offer advanced a different campaign goal shared by Zionist institutions: enshrining in state policy the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.54 That definition asserts that opposition to Zionism is inherently anti-Jewish, implausibly positing that U.S. Jewry is oppressed by colonized Palestinians.55 (Kenneth Stern, who authored the IHRA definition, publicly reconsidered in 2019 because it had been thoroughly weaponized by right-wing groups.56) In another instance, StandWithUs proposed to defend students against positive framings of major intellectual, cultural, and political figures from the four groups and to reorganize the model curriculum around Zionist inclusion. Since Grace Lee Boggs, Eduardo Galeano, Rigoberta Menchú, Edward Said, and others were known to have opposed Israel, StandWithUs argued that a contrasting list of figures “prominently known for having a different perspective” should be provided.57 StandWithUs also proposed to defend ethnic studies against the research and ideas of Angela Davis, Jack Shaheen, and other key antiracist thinkers.58 StandWithUs drew from the lexicon of ethnic studies to attack: rather than charging those figures with antisemitism (and locating StandWithUs’s objections in the realm of Zionist politics), it claimed that Davis and Shaheen “promoted components of white supremacy.”59

Zionist groups’ interventions in ethnic studies were seismic. By the time the ESMC was approved in 2021, Arab American studies content had been cut to meet their demands,60 the IHRA definition of antisemitism been added,61 and diminishments appeared across the model curriculum: for instance, educators noted that a lesson on Black Lives Matter had been changed so that it addressed neither “the true causes of police brutality [nor] the significance of ongoing anti-racist struggle in African American communities.”62 New sample lessons had been added on Jewish identity and antisemitism. These lessons, on which I provided comment at the time, deserve a separate examination, but it is important to mark some of their contributions toward Zionist strategy. Mixing biblical and present-day terminology (“the land of Israel” and “the modern state of Israel,” among others), one sample lesson text wrongly suggests that a Jewish ethnostate has always existed in Palestine and asserts that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel.63 These misconstructions are transparently aimed at reinforcing emerging Zionist claims that Jews are an Indigenous people with a competing legal claim to Palestine.64 Through remarkable elision, the term Zionism does not appear anywhere in the curriculum even as it structures the ESMC; instead, the present-day state of Israel is presented as if there had been no need to establish it. This claim conceptually strips Palestinians of Indigenous status and rights65 and asserts that the violence and dispossession Israel inflicts on Palestinians is not colonial violence but in fact “resistance,” as if Palestinians were subjugating Israelis.66

In addition to changes in content, the installation of guardrails in ethnic studies worked in close parallel to anti-CRT laws. The guardrails language, which vaguely dictates that materials be “appropriate for all” and not “reflect or promote, directly or indirectly, any bias,” has become the basis for Zionist groups to seek control over ethnic studies as local California school districts move to enact AB 101, the law passed on October 8, 2021, which mandates the teaching of ethnic studies in California public high school education.67 It wrested control over ethnic studies’ implementation from the communities who had struggled to ensure its K–12 realization and placed ethnic studies educators under a form of hostile surveillance. Assemblymember Gabriel announced that guardrails limiting content would ensure no students would “feel they’re being targeted.” Educators who crossed the line, by contrast, could expect to be sued.68 As teachers have self-reported, laws policing CRT operate by chilling speech far beyond the legal restrictions, since teachers and school districts cannot afford to risk being sued, regardless of the outcome.69 The coalition’s proposals for “inclusiveness” had, in the words of Lara Kiswani, Arab Resource and Organizing Center executive director, turned a hard-won antiracist intervention into an “all lives matter curriculum.”70 The scholars who had developed the pedagogy demanded the removal of their names from the state’s gutted framework, providing a clear narration: “California students have been denied Ethnic Studies as conservative adults with other agendas have turned the model curriculum into something which is far from the scope and focus of Ethnic Studies.”71

Expanded Tactics, New Resistance

Zionist groups have succeeded not just in changing educational policy but in reorganizing and transforming the meaning of “opposing racism,” centering Zionist logic and redefining movements for substantive, structural change as “extremist.” Although Zionist institutions are properly understood as transnational political actors,72 in the arena of ethnic studies they entered in the register of community advocates, surveilling a sphere in which the Israeli settler colonial project is construed as the protection of a “like race” identity.73 Conversely, communities of color seeking to implement ethnic studies as a pedagogy for intervening in systemic racism are legally at risk of being charged with civil rights violations for discriminating against that identity. In practice, they are pitted against a field of hostile institutions with potentially nearly limitless resources of attack, as such campaigns are historically financed by conservative megadonors.74

The conservative reorganization of race and rights discourse is not limited to areas where guardrails are in force: there is evidence that they are unmaking the political culture of antiracism that undergirded the state’s original commitments to ethnic studies. Since 2020, the University of California (UC) Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has been considering criteria for high school ethnic studies courses that are to be required college prep for students entering the UC system. The criteria have been developed by ethnic studies content experts from throughout the UC system and reflect the necessary study of structural power.75 After BOARS voted to approve the course criteria in November 2021, those criteria, in a highly unusual procedural move, were returned to BOARS by UC Academic Council chair Robert Horwitz who cited, as an obstacle, that the UC criteria hewed to ethnic studies scholarship and pedagogy rather than the “inclusive” K–12 model produced by right-wing intervention.76 The course criteria have languished in BOARS since that time; the ESMC’s diminished framework for ethnic studies has become the referent.77 Scholars who initially volunteered for the state’s ethnic studies advisory committee have continued to battle legal campaigns, defamatory comments, harassment and intensive monitoring through excessive public records requests,78 and the refusal of school districts to hire them.79

The attacks are not over; Zionist organizations appear to be testing ways to use their newly affirmed legitimacy in ethnic studies to make increasingly upside-down interventions in rights discourse. In May 2022, a federal civil rights lawsuit targeting a California scholars consortium, academics and educators, the Los Angeles teachers union, and the Los Angeles Unified School District was filed by the Deborah Project, a lawfare organization whose board overlaps with that of the Israel on Campus Coalition.80 Lawfare is a tactic that aims broadly to impede organizing and impose intense debilitating personal and professional costs on individuals who resist Zionism.81 This lawsuit fits that mold, alleging that its targets violated the federal civil rights of Zionists by advancing or implementing ethnic studies. Regardless of outcome, the disruptive power of such action on scholarship, lives, and organizational politics is enormous.

Beyond lawfare’s harassment function, the lawsuit evacuates ethnic studies in order to extend Zionist claims on subjugated identity. Specifically, it contends that Zionism’s drive for colonization is protected as religious belief; it contends therefore that educators cannot “denounce” it.82 To do this, the complaint presents another ahistorical lesson on Jewish identity, conflating religious Zionism’s attachment to the Holy Land with political Zionism. The power of this misconstruction becomes clear as the complaint lays out its demand for protections. It asks, effectively, that Palestinian experiences of colonization, reasons for migration to California, scholarship, and claims under international law be legally excluded from the classroom by barring “any language, in any teaching materials . . . asserting as a fact that the Jewish State is guilty of committing such horrific crimes against others as ethnic cleansing, land theft, apartheid or genocide, or that the Jewish people are not indigenous to the land of Israel or to the Middle East” or “denying the State of Israel the right to self-defense.”83 The conflation of Jewish and Zionist identities has already been the aim of campaigns for the IHRA definition of antisemitism. However, the IHRA definition claims that Zionism is political self-determination, while this suit makes a civil right of an old colonial rationale: the religious right to dominate.

