White Supremacy and Zionism at UCLA’s Medical School

Introduction

In April of 2024, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), students protesting the university’s investments in Israel and the university’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians were brutally attacked by a mob of counterprotestors. The attackers carried Israeli flags, called for a second Nakba (referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and using the Arabic word for “catastrophe”), and assaulted students with sticks, stones, poles, metal fencing, and pepper spray.1 Of all the slogans and chants of the counterprotesters, none was more disturbing than the chant of the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, who joined the crowds waving Israeli flags and chanted, “Let’s finish what Hitler started.”2 The alliance between a well-known white supremacist group and Israeli flag-waving counterprotesters seemed uncanny at the time. The Proud Boys are not known to be allies of Jews, whom they have routinely attacked, and if the attack on Jews was the intent—“finishing what Hitler started”—the Proud Boys could not have known that among the students in the encampment were many Jewish students protesting the genocide. Although an alliance between the far right and Zionists is not new—Israel has pursued such a connection and in February 2025 Israel’s ruling party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined Patriots for Europe, Europe’s third-largest far-right group in the European parliament as an observer member—the connection, cemented by a shared anti-Muslim racism, is not one that is openly acknowledged in all corners of the university.3

If the “uncanny”—the “strangely familiar” and the “disturbing”—describes the alliance between a card-carrying white supremacist group and Jewish Zionists, the “familiar” or “commonplace” describes the connections between those who wish to maintain the university as white space and those who engage in the repression of speech and scholarly dissent on the question of Palestine. The two goals—maintaining the university as white space and repressing speech on Palestine—are meshed, and at UCLA as elsewhere, the concrete impact of both is the protection of white property interests. To achieve this outcome, spectacular violence (“finish what Hitler started”) joins with suspended violence, the violence Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir describe for the Israeli state as the violence that “forbids, deters, and delays, complicates simple actions, undermines preferences, undercuts daily schedules, drives people crazy and sometimes even kills.”4 The encampment at UCLA, where spectacular violence against the students came not only from pro-Israel demonstrators but also from police, was both preceded and followed by the suspended violence of punishing the speech of those speaking against anti-Black racism and against the genocide of Palestinians. Contemplating the speech of the Proud Boys in tandem with the suspended violence of censorship, limitations on academic freedom, and the punishment of dissent, it is worthwhile to recall that “when we grant to racism an ideological exceptionality, we uncouple it from Western Imperialism.”5 So too, when we uncouple spectacular violence from suspended violence, we fail to see white supremacy as structural and how each form of violence preserves the structure intact. Most of all, we fail to see the university as a space long dedicated to the racial and genocidal logics of empire and capital accumulation, a space that Zionists have successfully commandeered.

This article examines the connections between white supremacist politics and Zionist politics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (DGSOM). It is based on the data obtained by the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, of which I am a cochair.6 The task force produced three reports on the racism and violence directed at Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs and against anyone expressing any level of support for Palestinian human rights.7 By the time the task force issued its third report, Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Medical School, UCLA, one thing had become glaringly obvious: At UCLA, there are deep connections between anti-DEI and anti-Black politics and the repression of speech and the curtailment of academic freedom on the subject of Palestine.8 A white supremacist politics, where the protection of white property interests (in the form of access to the professions and to education) is paramount, has made serious inroads in the university. Its manifestation as a Zionist politics provides this deeply white supremacist thrust with a liberal veneer, coating the assault on Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and anyone in solidarity with them as necessary and justified in the wake of a rising antisemitism, understood principally as criticism of Israel. Those who accept the argument that antisemitism is rife (and not merely present, as it surely is) on college campuses, make common cause with this right-wing and white supremacist agenda. Paradoxically, it is in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion that Zionists wish to center attention on the Holocaust and on Jewish life. From this perspective, white Jews, whose collective economic status surpasses all groups of color, including Asians (who sometimes join in this politics), are to be considered racial minorities who endure the most virulent racism of any group even as, for the most part, they are privileged economically and politically.9

I discuss these contentions and contradictions at UCLA, focusing on the task force’s third report on Palestinian human rights and the struggle for racial justice in the David Geffen School of Medicine. I argue that the alliance between the far right and Zionists of all political stripes reveals that we should understand the targeting of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims and those in solidarity with them on college campuses as white supremacist politics through and through. Such a politics legitimizes the genocide of Palestinians on the grounds that Palestinians are outside of the realm of humanity, and it preserves the university as a space that only white people can access. Crucially, when access to the professions and to education is controlled, dissent is suppressed, and academic freedom is curtailed, the university becomes a place where critical thinking is absent, a place that upholds white supremacy and contributes to Israeli apartheid and the genocide of Palestinians.

In line with scholars who examine “the imperial university,” and who note that “higher education is firmly embedded in global structures of repression, militarism and neoliberalism,” I propose that when we examine the minutiae of the policing of anti-imperial knowledge production, the restriction of access to public higher education, and the ongoing repression of scholarly dissent at UCLA, we see that in these maneuvers the university remains dedicated to the imperial state.10 What is at stake for all of us goes well beyond the issue of academic freedom. In essence, as Vijay Prashad puts it, “campus democracy needs to be understood on a far greater canvass than in terms of ‘academic freedom. We have to be alert to the fact that it is this narrow notion of democracy (academic freedom) that allows our intellectual institutions to get away with a great deal of undemocratic activity.’”11

In what follows, I begin with Zionism as racism showing how Jewish supremacy requires the elimination of the Muslim/Arab, a racial logic of replacement and annihilation that it shares with white supremacists. I then turn to UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, where racial politics meets Zionist politics, resulting in the dismantling of curriculum on structural racism (a move akin to the attacks on critical race theory), the punishment of speech in defense of Palestinian rights, and the harassment of Black faculty. In the conclusion, I consider that when the linchpin of the connection between Zionist politics and racial politics is that Jews are the most (and sometimes the only) imperiled minority, it becomes necessary to deny that there is any racism against Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and those associated with the defense of Palestinian rights. A vigorous lawfare then ensues that seeks to establish that antisemitism, defined principally as criticism of Israel, is the only racism in the university.

Zionism as Racism

Race is foundational to the logic and structure of Zionism. As scholars show, the nineteenth-century European political ideology of Zionism exhibits both an antisemitic and a racist base when it underwrites a politics of racial respectability, as it has from its inception, casting some Jews (often described as “ghetto Jews”) and all Arabs as insufficiently modern, the latter considered to be deserving of annihilation. In declaring that “racism is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler state, nor is it an accidental, passing feature of the Israeli scene. It is congenital, essential, and permanent,” the Palestinian scholar Fayez A. Sayegh explains that Zionist colonization of Palestine is premised on the idea that the land belongs to Jews only. Unlike European colonization elsewhere, Zionist colonization was “essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country.”12 Ineluctably racial and imperial, the declaration of Palestine as a land for Jews rests on the bedrock of Jewish supremacy and Palestinian removal from Palestine. Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer and politician murdered by Israel in 1972, in his study of Zionist novels shows that, from the middle of the nineteenth century leading up to the first Zionist congress in 1897, a specific class of Jews, including Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, made the argument that as “God’s chosen people,” and a pure race, Jews could nevertheless not be integrated into Europe. As Daniel Boyarin shows, for Herzl, Jewish men had to transcend the heritage of the “ghetto Jew” and develop a European masculinity in order to survive.13 Kanafani concludes, “The Zionist writer must justify non-integration in the societies from which he came, and simultaneously justify the violent uprooting of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants. Such justifications in art are bound to expose the racist and fascist essence of the Zionist movement.”14 The Jewish supremacist mythologies of Zionism travel affectively along anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racist rails, making the case for Jewish entitlement to the land (often on the basis of the narratives of the Old Testament and on the basis of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust) and, simultaneously, on the basis that Arabs do not deserve a country and do not deserve to live.15 Kanafani shows the connection between novels, newspapers, the Nakba, and the 1967 Israeli takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, showing, as Steven Salaita notes in the introduction to the English translation of Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature, the importance of narrative in authorizing state violence.16

Despite Zionist insistence on the right of Jews to settle Palestine, and to dispossess the native inhabitants of Palestine, there was, and is, widespread international agreement that Zionism is racism. Canvassing this history is instructive. On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted Resolution 3379, determining that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.17 At the UN conference held in Mexico City from June 19 to July 2, 1975, the United Nations had earlier promulgated the principle that “international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination.”18 Resolution 3379 was revoked shortly after the Gulf War in December 1991.19 As then–President George H. W. Bush, who introduced the motion to revoke Resolution 3379, declared, “To equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations.”

