Antisemitism Training with Eli Meyerhoff

Antisemitism Training with Eli Meyerhoff

EMMAIA: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. This episode looks at “antisemitism training” as a keyword for Critical Zionism Studies. I’m talking with Eli Meyerhoff, who’s a fellow at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, which is part of the American Association of University Professors. (I should also to point listeners to last week’s related episode — that one is about tacking anti-Islamophobia messages onto discussions of antisemitism — as in we’re worried about antisemitism… oh, and Islamophobia.)

So – why “antisemitism training” as a keyword? I’ll put on my historian hat for a second here to explain. Zionist institutions it seems like forever have used charges of antisemitism as a reason that people should stop talking about Zionist colonialism, racism, and the Israeli state. Zionist groups in the United States have historically been at the heart of that effort — and that’s partly because financial support from the U.S. has been so critical to colonizing Palestine, initially with Jewish communities collecting donations, and later with the U.S. government sending massive amounts of aid. The Costs of War project puts U.S. contributions to the Gaza genocide at nearly $23 billion, way more than any other state, and it’s widely acknowledged that Israel could not function without U.S. aid.

So, the weaponization of antisemitism charges has been around for a long time. In the 1950s, Palestinians in the U.S. start speaking and writing about the rights of Palestinian refugees, understanding that the U.S. and the U.N. would have a lot of say in what happened. The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League counter with a campaign calling them antisemites. That continues with attacks on Palestinian organizing in the present. 

In the late 1960s, Black civil rights organizers of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, recognized Zionism as colonialism and tied anti-Zionism to the US civil rights movement. Zionist groups called them antisemitic. That also continues with Black organizing in the present, Zionist groups attacked the Movement for Black Lives for the same thing. 

1975, the United Nations resolves that Zionism is Racism. Zionist organizations call it antisemitic, and at that point the U.S. government piles on too.

When Jewish groups have organized against Zionism, or even just criticized aspects of it, same thing, they get called antisemites: historic groups like Breira, New Jewish Agenda, Jews Against the Occupation. Right now Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network… Okay, you get the picture.

So when Zionist organizations run antisemitism trainings, we want to have a look at what that’s doing. 

So let’s hear from Eli Meyerhoff. Welcome, Eli.

ELI: I’m Eli Meyerhoff. I use he/him pronouns. I work at Duke University, it’s called the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, as a fellow in the American Association of University Professors new Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. 

EMMAIA: Thanks for being here. You recently attended an antisemitism training at Duke University, where you work. It was put on by Jewish Life at Duke — you’re Jewish, and you’re at Duke, so theoretically it was for or about you. And you wrote an article about it in the university newspaper, the Duke Chronicle. It’s titled Unmasking Indoctrination, we’ll link it in the show notes. It’s kind of a big deal because that training was comparable to trainings that have rolled out all over the United States on college campuses during this year of Israeli genocide in Palestine, now expanding to assults on Lebanon, Iran, and Syria. 

It was one of many antisemitism trainings affiliated with Zionist institutions that are being offered ostensibly in the face of a crisis of antisemitism — but what’s being described as a crisis of antisemitism is actually almost entirely protest against Israel, genocide, colonialism, Zionism. The trainings — to some extent just by popping up everywhere — reinforce their claim that protest against the genocide is a form of “intolerance.” Your article went through what was taught at the training, and what was obscured by it — in other words, treating the training as a political act, produced by political organizations under highly politicized circumstances. Which is significantly different of course than its stated framing as “a pluralistic approach to ensure inclusion.”

From your vantage point as someone who works on academic freedom, can you talk to us about what is going on with antisemitism trainings?

ELI: Over the past 10 months, 11 months with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian people, Zionist organizations have been pushing this kind of moral panic about Jewish safety, this idea that Jewish people around the world are in danger, and should feel fear, insecurity about the possibility of antisemitic violence against them. University campuses around the world, really, have been flashpoints of protest. So antisemitism trainings on university campuses are part of that wider political project of deflecting attention, saying “Don’t look over there at Palestine, look over here, at this danger to Jewish people in the U.S. or Europe, Australia, all over the world,” – this kind of narrative. 

So campuses are a site of political struggle. And university administrators have responded by attempting to frame students, Jewish students in particular, as potential victims of antisemitic violence. They use that framing to call the protesting students a danger, a threat. And in doing so they use infantilizing discourse about the Jewish students, like seeing them as children who need to be protected. But then paradoxically, the anti-Zionist Jewish students who are engaging in these protests are framed as a threat to these other Jewish students. Administrators have used repressive tactics, like suspending the protesters, even expelling them, trespassing them from campus as a way to exclude them from being considered as students in need of protection. The protesting students really are bursting the fantasy of the campus as a space where students are only to be protected.

