By Shlomo Dubnov in La Jolla, California
For decades, Jewish Studies departments were seen as the intellectual guardians of Jewish history, language, and the nuanced defense of the Jewish right to self-determination. But a transformation is underway at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and across the UC system. What was once a field of study is becoming a field of struggle, as a new guard of politically minded academics swaps the scholar’s mantle for an activist’s bullhorn.
On May 13, UCSD’s Institute of Arts and Humanities will host a symposium titled “Antisemitism on Campuses and the Federal Response.” On the surface, it sounds like a sober academic inquiry. In reality, the panel featuring UCSD’s Amelia Glaser, UCLA’s Dov Waxman, and UC Berkeley’s Ronit Stahl represents a unified front that is increasingly at odds with the mainstream Jewish community and the federal government’s efforts to protect Jewish students.
The ideological foundation for this shift has been built stone by stone through a series of radical manifestos. Professor Dov Waxman, once considered a centrist voice, was a key signatory of the 2023 “Elephant in the Room” petition, which explicitly labeled the West Bank occupation as a “regime of apartheid.” By 2025, Waxman abandoned previous scholarly reservations to argue that Israel’s military actions in Gaza could be characterized as “genocide.” This shift provided academic cover for an accusation once reserved for radical activists, fundamentally altering the discourse in California’s most prominent lecture halls.
Similarly, Ronit Stahl has used her platform to push the boundaries of academic critique. Stahl was a high-profile signatory of the 2021 “Statement from Jewish Studies Scholars,” which described Israel’s government as a system of “Jewish supremacy” and explicitly affirmed the right of faculty to engage in BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions). By framing boycotts of the Jewish state as a protected “academic right,” Stahl and her colleagues effectively normalize the isolation of Israel within the very institutions meant to study it.
Central to this movement is the promotion of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). Critics argue the JDA is an “anti-definition” designed to undermine the federal government’s reliance on the IHRA definition. By pushing a definition that excludes most forms of anti-Zionism from being labeled as antisemitic, Jewish scholars and professors provide a “legal loophole” for campus agitators. It allows them to argue that even virulent anti-Israel rhetoric is “protected political speech,” thereby stripping the Department of Education of its primary tool for enforcing Title VI and Title VII civil rights protections for Jewish students and faculty.
The irony is thick. During UCSD’s Israeli Week that is meant to celebrate Jewish-American heritage, Jewish scholars organize an event on antisemitism focused on federal actions. Previous letters circulated by some Jewish faculty warned that Jews will be blamed for the destruction of universities due to federal budget freezes. This slants Jewish-American heritage from scholarship into partisan politics. As the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) May 2025 report noted, it is the faculty themselves who are framing federal oversight as a “weaponization” and a “threat to academic freedom.” When a departmental chair and director of a prestigious UCSD institute uses an academic platform to moderate panels by professors that characterize safety measures as cynical, she isn’t defending Jewish students, but making federal efforts to protect them significantly more difficult.
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Shlomo Dubnov is a UCSD music professor specializing in computer-generated music.
It is striking that you somehow have interpreted my response as addressing some sort of philosophical question posed impersonally by someone who is not a part of the Jewish community. Please read the response again, carefully and without ideological blinders. It civilly expresses the anguish of Jews forced to confront the unwelcome reality of necessarily questionable Israeli policy and behavior. If you choose not to question what other Jews find as a personal and ethical obligation to examine, then that is fine. But, for those of us whose beliefs are responsive to changing realities, this is not an option. The Jewish way I was raised makes this an unavoidable and sorrowfully unpleasant obligation. So, once again I thank the open inquiry that UCSD offers to explore difficult issues, despite pressures that would prefer silence.
The Bundist and other internationalist ideologies might be prevalent among some Jews. This largely manifests itself in Anti-Zionism since the Soviet times, and now finding a new home in the green-red alliance. The speakers in this event evidently crossed the line into supporting BDS and genocide libels. Additionally, it is actually endangering Jewish students and faculty by preventing federal action to fight antisemitism. The TDS has nothing to do with the fact that antisemitism in the form of anti-Zionist activism has spiked after Oct.7. There is nothing Jewish about appreciating what this symposium does accept for its cynical use of the name.
The irony of citing Gustave Le Bon to defend the current campus climate is staggering. Le Bon’s primary thesis was that crowds are “only powerful for destruction” and are led by images and simple slogans, not by reason. By invoking him, you inadvertently describe the exact phenomenon currently “overwhelming” our universities: a populist stampede toward Israel-hatred where complex historical truths are traded for the “uncritical and conventional assumptions” of a radicalized academic collective.
