Editorial Preface to Vol. 1

Editorial Collective

The conference centered on the working definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), typically referred to as the IHRA definition.² The IHRA definition functions to silence criticism of Zionism and Israeli policy and to suppress Palestinian perspectives and support for the Palestinian struggle. Equating these with antisemitism lays the preliminary, if intellectually unsupportable, groundwork for criminalizing these practices under Title VI of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin by programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism is hegemonic in the Global North. 38 U.S. states, 32 countries in Europe , and 7 of 10 Canadian provinces (as well as the Canadian federal government) have adopted the definition, as have dozens of municipalities, colleges and universities, and corporations in the United States and across the globe. Currently 30 U.S.-based colleges and universities, including public institutions ranging from the City College of New York to Texas A&M to CalTech, rely on the IHRA definition to adjudicate antisemitism on campus. Nationally, 86 U.S. cities and towns have adopted the definition. Outside the Global North, South American countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, and Uruguay have also adopted the definition. By the end of 2022, 1,116 entities had adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. ICSZ is committed to tracking the proliferating support for the IHRA definition and, to that end, is soliciting entries for its new crowd-sourced project, Mapping out IHRA: Terrain of Struggle. Working in tandem with existing resources, such as the Defining Criticism of Israel as Antisemitism database created by Lara Friendman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, this project will be used to generate an interactive map of battles against IHRA.

The widespread adoption of the IHRA definition further enables its oppressive impact on the political freedoms of millions of people, especially as it facilitates official attempts to silence worldwide outrage over the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and across historic Palestine. Equating anti-Zionist protest against the violence of the Israeli state and its military apparatus with antisemitism, the IHRA definition and similar guidelines have been mobilized by colleges and municipalities alike to brutally assault, arrest, and silence the millions who have taken to the streets across the globe over the last year, including many on college campuses who led the way in what has been called the student intifada. Many students have been criminalized, either threatened with or in fact facing expulsion. So too have a number of faculty, whose university presidents maligned them with false accusations of antisemitism in draconian Congressional hearings, despite faculty members having also been subjected to campus violence, including chemical attacks from students, some of whom are former IDF soldiers. Not only have faculty been fired for opposing the genocide, so have workers across all professions, including doctors, nurses in New York and Minnesota, dozens of workers at Google, and celebrities and public figures. Some have been fired even for identifying the Israeli siege as genocidal, despite the face that the International Court of Justice has determined genocide to be occurring in Gaza. The IHRA definition not only participates in the punishment of dissent, but in doing so, it aids and abets the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. 

Since October 2023, we have also witnessed a stunning rise of violent attacks across the United States targeting Palestinians and Palestinian Americans. From the murder of six-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume and the stabbing of his mother in Plainfield, Illinois, to the shooting of Brown University students Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani, who were visiting Vermont, to the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian child in Texas, these attacks testify to the lethal endangerment of Palestinian lives in the United States. Meanwhile, policymakers, leaning on the IHRA definition, are proposing to criminalize constitutionally protected speech under the pretense that it makes some U.S. Jews feel unsafe. Such criminalization and repression of dissent justifies and legitimizes violence against Palestinians worldwide. 

Importantly, Jewish students, professors, and activists have also been significant targets of the IHRA definition. This apparent irony highlights that neither Jewish safety nor antisemitism is really the concern of advocates for the IHRA definition, but instead any speech, research, and teaching that criticizes – or even rigorously examines – Israel and Zionism. Instead, the IHRA definition fosters common misunderstandings about the difference between Zionism and Judaism, enacting a conflation of these terms which is itself antisemitic. 

The time is ripe for a critical academic space that unites scholars and activists who are dedicated to an intellectually-grounded, justice-oriented critique of Zionism. We understand Zionism as a settler colonial project based in racial capitalism, one founded under historical conditions of European nation-state imperial expansion and one that has since been perpetuated by the United States and its allies, including some in the region. This journal is explicitly anti-Zionist, interdisciplinary, and transnational in nature, seeking to support the abolition of Zionism, along with all related forms of global structural oppression, such as militarism, imperialism, racism, cisheteropatriarchy, colonialism, and neoliberalism. As Fannie Lou Hamer reminds us, “No one is free until everyone is free.” The journal will center the scholarship and knowledge production of those working towards the collective liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people.