At the same time, communities and educators have built strong, national support for ethnic studies and made increasingly visible Zionist institutions’ assaults on antiracism. In mid-2020, members of the ESMC’s original advisory committee along with teachers union activists, curriculum developers, scholars, and educators formed the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC) to produce a model curriculum that could anchor public ethnic studies programming.84 LESMCC, named in the Deborah Project lawsuit, has had success working with school districts to implement ethnic studies despite the deficiencies of the state’s model curriculum. As California organizers work to preserve ethnic studies, they have heard from educators elsewhere, too. “Folks reached out for support because ethnic studies was being attacked around the country,” Lara Kiswani said.85 To share strategy and resources, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies was launched in February 2022 with a national online meeting. In a mapping session, attendees dropped pins to explain the obstacles they were facing. The ADL popped up as antagonist in one region after another. The forms of attack were diffuse: the proposal of district resolutions, the mobilization of local groups by outside organizations, the offering or withdrawal of funding.86 Kiswani said, “Looking at the map, it became clear that it was the JCRC and ADL with StandWithUs and others, all over.”87

Anticommunism, Zionism, and Control over Racial Knowledge

Why are Zionist organizations so invested in overturning ethnic studies? Why claim that the “all lives matter” curriculum is the real manifestation of racial justice? Here, it is necessary to situate the ADL historically as an ideological and political actor advocating U.S.-branded colonialism and capitalism, particularly in the context of the Cold War, rather than primarily a civil rights or Jewish representational organization, or even, initially, a Zionist institution. The ADL’s merger of rights/antidiscrimination work with Zionist advocacy has been replicated by dozens of new organizations in the past decade, supported by conservative megadonor funding.88

The ADL was founded in 1913 by upper-class leaders of the German Jewish community that had settled in the United States eighty years earlier. It was imbued with their close allegiances to capitalism, individualism, and the “great men” who exemplified it, including their enthusiasm for settler state-building.89 Its leaders held that anticommunism was essential both to fighting antisemitism and upholding the U.S. state, even though that meant denouncing the robust Jewish Left.90 Following WWII, the ADL joined the national push to distance U.S. society from Nazism and fascism, in part by producing a vast set of educational materials on racial and religious tolerance. These launched the ADL’s authoritative national role in antibias education.91 The anticommunist nature of the project required imagining a version of racial justice that did not permit challenging the state but instead embraced capitalism and individualism. Teaching materials produced by the ADL did not shy away from their purpose. For instance, its 1951 text for educators, How You Can Teach about Communism, was written by a U.S. Army psychological warfare officer turned high school social studies teacher, Gerald L. Steibel, along with Columbia University historian Ryland W. Crary. They explained that racism was an aberration from the nature of U.S. society and that it could only be redressed in the context of U.S. capitalism and individualism. Communists, they argued, preyed on Americans’ concerns about racism as a means of enticing them to communism; communists’ concerns about U.S. racism were to be seen as a ruse.92 These materials would not likely have registered as unduly doctrinaire at the time; instead, I cite them here to convey the ADL’s ideological underpinnings. What is notable is the extent to which the ADL has consistently claimed opposition to racism as its own domain and demonized movements that challenge prevailing power structures.

In subsequent decades, the ADL continued to use education and civil rights as fields on which to defend the state against the Left. In 1983, for instance, Ku Klux Klan recruitment of youth around the United States created an imperative for schools to teach about racism. The National Anti-Klan Network and the Council on Interracial Books for Children developed a curriculum titled Violence, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Struggle for Equality with the National Education Association, which intended to implement it in classrooms nationwide.93 The ADL blocked the curriculum, which it found unacceptable for “indicting American society as innately racist.” It promised instead to create a more celebratory curriculum: to “highlight modern progress toward racial justice.”94 Within two years, the ADL had launched its national antibias education programming. That programming has been critiqued since its inception for avoiding structural racism, reducing racism to individual bias, and marginalizing affected groups.95 The work of defining racism as aberration and holding it separate from analyses of capitalism and colonialism was, as historian Mary L. Dudziak terms it, the project of “Cold War civil rights”: a dual project undertaken so the U.S. state could embrace a tightly limited version of antiracism and perform on the Cold War global stage as an egalitarian, moral force.96 This project fully aligned with the ADL’s long-standing commitment to the elite state-capital formation of the United States: a commitment that has undergirded its hostility toward redistributive movements since its inception in 1913.97

The geopolitics of the Cold War, in which decolonizing areas of the world construed by the U.S. national security state as potential bulwarks against communism—or potential communists—serve as the context against which the ADL and other major Jewish organizations became full-fledged supporters of Zionism in the mid-1950s.98 The major U.S. Jewish institutions had no prior strong interest in Israel except as a place to resettle European refugees. They were invested in American identity and viewed Zionism as a foreign campaign tainted by communist participation.99 However, as Palestinian and Arab groups in the United States organized outreach to inform Americans about Israeli colonization,100 U.S. Jewish groups developed campaigns against them as enemies of the West, denouncing both Arab governments and Arab anticolonialism as subversive, antisemitic, and hostile to democracy.101 At the same time, mainstream Jewish institutions adopted a Cold War strategy, identifying Israel with the West and presenting it as a “Middle-East defense system against communism.”102 These framed Israel as a liberation project, both in the sense of Jewish racial uplift and as a Cold War outpost of Western freedom. As such, the ADL’s new Zionism drew on the same ideological underpinnings as its devotion to the U.S. state: a commitment to Western global order and the values of European settler colonialism, manifested with particular vigor in anticommunism. Acting as a civil rights organization, it policed leftist movements whose calls to dismantle racist and colonial power it deemed “extreme” whether by demonizing them or by counterorganizing. Its Cold War targets included leftist Jews, Black radicals, Palestinians, and Third World anticolonial movements broadly, much the same as in recent ethnic studies battles.103

The Zionist narrative strategy faltered as conditions changed for the Israeli state, for U.S. Jewish populations, and within U.S. antiracist struggles. In 1967 and 1973, Israel had major military victories, capturing the Golan Heights, Gaza, and Sinai, overcoming Syrian and Egyptian forces, and securing a flood of U.S. aid when the Soviet Union backed Arab states. These events shifted public perceptions of Israel from beleaguered agricultural co-op settlement to regional power, occupying force, and U.S. proxy.104 They coincided with changes in Jewish identity in the United States: Jews as a group markedly jumped class through post–World War II processes of suburbanization and accumulation. At the same time, Black and brown populations (with whom Jews had once identified as civil rights partners) were increasingly segregated and dispossessed in cities and increasingly distant from Jews in geography and racial positioning.105 While Black civil rights leaders and some members of the Black Left had initially endorsed Zionism in the early Cold War period, by 1968, the same year students at San Francisco State University went on strike under the Third World Liberation Front banner for ethnic studies, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the core Black student organization of the civil rights movement, declared Zionism to be colonialism.106 In the United States, as Black organizations stepped away from white groups, Jewish (white) groups were no longer insiders in antiracist spheres.107