So I think, when we see how much the student movements, the Gaza Solidarity encampments, with the students as protagonists of resistance, how their actions really threatened the kind of order that administrators maintain on campus. That context, I think, helps us understand why Zionist organizations like Hillel, have increasingly pushed these antisemitism trainings on campuses because they recruit more people into believing in that narrative, that discourse. 

EMMAIA: Okay, let’s go to the antisemitism training that you attended and the article that you wrote about it. As we’ve said, trainings like this are happening everywhere.

ELI: Yeah, I am a participant in Jewish Voice for Peace in the North Carolina triangle. And this antisemitism training was being put on Duke’s campus affiliated with Hillel International. And my colleague she’s a staff member at Duke, like me, and she put out a call for other staff to join her in attending this antisemitism training to see what was happening in it. We knew that it would be presented from a Zionist perspective based on our understanding of the kind of politics that Hillel pushes and based on the framing of the training on the website. But we were surprised though by how blatantly Zionist it was when we attended it.

Some ways it was presented, at least the framing of it in the emails about it that they sent to Duke workers, it was presented in a way that made it seem like it was objective. It’s not coming from any particular political perspective. When we attended it, we found that the veneer of objectivity was really a mask for a really obvious political pro-Zionist, pro-Israel perspective and one that obscured, excluded consideration of political alternatives, alternative ways of understanding Jewishness and antisemitism, other Jewish political traditions and political traditions other than Zionism. 

EMMAIA: I’m curious about the framing. The notion of antisemitism training, like teaching against racism, generally suggests that it comes out of social justice movements. The premise is that we who have grown up in racist environments, and that would be all of us, have to unlearn some things. I mean, there’s more to it: to understand how to actually shift things, we also have to learn to see the structures that produce racism — but “unlearning racism” is often a starting point. So that’s a social justice framing. And it sounds like that’s what you’re saying the training is leaning on, or that the advertising is leaning on. What work is that actually doing?

ELI: Yeah, the training was couched in language of anti-racism and social justice, a big part of the training was a three part video by Hillel international. It’s available on their website. It showed footage from the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, where there were these tiki-torch carrying white supremacists.

So they shared a video of that and talked a little bit about how white supremacist racism is related with antisemitism, but they did so in a way that presented support for Israel as a solution to that problem, so it was a very selective, politically selective, framing of how these different forms of oppression are interrelated with each other. There is zero mention of colonialism or settler colonialism in the video or the training as a whole. So thereby they could neglect how these forms of oppression, racism, antisemitism are related with settler colonialism. And by avoiding discussion of settler colonialism they could avoid the argument that Israel is a fundamentally oppressive project.

EMMAIA: In your writing about it, you talk about some of the specific facts that are included, and facts that are excluded. Can you say more about what ideas the trainings are building, and what is the sort of worldview that they’re asking us to have about antisemitism and race?

ELI: Their narrative gives a kind of mythological history of Jewishness. They gave a map that showed a supposed unified kingdom of Israel that was supposed to have split into two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And that’s really a mythical history. According to historian Shlomo Sand’s book, The Invention of the Land of Israel, such a unified kingdom never existed, and rather, if you look at the biblical texts, they use the name of the land of Canaan to talk about that historical land. And so, by claiming this kind of origin story of Jewish people in the land, they set up a narrative that supposedly can help them counter the anti-Zionist critique of Zionism as a settler colonial project.

So there is no mention of the very intentional and explicit ways that the early Zionists in the late 19th century and early 20th century through the 1950s talked about the Zionist project as a settler colonial project. I should say they still talk about it as settlement today. They made it seem like there had been a much larger continuous population of Jewish people in the region. They didn’t mention how actually only about 2 or 3, 4, maybe 5 percent of the population was Jewish through the early 20th century.

When they talked about the increase in Jewish people in Palestine, in the early and mid 20th century, they framed it as immigration in response to antisemitic pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust as the main reason. But they didn’t talk about the really intentional settler colonial character of much of that immigration. Most importantly, they didn’t talk about the dispossession of Palestinian people as a result of that settler colonial project. 

They mentioned that Palestinian people were pushed out but they framed it as a result of what they called the Israel-Arab war in 1948. Video and trainers didn’t say anything about how Palestinian people refer to that dispossession as the Nakba or catastrophe, which over 750,000 people were ethnically cleansed from their land. By avoiding talking about Zionism as a particular political project, they avoided having to consider the alternative political projects that Jewish people had created as responses to antisemitic violence that they experienced in Europe in the 19th century and 20th century.

