DEI with Amira Jarmakani and Sean Malloy

Transcript

DEI with Amira Jarmakani and Sean Malloy

[00:00:00] 

EMMAIA: Welcome everyone to Unpacking Zionism. I am Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. On today’s show, I’m joined by Amira Jarmakani and Sean Malloy to talk about DEI, yep, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as a crucial term to unpack in order to understand how Zionist politics are working.

Let me start with some introductions. Amira Jarmakani is a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliated faculty with the Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies and LGBTQ Plus Studies at San Diego State University. They’re the author of books, including An Imperialist Love Story, Desert Romances and the War on Terror, which explores the crucial role of desire in understanding how the war on terror works.

Also the prize-winning book, Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. And they also advise the Critical Arab American Studies series with Syracuse University Press. Amira is a past president of the Arab American [00:01:00] Studies Association, board member for the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies, and an organizer and member with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. And most importantly, Amira is on the advisory board of our very own Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. 

And now for Sean. Sean L. Molloy is a professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Merced. He trained in history at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He’s the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb against Japan, and also Out of Oakland, Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War. And Sean is also, most importantly, a collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

And in fact, this is a conversation that Sean and Amira and I have been having since the Institute’s conference last October, which was called Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism. We’ll be posting their talks from that conference in the show notes. And we’ll also [00:02:00] post soon, although not yet, Sean’s forthcoming article, “A Safe Space for Apartheid, Zionist Organizations, and the Counter Mobilization Against Palestinian Solidarity on U.S. Campuses,” which will run very shortly in the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, which is free and open access and online at criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org. Friends, it is super exciting to be with you for this among the very first of our episodes. 

SEAN: Thank you, Emmaia. 

AMIRA: Good to be here.

EMMAIA: So let’s just start with what is DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion? We hear about it on college campuses, across the U. S. and other places, and often it lays out a policy approach, right? What is it supposed to be doing? How do we get it? 

SEAN: In response to the uprisings on college campuses and in communities in the United States in the late 60s and early 70s uprisings that made radical demands for transforming not just the university, but society. Some of the response to that was repression in the form of the National Guard and kicking out students, but some of it was a soft counterinsurgency in [00:03:00] which institutions sought to domesticate those ideas. To me, in my analysis, DEI is a liberal project to contain radical calls for transformations within existing institutions, whether that is the university or the corporation or the government. So it is, sort of funny to me to see, 2024 DEI is the boogeyman on the right when from the perspective of someone on the left DEI is actually an attempt to contain and head off attempts at more radical change. 

EMMAIA: Okay, so Sean has situated us in some critical history. DEI policy, which frames itself as a move to make space for students and faculty who have been marginalized, which is why it tends to be viewed under the banner of remedying racial or gendered exclusion, is actually a sort of soft response to the movement that demanded much deeper transformations of the university system during the student uprisings of the late 60s and 70s.

In doing so, in doing that work over these past decades, DEI has also become a policy platform, like a [00:04:00] set of institutions, that not only offers some solutions to these exclusions, but actually shapes our ideas of what the problems are that are producing exclusion. Amira, can you talk us through those? And once we’ve laid this down, we’ll turn to the way that DEI and Zionism interact. 

AMIRA: If we take the idea that universities are interested in Demonstrating their diversity as a matter of PR. Let’s say even if we’re taking it cynically it usually plays out in terms of events and activities on the student affairs side of universities, there is then move to include. All of these diverse groups of students and to make efforts and to demonstrate the efforts at the university is making to enact such inclusion.

We hear a lot about diversity and inclusion in terms of the buzzwords on campuses, but much less about equity. It is the part of the university to recognize that there is not a quote unquote level playing field [00:05:00] given that folks are starting from systematically disadvantaged locations. It’s just the way that it has been commodified and played out. It’s a sort of diluted, commodified form of enclosing the ideas of critical race theory. It’s shifting from critical race theories, proposal, an idea that race is a structure, race and racism are systemic, and thinking about how those play out, and then diluting it or enclosing it into, sort of different kinds of packages, more neatly tied up packages.

One of the ways that this happened was through identity categories, and this isn’t to say that identity categories are on their face, bad or problematic. So if we look at the theory of intersectionality as an example, maybe we can see this play out a little bit, right?