Notwithstanding American and European support for Israel, in its relatively short life Resolution 3379 had many defenders. In order to provide an opportunity for a careful study of Zionism, for example, five hundred scholars from eighty countries convened in Tripoli in July 1976. Conference attendees formed the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and published several of the papers and presentations. Symposium attendees carefully laid out the racist contours of Zionism, noting that a system based on considering Palestinians as a nonpeople and as nonpersons is one that is committed to genocide. Attentive to the fact that Zionism, while clearly a European colonial movement, has the distinctive feature of creating a state for Jews only, casting Indigenous inhabitants as uncivilized tribes and nomads who had to be evicted from their homeland, presenters showed in detail how Palestinians had been driven out of their homes, while those who remained were treated as racially inferior and absorbed in a net of “juridical racism.”20

The 1976 symposium and the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination are indicators of the scholarly consensus that Zionism is a form of racism but also are reminders of the condemnation that scholars who are critical of Zionism attract for their critical scholarship. The majority of the symposium’s attendees came from countries that opposed Resolution 3379, and they, among whom were many Jews, were censored for their views in their home countries and accused of antisemitism in what one symposium attendee described as a highly organized propaganda campaign directed at Western Europeans and North Americans.21 As the symposium attendees declared, “Nothing is more dishonest than the slogan, unleashed by the United States and Israel as the principal weapon in their campaign against the decision of the United Nations [Resolution 3379] that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This dishonest slogan is predicated on the false equation of Judaism with Zionism, and the equally false equation of Jews with Zionists.”22

Today, those calling for an end to the genocide of Palestinians face the same censure as did the symposium’s attendees in 1976 and are met with the same dishonest slogan. To maintain that Zionism is racism is to incur the full force of condemnation both on official levels and informally, with a vigorous online and legal harassment of critics of Zionism in play. Not coincidentally, suppressing any discussion of Zionism as racism through the weaponization of antisemitism comes at a time when, as Shaira Vadasaria observes, the annihilation of Palestinians now taking place in Gaza reveals for all to see “the naked material and discursive force of race.”23 From the statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to those of the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, and to military, judicial, and civil society voices all calling for the annihilation of Palestinians as “the seed of Amalek” (a reference to the biblical narrative of the Amalek as the archetypical enemies of the Israelites who must be annihilated), there can be little doubt that the Zionist state is founded on the premise that Palestinians, as subhumanity, must be wiped out and their lands taken if a Jewish state is to prevail in the Middle East. As Atalia Omer argues, a literal reading of Amalek narratives in the Bible amounts to a license for genocide, a call for the extermination of the enemies of the Israelites.24 Importantly, she adds that fidelity to such a literal and genocidal biblical narrative is not simply, as many have assumed, a recent religious reactionary shift in Israeli culture but instead consistent with the secular colonization of Palestine and the imperative to violently cleanse the land of its Palestinian inhabitants, a Judaization of the land that makes the ethnonational state a political reality.25 Put another way, the theological basis to the annihilation of Palestinians gains coherence because it is told as a manifestly civilizational/racial story involving the annihilation of a supposedly barbaric culture by one that is to be considered more civilized and European. As Edward Said points out in The Question of Palestine, the argument that turns colonial dispossession of a people into a story of an empty land awaiting European improvement draws on “the picture of a handful of Europeans hewing a civilization of sweetness and light out of the Black Islamic Sea.”26

The political connection between Zionists and white supremacists in the United States is not a new phenomenon. In 2017, shortly after the Charlottesville rally of white supremacist groups in Virginia, Nada Elia, commenting on a Confederate flag flying alongside an Israeli flag in an apartment window in Manhattan’s East Village, observed that “the reasoning behind the linking of the two symbols—white supremacy and Zionism—is far from torturous. . . . Both represent a desire to establish and maintain a homogenous society that posits itself as superior, more advanced, more civilized than ‘others’ who are, unfortunately, within its midst a ‘demographic threat’ to be contained through border walls and stricter immigration law.” Recalling that Richard B. Spencer, the de facto leader of the alt-right supremacist movement in the United States, considered himself a white Zionist since his desire for a homeland exclusively for white people could be compared to the Zionist desire for a homeland for Jews only, Elia concluded, “White supremacy and Zionism are birds of a feather, whose flags can and do fly together.”27 We see related connections when Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League maintains that “there is a throughline from Occupy Wall Street to BLM [Black Lives Matter] to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea.’” Proclaiming that “they are the same people, these are the same kind of nihilists,” he unabashedly declares that Jews stand with capitalist and racist interests.28

Given the intrinsic raciality of Zionism, where whiteness/Europeanness is protected through the elimination of the supposedly barbaric Muslim/Arab, that Zionist politics shares common ground with the politics of white supremacy in the university should not surprise us. Yet the field where they meet, the repression of speech and the curtailment of academic freedom on the subject of Palestine, is uneven terrain, the ground full of potholes of contradictions and illogic and characterized by the “all-over-the-placeness” of racism that Ghassan Hage correctly describes.29 It is a field where nothing has to make sense, where Jews are described as a people who can never be oppressors, only oppressed, a unique position of innocence that no amount of assimilation into a white majority culture can weaken.30 Jewish racial dominance becomes an impossibility, writes Sheryl Nestel, when the history of the Holocaust is invoked. Paradoxically, as Nestel suggests, the transition of European Jews to racial respectability is a whitening accomplished primarily through the association of Jews with Zionism. The settler colonial project of occupying Palestine and dispossessing Palestinians—a people cast as murderous, as culturally and biologically inferior, as Muslim, and as an existential threat to Jews—transformed Jews from a people with a long and peaceful history of Jewish life in Islamic countries into a people who “represent all that is good about the West,” a people who are “a whitened model minority.”31 If Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish supremacist state is to be maintained, defenders of Israel as it is currently constituted must stress the civilizational and racial difference between Jews and Palestinians (always called “Arabs” by Zionists). As Joseph Massad puts it, Jews must be seen as “white Europeans defending white European values and civilization against the primitive Arab hordes.”32 The terrain that is shared by Zionists and white supremacists is therefore a long-standing arrangement, one that secures a place for Jews in whiteness, a place that is nevertheless always provisional, as a century of European antisemitism amply demonstrates.