EMMAIA: It sounds like the tactic is to create a sort of Frankenstein history, right? Like, pulling some elements of the present into the past — like this idea that Israel is here now and okay, the thing that was there in the past is the same. Conflating present day Jewish Israelis with the people who lived there in the past is useful if you want to claim that opposing Zionism in the present is an attack on Jewish history. It’s ahistorical but how many people know that? And now you have to defend yourself against that ahistorical claim. There’s also the way that Zionists borrow the contemporary idea of indigeneity — which is an idea that describes people encountering colonization — and transplanting it backward to a time before colonization.

Reading about that in your article was interesting, because these odd conflations of past and present, and the sort of ahistorical smushing together of Jewish history from one setting with Jews from a totally different setting, are a tactic that’s repeated. It reminded me actually of the classroom lessons on Jewish experience that Zionist organizations proposed for the California ethnic studies model a few years ago. For instance, they used terms like “the land of Israel” and “the state of Israel” interchangeably. And they made other odd moves like, talking about the experience of Arab Jews as marginalized people of color as if it were part of the Holocaust experience of European Jews. It’s very odd stuff if you know any history, but calibrated to tug on people’s instinct to oppose racism. Which are instincts we can get behind. But they’re applied to this ahistorical construction of Jewishness.

So let’s talk about what happens when people are trained in this way? What are the material impacts on the university particularly?

ELI: Training drew upon materials mostly from Hillel and from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, and that the ADL has long been a conservative organization also some of the materials came from op-eds written in the Atlantic and New York Times that were some kind of liberal Zionist writings.

Organizations like the ADL and Hillel, the on campus Zionist organizations, they circulate these discourses in ways that feed on each other. The way that this kind of discourse is infiltrating universities through these kinds of trainings, it’s really antithetical to the ideals of academic knowledge production. By presenting Jewishness and antisemitism as concepts that can be easily defined through trainings like this, they’re obscuring how those concepts are highly politically contested and have deep histories of contestation behind them with different political projects like Zionism or alternatives like the Jewish labor movement or Jewish anarchists, Jewish Marxists, wishing alternative definitions of Jewishness, understandings of antisemitism.

Those kinds of complex histories and theoretical, political, intellectual debates around those concepts are really obscured and buried through these kinds of trainings. And people who take these trainings are indoctrinated into this kind of moral panic around Jewish feelings of unsafety on campuses and so then people feel like if they consider anti-Zionist alternative understandings to this kind of Zionist dogma that will be treated as a threat to Jewish safety. So this dynamic creates a chill effect on campuses, a chill effect that students and staff are feeling in a big way. We’re seeing what can happen: people being fired and suspended for engaging in Palestine solidarity activism. 

EMMAIA: You’ve talked about students who are organizing on campuses against genocide — often led by Palestinian students, students of color, Jewish students. So… who’s in the training? Who is getting the Zionist institutional message instead of the students’ message? I mean, Jewish dissent is incredibly highly visible, and the repressive nature of Zionist institutions acting on everyone is visible. The genocidal intent of the Israeli state is visible. Is it really possible that the people who are taking these trainings believe what the trainings are selling? Or do the trainings just work as cover — a way for administrators to say, well, they told me that this is what antisemitism is and it’s my job to create policy against it. 

ELI: Unfortunately, I think a lot of people do believe the indoctrination that they’re being fed in these trainings, I think for people who are not, you know, involved in Palestine Solidarity organizing, anti-Zionist Jewish organizing. If they’re not involved in that organizing and not engaging on social media or through alternative media to get perspectives from Palestinian people, from anti-Zionist Jews, they’re not getting these narratives anywhere because the mainstream media is censoring out those narratives. Mainstream media is pushing the Zionist narrative. And the U.S. government is pushing the Zionist narrative. Most of students’ classes are excluding Palestinian perspectives and anti-Zionist U.S. perspectives. I think it’s very, very hard for the majority of people in the U.S. to be exposed to Palestine solidarity or anti-Zionist Jewish narratives. Yeah, there’s this kind of closed loop.

EMMAIA: I still want to push back on that a little bit. That may be true in places where people don’t encounter resistance, right? But campuses are sites of incredible resistance, and Palestinians and Palestinian history are not actually invisible on campuses because of that, the genocide is not invisible. So that’s why I’m asking if it’s really plausible that people don’t know.  