The Inaugural Issue

Given the urgent need to address the chilling effects on global protest of the IHRA definition, even as the genocidal violence it sanctions continues unabated, the first issues of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism will focus on it. These issues will feature articles based on papers and presentations given at the ICSZ conference in October 2023, alongside pedagogical interventions, case studies, organizing notes, and related multimedia publications and resources. Examining theory, history, and case studies, the pieces will connect the many strands of critical discourse regarding anti-Zionist speech (sometimes referred to as the “Palestine exception” to free speech) by discussing historical antecedents, contemporary applications, varying manifestations, and socio-political consequences. We must also note that a number of colleagues who presented at the conference chose not to publish their papers here, for fear of being targeted in ways that are described throughout this issue, and with particularly excruciating detail by Lara Sheehi. 

Theory & History

Theory & History contains four articles. The first, from Terri Ginsberg, offers a critical historiography of definitions and understandings of antisemitism. Drawing on the scholarly claims of cultural geographer Mohameden Ould-Mey and settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe, she highlights how the definition has shifted from one that identifies an ideology imposing real restrictions on Jewish social life to one that serves the advancement of the racialized capitalist colonialism that would eventually produce Zionism, legitimizing Palestinian dispossession through Jewish settler colonization. Ginsberg’s renarration of antisemitism reveals the IHRA’s elision of these important historical developments and, thus, the elision of the real history of antisemitism itself. 

In this section’s second article, John Harfouch & C. Heike Schotten draw on Fayez Sayegh’s critically important scholarship from the 1960s addressing links between antisemitism and Zionism. Highlighting Sayegh’s findings that perceptions of the existence of global antisemitism are sometimes manufactured by Zionists themselves, Harfouch and Schotten identify the ways that Sayegh’s analysis illustrates the strategic uses and functions of the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism.

Melissa Weiner’s article studies how Zionists’ early efforts to colonize Palestine manufactured consent for that project and financed it via emotional appeals to U.S. Jews. She identifies a similar dynamic at work in the ways that the IHRA definition seeks to limit debate by appealing to Jewish emotions and fears of historical violent antisemitism, with the ultimate effect of shoring up efforts to colonize Palestine. 

Sean Malloy helps clarify IHRA definition’s historical precedents by offering an alternative history of its emergence: namely, by re-reading the 1970s Zionist theorization of “the new antisemitism” as a form of counterinsurgency against emerging global, anti-imperial solidarities both at home and abroad.

Case Studies

Turning to case studies, we open with two articles on the IHRA definition’s deployment in Canada. Jillian Rogin shows how the advocacy of Jewish Canadian political institutions merged with the interests of the Canadian state after 1967, as Jewish community institutions engaged in slander and fearmongering about the Black Panthers and other Black organizations that were advancing a global anti-imperial analysis. The legislation that emerged from this period prefigures the adoption of the IHRA definition. Next, Sheryl Nestel describes research conducted by Independent Jewish Voices Canada on the chilling impacts of IHRA on academics: harassment on the job, limits to academic freedom within and outside the classroom, slurs, and threats of violence, including death threats and threats of sexual violence. 

Moving to the United States., Andrew Ross offers an essential institutional history of New York University (NYU), one of the few U.S. universities to have formally adopted the IHRA definition. Historically home to a vibrant and diverse set of Jewish students, faculty, and staff, NYU did not arrive organically at this decision. It adopted the IHRA definition after settling a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government alleging that the campus was antisemitic. Ross offers lessons from the NYU experience for campus activism, academic freedom, and the BDS movement, centering the critical study of Zionism for each of these. 

Lara Sheehi’s conference presentation transcript provides the final case study. Sheehi uses her own experience as a target of Zionist harassment and intimidation to analyze a larger social phenomenon. Sheehi contends that demands to reject antisemitism as a precondition of speaking about Palestine are better understood as demands by Zionist organizations that act as “settler colonial outposts,” seeking to impose a “psychic state of siege” on anti-Zionist discourse and its participants.