Racial Politics Meets Zionist Politics at the David Geffen School of Medicine

UCLA has a long history of race-based discrimination against nonwhite people, and specifically against Black people. The campus’s racial climate became the subject of formal concern in 2012 when racist actions targeting Christian Head, a Black professor of medicine, highlighted anti-Black racism in the medical school. In 2013, the Moreno Committee, chaired by retired California Supreme Court Justice Carlos R. Moreno, issued recommendations to address race discrimination at UCLA, developing a comprehensive approach to “faculty equity, diversity, and inclusion.”33 It is not surprising that racial politics should surface at the DGSOM, as they have in medical schools throughout the United States since at least the 1970s. The prized possession of a medical degree led white applicants like Allan Bakke, a white male, to claim in 1974 that he was denied entrance into the UC Davis medical school in both 1973 and 1974 on the basis of race because four special admissions slots were reserved for applicants belonging to minority racial classifications. Those four slots were filled by applicants with lower scores than Bakke.34 The landmark Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in support of Bakke effectively halted affirmative action in college admissions in California.35

The defense of white European values and civilization thus comes to the university dressed, in the first instance, as the protection of university space for white people and in the name of merit and equal protection of the law absent the historical and present-day context of white domination and Black insubordination.36 The Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action programs in Bakke promulgated the idea that any effort to redress racial inequality constituted reverse discrimination against white people, who should not be made to bear the burden of dismantling the effects of racial inequality. Since Bakke, individuals and groups who oppose any consideration of race in the medical school admissions process, however slight, and in medical education more generally, continued their campaign, turning their attention to what are commonly termed “DEI measures” in medical schools and often maintaining that supposedly innocent white people should not have to pay for what their ancestors did. These anti-DEI campaigns allege that medical schools who admit nonwhite students show a decline in standards, unproven racist allegations that then open the way for a reconsideration of the admissions process and the curriculum. An anti-DEI politics continues the protection of white property interests not only through actively blocking the entrance of nonwhite people into the university but also through the idea that justice-oriented scholarship is political scholarship that should have no place in the medical school or elsewhere in the university. The political, Steven Salaita reminds us, is deemed to be any scholarship that “threatens the preponderance of state power” and the power of elites to claim the university for their exclusive use.37

Zionists join the anti-affirmative action, anti-DEI campaign in disparate and contradictory ways, but chief among them is the idea that anti-Zionist scholarship is political scholarship that is deeply antisemitic. At first glance, the weaponization of antisemitism in this manner would seem to contradict the claim that health care must be protected from the “disastrous consequences of identity politics,” as proponents of anti-affirmative action and anti-DEI measures put it.38 It could be assumed that anyone concerned with antisemitism is also someone engaging in identity politics in the same manner as antiracists are generally criticized as doing. Further, those who protest that white people are losing out to racial minorities have often discriminated against Jews; for example, medical schools in both Canada and the United States practiced discrimination against Jews until the 1960s.39 What then serves to reconcile these historically conflicting interests? One answer can be found be in the campaigns waged by outside groups who oppose measures aimed at diversifying medical schools and the medical school curriculum itself and who also maintain that medical schools are antisemitic. In one such campaign by the group Do No Harm, what undergirds an apparently disparate set of claims—anti-DEI, opposition to gender-affirming care, and the claim that DEI breeds antisemitism—is a confusing but nonetheless strident claim to the university as white/imperial space that must be fortified against the intrusion of those deemed to be usurpers of that space.40

In May 2025, the organization Do No Harm filed a class action complaint against the David Geffen School of Medicine alleging that the school had engaged in a race-based admissions policy by conducting a holistic review of applicants and by requiring applicants to take an exam that measures their cultural awareness, cultural humility, empathy and compassion, and interpersonal skills.41 Maintaining that such skills-testing amounts to discrimination against white applicants (though it is not clear how) and considers skills that are nonacademic, the lawsuit alleges that the exam was created by various “diversity affairs officers from various medical schools” with the aim of leveling the playing field for applicants deemed historically underrepresented in medicine. The exam is said to give nonwhite people an unfair advantage, and the lawsuit alleges that UCLA routinely admitted Black applicants with lower GPAs and MCAT scores than white or Asian applicants. Notably, in January 2026, the United States Department of Justice sought to join the lawsuit launched by Do No Harm. As the assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division put it, “This invidious racism [referring to racism against white people] not only violates the U.S. Constitution, but stigmatizes minority applicants as less qualified, and causes the medical school to admit applicants who are substantially less qualified to become medical doctors.”42

Do No Harm attacks medical schools across the United States on the basis that they are both antiwhite and antisemitic. As a medical and policy advocacy group formed in 2022 with a focus on opposing antiracism in health-care education and hiring, Do No Harm trained its eyes on UCLA shortly after the group’s founding.43 The group’s explanation for why DEI amounts to discrimination against white people and against Jews was soon taken up by DGSOM faculty who express a pro-Israel stance and specifically by faculty associated with the pro-Israel Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG).44 These collaborations and politics are useful for illustrating the nexus between the politics of anti-Blackness, an anti-DEI politics, and an anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racism.45

The road that Do No Harm travels—from counteracting supposedly divisive trends in medicine such as DEI and “youth-focused gender ideology” (the latter expressed as opposition to gender-affirming care) to the position that DEI breeds antisemitism—is a confusing one, illustrating what I describe elsewhere as the incoherence and miasma that surround the figures of the Muslim and the Black who inhabit places in law where nothing has to make sense.46 DEI is first condemned as a policy that results in white applicants not receiving scholarships or entrance to medical programs, applicants who are seen as presumptively entitled to admission. Any measure deemed “DEI,” however minor, is vilified and is considered as denying white people their due. Lawsuits aim to drive this point home. For example, on January 10, 2024, Do No Harm filed a lawsuit against the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians for offering a $1,250 “diversity” scholarship for educational materials, a scholarship from which white applicants are excluded.47 The Do No Harm position that DEI not only denies white people their due but also breeds antisemitism is fully articulated, if confusingly so, by the physician Sheldon Rubenfeld, a clinical professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. In a Do No Harm podcast episode moderated by Marilyn Singleton and Do No Harm founder Stanley Goldfarb, Rubenfeld was introduced as follows: “He discusses how his long-standing elective, Healing by Killing: Medicine During the Third Reich, was canceled in the face of antisemitic backlash. Then, just two months after the October Hamas terrorist attacks, Dr. Rubenfield’s scheduled lecture on antisemitism in medicine was canceled by school officials. Now, Dr. Rubenfeld is bravely confronting what most of his colleagues refuse to admit: That diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies breed antisemitism in medicine.”48 (The cancellation in question appears to be because there were complaints that Rubenfeld made racist remarks about Palestinians.)

Rubenfeld’s remarks about the prevalence of antisemitism in medical schools relies on his edited collection on medicine during the Third Reich.49 In a speech delivered at Georgetown University for Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2025, Rubenfeld elaborated that the Nazi regime took “the Judeo-Christian Hippocratic doctor-patient relationship and transformed it into a secular state-Volkskörper relationship.”50 The Nazi regime was committed to the idea of the purity of the Germanic race, and it practiced a policy of eugenics, from sterilization and euthanasia to the killing of Jews. From this historical fact, Rubenfeld argues that the inclusion of politics in the medical field, such as happened in Nazi Germany, takes us to the kind of consequences we know—namely, the Holocaust. The only remedy, then, is to take the politics out of medicine and to purge medical schools and medicine of any attention to race, the main goal of Do No Harm. Confusingly, Rubenfeld’s advises that medical schools drop what he calls “German scientific medical education,” which he describes as “very short in humanities, very short on history and very heavily intense on science.”51 A course on racial injustice apparently fits the bill only if it refers to the Holocaust and not to the history of slavery and anti-Black racism. Additionally, for Rubenfeld, medical students who receive any kind of “anti-bias training” create difficulties for Jewish students because DEI training, in his view, regards Jews as white and emphasizes their belonging to an oppressor class, an allegation that occurs frequently in Zionist discourses in the medical school. Alleging that “bias training” seldom mentions antisemitism, Rubenfeld adds what he considers to be the related point that anti-Zionist protests have been intensely antisemitic.52 On the podcast, Rubenfeld offers listeners the building blocks of the simple logic of his argument that DEI promotes antisemitism: Nazis followed a party line; DEI advocates follow a party line; Nazis classified people by race; DEI classifies people by race; Jews are included in the category of white people and are considered oppressors; DEI promotes antisemitism. The solution has to be to abandon DEI and racial categories altogether.53 A popular version of this reasoning, as expressed by a writer in the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston, is that DEI should be dismantled precisely because of its apparent reliance on the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy and its refusal to celebrate the success of Jews.54