ELI: I think it’s a question of not only not knowing, but knowing and deflecting attention away from what you know, and the implications of what you know. It’s not so much a matter of ignorance, but of disavowal of the implications of what one knows. These trainings support that process of disavow because they present these narratives of Jewish history and Jewishness and antisemitism from the perspective of the settlers while disavowing their settlerness, selectively forgetting and selectively remembering, but in a way that constructs a certain mythical history. Administrators, staff, faculty who are doing this kind of settler disavow, they’ll pay lip service to caring about Palestinian people, but then in their actions, they’ll call the police on the protests, they’ll fire the faculty, they’ll suspend the students who organize encampments. 

EMMAIA: So there’s a sort of like giving permission. I mean, I’m curious about this because you’re talking about psychology basically. And the idea of training people out of racism, like that sort of social psychology is actually,  You know, it has a history, it’s actually a Cold War project.

This is part of the history of the ADL, and like, I’m always in the weeds of the ADL… But in that history, dealing with social psychology is a way of refusing to confront capitalism and settler colonialism. It’s like we’re just going to fix individual people, that’s how we’re going to tackle racism. And we know that that’s a deflection, as you said.  At the same time, in universities policies are often driven by individual leaders. Like, the DEI office is made up of a couple of people doing policy, and they get to decide what claims are credible. So I wonder how we tease apart the idea that psychologizing racism is a deflection from the fact that antisemitism trainings themselves are functioning as a psychological tool that allows people to be cogs in repression.

ELI: Yeah, those are two sides of the same coin. Let’s say these trainings pushing this individualizing racial liberal understanding of antisemitism in a way that deflects attention from structural racism, capitalism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, deflects attention away from a structural critique. I think they want to portray antisemitic attitudes as an eternal problem, as some kind of like inherent part of human nature and therefore, from the Zionist perspective, Israel is always a necessary safe haven for Jewish people.

I don’t wanna give too much agency to the Zionist organizations in creating that project of deflection. I think the real historical force pushing them to do that was radical social movements – Palestine Liberation Movement against the settler colonial dispossession of Palestinian people’s land and lives, and then also the radical social movements in the U.S. who joined in solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Movement, like especially the Black Power Movement and the Third World Liberation movements that led to the creation of critical ethnic studies programs in the 60s.

And yes, these movements have diagnosed the problem of antisemitism in a structural way, as interconnected with white supremacy and settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy and gave really an alternative description of that problem. Yeah, I mean, basically seeing antisemitism as a kind of deflection of people’s anger about oppression, exploitation that they experience under racial colonial capitalism, and it deflects their anger away from these oppressive systems, deflects it away from ruling class and toward Jewish people as a kind of scapegoat. That’s basically kind of like the structural critical approach. And that can be the basis of organizing in solidarity with other people across groups of people who are marginalized and oppressed and exploited in various different but interconnected ways. And that’s the real threat. And so in response to that threat, the ADL and other conservative groups ginned up this idea of the new antisemitism, anti-Zionist critique of Israel and I think that has been bound up with this kind of individualizing, psychologizing view of antisemitism as Jew-hatred.

EMMAIA: Okay so we have a sense of how antisemitism training is both an idea and a practice that’s helping to move Zionist politics along. Can we consider why this is happening on college campuses? I mean, we’ve talked before on this podcast about the pressure of Zionist civil rights lawsuits against universities, federal Title VI complaints alleging that talking about Palestine or Israeli genocide amounts to “antisemitism” — and how, for university administrators, those have now become financial risks that are managed through repression — whether physical police repression and violence against students who protest, or through antisemitism trainings like these, which both repress knowledge about Palestine and kind of performatively do “Zionist inclusion” on campuses.  But your view of universities is broader and more historical than that. Can you talk to us about what’s going on here?

ELI: The risk management perspective that administrators take on and how they’re seeing these antisemitism trainings is part of the capitalist structure that universities, in the U.S. at least, are thoroughly integrated with the dominant view of academic freedom that we have in institutions supporting academic freedom. Like tenure are currently also part of that capitalist statist university institution. Academic freedom and tenure emerged in response to repression that faculty were experiencing during the first Red Scare around World War I. They formed the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in the late 1910s and it was a site of struggle between different political projects for defending academics against repression.