For Zionist advocacy, the deaccreditation of Jewish ethnicity as an insider identity in racial struggle constituted a strategic crisis. To address it, the ADL used its national platform to rewrite the meaning of antisemitism. In 1974, its directors published and widely disseminated a book, The New Anti-Semitism, that explained that Jewish economic, social, and political inclusion in U.S. society meant that Jewish communal interests were now aligned with “the establishment.”108 They called for the recognition of a new kind of antisemitism: one that arose when leftist movements opposed “establishment” interests—especially Israel—without regard for the fact that they were (according to the authors) also Jewish interests.109 Like the white students at HBCUs, the ADL narrated a racialized experience that constructed itself and U.S. Jewry as politically marginalized by eliding the terms of economic, social, and political power at its disposal; it then described the practice of opposing larger racist systems as oppressive to them. Many astute writers note the constant reappearance of claims of a “new” antisemitism, referring to critiques of Israel or Zionism.110 However, the astounding intervention that the ADL worked in this moment was to insist, in an ideological inversion, that the powerful may also claim to be oppressed. Indeed, the ADL spent subsequent decades advancing the idea that being a powerful social group, part of the “establishment,” should not diminish the group’s minority, and in fact marginal, status. As such, it has claimed that Zionism and the state of Israel are owed the support of the U.S. state, including material aid, protection against critique, and ideological endorsement, as part of state commitments to pursuing racial equality.111 That claim is now commonplace in the broader Zionist political movement.

Recuperating Marginality and Newer Strategies

In the present, Zionism’s footing in the sphere of civil rights is tenuous, presenting a crisis to which Zionist institutions are again responding. Since the 2014 Ferguson uprising, the urgent antiracism animating U.S. popular culture has been infused with critiques of local repression as a manifestation of larger militarist and capital projects. Central to the Ferguson uprising, as Noura Erakat writes, was the Ferguson–Gaza moment—the period of public cognizance of Israeli assaults on Gaza taking place as police besieged Ferguson and the production of solidarities between Black and Palestinian activists. That experience yielded a durable knowledge, held and propagated in the powerful Black Lives Matter movement, that Black and Palestinian experiences of state violence are coproduced.112 Zionist groups have been increasingly isolated as cross-movement solidarities have continued to bloom in the context of Black Lives Matter, Trump-era attacks on multiple groups, and the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, in 2016, Zionist groups denounced the Movement for Black Lives, which had produced a policy platform that challenged Israeli violence as apartheid and genocide,113 terms to which they objected.114 In 2017, as critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term intersectionality came into popular circulation as a way to recognize the interweaving of state, capital, and cultural modes of power, Zionist groups pitched themselves against it.115 The “20x Problem” investigation by ADL and the Reut Institute sought to know why, despite a twenty-fold increase in “investments” between 2010 and 2016 (including outreach efforts to build public support for Israel as a U.S. ally, a social justice cause, and a centerpiece of global Jewish identity), support for Israel “remain[s] elusive.”116 A key finding was simply that U.S. antiracist movements had developed solidarity with Palestinians and that intersectionality discourse had drawn attention to Israeli colonialism.117 These are the conditions currently driving Zionist groups to seek to reinvigorate and escalate a set of racial and Indigenous claims about Jewish identity. For that project, ethnic studies is important terrain.

As the state-level battle concluded in 2021, Zionist organizations prepared to replicate their strategy across the United States. “I’m sure we have people outside of California watching,” said JCRC San Francisco director Tye Gregory on the webinar that followed Tablet’s article.

In blue states and major cities across the country, we’re already sharing best practices and doing briefings for the community relations field on our lessons learned. . . . Build the relationships with the Department of Education, start meeting school board members. We really have to begin the work early, because this is a major priority for communities of color. 118

Similarly, anticipating that communities of color will be pushing for ethnic studies around the United States, Assemblymember Gabriel urged the deployment of two measures, district by district. First, move to support ethnic studies while explaining to advocates that the curriculum “can’t be bigoted against Jews” and point to the cleansed California model. Second, use the accumulated successes—guardrails, curricula, and framings—as cookie-cutter materials to replicate at each subsequent site.119

These erosive strategies, seeking to undo antiracist solidarities by replacing the meanings of key terms, operate alongside more overt strategies. The transnational Zionist political movement, including groups involved in the ethnic studies battle, is actively working to have the IHRA definition of antisemitism adopted by federal, state, and other institutions, particularly universities, in the United States.120 Zionist groups advocate for the heightened surveillance and repression of Muslims, community organizers, and critics of the state.121 The ADL has long been a sponsor of U.S.–Israel police exchanges (reportedly suspended in 2022) where U.S. police officers who observed Israeli law enforcement were “impressed” and “found [their] perspective broadened” by the use of surveillance-ware and violence that is illegal in the United States.122 Such repressive political work is made possible, community organizers argue, by Zionist groups’ continued presence in the sphere of civil rights and antiracism. In that context, they have been instrumental to framing militarism as the precondition for rights.123

What is at stake for Zionist institutions in these claims to antiracism, to marginalization, indeed, to dominating the field of rights while subjugating others within and through it? Other ideological movements closely intertwined with present-day Zionism in the United States, including anticommunism, white grievance, and anti-CRT, have not relied on passing as antiracist even where they have borrowed the terminology of identity-based rights and state-owed protection. The Zionist movement itself is increasingly unsettled in terms of its own political alignments, as major institutions and donors have noisily allied with Trump and the Christian Right and liberal Zionists have struggled with the contradictions between Zionism and antiracism. The long-standing answer is that “like race” arguments are key to framing Israel in a positive light: as the “20x Problem” report explains, Zionist organizations aim to build popular feelings of affinity for the Israeli project and to do so by detaching Palestinian anticolonialism from U.S. antiracism in the hearts and minds of the U.S. population. Where the work performed by Black–Palestine solidarity and Black Lives Matter has reduced political will for U.S. and Israeli militarism, Zionist institutions aim to restore it.

Beyond the long-standing need of Zionist advocacy to dislodge antiracist ways of seeing the world, though, attacks on ethnic studies also reflect a very specific present. Zionist institutions are enmeshed in the project of post-9/11 U.S. securitization, organizing the state around conceptions of threat, and ever more dominating antithreat infrastructure.124

Zionist institutions’ work on securitization has included advocating for and participating in programs around the Islamophobic Obama-era Countering Violent Extremism125 and the Biden administration’s Domestic Violent Extremism framework.126 Although the latter’s advocates have presented it as a tool for containing white nationalism, it functions as a weapon against movements for structural change. It extends the definition of terrorist motives to “opposition to perceived social, economic, or racial hierarchies,” capitalism, corporate globalization, and ethnic bias, which proposes that weaponized antisemitism charges can become charges of terrorism.127 The project that such supposed antiterror work undertakes is a performance of protecting rights that the ethnic studies battle now makes familiar. As Nicole Nguyen and Yazan Zahzah write, it responds to public fears about racism and violence, while reinforcing controls on communities and movements that resist white supremacy and its power structures.128 As in ethnic studies, Zionist institutions’ authority to do that work rests on the claim that they are advocates for rights and against racism.

These present expansions of militarism and surveillance are at stake in the battles over ethnic studies as they ripple out into new spheres. As the #DropTheADL coalition argues about that organization in particular, “The ADL’s credibility in some social justice movements and communities is precisely what allows it to undermine the rights of marginalized communities, shielding it from criticism and accountability while boosting its legitimacy and resources.”129 As many other Zionist organizations borrow the ADL’s tactics, they similarly use social justice claims to try to undo the gains of antiracist organizing. The attacks on ethnic studies must be understood in those terms: as efforts to break down antiracist movements that are the infrastructure of challenges to securitization and to defend militarism in the United States as well as Israel and other global sites. Resisting the attacks—both by refusing Zionist organizations’ claims to be antiracist actors and by continuing to counternarrate experiences of colonization—is crucial support for the transformational project that the ethnic studies movement has undertaken.