In taking on UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, Do No Harm maintains that DEI at UCLA stokes hatred against Jewish people and does so primarily through the School of Medicine’s antiracism curriculum, the Structural Racism and Health Equity (SRHE) course, which was the result of a decade of struggle and was only obtained after the Black Lives Matter protests about the murder of George Floyd by police.55 Citing the opinions of select faculty at the School of Medicine, Do No Harm concludes that the SRHE course blames Jewish people for racism. DEI at DGSOM is said to be antisemitic because it relies on critical race theory (CRT) that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed. Because DEI is said to always lump Jewish people in with the oppressors (as white), Do No Harm concludes: “For diehard DEI advocates, anti-Semitism isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.”56 Torturous as the reasoning is, the perceived nexus between CRT, DEI, and antisemitism has resulted in successful attacks on medical education beginning with a course on structural racism, as I show below.

The Structural Racism and Health Equity Course

For those who fought for medical education to include attention to racial injustice and health inequities, the challenge was to shift the medical school curriculum from one that paid little attention to the social determinants of health to education that recognized the harm that medicine has caused and the manner in which medicine was “presently violent” toward minorities.57 A liberatory curriculum required attention to the racialized exclusion of low-income patients from UCLA academic hospitals and a sustained effort to equip medical students with the tools needed to care for their patients holistically. To do so, medical education had to be aligned with racial justice struggles and had to be accountable to the communities they served. As the organizers of the SRHE course put it, graduating students of the course “should leave with answers to the questions ‘who are [my] patients and what structures and history have shaped their experiences, their vulnerability and their power?’”58 Pedagogically, this approach to medical education entailed guest speakers from marginalized communities and curricula that took seriously what the organizers referred to as “the particularities of place.” Physicians could not serve their patients without understanding that Los Angeles, then as now, is made up of communities repeatedly under attack from deportation raids on immigrant communities, for example, and that the city has a long history of racial unrest. Without attention to structural injustice and the specific histories of the place where they practice medicine, medical students could not learn about the oppressive structures in which medicine was embedded.

In rejecting the alignment of medical education with racial justice struggles, critics of the SRHE course maintain that medical students have too little time for the twenty hours per year of the proposed liberatory curriculum. If time is the issue, content and pedagogical approaches became even more so as the course adopted what is widely known in antiracist education as a pedagogy of discomfort, where learners consider their own privilege and how to critically analyze structures of power in which they are embedded.59 Two examples in the course’s early history detailed in the task force’s third report reveal how opposition to the SRHE course early on took the form of allegations of antisemitism. In 2021, when the course discussed the power of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries and displayed a cartoon of the industry extracting dollars from a patient’s body, a student in the class complained that the cartoon was antisemitic (presumably because the cartoon depicted a patient in a manner seen as reminiscent of the stereotype of Jews as rich).60 In a second incident in 2022, a guest lecturer in the class discussed the policies of former Los Angeles sheriff Sherman Block (a sheriff during the Rodney King uprising whose practices were widely criticized as racist) in order to highlight his mismanagement, corruption, and racism against Black and Brown Los Angeles citizens. A student (reportedly the same student as in 2021) once again complained that the guest speaker’s criticism of Block was antisemitic since Sherman Block was Jewish.61 When it becomes antisemitic to criticize individuals for their racism, the corollary is that individuals who are Jewish, and the state of Israel, cannot ever be criticized, either for racism or for genocide. Further, antisemitism becomes the only racism.

As complaints of antisemitism in the SRHE course were brought to the attention of administrators (and typically by the same student, as interviewees told the task force), a companion strategy to discredit both the course and Black instructors took shape involving outside groups and right-wing media, prolonging the shelf life of these initial targeting incidents. In 2022, a Black faculty member of the SRHE course was criticized and harassed online for a lecture she gave on race and racism in the fall of 2021. The instructor had shared a slide that discussed the social construct of race and noted how groups such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews have been both dissociated and associated with whiteness.62 The targeting in 2022 was later recirculated in 2024 by faculty member Nir Hoftman, who used the example to broadcast on Israeli media a narrative about rising antisemitism at UCLA as illustrated in an illegal video clip obtained in the 2022 lecture on race and racism.63 The Israeli broadcast led to further online harassment of the Black faculty member, a harassment strategy the task force discusses at length in the third report.64 In Los Angeles on September 15, 2024, Hoftman explained at an event of the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group that antisemitism had reached such proportions at UCLA that Jews in the medical school felt deeply imperiled. His example was once again the SRHE course at UCLA where, in his view, Jews were named as white oppressors, causing distress among Jewish students and resulting in a decline in general knowledge about Jews altogether in the medical school curriculum.65 (This allegation is repeated almost verbatim by the House Committee on Education and Workforce in its investigation of UCLA for antisemitism, announced in August of 2025.)66

An array of outside right-wing groups and media have circulated the allegations that the SRHE course is antisemitic. The task force documented the following pattern: An anonymous complaint against the SRHE course by one student or faculty closely allied with JFRG triggers online harassment that travels the rails to outside groups such as Do No Harm and Physicians Against Antisemitism, as well as to right-wing media such as The Daily Wire, Fox News, The New York Post, and The Washington Free Beacon (the latter published a significant percentage of the stories defaming Black faculty and its chair is Michael Goldfarb, son of Stanley Goldfarb, founder of Do No Harm).67 JFRG posts the video on its website. Internally, this then leads to instructors of the SRHE course being called upon by administration to address issues of alleged antisemitism and to have their competence to teach the course questioned by medical faculty who are not experts in the study of race.

As the task force documented, the pattern of mediatized spectacles continued throughout the course’s tenure, erupting again when the course utilized a pedagogy widely in use in antiracist education, a racial caucusing exercise—a small group exercise where students are invited to discuss, in racial groups to which they self-identify, their own experiences of race. Right-wing news outlets soon affixed the charge of antisemitism to the course and once again singled out the Black faculty member. The editor of one of these media outlets, Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire, who posted on Twitter (X) that the course was antiwhite and anti-American, noted that he had been given documents about the class by Do No Harm. Shapiro, who has previously made public statements about homosexuality as a mental illness and who discussed General Colin Powell as an affirmative action case, was invited to UCLA to give a lecture on October 24, 2024, where he reiterated his claims about the undue influence exercised by left-leaning professors.68

In March of 2024, when another mediatized spectacle erupted over an invited speaker to the SRHE course who ended her talk on unhoused people with “Free Palestine,” the SRHE course was “paused” by administration and guest speakers were no longer permitted. If this final mediatized spectacle reveals that racial and class equality and support for Palestinian human rights are all deemed topics that do not belong in the medical school curriculum, the tactics resulting in the course’s cancellation offer an example of how speech is repressed and academic freedom is curtailed in pro-Israel discourses. In a familiar pattern, as the task force documents, a student illegally records the session and the illegal recording is then shared widely, mischaracterizing and disparaging the speaker’s request to share prayers and intentions for Mother Earth.69 Members of JFRG responded to the recording characterizing the class as “cult-like indoctrination” and announced their intention to write to the dean and to the Faculty Executive Committee condemning the SRHE course.70 Harassment of SRHE instructors followed, with the course’s Black faculty member once again receiving the lion’s share of attention online. At a meeting of California Regents on April 10, 2024, JFRG members shared false statements about the course and the instructor and promoted an extremist and conservative anti-DEI political agenda.71

