When I signed up for Jewish Life at Duke’s "Antisemitism 101 Training," I hoped for an impartial, educational approach to understanding and combating antisemitism on campus. However, from attending the training along with two fellow Duke staff members, I found that it instead indoctrinates participants into the political project of Zionism.
JLD frames itself as a welcoming community for all Jews at Duke. According to JLD’s website, it is "the hub for all things Jewish on Duke’s campus," and it "takes a pluralistic approach to Judaism to ensure that all Jewish students, regardless of affiliation, are welcome and included." They also proclaim that JLD is "fully accredited by Hillel International." Yet, this affiliation contradicts their claim of being welcoming to all Jewish students. Hillel’s "Israel Guidelines" prevent any affiliate to “partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice” seek to “delegitimize” Israel. This means that JLD cannot be welcoming to anti-Zionist Jews, such as members of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that opposes the ethno-nationalist state of Israel and proposes alternative means for Jewish safety, particularly through solidarity with other marginalized peoples.
The leaders of JLD’s training were not transparent and up-front about this limit. They presented JLD as a home for all Jews at Duke, but they did not reveal that the training came from Hillel’s mandated Zionist perspective. However, their perspective is just one political perspective among the range of Jewish political perspectives on how to define and combat antisemitism.
By obscuring the political agenda behind their training’s materials, the JLD staff made it seem like they were giving objective, unbiased definitions of antisemitism, Zionism, and anti-Zionism. For example, the training relied heavily on resources from Hillel International and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which the JLD staff presented as objective expertise, but are known for their Zionist positions (as seen in statements by Hillel’s president, this profile of Hillel, and articles on "the ADL’s anti-Palestinian advocacy," the ADL’s campaign to suppress criticism of Israel by calling it 'anti-semitism' and the ADL’s role in a network of "astroturf antisemitism watchdogs").
The participants at this training might have taken what the JLD presented as fact and as the only perspective out there if my colleagues and I had not attended and spoken out to share alternative perspectives.
Historical narratives are inevitably contested and shaped by political commitments. However, this differs from "historical" accounts that lie, repress inconvenient facts, and are disingenuously framed to serve an ideological agenda. The bulk of the JLD’s training content came in a 3-part video series created by Hillel International. The history sections of the training’s videos were selectively framed in ways that portrayed the Zionist creation of the Israeli nation-state as the necessary endpoint of Jewish history.
To justify Zionism, they repeated the myth of a "unified kingdom of Israel" that supposedly split into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. In "The Invention of the Land of Israel," the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand debunks this "mythistory": "Because a united kingdom encompassing both ancient Judea and Israel never existed, a unifying Hebrew name for such a territory never emerged. As a result, all biblical texts employed the same pharaonic name for the region: the land of Canaan."
To make Zionism seem like the necessary political project for Jewish peoples, the video’s presentation of Jewish history obscured alternative political responses to the longstanding problem that Jewish people have faced: how to create safety as a marginalized, oppressed minority in a world of nation-states.
The Zionist solution to this problem is to try to find Jewish safety by creating a Jewish doppelgänger of those nation-states and their colonial projects: the ethno-nationalist state of Israel, a settler-colonial project that has violently dispossessed the Palestinian people from their land, leading to the genocide in Gaza today. The JLD’s Hillel-produced training video made no mention of the colonial character of the Zionist project, about which the early Zionists themselves had been explicit. It neglected to mention that during the 19th century, only around 2 to 5% of the population was Jewish, prior to the increasing influx of Jewish settlers in the 20th century, including political Zionists as well as refugees who were brought along in the Zionist settlement project. It blamed Israel's dispossession of Palestinian people from their land in 1948 on "the Israel-Arab war." It didn’t give any perspectives on this history from Palestinian people, who call their dispossession "the Nakba," which means "catastrophe."
The training failed to acknowledge the rich history of anti-Zionist, diasporic Jewish movements that have presented alternative visions for Jewish safety. For example, the Jewish Labor Bund, which emerged in the same year as the birth of political Zionism, 1897, creates Jewish safety through building solidarity with other marginalized peoples. Bundism is centered on the principle of doikayt in Yiddish ("hereness" in English), which is about seeing wherever Jews live in the world as their country. Opposed to the Zionist path of escaping to a Jewish state, Bundists affirm the places they landed in the diaspora as where they should struggle in solidarity with other oppressed people, to improve the world for all. The principle of creating Jewish safety through solidarity is also enacted by the current movements of If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, including the JVP-Triangle chapter, which is "grounded in Jewish community and in the south, working for a free Palestine and liberation for all."