Emmaia Gelman is guest faculty in social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College and the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the transnational work of Zionist political and ideological institutions. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights as levers in political culture and is cochair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism. She is writing a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913–1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution.

Notes

  1. 1. Emily Benedek, “California Is Cleansing Jews from History,” Tablet, January 28, 2021, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/california-ethnic-studies-curriculum. Tablet does not identify itself as conservative; its masthead announces it as a “magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture.” Jewish community readers and scholars have demanded that it be recognized as a right-wing publication, in ways that echo the demands of ethnic-studies advocates to recognize the Zionist institutions described here as right-wing organizations. Tablet has leveled weaponized antisemitism charges against critics of Zionism and published attack articles on topics including Black Lives Matter, Covid vaccination, trans rights, and “wokeness.” Tablet’s founder and sponsor, the Keren Keshet Foundation, is related to a set of neoconservative billionaire projects capped by the Tikvah Fund; its donors make strategic investments to move academic and policy discourse on Israel to the right. See “Welcome to Tablet Magazine,” Tablet, accessed September 6, 2023, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/welcome; Marsha B. Cohen, “The Hub of the Jewish Neoconservative Echo Chamber,” Lobe Log (blog), October 19, 2016, https://lobelog.com/the-hub-of-the-jewish-neoconservative-echo-chamber/; Mari Cohen, “Jewish Studies Draws a Line on Tablet,” October 6, 2022, https://jewishcurrents.org/ajs_tablet.

  2. 2. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020), 9–15.

  3. 3. StandWithUs, AMCHA Initiative, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are the organizations primarily discussed in this essay. StandWithUs, formally called the Israel Emergency Alliance, is chartered as an Israel advocacy organization. AMCHA’s mission statement denies that it is an Israel advocacy organization, but empirically its work consists of arguing that Israel/Zionism is a moral imperative and demanding university policy that adopts support for Israel and excludes its critics from scholarly life. The ADL is a major U.S. institution that, by the late 1950s, prioritized Zionism while maintaining its extensive involvement in civil rights programming. These organizations are active members of the Zionist movement, theorized by Hil Aked as “a social movement ‘from above.’” “About,” StandWithUs, accessed May 6, 2023, https://www.standwithus.com/about; Hil Aked, Friends of Israel: The Backlash against Palestine Solidarity (London: Verso Books, 2023), 16. On AMCHA, see “Israel-Advocacy Group AMCHA Tracking SJPs, JVPs,” Palestine in America (blog), March 2, 2017, https://www.palestineinamerica.com/blog/2016/03/2942. On the ADL, see Emmaia Gelman, “Empire against Race: A Critical History of the Anti-Defamation League (1913–1990)” (PhD diss., New York University, 2021), 178. On the Zionist movement, see Hil Aked, “Whose University? Academic Freedom, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of ‘Israel Studies,’” in Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine, and the Criticism of Israel, ed. David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy, 39–66 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).

  4. 4. For critical analysis of the “hate frame” to call for identity-based protections, see Kay Whitlock, Reconsidering Hate: Policy and Politics at the Intersection, a Political Research Associates Discussion Paper, June 1, 2012, https://politicalresearch.org/2012/06/01/reconsidering-hate. For a discussion of the hate frame in relation to the weaponization of antisemitism and Zionist institutions, see Emmaia Gelman, “The Hate Crimes Framework, Conservative Power, & Jewish Resistance,” Medium (blog), January 4, 2020, https://medium.com/@emmaiagelman/no-fear-and-no-hate-crimes-either-c1746a506f81.

  5. 5. The Zionist organizations leading the efforts to derail ethnic studies claim to represent Jewish communal interests both by defending Zionism as “Jewish self-determination” and by “standing against antisemitism.” These claims ring hollow: U.S. Jews are increasingly detached from Zionism, as these organizations themselves frequently note. See, for instance, Marc Tracy, “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism,” New York Times, November 2, 2021, sec. Magazine, www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/magazine/israel-american-jews.html.

  6. 6. Anti-Defamation League Central Pacific, “Public Briefing on Ethnic Studies,” February 24, 2021, https://sanfrancisco.adl.org/event/public-briefing-on-ethnic-studies/.

  7. 7. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales et al., “Toward an Ethnic Studies Pedagogy: Implications for K-12 Schools from the Research,” Urban Review 47, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 111–12, 120, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0280-y.

  8. 8. Karen Umemoto, “‘On Strike!’ San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–69: The Role of Asian American Students,” Amerasia Journal 15, no. 1 (January 1989): 3–41, https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.15.1.7213030j5644rx25.

  9. 9. Assembly Members Luis Alejo, Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer, David Chiu, and Katcho Achadjian, “An Act to Add Section 51226.7 to the Education Code, Relating to Pupil Instruction,” Pub. L. No. AB 2016 (2016), http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/15-16/bill/asm/ab_2001-2050/ab_2016_bill_20160601_amended_asm_v97.htm. For a historical overview of the political and pedagogical development of ethnic studies, see Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” accessed September 16, 2022, https://www.liberatedethnicstudies.org/uploads/1/6/1/9/16198322/lesmc_intro_to_chapter_1.pdf.

  10. 10. Israel advocacy groups charged that the inclusion of Palestinian experiences in the sample lessons was antisemitic both on its face and because those experiences were not opposed by counternarratives in support of Zionism. See, for instance, StandWithUS, “Public Input Template–2020 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, May 2019 Draft,” accessed September 21, 2022, available at https://static.wixstatic.com/ugd/46fc49_7dee330520fe4d9ead93b6694f5ede72.docx (download). On objections to Palestinian rap lyrics, see, for example, “Proposed Anti-Israel Ethnic-Studies Curriculum in California Has Jewish Community on Alert,” StandWithUs, August 2, 2019, https://www.standwithus.com/post/proposed-anti-israel-ethnic-studies-curriculum-in-california-has-jewish-community-on-alert.

  11. 11. “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism,” American Association of University Professors, March 21, 2022, https://www.aaup.org/report/legislative-threats-academic-freedom-redefinitions-antisemitism-and-racism.

  12. 12. See California Legislative Jewish Caucus, “Jewish Caucus Letter on Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum to Ms. Soomin Chao, Chair, Instructional Quality Commission, California Dept. of Education,” July 29, 2019, available at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/6261215-072919-Jewish-Caucus-Letter-on-Ethnic-Studies; California Legislative Jewish Caucus, “Jewish Caucus Letter.”

  13. 13. Jackson Richman and Sean Savage, “Proposed Anti-Israel Ethnic-Studies Curriculum in California Has Jewish Community on Alert,” Jewish News Syndicate, August 2, 2019, https://www.jns.org/proposed-anti-israel-ethnic-studies-curriculum-in-california-high-schools-has-jewish-community-on-alert/.

  14. 14. John Fensterwald, “More Changes Proposed for California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum to Strengthen ‘Balance,’” EdSource, November 7, 2020, https://edsource.org/2020/more-changes-proposed-for-californias-ethnic-studies-curriculum-to-strengthen-balance/643306.