Like Crenshaw’s original idea of intersectionality was to think about how these systems of racism [00:06:00] and systemic forms of oppression can impact people in intersecting ways. But when I talk about it with my students and women’s gender and sexuality classes or think about it in even just the way it’s represented in popular feminism, let’s say, oftentimes intersectionality gets boiled down into inclusion.

The way that people are understanding it and talking about it popularly is like, oh, yeah, that just means we include everybody. And so in that move, you start to see, okay, well, then if we just can say, here’s an identity that we need to include, then we have intersectionality. And it made me think about part of Sean’s essay and also something that you have written Emmaia about mobilizing Zionism as an identity as a way of arguing for rights within, let’s say the university structure. So I think that is one way that we can introduce this idea of liberal co-optation of DEI. 

EMMAIA: The idea that DEI is co-opted or used as cover is actually very [00:07:00] familiar, I think, to all of us in the sense that we see brochures that colleges put out that always feature like the one Black student in a class as a way of trying to suggest that the experience of being there is inclusive and for everybody, when in fact it’s a very narrow experience.

But I want to get now to why we’re talking about DEI in relation to Zionism. So one of the ways that Zionist institutions have in the last few years made use of these policies is by highlighting what they’re calling antisemitic incidents, which in fact are, often anti-Zionist incidents or incidents in which a student just felt that Zionism wasn’t being sufficiently endorsed by the professor of the university.

And that has produced a spate of different reports that claim that Jewish students feel unsafe on college campuses. It doesn’t distinguish between any one kind or another kind of Jewish students, but we know they’re talking about Zionist students. Those numbers have been debunked in the Jewish press, especially there’s been a lot of inquiry into like, who are these Jewish students and are they actually [00:08:00] unsafe? For those of us who are on campuses and are working with Jewish students and are Jewish ourselves, that’s not our experience. And I’ll relate just briefly that when we were planning the conference, the Institute’s conference on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, we were which is the definition that says criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

One university where students were trying to host the conference were told by their school’s DEI office that it might be a violation of policy to have a conference, that looks at Zionism as settler colonialism. And even though eventually they were told that it was not a DEI violation, by that point the concern that it might be had produced so much delay that it was impossible to hold a conference there.

So it actually does have material effects when Zionist organizations raise DEI concerns even if policy doesn’t actually accommodate the concerns that they’re raising. But Amira, your work shows that it doesn’t even matter whether these numbers of Jewish students who feel unsafe on campuses or antisemitic incidents are actually [00:09:00] backed up with fact, right? What matters is that they’ve been counted. Can you elaborate on who is counting what and what they’re trying to do? 

AMIRA: Since counting is already its own kind of logic within the institution, it’s an easy sort of in and I think here we would want to really pay attention to organizations like the ADL, the anti-defamation league, which even produces annual reports called anti-Israeli activism on U.S. campuses.

It’s not the only organization that is doing this, but I’ll focus on the ADL here because of the frequency with which ADL statistics are repeated and picked up in mainstream news sources. So for instance, in May 2021, when you saw statistics about the quote unquote upticks in antisemitism, The exact statistic was repeated over and over and over again, sometimes attributed to the ADL and sometimes not attributed at all.

And when you look [00:10:00] into the report, what you will see is that it’s really clear that what’s counted is any form really of anti-Zionism. Any kind of statement or Event. In fact, if you look at, for instance, ADL’s report on anti-Israeli activism on U.S. campuses from 22 to 23, you’ll see this breakdown that talks about physical assault, and there were zero instances, vandalism, of which there were nine, breaks it down into harassment, so it gives the number of 24 there, and the bulk of incidences are events – 303 and then protests or actions – 326 and if you were to look at examples, you would see that they were very clearly anti-Zionist events. 

And so the statistic that has been really widely circulated since October 7 about the rise in antisemitism is that it has risen 400%. And that statistic has done a lot of [00:11:00] work to sanction, any kind of speech about Palestine on campuses events, shutting down events as we have seen at Columbia and Brandeis and so many places, it would be impossible to talk about them all. Yet the 400% does this same collapsing of antisemitism with anti-Zionism and really importantly, the huge majority of the things that are being counted are actually anti-Zionism. 