Pedagogical Interventions

This inaugural issue offers two resources to support critical study: a Keyword + Microsyllabus and an annotated version of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.

Each issue of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism will present a Critical Zionism Studies keyword and bibliography of suggested reading. This issue’s keyword is “Antisemitism Industrial Complex (AIC),” a concept that speaks to many of the issues and ideas analyzed by contributors. The AIC also names a phenomenon that is much discussed but under-articulated. Ironically, a likely reason for its under-theorization is that those who address it risk being accused of antisemitism – a predicament manufactured by the AIC itself. With this keyword, the Editorial Collective aims to formally define a set of conditions already familiar to so many of us, in order to develop an adequate analytic tool to study and challenge Zionism.

In the second pedagogical intervention, the ICSZ collective offers an annotated version of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. Our notes intend to identify the many difficulties with this document, presented in an accessible format that does not require reading a long or scholarly article. It is also an invitation to readers to supply their own annotations, an opening to yet more critique since we surely have not exhausted the possibilities here. As a pedagogical intervention, it is an attempt to show how critical analysis can and must contribute to our movements for justice and abolition. 

Organizing Notes

In this section, JCSZ supplies tools and transcripts for anti-Zionist organizing. The first is a missive emerging from a fight against adoption of the IHRA definition in Montgomery County, Maryland. The next two pieces are transcripts of the ICSZ podcast Unpacking Zionism. The first features Sara Kershnar, co-founder and international coordinator of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Kershnar highlights how Zionism has ideologically colonized Judaism, just as it has colonized conceptions of Palestine and Palestinians. She reminds us that mainstream Jewish community organizations have been and still are deeply involved in weaponizing Jewish history and trauma for imperial settler purposes in Palestine, particularly through promoting the IHRA definition of antisemitism. In solidarity with larger anti-racist and anti-imperial movements, anti-Zionism seeks to eradicate settler colonialism from Palestine and to eliminate Zionism from the practice of Judaism.

The second transcript features Miriam Osman of the Palestinian Youth Movement and redirects our attention to the history and roots of Zionism. Osman reminds us that Zionism did not “go bad” or “take a wrong turn.” Rather, the genocide we are currently witnessing is the logical outcome of more than a century of settler colonial violence, supported as part of larger British and U.S. imperial projects. Osman’s analysis centers the importance of anti-imperialism, historically and today, challenging us to build a global anti-Zionist movement that would benefit not only Palestinians, but all those who are subjected to the similar political and material violence around the globe.

Journal Scope and Future Issues

Confronting the IHRA definition as well as the longstanding efforts of Zionists to denigrate and reject any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism provides a much-needed publication venue for scholars who struggle against censorship and distorted knowledge on this crucial topic. We seek anti-Zionist, abolitionist, transnational, and interdisciplinary scholarship from around the world that centers the voices of Palestinians and their allies and advances Palestinian liberation. While the first issues of the journal will address the IHRA definition, we have a more expansive vision for this important new publication: to encourage contributions that place the critique of Zionism, in its broadest senses, at their intellectual apex. This vision includes, but is not limited to, analyses of historical and contemporary aspects of the Zionist project; questions about how Zionism affects Palestinians in historic Palestine and around the world; comparative study of Zionism and other forms of racism and settler colonialism; and strategies for challenging the Zionist project. We plan to circulate timely calls of special topical relevance concerning these and other matters.

The Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism serves as a collegial counterpart to longstanding journals that share some of this focus, including the Journal for Palestine Studies and Jerusalem Quarterly, both published by the Institute for Palestine Studies, and Holy Land Studies. At a moment when work on these matters is facing unprecedented, restrictive gatekeeping by the academic and publishing establishment, (as attested by multiple articles in the current issue), we hope to expand opportunities for scholars who address these topics. As an explicitly anti-Zionist publication, and in the spirit of Edward Said’s 1979 article, the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism seeks to re-center scholarly focus and attention on Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.