Complaints that the SRHE course is antisemitic prompted extensive administrative oversight. Before being canceled altogether, instructors were told by the administration to focus more on “Jewish life” and on antisemitism.72 They were urged to use politically neutral language; administrators even questioned the use of the word oppression in lectures. Relatedly, content on Palestine elsewhere in the curriculum was immediately sanctioned as, for example, in the cancellation of a global health seminar on Palestinian access to health care. Syllabi and slides are subjected to oversight, a direct infringement on academic freedom. Even the most tangential reference to settler colonialism comes in for scrutiny, as when a course reading identified a connection between settler colonialism in North America and Israeli settler colonialism, prompting administrative interference in the curriculum to an unprecedented extent.73 In May, 2024, in response to what he termed “rumors” about a drop in standards, the dean of the medical school announced the creation of a new task force to review the curriculum. Although no one on the task force on curriculum matters held an expertise in antiracist education, they recommended a curtailment of the SRHE course in the name of improving standards in medical education.

Occasionally, efforts to purge the curriculum of attention to structural racism come with statements about the need to address both antisemitism and “Islamophobia” and to foster constructive dialogue.74 Although the politics that brings together anti-Blackness, anti-DEI, and anti-Palestinian racism explicitly target what is often referred to as identity politics, a paradoxical effect of insisting that Jews cannot be placed in the category of white oppressors is that they are to be included in the category of a marginalized group, hence a legitimate inclusion in the very DEI politics that is being decried. Thus, sessions on global health disparities are replaced by sessions purporting to foster constructive dialogue between marginalized groups, a dialogue intended as a replacement for a critical discussion of the social and structural determinants of health. Such events at DGSOM have provided an opportunity for speakers on Israel to discuss Jews as marginalized and Palestinians as “terrorists” and to harass students who object to this analysis. Students reported to the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism that in such sessions they are told that racism against Jews is the primary racism and that nothing was said about racism directed at Black people and Palestinians.75 Curricular spaces where racial justice and health could be discussed without fear of harassment are disappearing. Students expressed considerable dismay at the institutional acquiescence to the demands of a few that antisemitism, especially in its narrowest frame of criticism of Israel, replace all learning about racism. This outcome brings DGSOM full circle to the previous decade’s history of racism.

As the targeting of students and residents in support of Palestinian human rights increased after October 7, 2023, DGSOM did very little to protect students who are targeted by internal faculty and students and outside groups. One serious way in which the DGSOM and UCLA administration contribute to the repression of speech is by refusing to condemn faculty actions that lead to the doxxing (online harassment) of students and faculty. One example in the third task force report is the failure of the administration to publicly sanction the chair of JFRG, Kira Stein, for making an illegal recording of a lecture by two Arab psychiatry medical residents on the pathologization of various forms of resistance in marginalized communities, including Black communities and communities of minority sexualities.76 The JFRG had complained to upper levels of UCLA administration even before they knew about the content of the lecture, the race of the presenters apparently sufficing to make the case for stopping the lecture. During the lecture, the presenters offered as an example of resistance the case of Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in protest of the genocide in Gaza. The illegal recording made by Stein soon made its way online and led to serious threats against the two medical residents. With little fear of sanction, JFRG even posted the recording on their website. The illegal recording even reached the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, leading to UCLA being condemned and later officially investigated for antisemitism. Although administrators often excuse their inaction by saying that they can do nothing about doxxing, statements that DGSOM community members should not contribute to doxxing and that secret recordings contravene existing codes of conduct were not forthcoming until April 2024, and, to date, there has been no public sanction of Stein for illegally recording a lecture and contravening the faculty code of conduct. In the meantime, targeted students continue to face serious harassment and death threats, damage to their reputations, and innumerable professional and private penalties as doxxing efforts revealing their private information proliferate on the internet. As is the case with doxxing, the penalties continue for time immemorial. When the targeted students receive tweets informing them that they will never get a job in medicine, the threat cannot be taken lightly, given the power of Zionist groups and individuals to circulate such threats without condemnation by university administrations.

Doxxing produces heightened racism in the medical environment and on the wards, with patients refusing to be served by anyone in support of Palestine. In this environment, administrators regularly discipline and threaten students who show support for Palestinian human rights, from threatening the wearers of watermelon pins with discipline to the demand that both faculty and students not speak publicly—for example, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The repression of what is deemed political speech does not extend to those UCLA physicians who spoke at the violent counterprotest in support of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Students who express support for Palestinian rights, and especially those who are themselves Palestinians, face racial discrimination at the hands of their instructors, often by the same instructors who complain that there is a rising antisemitism at UCLA. UCLA has responded poorly to complaints of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism and in one case has actively supported the expulsion of a student from the program for his support for Palestine.77 There is little transparency in how complaints of racism are investigated.

Conclusion

The repression of speech and the curtailment of academic freedom on the subject of Palestine and on the current genocide is white supremacist politics through and through. An anti-DEI politics merges with the weaponization of antisemitism through the allegation that DEI divides the world into oppressor and oppressed and unfairly includes Jews as white and in the category of oppressor. According to this far-right and Zionist politics, there should be no attention paid to racial inequities in the medical school because such a politics leads to the demonization of Jews. As I have shown elsewhere, nothing has to make sense in this type of argument, the incoherence resolved by a parade of racist phantoms such as Palestinians as “terrorists” who do not belong in medical school because they are antisemitic. In short, a circulating racial affect, where threatening racial phantoms must be annihilated, stands in for logic.78 Racism connects the components of the far-right agenda, bringing together those who believe that white people have lost out on their entitlement and those who insist that a virulent antisemitism prevails in medical schools. The alliance has led to the attack on antiracism educational initiatives, specifically to any attention to structural racism, and simultaneously to a profound repression of speech on Palestine and on the genocide. The repression of speech on Palestine comes coated in an apparently more liberal message that to criticize Israel is to criticize Jews, and as victims of the Holocaust, Jewish pain and suffering ranks as the first, and the only, suffering. An inseparable corollary is that it is antisemitic to criticize the state of Israel for its genocidal actions in Gaza.

UCLA has a long history of rejecting the value of Palestinian life and suppressing speech on Palestine. Chancellors from Gene Block to Julio Frenk have refused to acknowledge Palestinian suffering, let alone a genocide, and have spared no effort to highlight Jewish discomfort and to demonize Palestinian voices.79 On March 4 2014, Chancellor Block endorsed a UC-wide report of 2013-13 maintaining that Jewish students faced a hostile environment from Palestinians.80 Faculty were put on notice that they should not raise issues critical of Israel. In 2018, presaging what came to pass in 2025 when Students for Justice in Palestine was sanctioned, Chancellor Block took aim at the National Students for Justice in Palestine when they set out to hold a conference about Israeli military violence and BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions). The chancellor expressed his concern in an op-ed that BDS “demonized the world’s only Jewish state,” and he proposed to address “hate” at UCLA by creating an institute for the study of hate, headed by Jewish studies professor David Myers.81 When Jews are positioned as the most common target of hate (a position adopted by the ADL, for example), then Palestinians are viewed as those most given to hate, and they are soon criminalized.82 Chancellor Frenk followed a similar line when he announced that UCLA was rife with antisemitism and that he would be adopting the recommendations of the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.83 In a meeting on March 12, 2025, with the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, Chancellor Frenk maintained that he would not be publicly acknowledging or responding to the task force reports and recommendations.84 If antisemitism is to be the only racism, then anti-Black, anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racism cannot be acknowledged.