So this is a reason why counting is so important to how DEI works in relation to Zionism, and antisemitism really weaponized in relation to it. Another thing that I would name is that Kenneth Stern, one of the main architects of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, so the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, this definition also very clearly includes anti-Zionism as part of antisemitism. And we’re seeing, it’s been definition that is [00:12:00] really dangerous and especially dangerous you know, if it’s deployed, in this way, Kenneth Stern has said that he did not intend for it to be used in this way. And did not intend for the weaponization of antisemitism in that way, but at the same time, he has also been clear that he’s interested in this project of counting which he describes as bean counting, but it’s, it’s necessary to be able to count up the incidents of antisemitism in order to be able to mobilize in relation to them. 

EMMAIA: So interesting. Amira, you’ve laid out how DEI policy offers a tool for Zionist institutions to do the work of portraying anti-Zionism, meaning the politics that opposes a colonial project and the state violence that goes with it, to portray that not as a political stance, but as a violation of a call to include people to be culturally open. So DEI in that way is being used by Zionist [00:13:00] institutions, to portray themselves as being part of the progressive sphere, Sean, your work looks at a completely different way.

The Zionist institutions are using DEI in other cases, they’re portraying DEI as too woke, meaning that Zionist organizations are aligned with the right against efforts to undo the effects of racism. And so they’re ending up in coalitions with anti-critical race theory, white Christian Moms for Liberty-style organizations. How do we have both of these things happening at once? 

SEAN: One of the most valuable contributions of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism is to unpack some of the ways Zionism can operate within these spaces, often in different ways. One is to undertake a very blunt attack on DEI, and I think in terms of people to look for here David Bernstein and the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values Adam Milstein, who’s an Israeli-American real estate mogul and philanthropist are good examples of this.

And in attacking DEI, [00:14:00] what this strain of Zionism is doing is hitching its wagon to a very long tradition of assaults on the academy in general, and on any attempts, even the most milquetoast liberal attempts, to identify and address racial inequities, right? So think about yhe anti-CRT crusade, the anti-wokeness going back to the cannon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the anti-blackness of the neocon movement in the 70s in that respect, I think for, for many Zionists, and they tend to be more politically identified on the right wing in this country DEI is just a code word, right? It’s a code word like CRT for any efforts to challenge or even acknowledge racial or national ethnic hierarchies. And of course, what is Zionism, but a form of racial and ethno-national hierarchy, right? I think most Zionists who target DEI don’t really know, what DEI actually is and does.

And to this extent, I think it’s just like the CRT panic, [00:15:00] right? Critical race theory. They understand it and use it as a convenient kind of catch-all term to mobilize their base against any projects that threaten to identify particular racial hierarchies, and this is crucial because the existence of Zionism in practice depends on these kind of hierarchies. And so even something as tepid as DEI Is a potential threat ideologically, if not institutionally. One wing of the Zionist movement is attacking DEI for that reason.

Also, because it allows Zionists to hook up with this powerful existing right wing network you know, think about folks like Chris Rufo and Fox News and the presidential campaigns of just about every single Republican in the primary. that has deep ties to white supremacist ideas that go back to the founding of this country, right? And so it allows Zionists to ally with these very powerful rhetorical, ideological, and political forces and link them to Zionism.

AMIRA: Yeah, thinking about this fluidity and how it can be used is really key. Responding to [00:16:00] Sean’s comments, it just made me think about an article that I saw in Vox and maybe we can link to it in the show notes, it’s called “How Republicans are weaponizing antisemitism to take down DEI.” And it was about the congressional hearings on antisemitism and it included the rabbi from Harvard university who said that it seemed to me that the issue an that hearing was about antisemitism but also not antisemitism and it seemed like it was about DEI and representative Elise Stefanik’s interest in attacking it rather than the rise of antisemitism on campus.

So I think this idea of weaponizing antisemitism is really key also to our conversation on DEI and how it’s related to Zionism. Mobilizing DEI in the service of Zionism by weaponizing antisemitism, in particular.

SEAN: Yeah, ultimately, I think Zionists finding ways to use DEI, I won’t even say coopt, because I think DEI from the beginning was a cooptation, but to use DEI, which is itself a kind of  [00:17:00] counterinsurgency against the radical energies of the 60s and 70s, against anti-racism, against anti-colonialism. I think that’s a much more, frankly, powerful approach, when you can leverage these structures and use them from the inside rather than assaulting them from the outside. I think it’s ultimately much more dangerous. 

