Safety is Not Transactional:
Criminalizing Voices for PALESTINIAN FREEDOM IS NOT FIGHTING ANTISEMITISM
We come together as Jewish students, faculty, alumni, organizers, and organizations to demand an immediate end to the nationwide repression and criminalization of students and faculty for speaking out, teaching, organizing, and advocating against the ongoing genocide in Palestine and for Palestine liberation.
For decades, pro-Israel lobbyists, alongside warmongering politicians, have invoked and exploited historical Jewish persecution to shift the public’s understanding of antisemitism. While these actors claim that censorship of pro-Palestinian voices works to “ensure Jewish safety,” we declare with steadfast conviction that these efforts do not create safety for anyone. Instead, they work to normalize state-sanctioned violence, expand criminalization, intensify militarization, and obfuscate legitimate criticism of Israel.
We assert that our struggle against antisemitism will not be won through calls to increase the surveillance and militarization of our campuses, as proposed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, and United States politicians; including the Biden administration. As Jews who dedicate our lives to building with and caring for our communities, and who fight for a Jewish future grounded in collective liberation, we reject these calls wholeheartedly. We refuse to be complicit in or be used as pawns to further exacerbate the punitive policing on campuses that impacts Palestinian, Black, Muslim, and other students and workers of conscience.
Over the course of two months, hundreds of thousands of students and workers across the world have protested the escalating genocidal campaign by Israel. Since the end of the ceasefire on December 1st, Israeli forces have resumed their relentless bombing of Palestine, killing over 1,000 Palestinians in just 3 days, an estimate which has now grown to over 20,000 Palestinians—almost half of whom are children— killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, with likely thousands more remaining buried under rubble. At the same time, nearly 300 more Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by armed settlers, and thousands of imprisoned Palestinians within Israel are facing torture and state-sanctioned kidnappings.
In response, mainstream pro-Israel groups have collaborated with collegiate and elected officials across the country to target and censor people on campuses who advocate for Palestinian liberation. The Biden administration has moved to collaborate with campus law enforcement, using false charges of antisemitism as a means to intimidate and silence opposition to genocide. This is in line with Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis’s efforts to ban chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—the nationwide network of college-based student groups fighting for Palestinian freedom—from Florida campuses. New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced an investigation into the City University of New York following a series of the largest student-led pro-Palestine rallies held in New York City. In the middle of this, Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman demanded armed guards be present on campuses for Hillel chapters by lobbying the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, all while the Anti-Defamation League calls upon university leaders to investigate SJPs nationwide for “supporting terrorism.”
These pro-Israel organizations misrepresent themselves as a body of voices engaged in the genuine interests of combatting antisemitism. However, they stand shoulder to shoulder with Christian Zionist organizations and philo/antisemites like John Hagee; regularly honor right-wing figures like Henry Kissinger; and invest in violent systems like “deadly exchange” programs, where the Israeli Offense Forces train US police, as well as initiatives to militarize our campuses and criminalize social justice advocates. Startling similarities have emerged between these tactics—tactics that have been used to oppress Jewish communities in years past.
When universities choose to militarize campuses and target pro-Palestine organizers, they limit their ability to build genuine, sustainable paths toward safety. This drives a wedge between Jewish communities and other historically oppressed groups and homogenizes Jewish identity and what “Jewish safety” looks like—ultimately undermining the collective safety of all peoples.
Investment in state violence is not indicative of “care” for Jewish lives, or the issues Jewish people face; but instead demonstrates a commitment to preserving decaying colonial systems as people around the world—including Jews—fight to end them.
We strongly affirm the following:
Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.
Judaism is not Zionism.
Increasing police presence on campuses does not increase, but rather threatens the safety of all students, including Jewish students, despite the opinions of both President Biden and Hillel International.
The 400% increase in antisemitism claimed by the ADL is inaccurate, as it bases most of its claims on “anti-Israel” activity, rather than antisemitism. The ADL has consistently conflated antizionism with antisemitism in its reporting of hate crimes.
Real instances of antisemitism that arise on campuses, such as the incident at Michigan State University and the neo-Nazi march near the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are overwhelmingly motivated by white nationalist and Christian supremacist ideology. Conflating right-wing opportunists with supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement is a racist anti-Palestinian canard that also draws attention away from the root causes of antisemitism.
Zionist/pro-Israel groups are the most prominent purveyors of the messaging that conflates Jewishness with Israel and insists that Jewish opinions about Israel are homogenously supportive. These groups directly endanger Jews by using Jewish identity to legitimize Israel’s war crimes in Palestine at the direct cost of Palestinian lives.
The history of antisemitism is embedded in a larger and interconnected history of white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, which remain the root causes of antisemitism.
True community safety is built through cross-communal solidarity and access to basic needs, as opposed to through American-state-based 'safety' rooted in violence.
We stand by the #DropTheADL campaign and demand that the ADL is delegitimized as a representative of the Jewish community or as an authoritative source for defining antisemitism — to say nothing of the organization’s historical origins in attempts to disempower the Jewish and broader left.
We must move beyond Hillel International as it remains committed to pro-Israel/Zionist policy through its Standards of Partnership, thus isolating Jewish students en masse, and move towards Jewish student organizations that embody the values of equal justice and liberation for all.
Palestinian liberation does not and cannot come at the cost of Jewish safety, and claiming that it does is a racist narrative aimed at dividing Jewish and Palestinian communities.
Our institutions and those who claim to act in our name must cease their reliance on state policing to combat antisemitism and begin exploring new ways to practice communal safety centering the needs and experiences of Black Jews and other Jews of Color.