  15. 15. In 2020, Rufo had also recently joined the Manhattan Institute and its publication, City Journal. The Manhattan Institute is a conservative policy organization that uses law-and-order arguments (including the discredited broken-windows theory) to attempt to win the support of immigrants of color for right-wing economic and policing policies. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory,” New Yorker, June 18, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory; Judd Legum, “‘Moms For Liberty’ Says Book about MLK Violates New Law Banning CRT in Tennessee,” Popular Information, December 1, 2021, https://popular.info/p/moms-for-liberty-says-book-about; Don Mitchell, Kafui Attoh, and Lynn Staeheli, “‘Broken Windows Is Not the Panacea’: Common Sense, Good Sense, and Police Accountability in American Cities,” in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, ed. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, 237–57 (New York: Verso, 2016).

  16. 16. See Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 221; Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), chap. 5.

  17. 17. Benedek, “California Is Cleansing Jews from History.”

  18. 18. California Department of Education Instructional Quality Commission, “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum: Glossary and Bibliography, Item 2.A.1., Attachment 4,” May 6, 2019, 2, available as a download at California Department of Education, https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/cc/cd/documents/esmcglossarybibliography.docx.

  19. 19. “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS,” BDS Movement, July 9, 2005, https://bdsmovement.net/call. Tablet charged here that the true goal of the BDS movement is “the elimination of Israel.” That is untrue of the BDS movement, which takes no position on Israel’s existence but calls solely for “the realization of basic rights and the implementation of international law.” (See “FAQs,” BDS Movement, accessed August 28, 2022, https://bdsmovement.net/faqs.) However, many BDS-supporting groups are anti-Zionist. In making their assertion, the Tablet authors are referring to the claim, often presented by advocates of Zionism, that anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism. This is a weaponized charge of antisemitism of the form explained above. For additional discussion of the origins and political uses of this conflation, see Jewish Voice for Peace and Judith Butler, On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

  20. 20. At the time of writing, Palestine Legal, the primary U.S. NGO engaged in tracking antiboycott legislation, identified 261 bills introduced, 23 percent passed, and thirty-four states with legislation in effect. See “Legislation,” Palestine Legal, accessed August 26, 2022, https://palestinelegal.org.

  21. 21. Benedek, “California Is Cleansing Jews from History.”

  22. 22. Indeed, European and European American Jewish experiences are traditionally covered in subjects including U.S. immigration history, European history, the Nazi holocaust, and human rights, even as curricular mandates vary. While Zionist groups eventually called for the inclusion of Jews of color in the ESMC, the thinness of that call is discussed later in this essay. On the centrality of holocaust materials in U.S. education across the political spectrum, see Thomas D. Fallace, The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). In California, holocaust education for grades seven through twelve has been mandated by state law since 1985. California Code, Education Code—EDC § 51220.

  23. 23. In one representative instance, the chair of San Francisco’s Holocaust Center Council wrote that that she favored ethnic studies but also that it should be defined in explicit opposition to decades of established ethnic-studies scholarship (meaning that it should be a way to touch on every student’s identity rather than the study of decolonization). Claims by opponents of ethnic studies that they actually support it are used to portray them as antiracist and obscure their alignment with racist movements. Lydia Shorenstein, “Ethnic Groups’ Stories Essential to California Curriculum,” The Blogs (blog), Times of Israel, October 11, 2020, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ethnic-groups-stories-essential-to-california-curriculum/.

  24. 24. On Zionism’s shared ideological roots with U.S. settler colonialism, see Steven Salaita, Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 16.

  25. 25. Emmaia Gelman, “The Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems,” Boston Review, May 23, 2019, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/emmaia-gelman-anti-defamation-league/.

  26. 26. Use of messaging referencing Zionism as an ideological partner of the U.S. civil rights movement is not unusual, for instance, as in this StandWithUs tweet: StandWithUs (@StandWithUs), “Today we honor Civil Rights Movement leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). We are forever grateful that as he fought racism, & as Jews stood with him to fight for civil rights #MLK was also a Zionist who strongly supported the State of Israel... (1/2),” Twitter, January 18, 2021, 3:29 a.m., https://twitter.com/StandWithUs/status/1351129462788804610.

  27. 27. Michal David and Shahar Zaken, “Mizrahi Jews Speak in Support of the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum,” Unruly: JOCSM (blog), accessed April 20, 2022, http://jocsm.org/mizrahi-jews-speak-in-support-of-the-ca-ethnic-studies-curriculum/.

  28. 28. A clear summary of the weaponization of antisemitism is offered in “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom.”

  29. 29. Legum, “‘Moms For Liberty’”; “Fighting for America’s Future,” Heritage Foundation, accessed August 15, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/priorities.

  30. 30. See for instance the Orange County (California) Department of Education’s draft survey of “the intellectual and empirical debates surrounding ethnic studies and CRT” developed in consultation with directors of self-identified liberal, anti-CRT, anti-Marxist advocacy organizations the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies. The white paper, presented as a scholarly evaluation of CRT and antiracist education initiatives including the 1619 Project, distinguishes “ideological” and “illiberal” scholarship (24) focused on power structures (which the paper describes as “grievance studies” [21]) from conservative “intellectually honest black academics” viewing history through the not-“explicitly political” lens of “individual choice and initiative” (21). After rehearsing liberal rationales for opposing antiracist study and the neutrality of the survey (23), the white paper ultimately finds ethnic studies in violation of California law against “inculcating in students a preference for Marxism” (30). Orange County Board of Education, “White Paper-Final Draft: Special Community Forums on ‘California’s Ethnic Study Model Curriculum,’” January 5, 2022, available as a download at https://ocbe.us/Documents/Board%20Updates/Policy%20Paper%20on%20Ethnic%20Studies%20and%20Critical%20Race%20Theory%20in%20California.pdf.

  31. 31. Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons offer an essential analysis of how Cold War politics engendered the perception of movements for political change as “extremism” rather than self-determination. Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, “Repression and Ideology: The Legacy of Discredited Centrist/Extremist Theory,” Political Research Associates, April 15, 1998, https://www.politicalresearch.org/1998/04/15/repression-and-ideology-the-legacy-of-discredited-centristextremist-theory-violent-radicalization-extremism-homegrown-terrorism/.

  32. 32. The conceptualization of attacks on antiracist education as counterinsurgency here comes from Uma Mazyck Jayakumar et al., “Why Are All the White Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Toward Challenging Constructions of a Persecuted White Collective,” Education Sciences 11, no. 11 (November 2021): 15, https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci11110679.

  33. 33. CDE Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Advisory Committee Members of 2019, “Remove Names from Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” February 3, 2021, available as a download at Save Arab-American Studies, https://savearabamericanstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Letter-to-CDE-2.3.2021.pdf.

  34. 34. Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, John Doe, and Jane Does 1–5, Plaintiffs, v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium; United Teachers of Los Angeles; Cecili Myart-Cruz, Theresa Montano, and Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, in their individual and official capacities as public employees; and Does 1–10, Defendants, No. 2:2022cv03243 (U.S. District Court Central District of California Western Division, May 12, 2022).

  35. 35. This shorthand is inspired by Jodi Melamed’s characterization of post-WWII liberalism’s commonsense about race/racism that strips those terms of their meanings. See Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

  36. 36. As Jacobson points out, the development of white ethnic identities had a split effect on left- and right-wing racial politics, producing both white grievance and an antiracist project of interrogating whiteness. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, “A Ghetto to Look Back To: ‘World of Our Fathers,’ Ethnic Revival, and the Arc of Multiculturalism,” American Jewish History 88, no. 4 (2000): 466, 472.