Going to Amira’s point about identities, you can actually trace back the origins of the attempts to use the DEI rather than assault it back to a guy named Kenneth Marcus. So Marcus got his JD from UC Berkeley and in the George W. Bush administration from 2004 and 2008, he served as the staff director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. And while he’s in that job he engineers a policy change in which the Office of Civil Rights, or OCR, would use Title, Title IX, and Title VII, and apply it to religious groups, including Jewish students, as a protected category. And what that does is it opens up a slew of complaints filed by Zionist groups against campuses in the University of [00:18:00] California, against Rutgers, against Barnard, against Brooklyn College claiming that Jewish students are being discriminated against primarily because of their support of Israel. Marcus then leaves government. And he helps found the Brandeis Institute, the Louis D. Brandeis Institute for Human Rights Under Law. And then he helps file a number of these claims with the office that he used to work for. And then again he comes back under Trump in 2017 as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights and once again, opens up a lot of these files. I think this is the first less subtle attempt to do this, right? The problem with this approach is it depends on outside legal enforcement. And I think the more clever and sophisticated iteration of the approach that Marcus starts is to embed this not in the Office of Civil Rights, but to embed this kind of enforcement mechanism within each university itself.

And doing that within the DEI office also offers you the benefit that DEI offices are not run by faculty, not run by students, but run by the administration. [00:19:00] Essentially outsourcing the enforcement of anti-Zionism to universities themselves rather than having to rely on lawsuits in the Office of Civil Rights, and, that iteration over time is much more frankly effective than the blunt outside assaults that we see from folks like Chris Rufo and David Bernstein.

EMMAIA: Sean, you’re pointing to a tactic that we’ve seen from Zionist institutions, which is to turn away from politics and moral discussions and turn to procedure instead as a way of leveraging power because procedure doesn’t see who’s right or wrong. Procedure doesn’t see like that something started before October 7th, right? Procedure just sees what the letter of the policy says. And Amira, your discussion of counting antisemitic incidents, counting discriminatory incidents seems like another tool in the procedural toolkit. Can you explain what it represents and what it obscures, what it hides?

AMIRA: Yeah, so we’re really talking about an institutional universe in which everything needs to be measured and in which we collect data as a way of [00:20:00] quantifying the amount of inclusion and the amount of diversity and indeed, the amount of equity. And so these data can operate as a way to hold the institution accountable, or at least as a way of using the institutional language of data in the service.

So, for instance, at my university, and I’m guessing this is a national trend, students can fill out an incident form to report anything they may have experienced, from a violent assault to a microaggression. And the university then follows up to refer the student to the correct office. So that could be like, Title IX office, or even the university police. And if those don’t apply, you know, covering their sort of legal basis, if those wouldn’t apply to the incident, then they would reach out to provide counseling or other support. So it becomes like the supreme way that campuses can manage and contain at least the narrative around how the university is keeping everyone safe, right?

And, you know, like safety is probably a great word, another keyword to do in the podcast [00:21:00] series because there’s a lot to say about that in terms of how it’s playing out. But lots of things get obscured in this process. Like who determines what rises to the level of response, which incidents are deemed urgent, you know, like about which ones does the president issue a statement and form a task force to respond as seems to be the way that the task force against antisemitism was formed, at least in part on my campus.

So, to use these kinds of tools, the community has to be legible within DEI rubrics, even to tap into them in the first place. So it also matters what kinds of categories exist. For instance, on UC campuses and then more recently on CSU campuses, folks have successfully mobilized to have a category called SWANA, Southwest Asia and North Africa, as a way of even being able to account for what’s happening with Arab-American, Iranian-American, Armenian-American, Kurdish-American, you know, all this one diaspora folks, since we’ve traditionally been counted as [00:22:00] white or have had to check white and, you know, even on university campuses.

Because SWANA folks have not had a category, we haven’t really had access to institutional resources that can help us organize and support our communities. So that’s just all to say that this act of counting, collecting data becomes an arena to kind of mobilize. And within the institution, it becomes a way to address the needs of students and also what’s happening with them.

So within that landscape, counting is a strategically important tool to mobilize resources, and also an important tool that helps shape the narrative about what kinds of harassment, discrimination, and violence each community may be experiencing on campus, and that in turn will impact other, you know, myriad things.

So, in a context in which counting anti-Zionism as included in antisemitism, which is the one that we’ve been discussing and is really, critical in this moment, it can get twisted. This DEI tool that’s supposed to be about inclusion and belonging, it actually gets deployed as a way [00:23:00] to censor and overtly censor pro-Palestinian speech. And so that’s, what’s really super concerning. 

