Opinion Piece Argues Jewish Scholars Are Fueling Academic Opposition to Zionism

Last April, encampment demonstrators at the University of Pennsylvania waved the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) while chanting “Al Qassam, make us proud,” a phrase that invokes Hamas’s military wing and its stated mission to destroy Israel. That night, a rabbi and a student who were trying to pass through the encampment were physically harassed. The author notes that, hours earlier, two Israeli scholars, Brown University Professor Omer Bartov and Stockton University Professor Raz Segal, had lectured at the same encampment on the weaponization of antisemitism. The following May, Bartov defended the demonstrators, saying, “There’s nothing threatening about opposing occupation or oppression.”

The article then turns to an October 2024 Al Jazeera documentary, “How Israel Won the West,” in which five Jewish scholars, including Segal and Bartov, describe Israel as genocidal, racist and settler-colonialist. The author says they do so with a tone of certainty and treats American complicity in this alleged evil as settled. The author argues that such positions reflect a broader intellectual reckoning with Jewish identity, one that seeks to separate Judaism from the State of Israel. In this framing, two positions are central. Non-Zionism accepts that Jews may have ties to the land of Israel but rejects a Jewish state. Post-Zionism holds that the Zionist project ended with Israel’s founding. The author states that neither is inherently antisemitic, though he criticizes post-Zionism as ironic given that Jewish intellectuals question the existence of the Jewish state.

The author traces non-Zionism to late-19th-century Eastern European Bundists and to certain Orthodox sects, and says the Holocaust and the events of October 7 showed that Jews must assert their sovereignty and security. He also distinguishes between Jews who feel a strong connection to the diaspora, call for a ceasefire in Gaza, or criticize Israeli government policies, and those who take part in anti-Israel protests or intellectual movements. He argues the latter are not merely expressing diasporic ties or political critique.

According to the article, a February 2025 conference titled “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions,” hosted by Brown University’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities, had the stated goal of exploring the “changing relation to Zionism and the State of Israel” among Jewish communities worldwide. Brown student Maya Rackoff, who attended, said the characterization of Zionism as inherently racist and genocidal went unchallenged, and that speakers attacked Zionism’s founders and adherents as genocidal, Jewish supremacists. The author notes that panels included titles such as “Disillusioned Zionists” and that Bartov, who organized the conference, has accused Israel of genocide. He also identifies Israeli scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay as a member of the advisory board of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which he describes as an anti-Zionist organization. Yale Law School’s Aslı Ü. Bâli, identified as president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), which the article describes as pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), also spoke.

The author argues that the presence of representatives from explicitly anti-Zionist organizations undermines the conference’s stated purpose. He cites Brown Chair of Palestinian Studies Beshara Doumani’s term “Global Israel,” which he quotes as the “north star” of “rising global fascism,” and says Israeli scholar Adi Ophir argued that Jewish identity can be liberated only by becoming anti-Zionist. The article also mentions Shaul Magid of Harvard, a former Orthodox rabbi, whose recent book “The Necessity of Exile” argues that Jewish flourishing may require rejecting a Jewish nation-state. The author contends that students are influenced by credentialed figures, several of them Jewish or Israeli, who suggest that opposing Zionism is the only moral path for a Jew, and that faculty and students join anti-Israel protests to display knowledge and virtue.

The author describes this as a kind of modern-day conversion and argues that young Jews who reject Zionism expect it to make them righteous. He points to the conversos of the Spanish Inquisition, Jews who converted to Christianity seeking protection, and to 19th-century assimilationist Jews, as earlier cases in which abandoning Jewish identity did not spare them from hostility.

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