In the last few months, we have seen countless instances of repression and violence used against Palestinian students and those who stand in solidarity with them. We struggle with the ways that this letter remains incomplete in acknowledging the breadth of this violence amidst these ongoing horrors. However, this proves the importance of our statement: We know that this violence will not end until our communities divest from the false conflations of Palestinian freedom with antisemitism, and safety with state surveillance and policing. And so, we reject the dominant framing of security peddled by pro-Israel institutions that paint organizing in solidarity with Palestine as a greater threat than racism, fascism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism.
As we do, we ground ourselves in the radical Jewish traditions and histories these lobbyists have tried to erase—traditions of Jewish communities who came before us and who understood that living under oppression was not a uniquely Jewish experience, but one that wove us into relationship with other oppressed peoples. From our histories, we learn that solidarity among all oppressed peoples is the necessary condition for liberation.
Written by Judaism On Our Own Terms (JOOOT)
Initial Signatories
Organizations
Jewish Voice for Peace
Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinic Cabinet
Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Advisory Council
Jewish Voice for Peace, NYC
Jewish Voice for Peace, Houston
Jewish Voice for Peace, San Antonio
Jewish Voice for Peace, Bay Area
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)
IfNotNow, Boston
Tzedek Chicago (synagogue)
Jews Against White Supremacy
Tikkun Olam Chavurah
Making Mensches
Befrayung Itst
Judeu Que Escreve
Shomrim Media Collective
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
Shomeret Shalom Global Network
Jewish Liberation Theology Institute
MATSO
Student Organizations
CUNY Law Jewish Law Students Association
Jews Against Zionism at NYU
Ne'ametz at NYU
Jewish Voice for Peace at UC Berkeley
Jewish Voice for Peace at University of Virginia
Jewish Voice for Peace at the Claremont Colleges
Alternative Jews at Tufts
Princeton Alliance of Jewish Progressives
Jewish Voice for Peace Columbia/Barnard
Havard Jews For Palestine
UChicago Jews for a Free Palestine
Occidental College Jewish Voice for Peace
Penn Chavurah
MIT Jews for Ceasefire
Jewish Culture Club at the New School
Independent Jewish Voices McGill
Jewish Voice for Peace at University of Michigan
Jews Givin’ A F*ck (JGAF) at Clark University
Oberlin Jews 4 Palestine
Jewish Voice for Peace at University of Virginia (forming)
BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now
Nishmat of the Claremont Colleges
Campus collectives and coalitions
Not In Our Name, CUNY Jewish Antizionist Collective
Faculty
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Theoretical Physicist, University of New Hampshire
Emmaia Gelman, Sarah Lawrence College
Jared Ball, Morgan State University
Rebecca Alpert, Temple University
Andrew Shapiro, City University of New York (CUNY)
Talissa Ford, Temple University
Daniel Segal, Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges
Lynne Joyrich, Brown University
Michael Drexler, Bucknell University
Judith Norman, Trinity University
Keith Feldman, University of California (UC), Berkeley
Joseph Getzoff, Boston College
Barry Trachtenberg, Wake Forest University
Alan Wald, University Of Michigan, Collegiate Professor Emeritus
Eve Spangler, Boston College
Lisa Rofel, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC)
Noah Zatz, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Don Goldstein, Allegheny College (retired)
Naomi Braine, Brooklyn College (CUNY)
Jon Nissenbaum, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
Jordan Reznick, Grinnell College
Penny Rosenwasser, City College of San Francisco
Miller Oberman, The New School
Naomi Schiller, City University of New York (CUNY)
Michelle Fine, City University of New York (CUNY)
Laura Tanenbaum, LaGuardia Community College (CUNY)
Terri Ginsberg, City University of New York (CUNY)
Melissa Levy, University of Virginia
Karen Miller, LaGuardia Community College (CUNY)
Corinna Mullin, City University of New York (CUNY)
Brooke Lober, University of California (UC), Berkeley
Danielle Schwartz, Winona State University
Irene Siegel, Hunter College (CUNY)
Yve Laris Cohen, Hunter College (CUNY)
Nina Berman, Columbia University
Alexandra Juhasz, City University of New York (CUNY)
Sarah Chinn, Hunter College (CUNY)
Jane Guskin, CUNY (Queens College faculty, Graduate Center student)
Rabbis
Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein
Rabbi May Ye
Rabbi Miriam Geronimus
Rabbi Linda Holtzman
Rabbi Lizz Goldstein
Rabbi Rebecca Alpert
Rabbi Sam Luckey
Rabbi Lonnie Kleinman
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Lucia Pizarro
Noah Rubin-Blose (Student Rabbi)
Louisa Solomon (Student Rabbi)
Individuals, Alumni, Organizers
Adam Horowitz, Journalist
Rafael Shimunov, Organizer and Radio Host at WBAI 99.5 FM NY
Eli Valley, Writer and Artist
Max Ajl, Organizer, Writer
Dylan Saba, Alumni, Attorney
Micha Bazant, Organizer, Artist
Anna Rajagopal, Alumni, Organizer, Writer/Journalist
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Journalist
Marc Ellis, Author, Retired Professor
Susan Pashkoff, Organizer
Alice Rothchild, Physician, Author, Filmmaker
Sarah Kershnar, Organizer
Em Cohen, Writer
Non-Jewish endorsements:
organizations
National Students for Justice in Palestine
Palestine Legal
American Muslims for Palestine
Palestinian Youth Movement
Palestinian Youth Movement Houston
El Punto en la Montana, Inc. (Puerto Rico)
Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice
Feminists for Justice In/For Palestine
student organizations
Palestine Solidarity Alliance at Hunter College
Occidental College Students for Justice in Palestine
John Jay Students for Justice in Palestine
Queens College Students for Justice in Palestine
University of Houston Students for Justice in Palestine
Rice University Students for Justice in Palestine
Students for Justice in Palestine at City College of New York