There were some leftist socialist professors who wanted the AAUP to be a union to see faculty as workers organizing in solidarity with other workers in and beyond universities. That was one possible vision of what academics could be and what that vision, academic freedom, the freedom to teach and learn, could be something enjoyed by faculty and students and everyone as fellow workers, and that kind of freedom would be supported with institution of unions and broader social movements, which unions are or leftist unions are part. So that was one possible history – that didn’t happen though, because in the Red Scare, with this kind of racist anti-communist hysteria, the vision of how academics could defend themselves that won out was a vision of academics as professionals, who instead of organizing as workers, would organize as kind of elite professionals with a protective institution of tenure that they gain through professionalizing disciplinary processes, practices of hiring, and tenure process. And then also the institution of shared governance which is the idea that faculty share governance of the university with administrators, not with students, not with staff, but with administrators. So shared governance is really kind of divided governance where faculty govern knowledge production and administrators govern the economic processes of universities. Yeah, so shared governance and tenure were the institutions that won out as support of academic freedom. So that’s basically the academic world that we live in today. And since that time, the AAUP has shifted and become a much more labor union supporting social movement, supporting those other institutions. Tenure and shared governance still dominate, they’re kind of artifacts of that earlier historical compromise. 

EMMAIA: What’s the pushback? For the anti-Zionist movement, for anti-genocide organizing, what’s the intervention?

ELI: After my colleagues and I experienced this Zionist indoctrination form of an antisemitism training at Duke, we wanted to put on an alternative workshop that would present non- and anti-Zionist views of Jewishness and antisemitism in a way that would relate the struggle against antisemitism with struggles against other forms of oppression. And we started making one of those alternative antisemitism trainings with JVP and with The International Jewish anti-Zionist Network. There are other groups creating these trainings also, like Parseo is putting on these workshops.

I think it’s better to frame it as a workshop than a training. Training implies a kind of top down, sort of imparting of knowledge but I think more important than such trainings is continuing the student-led movements of resistance and solidarity with Gaza. I think students are the main potential force for change and for raising critical awareness on campuses. I think Jewish students’ involvement in these Palestine solidarity organizing business is really, really crucial. And yeah, I think Jewish students can play an important role in putting on these kinds of alternative antisemitism workshops. Ideally faculty and staff would be much more involved in this organizing. It’s been really disappointing, disheartening to see so many ostensibly radical faculty who have tenure stand on the sidelines and do very little to support these movements.

So, I don’t know. Yeah, seeing that happen makes me wonder if the university is really worth defending, to be honest. But at the same time, I think the students, student movements, especially in the encampments, have been enacting a kind of vision of the sort of radical liberatory university that I wish we had, or kind of student-run, autonomous university that is kind of a vision of what the university could be.

EMMAIA: Yeah there is a lot of disappointment, for sure, but also a lot of resistance. You’re in an interesting place to watch the organizing that’s unfolding, in your work with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. What are you seeing, in response to the repression and the trainings?

ELI: Well, seeing people being subjected to this anti-Palestine repression, anti-Palestine solidarity repression. We’re seeing them connect with each other through local organizing across campuses. People who are experiencing this repression are talking with each other about their experiences and about how they can support each other, forming mutual aid networks and trying to protect themselves and to fight back against this kind of repression aided by groups like Palestine Legal who are working in solidarity with the movement. 

One of the projects I’m starting with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is to connect with folks who’ve been repressed and help amplify their mutual aid networks. So I’m going to be working with them on finding out more about what has been repressed, like some people who’ve lost their jobs or been suspended have had media attention, at least alternative media, but many, many people who’ve been repressed, probably the majority by far. have not gotten any media attention, silently pushed out, or they’ve been non hired, blacklisted. And so, through this project, we’re hoping to build relationships with more folks experiencing this repression. 

Leanne Simpson says relationships not institutions are the infrastructure of our lives. And so I think in this kind of anti-oppression we’ve been building, recognizing that the relationships that are already there and doing what we can to strengthen and expand those relationships is really the best way to build the infrastructures of our lives and our movements.

Also out of this organizing against these obviously Zionist antisemitism trainings and against a long history of Hillel suppression of Jewish voices against the Zionist orthodoxy on campus, many folks, especially students, have been organizing alternatives, including the Open Hillel movement which has continued in the form of a group called Judaism on our own Terms or JOOOT. And students have started a new campaign called Drop Hillel that will seek to support organizing on campuses to combat Hillel’s hold over Jewish life on campuses and to support the creation of spaces for non and anti-Zionist understandings of Jewishness and to fight antisemitism in ways that actually break down its structural connections with other forms of oppression, in solidarity with other groups. 

EMMAIA: That’s exciting. Thank you so much, Eli, for this history and conversation, for attending a Hillel antisemitism training so we didn’t have to, and for your liberatory work.

ELI: Yeah, thank you. 

EMMAIA: Thanks for joining us. A note that Eli’s study at the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom is surveying faculty on their experiences of repression, We’ll link that survey in the show notes, and you can find the resources we mentioned, including Eli Meyerhoff’s article Unmasking Indoctrination, links to Drop Hillel, the Costs of War project, and PARCEO’s antisemitism training using a framework of collective liberation. Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.