If the whiteness of the Zionist project was from the start apparent, with Europeans believing that it was legitimate to dispossess those whom they regarded as an inferior race, today the calls across Israel for the annihilation of Palestinians, documented painstakingly in South Africa’s dossier on the genocide and by countless others, including Israeli scholars, can only be based on the conviction that Palestinians are subhumans who deserve to be slaughtered because they are imagined to pose a threat to those who have dispossessed them.85 Anti-Palestinian campus politics repeats this racial and genocidal logic, based as it is on the idea that anyone Palestinian, Muslim, or Arab and anyone protesting the genocide deserves to be expelled from the university, denied professional careers, and sanctioned for knowledge production that threatens to unmask white supremacy. Medical schools across the country have been such sites of repression.86 The logic upon which this urge to repress and annihilate rests reveals the shared connection between Zionism and white supremacy. If in the university Jews cannot be criticized for their implication in white supremacy and settler colonialism, on the grounds that it is antisemitic to do so, then such Jews and their defenders preserve white supremacy and enable its lethal and annihilative agendas to be carried out. Remarking that Jews who colonized Palestine did not free themselves from white supremacy or anti-Jewish hate and merely negotiated a different role for themselves in empire, Sim Kern reminds us of the uncanniness of the alliance between white supremacists and Zionists, its disquieting, anxiety-ridden features, and, above all, its confirmation that whiteness is an unstable place for Jews to stand.87

To some, the connection between Zionism and white supremacy is so obvious as to be not worth stating, connections too obvious to write down.88 What, then, can be learned from closely examining the enduring connection between Zionist politics and the politics of white supremacy at the UCLA medical school? We see elites seeking to restrict access to the medical profession and purging the medical school curriculum of opportunities for critical thinking about race and health inequities. We see the lengths to which these same elites will go to support the genocide of Palestinians, suppressing and punishing dissent. We see that when students and faculty call for an end to the genocide and for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the state of Israel and make clear the broader global politics of militarism and racial capitalism on which the genocide is made possible, they are met with violence and intense repression in the name of protecting Jewish students from harassment and intimidation. A singular claim buttresses the attacks—namely, that criticism of Israel is antisemitic no matter how many bombs are dropped on Gaza’s men, women, and children.

In this discursive environment, Palestinians are “dead on arrival” into humanity and in the university, nonhuman and always killable; as the Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian notes, a racial ontology has turned Gaza into a collective graveyard.89 Yet, in this discursive environment, as Mohammed El-Kurd puts it, “we remain ensnared by the psychological cues instilled in us by colonial logic.”90 Principally, the colonial logic of whose lives count and whose lives do not. It is therefore essential to continue to make visible the race line that runs through the genocide of Palestinians: Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs, marked as subhumanity, must be killed so that Jewish supremacy can be realized in Israel. That this race line runs through the university is something we should not forget. There is an abstract quality to the concept of empire and even to the concept of genocide that obscures raciality and contributes to forgetting. When we call for an end to genocide and an end to the imperial university, calls that are not about seeking inclusion but instead about imagining and building another way forward, one that does not demand the death and debilitation of Others, let us remember that the violence we are confronting is a racial violence dedicated to preserving white property interests. At stake is the very notion of who can be a human and whose life is worth preserving.

Postscript: Lawfare

On August 25, 2025, the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Republican member Tim Walberg, informed the dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine that the committee was investigating antisemitism at the medical school. Announcing that the House committee “has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem,” Walberg then offered examples of antisemitism, including the Structural Racism and Health Equity course, and he identified the third report of the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism specifically as having described Jewish faculty concerned about antisemitism as “a vigilante group.” He also identified the Black vice dean of equity, diversity, and inclusion as having cosponsored an event deemed as antisemitic and charged UCLA with having promoted her despite her implication in an event it deemed to be antisemitic.91 The House committee’s investigation of the DGSOM as an “unlawful hostile environment for Jews” contributes to the campaign spearheaded by pro-Israel groups nationwide that criticism of Israel is perforce antisemitic (the definition of antisemitism advanced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) and that protests against the genocide must be criminalized.92 The charge of antisemitism simultaneously contributes to the dismantling of initiatives deemed to be DEI and typically includes targeting Black faculty. In effect, the protection of white property interests and the protection of Israel for genocide come together, inviting us to follow the racial line that each politics shares with the other.

The circuit identified by UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism—where, for example, a DGSOM faculty member circulates the story of the Black faculty member and the SRHE course on right-wing and Israeli media in 2022 and 2024 and the JFRG continues the circulation in 2024, the story then wending its way to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and ultimately to the courts—remains the strategy of Zionist groups both inside and outside the university, a strategy supported by the Department of Justice. On February 24, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that it is suing UCLA for its failure to protect Jewish and Israeli staff and faculty.93 The suit, based partially on the report of the UCLA Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which the chancellor endorsed, includes information obtained from JFRG and features incidents discussed in the third report of UCLA’s Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism. However, what the Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism considers as evidence of racism directed at Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and anyone in support of Palestinian human rights, and what I argue reveals the shared terrain of Zionism and white supremacy at UCLA, is transformed into a story of antisemitism. For example, the professor who gave statements to the press in Israel about the Black faculty member and the SRHE course is cast as the victim of antisemitism because he was allegedly cautioned by the dean of the medical school that he was contributing to a hostile, presumably racial, environment at the medical school.94 The David Geffen School of Medicine is described as “a hotbed of antisemitism” where UCLA medical students were required to attend the SRHE course in which a speaker chanted “Free Palestine” and where students also had to endure Aaron Bushnell’s “tragic act of suicide” being described as “justified martyrdom against Israel.”95 Alleging that Jewish and Israeli UCLA employees have been threatened and subjected to a barrage of antisemitic chants and are made vulnerable by protests against the genocide in Gaza and in the calls for boycotts of Israel and Israeli universities, the lawsuit seeks redress for two Jewish professors who claim to have been subjected to a hostile work environment and requests that UCLA take measures to prevent and correct antisemitic discrimination. If successful, the lawsuit will pave the way for the establishment of antisemitism, defined as criticism of Israel, as the only racism, and it will endorse racist actors who engage in anti-Black, anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racism. The path is also cleared for authoritarian regimes to ensure that the university remains imperial. In effect, two for the price of one.

Sherene H. Razack is distinguished professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books and publications examine settler colonialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and global white supremacy, with a particular focus on the gendered effects of anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, anti-Asian, and anti-Muslim racism as they operate in law. Her two most recent books are Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy Through Anti-Muslim Racism and Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody.

Notes

1. 1. Neil Bedi et al., “How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours,” New York Times, May 3, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/us/ucla-protests-encampment-violence.html.

2. 2. UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, Report of Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab Racism, May 13, 2024, https://uclaracismtaskforce.com/report-1/.

3. 3. Farid Hafez, “Why Israel Is Joining Hands with Europe’s Far Right,” Middle East Eye, February 24, 2026, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-israel-joining-hands-europes-far-right.

4. 4. Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, “The Monster’s Tail,” in Against the Wall, ed. Michael Sorkin (New Press, 2005), 5.

5. 5. Barnor Hesse, “Im/Plausible Deniability: Racism’s Conceptual Double Bind,” Social Identities 10, no. 1 (2004): 9.