  37. 37. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 277.

  38. 38. Janet Halley articulates the way that, as the civil rights movement became an important referent for groups making later claims for rights, the abstract idea of Black/racialized identity became a referent for other identities deserving of rights that were denied to them. Janet E. Halley, “‘Like Race’ Arguments,” in What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 40.

  39. 39. Jayakumar et al., “Why Are All the White Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?,” 15.

  40. 40. Jayakumar et al., 11.

  41. 41. Jayakumar et al., 15.

  42. 42. Jayakumar et al., 1, 2, 15.

  43. 43. The phrase “fight racism and build understanding among ethnic groups” appears in the advocacy literature and press statements of two ethnic studies antagonists, the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies and StandWithUs. “Ethnic Studies Talking Points,” Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies, accessed December 4, 2023, https://www.calethstudies.org/ethnic-studies-talking-points; Kendall Tietz, “Ethnic Studies School Administrator Argued Some Jewish Americans Have ‘Control of Systemic Power,’” Fox News, December 23, 2022, https://www.foxnews.com/media/ethnic-studies-school-administrator-argued-some-jewish-americans-control-systemic-power.

  44. 44. Anti-Defamation League Central Pacific, “Public Briefing on Ethnic Studies.” These demands and the list of organizations supporting them are detailed on the Anti-Defamation League website. See Anti-Defamation League Los Angeles, “ADL Continued Action on the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” March 12, 2021, https://la.adl.org/adl-continued-action-on-the-california-ethnic-studies-model-curriculum/.

  45. 45. Jocelyn Gecker, “California Ethnic Studies Debate: Whose Stories Get Told?,” AP News, March 15, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-education-california-d4e28bba7b0c54fcd446ec456fa38e14.

  46. 46. Nancy J. Appel, California Legislative Director and Anti-Defamation League, “RE: Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” August 6, 2019, available as a download at San Francisco ADL, https://sanfrancisco.adl.org/files/2019/08/ADL-ESMC-comment-080619.pdf.

  47. 47. “California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum: December Analysis and Recommendations,” StandWithUs, accessed September 20, 2022, https://www.standwithus.com/ca-december-esmc-revisions.

  48. 48. Internal Revenue Service, Form 990: Israel Emergency Alliance, 2008, retrieved from ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer database, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/.

  49. 49. The organization’s original website explains its aims: “The Israel Emergency Alliance will stand in support of any bill that inhibits, punishes, or interferes with terrorism. Stand with Israel in solidarity, and support causes that align with our mission statements and goals. We are picking up the support of major religious and nonreligious institutions that will help multiply our efforts.” Its early barrage of news bulletins reflects the Islamophobic discourse of hard-right Israel advocacy in the post-9/11 period, with subject lines including “U.S.: Stop Selling Out Israel” (October 4, 2001), “Beautiful Baby Doomed to Die through Suicide-Murder” (October 7, 2001), “Militant Muslims Now Killing Christians in Pakistan” (October 8, 2001), and “This Is NOT the Time for a Palestinian State” (October 8, 2001). Roz Rothstein has been the director and primary voice of StandWithUs/Israel Emergency Alliance since launching it in September 2001. “Standwithus.com,” archived September 29, 2001, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20010929024225/http://standwithus.com/; “Past Actions and Essential Information,” StandWithUs.com, archived October 24, 2001, at the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20011024012933/http://standwithus.com/actions.asp.

  50. 50. StandWithUs has sought to influence campus discourse on Israel and also to control it: for instance, it has tried to wield donor influence to limit university hiring to pro-Zionist academics. Internal Revenue Service, Form 990; Lila Corwin Berman, “When Gifts Come with Strings Attached,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 15, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-gifts-come-with-strings-attached.

  51. 51. Seth Brysk, “The California Ethnic Studies Antisemitism Firestorm Is Far from Over,” Forward, February 22, 2021, https://forward.com/opinion/464493/california-ethnic-studies-curriculum-antisemitism-scandal/; Anti-Defamation League and Nancy J. Appel, California Legislative Director, “RE: Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum—Third Revision,” accessed September 18, 2022, available for download at San Diego ADL, https://sandiego.adl.org/files/2021/01/ADL-ESMC-third-draft-comment-012021.pdf.

  52. 52. In October 2021, Governor Newsome allocated $2 million to expand holocaust instruction in California schools, $2 million for the expansion of the Holocaust Museum LA, and $10 million for a single exhibit on antisemitism at the Museum of Tolerance. The Museum of Tolerance is operated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a conservative and Zionist political organization. California Code, Education Code—EDC § 51220; “Governor Newsom Launches Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education, Highlights Support for Diverse Communities,” Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, October 6, 2021, https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/10/06/governor-newsom-launches-%e2%80%8b%e2%80%8bgovernors-council-on-holocaust-and-genocide-education-highlights-support-for-diverse-communities/; Jody Sokolower, “Promoting Zionism Is Not ‘Education to End Hate,’” Mondoweiss, September 29, 2020, https://mondoweiss.net/2020/09/promoting-zionism-is-not-education-to-end-hate/.

  53. 53. California State Board of Education, Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide, 1988 ed. with a new foreword and preface (Sacramento: California Department of Education, 2000).

  54. 54. Zionist organizations have campaigned since 2016 for the government bodies, universities, and other institutions to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Federal bills were first proposed in 2016, followed by an expanding set of state bills and calls for university policy. “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom”; “Using ‘Anti-Semitism’ to Quash Israel Criticism—in Congress & States,” Foundation for Middle East Peace (blog), accessed September 25, 2022, https://fmep.org/resources/.

  55. 55. “Palestinian Rights and the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” Guardian, November 29, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/nov/29/palestinian-rights-and-the-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism.

  56. 56. Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” Guardian, December 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect.

  57. 57. “California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”

  58. 58. Beyond its inversions of civil rights logic, StandWithUs’s use of the ESMC comment process to raise concerns about people and organizations was highly opportunistic. It targeted Left, Arab, and Muslim figures whom Zionist organizations have consistently sought to discredit with a wide range of charges. See “California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”

  59. 59. “California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”

  60. 60. Gabi Kirk, “Authors of California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Decry Cuts to Arab Studies,” Jewish Currents, February 3, 2021, https://jewishcurrents.org/authors-of-california-ethnic-studies-curriculum-decry-cuts-to-arab-studies.

  61. 61. The portion of the IHRA definition text that references criticism of Israel was not included in the 2021 model curriculum, in a possible effort by legislators to walk a political line between adopting it and refusing it. The ADL continued to call for the full text, while StandWithUs claimed victory in its addition. Anti-Defamation League and Appel, “RE: Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum—Third Revision”; Roz Rothstein, “Where Things Stand with California’s Ethnic-Studies Curriculum,” StandWithUs, February 2, 2021, https://www.standwithus.com/post/where-things-stand-with-california-s-ethnic-studies-curriculum.

  62. 62. “Our LESMC Story,” Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium - LESMCC, 3, accessed September 20, 2022, https://www.liberatedethnicstudies.org/lesmc-story.html.

  63. 63. “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” California Department of Education, accessed January 20, 2022, https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmc.asp. For a helpful introduction to this subject, see Daniel R. Schwartz, Judeans and Jews: Four Faces of Dichotomy in Ancient Jewish History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 1–10.