EMMAIA: Sean, one of the features of the organizations that you’ve been looking at is that as they’re doing their work, whether they call it civil rights work or free speech or education work, they’re mobilizing these ideas about DEI, but fundamentally and openly they’re Israel advocacy organizations, Zionist organizations. Can you explain what organizations we’re looking at and how does this turn work where they arise as Israel advocacy organizations, but then they’re read as organizations? Working on rights and sort of liberal values in these other spheres.

SEAN: TThat’s a relatively, in the grand scheme of things, recent development. You saw particularly with with the rise of the First and Second Intifada and then BDS, you saw a response on the Zionist side that the traditional mainline institutions, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, were doing work on campus, but they were fundamentally outside groups.

And one of the things you [00:24:00] see starting in the early 2000s and really accelerating in the 2010s is the creation of new groups that are directly, if not organically, connected to campus. The preeminent one here in the DEI sphere and the university sphere is a group called the Academic Engagement Network. It’s co-founded by among others, a guy named Mark Yudof who was formerly the President of the University of California system. It is openly pro-Israel. If you go to their website and the about page, they are openly pro-Israel. But unlike these outside groups that oftentimes don’t necessarily understand the right way to interface with the university, right, some of these outside groups, and particularly the ones more to the right only operate in one register and that’s assaulting the university.

Groups like the Academic Engagement Network are formed of people who have worked within and adjacent to the university, understand its language, understand how to address it, and to hail it and have been, I think, very effective operating in conjunction with these more right-wing groups. So oftentimes what’ll [00:25:00] happen is you’ll have a broad assault on the university and DEI, by the Chris Ruffos of this world, the David Bernsteins of this world.

And then the academic engagement network will come in quietly, oftentimes they do a lot of their work behind the scenes and they’ll write to university presidents, they’ll write to chancellors, and I know because I’ve seen some of these letters that have come to my institution, and they’ll say, oh, you’re having this event That seems really antisemitic, right? You’re having Palestinians speak. We don’t want to stop your event because we respect free speech, but we’re here to offer you resources and counter-programming. And these groups oftentimes work behind the scenes. They know how to speak to universities. 

They oftentimes have connections to administrators at the higher level. And then they offer their services, and so you have two different Zionist approaches to DEI, one being an assault, the other being finding ways to use DEI to impose discipline on anti-Zionists inside the institution. They work in a very complementary fashion. And those attacks from the outside then allow these more inside-facing institutions [00:26:00] like the academic engagement network to quietly interface with administrators. And here’s where the IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition comes in.
Liberals and the folks who run these, these DEI offices you know, they’re liberal technocrats, right? And they want to know, well, how do we know? How do we know it’s antisemitic? Right? You, you know, our faculty and students are saying this is about Palestinian liberation. It’s about human rights. How do we know? And the AEN and these other groups can say, ah, well, thankfully we have the definition for this, it’s a definition that’s been adopted by organizations, states, universities. And it’s not just about counting. It’s about what is the threshold to trigger internal discipline? And if you can be said to have crossed this red line of violating this widely adopted declaration that can be then used by folks inside the institution and by DEI offices to impose discipline. 

AMIRA: And I think the AEN, if I’m not mistaken, has played a major role in sanctioning the statements that some departments have made, right?

SEAN: [00:27:00] Yeah, what’s interesting about that is whereas some of the more right-wing groups will look at these statements and say, Oh my God, they’re being antisemitic. Oh my God, they’re terrorists. Oh my God, they’re anti-Americans. The AEN approach speaks again in the register of the university and says, Oh, we need to think of the poor junior faculty. the untenured faculty. We need to think of the poor students who will be threatened or coerced by the fact that these professors are taking this position, but I do think we need to be aware of this approach because I think approaches that speak the language of the institution are effective.

Deborah Lipstadt, who is currently the Biden administration’s, antisemitism czar, before she came into government. She wrote about this and she says like a lot of the arguments that Zionists use in the mainstream press are not effective inside a university, because the university has different procedures. It has its own procedures, its own language. And if Zionists want to be effective, they need to speak the language. And engage the policies and procedures of the institution they are targeting, they’re, oh, we’re here to help you, we’re here. And they address this not to the general [00:28:00] public. They address this to chancellors and heads of DEI offices. Oh, we’re here to provide speakers. My own university has three times had AEN speakers on campus to talk about antisemitism.

