COMMENTARY: Rutgers faculty unions continue their crusade against Israel
The Rutgers American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT) has recently emphasized the cause of defending academic freedom on campus. It is a worthy struggle. But I wonder if, in the hands of these unions, it is simply serving their long-time crusade against the state of Israel.
Faculty unions devoted to academic freedom should also respect and value the diversity of political views among their members.
But both before and after Oct. 7, 2023, these unions have strayed well beyond their main mission of fighting for the bread-and-butter interests of their members by issuing one-sided resolutions condemning Israel that do not speak for many faculty and reflect little in the way of genuine democratic deliberation among their members, as previously published by The Daily Targum.
The latest example of this conflation of the struggle for academic freedom with a partisan invective against Israel was the webinar, cosponsored by the faculty unions and other campus groups, featuring Ellen Schrecker, a professor emerita in the Department of History at Yeshiva University and a leading anti-Israel activist long before Oct. 7, 2023.
Schrecker is a recognized expert on McCarthyism in the 1950s and the fate of academic freedom in the 1960s. The first part of her talk presented a straightforward account of those periods.
But she then departed in her Rutgers talk, as I will show, from her original areas of expertise to issue a pseudo-academic diatribe that reified antisemitic stereotypes and spread conspiratorial propaganda.
Schrecker argued, "There are now two major repressive forces focusing on higher education: the Right-wing billionaires' network of think tanks, conservative political operatives and opportunistic politicians, as well as, at the present, the politically powerful pro-Israel lobby and its Christian nationalist allies that have weaponized charges of antisemitism to legitimize a crackdown on criticism of Israel on American college campuses."
In my view, this scaremongering about Jewish power in league with other dark forces is not antisemitic as such, but it does trade on the most nefarious antisemitic stereotypes.
Many members of the Christian Right do support Israel. But Schrecker fails to mention that most American Jews are Liberal Democrats who have little sympathy for Right-wing evangelical Christian conservatism.
Data consistently shows that they are concerned about the rights of women and their freedom to choose and the rights of LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and many other vulnerable groups.
Schrecker did not mention the threat that antisemitism poses to academic freedom on college campuses and, in fact, denied that it is a problem at all.
Many Jewish students on college campuses are feeling increasingly besieged, as 64 percent of Jewish teens who took part in a survey believe that antisemitism is an important factor in their college search. Schrecker put air quotes around the term "antisemitism," treating it as a mirage.
Schrecker is concerned that redefinitions of antisemitism will punish those on campuses who are critics of Israel and support Palestinian freedom and that this has already occurred.
She sees the threats to academic freedom beginning when the "Israeli lobby, among its other activities — its main activity, by the way, was funding politicians — that lobby has been weaponizing a definition of antisemitism created by a Zionist-affiliated organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance that created a definition of antisemitism that claimed that Israel was central to Jewish identity and that, therefore, criticism of Israel was, by definition, a characteristic of antisemitism."
This one paragraph illustrates what can happen when a well-respected scholar strays beyond her expertise and allows her biases to take over. First, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is not a "Zionist-affiliated organization." IHRA is an intergovernmental organization with 35 Member Countries and nine Observer Countries. It was founded in 1998 by former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson.
Secondly, IHRA did not concoct the claim that Israel is central to Jewish identity. Jews' identification with the land of Israel as its indigenous occupants goes back to antiquity, more than 3,000 years. For most Jews, identification with the state of Israel is integral to their Jewish identity, and this has nothing to do with IHRA.
Third, Schrecker accuses IHRA of promoting the view "that criticism of Israel was, by definition, a characteristic of antisemitism." This is false. The IHRA explanation specifically says that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."
What IHRA defines as potentially antisemitic — depending always on context — is "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" or applying egregious double standards to Israeli behavior.
That definition has been challenged, but no reasonable person has ever argued that criticism of Israel is, per se, antisemitic. If it were, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets to oppose proposed judicial "reforms" before Oct. 7, 2023, in a tribute to Israeli democracy would be antisemites.
AAUP-AFT leadership has asked to serve on the advisory groups of Rutgers—New Brunswick Chancellor Francine Conway, who has said the groups will develop policies and procedures to "help address, among other issues, the extremely troubling rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia on our campus and more broadly."
The unions wrote, "Believing that these new policies may impact academic freedom, we wrote, 'We realize that University administrators are under intense pressure from politicians and interest groups. Our organizations can — and will — provide a counterweight to that pressure.'"
The unions are worried about the power of the Right. I am worried about our unions acting as torchbearers for anti-Israel extremism.
Cynthia Saltzman, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University—Camden.
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