  64. 64. See discussion of the emerging Jewish indigeneity discourse in Abe Silberstein, “Bio-Zionism: Why Claiming Jews Are ‘Indigenous’ to Israel Is So Dangerous,” Haaretz, December 21, 2021, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-12-21/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/bio-zionism-why-claiming-jews-are-indigenous-to-israel-is-so-dangerous/0000017f-df8b-d3a5-af7f-ffaf5b7a0000.

  65. 65. For an analysis of how Palestinian claims on Indigeneity are made precarious, see Ahmad Amara and Yara Hawari, “Using Indigeneity in the Struggle for Palestinian Liberation,” Al-Shabaka Commentary, August 8, 2019, 6.

  66. 66. In other sections, as Jewish and Sephardic studies scholars Ari Y. Kelman, Devin E. Naar, and Jessica Marglin wrote at the time, awkward conflations of European Jewish history with Mizrachi and Sephardic history actually erase the experiences of Jews of color and “substitut[e] current political concerns for historical accuracy.” In effect, they obscure the whiteness of white Jews behind the stories of Jews of color. Together the lessons work startling conflations of Jewishness and racialization, European and Middle Eastern Jewish identities, and settler and Indigenous histories. See Ari Y. Kelman, Devin E. Naar, and Jessica Marglin, “Jewish Studies Profs: Ethnic Studies Curriculum Substitutes Political Concerns for Historical Accuracy,” J.: The Jewish News of Northern California, March 16, 2021, https://jweekly.com/2021/03/16/jewish-studies-profs-ethnic-studies-curriculum-substitutes-political-concerns-for-historical-accuracy/.

  67. 67. “Today’s Law as Amended—AB-101 Pupil Instruction: High School Graduation Requirements: Ethnic Studies,” Section 1, 51225.3 (I & II), accessed September 21, 2022, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB101&showamends=false.

  68. 68. Anti-Defamation League Central Pacific, “Public Briefing on Ethnic Studies.”

  69. 69. Adrian Florido, “Teachers Say Laws Banning Critical Race Theory Are Putting a Chill on Their Lessons,” NPR, May 28, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000537206/teachers-laws-banning-critical-race-theory-are-leading-to-self-censorship.

  70. 70. Lara Kiswani, interview with author, March 10, 2022.

  71. 71. CDE Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Advisory Committee Members of 2019, “Remove Names from Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” February 3, 2021, available at Save Arab-American Studies, https://savearabamericanstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Letter-to-CDE-2.3.2021.pdf.

  72. 72. As I explain later in this essay, Zionist institutions are transnational actors whose work includes organizing state and capital power in support of a set of Western states’ global interests and should not be viewed narrowly as advocates for the Israeli state.

  73. 73. Halley, “‘Like Race’ Arguments,” 40–74.

  74. 74. See, for instance, Alex Kane, “Right-Wing Donor Adam Milstein Has Spent Millions of Dollars to Stifle the BDS Movement and Attack Critics of Israeli Policy,” Intercept, March 25, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/03/25/adam-milstein-israel-bds/.

  75. 75. The adoption of these criteria materializes the UC’s commitment to an Area A-G/H college-preparatory version of high school ethnic studies. Abby Lee, “California Proposal for New A-G Ethnic Studies Requirement Underway,” UCSD Guardian, April 24, 2022, https://ucsdguardian.org/2022/04/24/california-proposal-for-new-a-g-ethnic-studies-requirement-underway/.

  76. 76. Gabe Stutman, “Ethnic Studies Debate Comes to UC System with Proposed Admission Requirement,” J.: The Jewish News of Northern California, April 8, 2022, https://jweekly.com/2022/04/08/ethnic-studies-debate-arrives-at-university-of-california/.

  77. 77. John Fensterwald, “Heated Debate as UC Board Rejects Proposed Criteria for High School Ethnic Studies Classes,” Local News Matters, June 6, 2022, https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/06/06/heated-debate-as-uc-board-rejects-proposed-criteria-for-high-school-ethnic-studies-classes/.

  78. 78. Harassment through the use of California’s public records laws is a tactic employed by the Zionist Advocacy Center, a lawfare organization that, the news service Electronic Intifada reports, is registered as a foreign agent and has been funded by the Israeli government to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in the United States. See Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Israel Lobby Loses Legal Effort to Harass Palestinian Rights Activists,” Electronic Intifada, March 19, 2021, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-lobby-loses-legal-effort-harass-palestinian-rights-activists.

  79. 79. Author correspondence with Theresa Montaño, September 19, 2022.

  80. 80. Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles et al. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum et al.; “Discover Our Story,” Deborah Project, accessed September 25, 2022, https://deborahproject.org/about.

  81. 81. Kay Guinane, The Alarming Rise of Lawfare to Suppress Civil Society: The Case of Palestine and Israel (Washington, D.C.: Charity & Security Network, 2021), 8–11; Alex Kane, “A Pro-Israel Lawyer Is Weaponizing Public Records Law against Palestinian Activists,” Intercept, March 6, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/03/06/palestine-israel-students-ucla-public-records/; Natasha Roth-Rowland, “Waging Lawfare,” Jewish Currents, June 8, 2020, https://jewishcurrents.org/waging-lawfare.

  82. 82. Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles et al. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium et al., at 8.

  83. 83. Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles et al. v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium et al., at 53–54.

  84. 84. “Our LESMC Story.”

  85. 85. Lara Kiswani, telephone interview by Emmaia Gelman, March 9, 2022.

  86. 86. Sokolower, “Promoting Zionism Is Not ‘Education to End Hate.’”

  87. 87. Lara Kiswani, March 9, 2022.

  88. 88. In June 2023, journalist Arno Rosenfeld kindly shared with me his informal running list of dozens of anti-antisemitism organizations formed since 2012. The list is now posted online. Of forty-eight organizations, all but a few appear to be affiliated with right-wing networks like the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), related IHRA campaigns, or lawfare. Rosenfeld reports that CAM is an opponent of “woke ideology.” Conservative billionaires whose foundations sponsor these projects include Robert K. Kraft (Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, 2019), Ronald Lauder (Anti-Semitism Accountability Project, 2019), Adam Milstein (Americans Against Antisemitism, 2019), and Natie Kirsh (Shine a Light, 2021). Arno Rosenfeld, email correspondence with the author, June 20, 2023; Arno Rosenfeld, “Jewish Defense Organizations,” Arno’s Notion, accessed September 11, 2023, https://principled-haddock-800.notion.site/Jewish-defense-organizations-ee9091c9d57c4347978538a41dbaba0b; Arno Rosenfeld, “Major Jewish Groups Leave Coalition after Video Slams ‘Woke Antisemitism,’” Forward, June 20, 2023, https://forward.com/news/551246/combat-antisemitism-movement-woke-antisemitism-coalition/.

  89. 89. Gelman, “Empire against Race,” 43–45; Deborah D. Moore, B’nai B’rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 124–25.

  90. 90. Emmaia Gelman, “The Anti-Democratic Origins of the Jewish Establishment,” Jewish Currents, March 12, 2021, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-anti-democratic-origins-of-the-jewish-establishment.

  91. 91. Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 70.

  92. 92. Ryland W. Crary and Gerald L. Steibel, How You Can Teach about Communism (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1951).

  93. 93. Council on Interracial Books for Children and National Education Association of the United States, Violence, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Struggle for Equality: An Informational and Instructional Kit (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1981), available at https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/violence-ku-klux-klan-and-struggle-equality-informational-and.