6. 6. The task force reports can be found at the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism website (https://uclaracismtaskforce.com). Task force members include Gaye Theresa Johnson (cochair), Robin D. G. Kelley, Saree Makdisi, Sherene Razack (cochair), and Shannon Speed. The task force was convened by Executive Vice-Chancellor Darnell Hunt in November 2024 and charged to report on matters relating to anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racism at UCLA.

7. 7. UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, https://uclaracismtaskforce.com/.

8. 8.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Medical School, UCLA (UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, 2025), https://uclaracismtaskforce.com/palestinian-human-rights-and-the-struggle-for-racial-justice-in-the-medical-school/.

9. 9. Pew Research Center, “Economics and Well-Being Among U.S. Jews,” in Jewish Americans in 2020, May 11, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/economics-and-well-being-among-u-s-jews/. As the writer Sim Kern notes, 92 percent of Jews in the United States identify as non-Hispanic white, and these white Jews have a much higher household income than the average US citizen. Further, 23 percent of US Jews report family incomes of $200,000 or more, compared to 4 percent of all US adults. Jews do not in fact experience structural racism on the level that Black and Brown people face, although their acceptance into whiteness is always provisional. Sim Kern, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation (Interlink Publishing, 2025), 47.

10. 10. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State,” in The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, ed. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 6.

11. 11. Vijay Prashad, “Teaching by Candlelight,” in Chatterjee and Maira, Imperial University, 330.

12. 12. Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965), 21.

13. 13. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct (University of California Press, 1997).

14. 14. Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, trans. Mahmoud Najib (Liberated Texts and Ebb Books, 2022), 68.

15. 15. Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, 83.

16. 16. Steven Salaita, “Introduction to the English Translation,” in Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, xv.

17. 17. G.A. Res. 3379 (XXX), Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Oct. 11, 1975), https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-181963/.

18. 18. G.A. Res. 3379.

19. 19. George Bush, “Address to the 46th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City,” American Presidency Project, September 23, 1991, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-46th-session-the-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york-city.

20. 20. “Declaration of the International Symposium,” in International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Zionism and Racism, 241. See, for example, Walter Lehn, “The Jewish National Fund: An Instrument of Discrimination,” in Zionism and Racism, by International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Billing & Sons, 1977), 99.

21. 21. International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Zionism and Racism, 3–4.

22. 22. International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Zionism and Racism, 242.

23. 23. Shaira Vadasaria, “The Racial Question of Palestine and the Question of Anti-Racism in Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 54, no. 1 (2025): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2025.2488782.

24. 24. Atalia Omer, “Turning Palestine into a Terra Nullius: On Amalek and ‘Miracles,’ ” Journal of Genocide Research 28, no. 2 (2026): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2504737.

25. 25. Omer cites the following source for an analysis of the reliance of “secular” Zionism in Palestine on a biblical grammar: Nadim Rouhana, “Religious Claims and Nationalism in Zionism: Obscuring Settler Colonialism,” in When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, ed. Nadim Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 54–87 (Omer, “Turning Palestine into a Terra Nullius,” n28). Notably, Omer points out that settler colonial regimes such as the United States and Canada have also drawn on religious narratives to authorize the destruction of Indigenous peoples.

26. 26. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (Vintage Books, 1992), 25.

27. 27. Nada Elia, “Birds of a Feather: White Supremacy and Zionism,” Middle East Eye, August 24, 2017, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/birds-feather-white-supremacy-and-zionism.

28. 28. Quoted in Arno Rosenfeld and Jacob Kornbluh, “Exclusive: ADL Chief Compares Student Protesters to ISIS and al-Qaida in Address to Republican Officials,” Forward, June 6, 2025, https://forward.com/news/726133/greenblatt-adl-protesters-terrorists/.

29. 29. Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Polity Press, 2017), 9.

30. 30. Razack, Nothing Has to Make Sense.

31. 31. Sheryl Nestel, “Zionist Loyalty and Canadian Jewish Whiteness: Untangling the Threads of a Lethal Complicity,” in Advocating Palestine in Canada: History, Movements, Action, ed. Emily Regan Wills, Jeremy Wildman, Michael Bueckert, and Nadia Abu-Zahra (Fernwood Press, 2022), 55.

32. 32. Joseph Massad, “The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle,” Interventions 5, no. 3 (2003): 449.

33. 33.Final Report: Moreno Recommendations Implementation Committee (University of California, Los Angeles, 2021), https://ucla.app.box.com/s/j286jtajiuh7egrayxz0dwdor7rrrl3g.

34. 34. Regents of Univ. of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/438/265/.

35. 35. It is often forgotten that while the court ruled that race could not be a factor in the admissions process, it agreed that the goal of maintaining the number of physicians willing to serve minority groups was a compelling state interest.

36. 36. For a full discussion of Bakke and for a pathbreaking analysis of whiteness as property, see Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1710–91.

37. 37. Steven Salaita, “Normalizing State Power: Uncritical Ethical Praxis and Zionism,” in Chatterjee and Maira, Imperial University, 228–29.

38. 38. Do No Harm, “About Us,” https://donoharmmedicine.org/about/.

39. 39. For the Canadian context, see Judy Haiven, Another Ruined Dinner Party (blog), October 30, 2024, https://judyhaiven.ca/2024/10/30/systemic-discrimination-then-and-now/. For the American context, see Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920–1955,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56, no. 2 (2001): 140–67.

40. 40. Do No Harm, “About Us.”

41. 41. Do No Harm et al. v. David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA et al., case no. 2.23-cv-4131 (2025), https://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/cacdce/2:2025cv04131/969567.

42. 42. Josephine Murphy, “DOJ Seeks to Join Lawsuit Against David Geffen School of Medicine,” Daily Bruin, January 28, 2026, https://dailybruin.com/2026/01/28/doj-seeks-to-join-lawsuit-against-david-geffen-school-of-medicine.

43. 43. Katie Balevic, “Do No Harm, a Group of ‘Medical Professionals’ Fighting ‘Woke Healthcare,’ Is Behind Many Anti-Trans Laws,” Business Insider, May 20, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/do-no-harm-behind-anti-trans-laws-fighting-woke-healthcare-2023-5.

44. 44. Jewish Faculty Resilience Group, https://www.jfrg.org. The Jewish Faculty Resilience Group is a coalition of Jewish and allied faculty, researchers, and staff with the goal to combat antisemitism, defined as including criticism of Israel, in higher education.

45. 45. Do No Harm filed a lawsuit alleging that UCLA medical school uses a race-based admissions process. Do No Harm, “Federal Lawsuit Alleges UCLA Medical School Uses a Race-Based Admissions Process,” May 9, 2025, https://donoharmmedicine.org/in-the-news/2025/05/09/federal-lawsuit-alleges-ucla-medical-school-uses-a-race-based-admissions-process/.

46. 46. Do No Harm, “About Us,” https://donoharmmedicine.org/about/; Razack, Nothing Has to Make Sense, 41.

47. 47. Do No Harm v. National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians, US District Court Southern District of Mississippi Northern Division, case no. 3.24-cv-11-CWR-LGI (2024), https://donoharmmedicine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2024.01.10-Doc-1-Verified-Complaint.pdf.

48. 48. Marilyn Singleton and Stanley Goldfarb, hosts, Do No Harm Podcast, podcast, season 2, episode 7, “Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld on How Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Policies Breed Antisemitism in Medicine,” February 28, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lHFGRoeHBo&list=PL5NyEG9MQ_dlmbjmGAvKWjTiRRx_JHFy6&index=7.