You suggest that those criticizing Israel have “elevated themselves to knowledge,” yet the ideology you defend—the one currently being institutionalized at UCSD—is a recycled form of old knowledge. It is the ancient tactic of recruiting crowds by targeting a Jewish scapegoat, now rebranded in academic parlance. This is not a “painful struggle for understanding”; it is a retreat into the comfortable safety of the mob.
You urge us to look at “events where they really occur,” yet your own analysis suffers from a selective blindness regarding the most damning reality of all: the genocidal ideology of Hamas
To speak of “knowledge” while ignoring the “from the river to the sea” mandate of radical Islam—a movement that explicitly seeks the total erasure of the Jewish state and its people—is not just naive; it is a deliberate obfuscation. You claim to be “informed,” yet you ignore the documented intent of the actors who initiated this conflict. If you are truly seeking to move beyond “imagined worlds,” you must acknowledge that the “knowledge” you champion is being used as a shield for a movement that views your “academic freedom” as a temporary tool for its own anti-democratic ends.
The comment highlights a growing number of “reluctant” Jews siding against Israel. History, however, suggests a less noble explanation for this phenomenon. Throughout the centuries, there has been a tragic through-line of Jews who, out of a sense of cowardice or internalized self-hatred attempt to gain safety by siding with the accusers of their own people.
By validating the most extreme antisemitic lies—such as the “genocide” libel—these individuals hope to be seen as “the good Jews” by the very crowds that Le Bon warned would eventually destroy the institutions that harbor them. Divesting oneself of a national identity to appease a hostile environment is not an “elevation of thought”; it is a survival mechanism of the submissive.
Finally, you characterize federal efforts to protect Jewish students as a “right-wing plot” to dismantle the university. This is a profound inversion of reality. The university system is currently being dismantled from within by the very “crowd” you celebrate—one that replaces inquiry with orthodoxy and civil rights protections with “legal loopholes.”
To suggest that the federal government is the “chilling” factor, while Jewish students are being systematically harassed and isolated by a faculty-led “stampede,” is a masterclass in gaslighting. Real “knowledge” acknowledges that when Jewish Studies faculty provide the intellectual scaffolding for the boycott and isolation of the Jewish state, they are not fulfilling the university’s mission; they are betraying it.
Those who truly wish to “elevate themselves to knowledge” will see through this “difficult story” for what it is: a coordinated effort to normalize antisemitism under the guise of academic struggle. The “uncomfortable puzzle” is not Israel; it is the sight of scholars using their intellect to justify the destruction of their own community’s safety and identity, only to compensate for their own lack of identity and shame of being Jewish.
There is no irony in my citing LeBon, but there is explicit intention, which your uncritical advocacy of Israel and desire to discredit dissenting views evidently prohibits you from seeing. LeBon and others who describe the crowd mind, what we now call the herd mentality, were warning against the absolute incapacity of captured individuals to transcend the reflexive groupthink that comforts those in its embrace. And from the perspective of a growing number of indepedently thinking Jews your reflexive impulse to dismiss alternative views reveals how comfortable that unreflecting embrace is. I invite the Jewish community to explore all of the perspectives on present Israeli policy and behavior publicly offered by UCSD and elsewhere. Finally, accusing anyone who criticizes Israel as an apologist for Hamas is to deeply misunderstand what the criticism of Israel is about. When one sees the thorough devastation of Gaza and the inexcusable predation of settlers in the West Bank (please don’t argue with facts) you understand that both Hamas brutality and Israeli brutality are reprehensible. There is no country or group that has the privilege to brutalize without condemnation. That’s what I learned from the holocaust survivor (there was only of the many killed) in my family. She taught me not to permit myself to be brutalized by the eroding process of accomodation to increasing numbers of small brutalities, but to be vigilant against them all and to learn from them all. It’s a lesson that does not deserve caricature.
Speaking of irony, your defensive and reactionary criticism of Jews and Jewish studies scholars (not to mention your university colleagues) who are actually working to bring informed discussion on challenging issues to campus, even BEFORE the event has taken place, strikes me as quite antisemitic. Your cynical and ungenerous personal criticism of eminent scholars of good faith who hold different political views plays into the hands of the growing chorus of antisemites and racist xenophobes who would tear down all US universities. The universities are not the source of criticism of Israel, but they can be a place for actual learning, dialogue and debate—if we let them, if we listen to each other, and resist the urge to vilify and slander people of good faith and ethical conviction with whom we may disagree.
Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) in The Crowd: The Study of the Popular Mind was one of the first scholars to explore how an individual’s beliefs and behaviors are overwhelmed by the uncritical and conventional assumptions of those with whom s/he shares a familiar worldview, He sagaciously observed that “All men possess opinions; very few are able to elevate themselves to knowledge.” Shlomo Dubnov’s broadside against the critical views of Israel (a nation state) expressed by many in the UCSD Jewish community, and reflected in the (often reluctant) views of an increasingly large number of Jews around the world, reflects a once popular opinion about Israel, sustained by a hope about its ethical probity that new knowledge of its horrific actions in Gaza and the West Bank can no longer support. Those who want to “elevate themselves to knowledge” need to go beyond their familiar and comfortable opinions, and their communities of corroborating opinions, and be informed by what is going on in the world where events really occur (photos of complete devastation in Gaza and marauding settlers in the West Bank are unarguably damning – and no, they are not fakes), not in imagined worlds, however comforting. Moreover, to suggest that our federal government, containing and encouraging devout antisemites, is not using criticism of Israel to dismantle the US University system (a long-cherished goal of the American right) is astonishingly naive and subversive of the University’s mission of academic freedom and freedom of expression. As someone confronted with the uncomfortable puzzle and embarrassment that Israel has become, I welcome the knowledge of informed scholars who are struggling to understand what has happened and I appreciate their painful conclusions that cannot make anyone, including themselves, feel good. Knowledge suggests that Israeli actions are indefensible, despite inveterate and treasured opinions that find this hard to believe.Though this is a difficult story to hear, I am grateful to UCSD, especially those in Jewish Studies, for contributing to public knowledge and debate, despite impediments from uncritical members of the community and the chilling effects of federal threats.
You are proving exactly the point of the article. You are abstracting the issue to some philosophical question, mixing in Trump and some conspiracies about destroying academia etc. People who consider themselves part of Jewish community this is personal. It’s not some academic article that otherwise is buried in a magazine nobody reads. It’s a perfect example that someone speaks using Jewish identity about some abstract Jewish problem. Did it cross your mind, how come grand majority of Jews are Zionists but somehow in academia it’s completely opposite. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Feature developed by radicals who monopolize high public education. This system doesn’t belong to you or the radical left. It belongs to the public. And the public has a right to ask the question why public education has become unwelcome for Jewish community.
Shlomo Dubnov’s article, in contrast, provides very good insight of what is going on in academia. History is full of examples of Jews who used their Jewish identity to hurt their own community. It’s not a moral clarity but cowardice. The antisemites like SJP and others show them around to keep division within Jewish community. I have no doubt that these scholars understand very well that their allies are not looking for solutions for peace but extermination of Jews. They still play this game to capitalize on social benefits and attention. Let’s be honest: no one would care about them if not for anti-Israel stand whitewashing using Jewish community banner. If you continue to read history, none of these sellouts are remembered as a heroes, saviors or leaders. They all went to history trash bin, while truth prevails. Jews should not forget the thousands-years-long lesson and stand proudly for their identity. These Jewish Jew-haters are just con artists. They are destined to learn their history lesson, a different one than the one that kept the Jewish community thriving. We should keep proudly speaking up. Speaking truth is not scary. Scary is to live a lie that Jewish Jew-haters want us to be part of. Am Israel Chai.
Thank you for this article. Universities mostly have far liberal professors that wear their ideology on their sleeves, pushing for the popular narrative of hatred toward Israel and the Jews. It’s either a marketing business for them or true Jew hatred. This leads to the normalization of antisemitism, which has real consequences. When hatred against Jews is excused, downplayed, or repackaged as “activism,” when you reject the IHRA definition, support BDS, and accept all the lies as truths, there is real danger not only to Jewish students and their community, but to what we value most in our western society—freedom, freedom to think freely. Universities have promoted cult-like mentality and behaviors. Quite alarming.
While this panel may superficially appear to address antisemitism, what it really promotes is more divisive rhetoric that further alienates and polarizes the Jewish students and community. It takes us further and further into the lies, distortions, and misinformation about Israel and the Jewish people. This is not new. Antisemitism has been around for years. The new trend, however, the new antisemitism, is antizionism.
Golda Meir’s quote, “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present,” emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and understanding history, even when it is uncomfortable or inconvenient. Attempting to ignore or erase these aspects leads to a distorted understanding of the present and hinders our ability to learn from history.
Meir’s words serve as a reminder that confronting history—regardless of its challenges or complexities—is essential for growth, reconciliation, and making informed decisions for the future. It underscores the idea that history should be embraced and studied, as it provides valuable lessons.
This sentiment underscores the importance of standing firm in the truth, even in difficult discussions. We need to highlight the facts and remind our audience of the complexities involved, ensuring that distorted narratives do not dominate the conversation.
We have a responsibility to expose bias and lies, bringing them to light for our students. History has taught us the dangers of silence in the face of hatred. This panel “discussion” has really no substance whatsoever to encourage critical thinking or in-depth discussion. Alternative experts would be more appropriate to provide a more balanced perspective.
I believe that a diverse panel facilitates a more realistic and professional discussion.