  94. 94. Steve Askin, “Unteaching Racism,” Black Enterprise, March 1982.

  95. 95. Gelman, “Empire against Race.” For a partial account of this history, see also Gelman, “Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems.”

  96. 96. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  97. 97. Gelman, “Anti-Democratic Origins of the Jewish Establishment.”

  98. 98. Matthew Berkman, “Coercive Consensus: Jewish Federations, Ethnic Representation, and the Roots of American Pro-Israel Politics” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018), 229, available at Scholarly Commons, https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3093.

  99. 99. Berkman, “Coercive Consensus,” 207, 210.

  100. 100. Maurice M. Labelle Jr., “‘The American People Know So Little’: The Palestine Arab Refugee Office and the Challenges of Anti-Orientalism in the United States, 1955–1962,” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 5, no. 2 (2018): 85–87, available at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/778333; Robert W. McDonald, The League of Arab States: A Study in Dynamics of Regional Organization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 136.

  101. 101. See Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The Trouble-Makers: An Anti-Defamation League Report, 1st ed. (Garden City, N .Y.: Doubleday, 1952), 169, chap. 4.

  102. 102. Berkman, “Coercive Consensus,” 211.

  103. 103. Gelman, “Empire against Race.”

  104. 104. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 51–52.

  105. 105. Greenberg, Troubling the Waters, 208.

  106. 106. Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 116–19.

  107. 107. Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2018), 88.

  108. 108. The authors use “the establishment” to describe the dominant political and capital institutions of the state. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 9.

  109. 109. See Matthew Berkman, “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the American Racial Order: Revisiting the American Council for Judaism in the Twenty-First Century,” American Jewish History 105, no. 1 (2021): 127–55.

  110. 110. See Brian Klug’s laundry list of usages, now out of date but conveying the term’s extensive career. It begins even before the ADL’s usage, in 1965, with a quote from an Israeli intelligence officer. Brian Klug, “Interrogating ‘New Anti-Semitism,’” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (March 1, 2013): 468–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.734385.

  111. 111. Gelman, “Empire against Race,” 105–19.

  112. 112. Noura Erakat, “Geographies of Intimacy: Contemporary Renewals of Black–Palestinian Solidarity,” American Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2020): 491, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2020.0027.

  113. 113. Palestinian movement organizations and scholars have long understood Israeli domination as apartheid. Western NGOs have recently adopted the terminology. See Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1979), 37; Noura Erakat, “BDS in the USA, 2001–2010,” Middle East Report 255 (Summer 2010): https://merip.org/2010/05/bds-in-the-usa-2001-2010/; “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” Human Rights Watch, April 27, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution; “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime against Humanity,” Amnesty International, February 1, 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/; “Israel’s 55-Year Occupation of Palestinian Territory Is Apartheid—UN Human Rights Expert,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, March 25, 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-year-occupation-palestinian-territory-apartheid-un-human-rights.

  114. 114. Deepening the divide, the ADL’s CEO published an op-ed calling the fifty Black-led organizations who produced the M4BL policy platform “misguided” and proffered the ADL as a superior, more seasoned expert on civil rights. Jonathan Greenblatt, “Eyes on the Prize: In Pursuit of Racial Justice, Stick to the Facts and Avoid the Fiction,” Medium, August 4, 2016, https://j0nathan-g.medium.com/eyes-on-the-prize-in-pursuit-of-racial-justice-stick-to-the-facts-and-avoid-the-fiction-5a5486a5cb4e. See, for example, Jewish Community Relations Council, “Understanding the Movement for Black Lives Platform and Its Inclusion of Anti-Israel Rhetoric,” accessed September 21, 2022, https://jcrc.org/news-events/blog/understanding-the-movement-for-black-lives-platform.

  115. 115. Institute by Reut and Anti-Defamation League, “The Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy: The Frustrating 20X Question—Why Is It Still Growing?,” January 2017, version A, 5, https://www.jewishpublicaffairs.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2015/09/The-20X-Question-Strategic-Framework-vs-DLG-and-BDS-By-Reut-Group-and-ADL.pdf; Sharon Nazarian, “By Rejecting Jews, Intersectionality Betrays Itself,” Anti-Defamation League, January 25, 2018, https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/by-rejecting-jews-intersectionality-betrays-itself; Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1, 1991): 1,241–99.

  116. 116. Institute by Reut and Anti-Defamation League, “Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy,” 3. On efforts to build public support for Israel as a U.S. ally, see, for instance, Hadassah, Jewish Federations of North America, Israel Action Network, and Jewish Council for Public Affairs, “How to Talk about Israel,” January 2015, https://my.hadassah.org/myhadassah/resource-files/zionist-education/additional-programs/final-how-to-talk-about-israel-1222015.pdf.

  117. 117. Institute by Reut and Anti-Defamation League, “Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy,” 18–21.

  118. 118. Anti-Defamation League Central Pacific, “Public Briefing on Ethnic Studies.”

  119. 119. Anti-Defamation League Central Pacific, “Public Briefing on Ethnic Studies.”

  120. 120. Federal IHRA bills were first proposed in 2016 and an expanding set of state bills has followed. Campaigns to have institutions adopt the definition have run alongside the legislative campaigns. The Foundation for Middle East Peace maintains a database of these legislative campaigns. “Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom”; “Defining Criticism of Israel as Antisemitism,” Foundation for Middle East Peace, accessed September 8, 2023. https://lawfare.fmep.org/resources/defining-criticism-of-israel-as-antisemitism/.

  121. 121. Coalition for Civil Freedoms et al., “The Terror Trap: The Impact of the War on Terror on Muslim Communities Since 9/11,” 2021, 56–61, available at Bridge Initiative, https://bridge.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/THE-TERROR-TRAP-FINAL.pdf.

  122. 122. Alex Kane and Sam Levin, “Internal ADL Memo Recommended Ending Police Delegations to Israel amid Backlash,” Jewish Currents, March 17, 2022, https://jewishcurrents.org/scoop-internal-adl-memo-recommended-ending-police-delegations-to-israel-amid-backlash.

  123. 123. “Open Letter to Progressives: The ADL Is Not an Ally,” #DropTheADL, accessed September 21, 2022, https://droptheadl.org/.

  124. 124. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 30.

  125. 125. Coalition for Civil Freedoms et al., “Terror Trap,” 56; Emmanuel Mauleón, “It’s Time to Put CVE to Bed,” Just Security, November 2, 2018, https://www.justsecurity.org/61332/its-time-put-cve-bed/; “What Is ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ (CVE)?,” Muslim Justice League, November 9, 2015, https://muslimjusticeleague.org/cve/.

  126. 126. “Domestic Violent Extremism” is an ideological classification. Antiterror programming has been called Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP). Coalition for Civil Freedoms et al., “Terror Trap,” 56; Mauleón, “It’s Time to Put CVE to Bed”; “What Is ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ (CVE)?”

  127. 127. Federal Bureau of Investigation Department of Homeland Security, “Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism,” May 2021.

  128. 128. Nicole Nguyen and Yazan Zahzah, “Why Treating White Supremacy as Domestic Terrorism Won’t Work and How to Not Fall for It: A Toolkit for Social Justice Advocates,” 2020, 9, available at StopCVE National Coalition, http://www.stopcve.com/uploads/1/1/2/4/112447985/white_supremacy_toolkit__4_.pdf.

  129. 129. “Open Letter to Progressives.”

Essays
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