And I don’t think it’s because the folks running that office are particularly hardcore Zionists. I think they’re a cash strapped public university, worried about bad publicity and they get an email saying, hey, we’ll send for free a speaker to your campus. We’ll put on a whole educational program for you. We’re here to protect you from all of these people who are attacking on the outside. 

EMMAIA: I want to turn to the bigger work that this discourse is doing. We have a couple of building blocks here. We’ve talked about how DEI as a procedural and not very nuanced way of trying to think about being against racism, quote unquote, the sort of imperative that comes out of the civil rights era has been manipulable on campus where it’s shutting down student organizing by portraying student protest against genocide as somehow violating the right to inclusion that Zionists supposedly [00:29:00] have.

It’s producing the idea that Zionist political beliefs are a kind of racial or religious identity and triggering the protection. That are granted to racial or religious identities. And in the case of AEN, as you’ve been saying, it’s actually changing what kind of knowledge can come out of the university and to move against teaching about colonialism and racism.

AMIRA: What I wanna ask is how this turns to presenting the Israeli state itself as the victim of racism. Amira, this is something you talked about in your conference presentation. In this turn from Zionism as racism to antisemitism as racism, we really see this sort of assertion that a state can be a victim of racism. In particular, the idea that Israel is a victim of racism. And I think we want to first ask, like, what does it mean? To think of a nation-state as a victim of racism, particularly given that modern nation-states have really functioned in terms of what Cedric Robinson [00:30:00] calls racial regimes, that they come into being in many ways through modes of conquest and enslavement and violent displacement.

So to think of them as victims of racism is really upending the pretty much entire project of critical race theory and thinking about racism as a structure. Something that is embedded in histories of colonialism and settler colonialism. And another thing that I would just want to point to thinking about.

Zionism is racism here in the context of the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance that was held in Durban in 2001. In that context, this statement, Zionism is racism, had a really different reception. And in fact, Kenneth Stern has argued in his book, Conflict Over the Conflict, he claims that The mission of this statement, Zionism is racism, was, [00:31:00] quote, to counter racial hatred and bias, but instead it energetically promoted hatred of only one country, Israel.

There was also clear hatred of Jews, he says, so that’s the end of the quote. Here it’s really interesting to think about this semantic turn from racism to hatred in the statement. So the other thing that is happening in this shift from Zionism to racism, to antisemitism is racism. I would argue is this shift from thinking about racism in terms of systems and systematic structural issues to thinking about it in relation to individual forms of discrimination. And that’s a DEI move par excellence, right? Like this idea of DEI as a diluted version of critical race theory, not as diluted, but maybe we could think of it as diluted as well.

EMMAIA: These sort of stripped down ideas about racism that you’re talking about are actually part of a right-wing project, right? The history of [00:32:00] anti-racist organizing has been to try and point to the ways that racism is structural. That it’s not just a matter of one person being mean to another or having a bias, but actually that there are these structures of power that enforce bad terms of life and marginality, lack of power on groups of people.

And that’s actually the content of critical race theory, to try and look at those things, right? So, stripping away that understanding of what racism is, Making it individual, and also refusing to teach about it and to talk about it. Those are right-wing projects. And so we can see how that would work for Zionist power.

Not just Zionist people, but Zionist power. To try and distract from the ways that Israel is a powerful state that’s imposing racist violence, rather than a victim of racist violence. But we also see still at this point, an enormous number of people who identify themselves as liberal and some even as progressive, who are endorsing Zionism and particularly using these arguments about DEI and trying to defend against [00:33:00] antisemitism in order to do it.

So the last question I want to put to you, Sean, is you write just exactly about this, about how Zionism recruits from both left and right. Or, from liberal and Right. And the phrase that you use is so helpful. You write quite simply, Zionism remains a flexible organizing tool.

SEAN: And I wonder if you could just round out this conversation by talking about what that means and how DEI is working for Zionist institutions as a flexible organizing tool. For a very long time, the primary argument was, well, we’re protecting students’ Jewish identities, and their Jewish identity includes attachment to the State of Israel. This new move, I think, is clever because by emphasizing Zionist identities, you do two things. One is you broaden the circle to include anybody who supports Israel, Jewish or not.