The JLD training also sought to delegitimize the current forms of these anti-Zionist Jewish movements by associating contemporary anti-Zionism with antisemitism. For example, the JLD’s packet of resources had a list of "Antisemitic Myths" from the ADL, which included this statement: "Criticism of Israel is not in and of itself antisemitic. But much of contemporary anti-Zionism, or the delegitimization of Israel and its supporters, draws on and perpetuates antisemitic tropes."
In order to tar anti-Zionists with this charge of antisemitism, the JLD trainers mischaracterized anti-Zionist arguments. For example, trainers argued that calling for the end of the Israeli state is antisemitic because doing so would deny Jewish people the right to self-determination. This conflation is wrong because anti-Zionists' calls for eradicating the settler-colonial, Jewish-supremacist state of Israel coexist with their affirmations of alternative forms of Jewish self-determination.
As Professor Joseph Massad notes, "the invocation of 'Jewish self-determination' in the land of the Palestinians has been the major camouflage used to embellish the reigning regime of Jewish supremacy in Israel." By contrast, anti-Zionists affirm that Jewish people have the right of self-determination, but they also argue that this right should not come at the expense of oppressing other people by dispossessing them of their land and committing systemic violence against them, as the Zionist settler-colonial project has done for over a century. Anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish people have promoted many alternative, non-colonial forms of self-determining Jewish national autonomy, such as the Bund's cultural, diasporic nationalism, creating safety through building solidarity with the other marginalized peoples with whom they share the places in which they live throughout the world.
Finally, JLD discussed what they claimed to be anti-Zionist instances of antisemitism, while they gave no mention of the antisemitism committed by Zionists themselves. Since the founding of political Zionism, its proponents have deployed antisemitic accounts of diasporic Jews in contrast with their preferred ideal of the Israeli Jew. For example, consider the Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s statement: "because the Yid [the negative caricature of European Jewry] is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty." This Zionist antisemitism against diasporic Jews continues today, as seen in the responses of Zionists to the Twitter posts of diasporic Jews who call out Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. (See Eli Valley’s satirical comic about this Zionist antisemitism, "Israel Man and Diaspora Boy.") The trainers also neglected to mention that antisemitism has been ubiquitous historically and currently among Christian Zionists, who outnumber Jewish Zionists in the US.
Duke’s campus is supposed to be a place for education — for developing knowledge through practices of critical thinking and discussion, grappling with evidence and reasons to evaluate a wide range of political positions on any given issue. By contrast, indoctrination influences people to adopt a certain political project, and relies on suppressing critical thinking by selectively presenting a limited range of evidence and perspectives. This is what I experienced at JLD’s "Antisemitism 101 Training": Zionist political indoctrination masquerading as education.
Unlike JLD’s Zionist approach to understanding and combating antisemitism, effective approaches to addressing antisemitism, such as that of the American Friends Service Committee, center its intersections with other forms of oppression, such as white supremacy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and settler colonialism. Intersectional approaches to collective liberation — working together to build safety through solidarity across different struggles — aim to eliminate antisemitism and all forms of oppression.
Toward this end, I am excited to organize with Jewish Voice for Peace, Duke Academics and Staff for Justice in Palestine, Duke Divest Coalition, Makom, Carolina Bund, and other groups who are constructing solidarities across lines of difference. For Jewish people who consider ourselves to be non-Zionist or anti-Zionist — who don’t want to fall in line with Zionism’s oppressive, settler-colonial version of Jewishness — these groups are creating communities that offer alternative means of belonging, safety, and participation in Jewish traditions.
Given the clear unwillingness of the university and existing Jewish institutions at Duke to acknowledge and support the real diversity among Jewish students, staff, and faculty — including the many non- and anti-Zionist Jews on campus — it is time to build alternative social and intellectual spaces. (Want to help? Email AntiZionistJewishAtDuke@gmail.com)
Eli Meyerhoff, Ph.D., is a program coordinator and visiting scholar at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and is a fellow in The AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
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