49. 49. Sheldon Rubenfeld, ed., Medicine After the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

50. 50. Cited in Ruth Abramovitz, “Medical Educator Recounts Medical Ethics in the Holocaust,” Hoya, January 30, 2025, https://thehoya.com/news/campus-life/medical-educator-recounts-medical-ethics-in-the-holocaust/.

51. 51. Abramovitz, “Medical Educator Recounts Medical Ethics.”

52. 52. Abramovitz, “Medical Educator Recounts Medical Ethics.”

53. 53. Marilyn Singleton and Stanley Goldfarb, hosts, Do No Harm Podcast, podcast, season 2, episode 7, “Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld on How Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Policies Breed Antisemitism in Medicine,” February 28, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lHFGRoeHBo&list=PL5NyEG9MQ_dlmbjmGAvKWjTiRRx_JHFy6&index=7.

54. 54. Jillian Lederman, “Why Jews Must Dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI),” Jewish Journal, January 31, 2024, https://jewishjournal.org/2024/01/31/why-jews-must-dismantle-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-dei/.

55. 55. For an account of the formation of the SRHE course, see Cydni Baker et al., “Medical Education as Liberatory Praxis: Experiences from the UCLA ‘Structural Racism and Health Equity’ Curriculum,” Social Science and Medicine 376 (July 2025): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118094.

56. 56. “A Better Way to Beat Anti-Semitism at UCLA: Ditch DEI,” Do No Harm, October 25, 2023, https://donoharmmedicine.org/2023/10/25/a-better-way-to-beat-anti-semitism-at-ucla-ditch-dei/.

57. 57. Baker et al., “Medical Education as Liberatory Praxis,” 3.

58. 58. Baker et al., 4.

59. 59. Megan Boler, “Teaching for Hope: The Ethics of Shattering Worldviews,” in Discerning Critical Hope in Educational Practices, ed. Vivienne Bozalek et al. (Routledge, 2013).

60. 60.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 7.

61. 61.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 7.

62. 62. While the Task Force Report, No. 3, mistakenly attributes this initial targeting of the Black faculty member and the SRHE course to the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group rather than to the specific faculty involved (JFRG was not officially formed until two years later), some of students and faculty involved in the early events went on to be active in JFRG while others circulate the narrative continuously. See, for example, Minutes of the Regents of the University of California, April 10, 2024, https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/minutes/2024/board4.10.pdf; Aaron Bandler, “Jewish UCLA Faculty Speak out Against Antisemitism During Regents Health Committee Meeting,” Jewish Journal, April 12, 2024, https://jewishjournal.com/community/370323/jewish-ucla-faculty-speak-out-against-antisemitism-during-uc-regents-health-committee-meeting/.

63. 63. Gary Jacobs and Yaov Shapiro, i24NEWS English, “A professor and a 3rd year medical student from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine are part of a 30-member delegation that has come to Israel,” Facebook, n.d., https://www.facebook.com/reel/1089382658829178.

64. 64.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 6–12.

65. 65. Aaron Bandler, “UCLA Jewish Faculty Resilience Group Holds ‘Back to School’ Event,” Jewish Journal, October 4, 2024, https://jewishjournal.com/community/375563/ucla-jewish-faculty-resilience-group-holds-back-to-school-event/.

66. 66. Committee on Education and Workforce, “Chairman Walberg Investigates Antisemitism at University of Illinois Medical Schools,” press release, August 25, 2025, https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=412693.

67. 67.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 17–21.

68. 68. Alexandra Crosnoe and Sam Mulick, “Ben Shapiro Talks Israel-Hamas War, Condemns Left-Leaning Campus Politics at UCLA,” Daily Bruin, October 24, 2024, https://dailybruin.com/2024/10/24/ben-shapiro-talks-israel-hamas-war-condemns-left-leaning-campus-politics-at-ucla.

69. 69.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 9.

70. 70.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 9.

71. 71. Minutes of the Regents of the University of California, April 10, 2024.

72. 72.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 14.

73. 73.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 13.

74. 74.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 13.

75. 75.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 13.

76. 76.Palestinian Human Rights and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 17.

77. 77. CAIR, “CAIR-LA Files Title VI Complaint Against UCLA Medical School for Discrimination Targeting Muslim Palestinian-American Med Student,” news release, July 10, 2024, https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-la-files-title-vi-complaint-against-ucla-medical-school-for-discrimination-targeting-muslim-palestinian-american-med-student/.

78. 78. Razack, Nothing Has to Make Sense, 12–14.

79. 79. See “Open Letter to Chancellor Frenk,” UCLA Taskforce on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, March 20, 2025, https://uclaracismtaskforce.com.

80. 80.University of California Jewish Student Campus Climate Fact-Finding Team Report and Recommendations (President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion, 2012), https://cascholars4academicfreedom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/jewish-climate-fact-finding-report-july-2012-final.pdf; “Chancellor Block Addresses Results of UC-Wide Campus Climate Study,” UCLA Newsroom, March 19, 2014, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/chancellor-block-addresses-results-271702.

81. 81. G. D. Block, “Op-Ed: The Controversial Students for Justice in Palestine Conference Will Go on at UCLA. Here’s Why,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-block-ucla-students-for-justice-in-palestine-conference-20181112-story.html; “There’s a Lot of Hate in the World. UCLA’s Scholars Are Asking Why and What Can Be Done,” UCLA Newsroom, October 12, 2022, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-initiative-to-study-hate.

82. 82. Sherene Razack, “It Didn’t Begin in Hate: Why a Hate Crimes Framework Can’t Take Us to Abolition,” State Crime Journal 12, no. 2 (2024): 267–78.

83. 83. “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism,” Office of the Chancellor, March 10, 2025, https://chancellor.ucla.edu/messages/initiative-to-combat-antisemitism.

84. 84. UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism, “Open Letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 5, 2026, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/saree-makdisi-palestine-letter-ucla-chancellor-julio-frenk.

85. 85. United Nations Security Council, February 28, 2025, “Letter Dated 27 February 2025 from the Permanent Representative of South Africa to the United Nations Addressed to the President of the Security Council,” https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4079252?v=pdf.

86. 86. See, for example, the case of medical professor Rupa Marya, who was fired for her statements about the genocide in Gaza. Edward Helmore, “Professor Sues University of California for Suspension over Comments About Israel’s War in Gaza,” Guardian, June 7, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/07/rupa-marya-university-of-california-san-francisco.

87. 87. Kern, Genocide Bad, 112.

88. 88. Mohammed El-Kurd makes this point when writing about how Palestinians must demonstrate their worthiness before they qualify for admission into humanity. Mohammed El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Books, 2025), 39.

89. 89. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars of Zionist Genocidal Apparatus: A Palestinian Problematization of Genocide Studies,” Journal of Genocide Research 28, no. 3 (2026): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2556589.

90. 90. El-Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, 39.

91. 91. Committee on Education and Workforce, “Charman Walberg Investigates Antisemitism at University of Illinois, UCSF, and UCLA Medical Schools,” press release, August 25, 2025, https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=412693.

92. 92. “IHRA Non-Legally Binding Working Definition of Antisemitism,” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, May 26, 2016, https://holocaustremembrance.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IHRA-non-legally-binding-working-definition-of-antisemitism-1.pdf.

93. 93. United States District Court Central District of California Western Division v. Regents of the University of California, case no. 2:26-cv-01946 (2026), Complaint and Jury Demand, 70, https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1428731/dl.

94. 94. United States District Court Central District of California Western Division v. Regents of the University of California, case no. 2:26-cv-01946, Complaint and Jury Demand, 70.

95. 95. United States District Court Central District of California Western Division v. Regents of the University of California, 34.