Second, you excise anti-Zionist Jews. They’re not protected. Jewish Voice for peace isn’t protected, right? It’s important in thinking about Zionism, A, not to see it monolithically and B, to [00:34:00] acknowledge that there are tensions inside Zionism that can be both destructive to it as a movement and productive. As I noted earlier, they can work together, right? Within red states, say a Florida or a Texas, the right-wing Zionist frame is very effective and allows them to directly interface with legislatures and the governor and the electorate.

Whereas the more kind of liberal or faux progressive strain of Zionism that emphasizes things like Zionist identities, that can be very effective in a state like New York or California. You see this playing out in California right now in the debate over ethnic studies, where these Zionist organizations rather than saying, oh, we’re opposed outright to ethnic studies. They are instead trying to find ways to co-opt it. And again, I think it is a testament to the flexibility and durability of Zionism as an ideology.

It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to defeat. But I think we really need to understand, as we look at it, the, the [00:35:00] different ways in which it operates and, within the same institution or state, both of those strains can be at play, and we need to be ready for all of those. You need to be ready for the fact that you may beat back the abolish the DEI folks, but then watch under the radar folks come in from the more liberal or progressive side of the Zionist movement who smuggle this stuff right into the DEI offices that you have just managed to preserve through your efforts. 

EMMAIA: I don’t want to leave without asking this question. Both of you have been involved in pushing back on the instrumentalization of DEI on your campuses and in the sort of bigger, broader picture of U. S. academia. From your perspective, what are the opportunities for trying to untangle this mess?

SEAN: A couple years back I was sitting on what was called Academic Council, which is the kind of gathering of all of the academic governance folks on the faculty side in the University of California system. And we had a long two-hour fight about DEI statements in hiring promotion, should we require these sort [00:36:00] of things? And I walked out of that meeting with friend and comrade Dylan Rodriguez, who was also on this committee. And one of us said, Why the fuck did we just spend two hours defending DEI?

Because oftentimes in our institutions we are forced to defend it. I think about that a lot because, in some ways it’s like defending policing, right? Oh we want the good policing, not the bad policing. Stephen Salaita has written about this really eloquently, you know, ultimately the DEI office isn’t the place to have this fight because that’s not where the real power is. At the same time and it was over a decade ago he wrote that, and DEI offices have gotten a lot more power. I do think we need to engage with these offices. And we need to engage in the political and institutional debates around them simply because for this moment, significant institutional power resides within DEI offices.

So on the one hand, I think we cannot simply abandon them either having them abolished or have them completely taken over by Zionists. At the same time, we need to be able to walk and chew gum. While we engage with and [00:37:00] sometimes situationally defend DEI within our institutions, we also need to realize that true liberation will never come out of the DEI office. In some ways would liken DEI as a concept within the academy or corporations to the two-state solution, and that ultimately it’s designed to frustrate and contain actual liberation. It doesn’t mean we don’t engage in these fights when it is tactically useful.

But at the same time, we need to be thinking about longer-term creating structures that are more radical and more transformative than DEI will ever be. If we are truly interested in anti-racist transformation, if we are truly interested in freeing Palestine and anti-colonial movements around the world, we cannot be confined by the horizons of liberal multicultural institutions, whether that is the DEI office or, frankly, the university.

AMIRA: That was so beautiful. The only thing I would say is if we’re understanding DEI in relation to the kinds of tools [00:38:00] that it has enabled within the institutional context, then, the one way to think about what we can do is how we can use the tools, including the resources that are available currently within those offices, depending on your context and as ways of funneling some of the resources back toward the truly liberatory aims that critical race theory and what gave rise to it were interested in. 

EMMAIA: Fugitive DEI.

SEAN: Yeah, I’m thinking about, what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney would say about DEI offices. I think they might say, Hey, steal their printer paper, right? We should always be availing ourselves of the resources within our institution. 

EMMAIA: This was very illuminating. Thank you so much to both of you and look forward to sharing your paper and your talk and having more conversations. 

AMIRA: Thank you. Thank you for hosting. 

SEAN: Thanks, Emmaia. I really appreciate it.

EMMAIA: And that’s it. Thanks for joining Sean L. Malloy and Amira Jarmakani and me to talk through DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion [00:39:00] in Relation to Zionism.

In the show notes, you can find the link to Amira’s talk, an excerpt from Sean’s talk, and soon Sean’s article in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal. And you’ll also find the transcript of this conversation. Additionally, you can find all of these materials on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.