There is an old Jewish saying, "two Jews, three opinions,” which implies that intelligent debate is a core value of Jewish culture. In Duke’s official Jewish space, Jewish Life at Duke (JLD), the opinions of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish students are marginalized. JLD, "the hub for all things Jewish on Duke’s campus," is fully accredited by Hillel International, which imposes guidelines that significantly narrow the political perspectives that affiliates like JLD can platform.
Non- and anti-Zionist Jewish students have challenged Hillel through what was originally named the Open Hillel movement, which was founded at Swarthmore College a decade ago. At Duke today, our work is a continuation of this movement — which occurred at more than 60 universities — where Jewish students resisted and attempted to bend Hillel into becoming more accepting of anti-Zionist perspectives. Hillel's reaction — dating back to the beginning of these efforts — was to attempt to curb the movement through threatened legal action. In response to legal pressure, the broader resistance to Hillel changed its name to Judaism On Our Own Terms, of which our group at Duke is a chapter.
Zionist organizations dominate Jewish students’ options for engaging in Jewish community on Duke’s campus, making Duke into "a bastion of pro-Israel activism." Neither the Duke administration nor any other group currently provides resources, such as space, staff or funding, to support people at Duke who practice traditions of Jewishness that are alternative and opposed to Zionism. There is a pressing need for Duke to foster a community that accepts diasporic Jewish alternatives, particularly the tradition of seeing Jewish safety as actualized through solidarity with other marginalized peoples. Such alternatives are opposed to the Zionist vision of Jewish safety that is imagined to be realized through an ethno-nationalist state like Israel, in which pursuing the promise of Jewish security has resulted in continued violence against Palestinian people. Against Zionist dominance, we must build a movement of collective liberation and safety through solidarity that will not tolerate Israel’s ongoing devastation of Palestine and Lebanon.
Jewishness and antisemitism are politically contested concepts. Our understandings of emancipatory Jewish traditions, our personal experiences and our studies of academic work on these topics influence our approach to these topics. By contrast, the dominant approach at JLD is to hide their Zionist political position behind a veneer of objectivity. JLD claims to represent all Jews at Duke while covertly pushing Zionist programming, such as its "Antisemitism 101 Training." Hillel, both at Duke and nationwide in concert with a network of "astroturf" Zionist organizations, presents materials from biased advocacy organizations (such as the Anti-Defamation League) as authoritative while failing to integrate the wealth of academic research that presents contrasting views.
Thereby, these organizations are spreading a moral panic about Jewish feelings of discomfort and fear and conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which, as Judith Butler argues, serves "the purposes of extreme censorship, for it constrains those who oppose ongoing Israeli violence, the killing of [possibly more than 186,000 Gazans], from expressing moral and political outrage and defending fundamental principles of free expression and political justice."
Zionism as a political movement was founded at The First Zionist Congress, convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Zionism frames antisemitism as an inevitable, eternal hatred. It responds to this threat by seeking Jewish safety through building a settler-colonial, ethno-nationalist state modeled on European masculinist and militarist forms of nationalism. The Zionist founders referred to their project as one of colonization (e.g., Vladimir Jabotinsky spoke of "the colonisation of Palestine," noting that there is no precedent for "any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population”; also, Zionist organizations key to Israel’s foundation had "colonial" in their names, such as the Jewish Colonisation Association and the Jewish Colonial Trust). Zionism relies on a reactionary form of solidarity in which Jews protect other Jews at the expense of others' safety, particularly Palestinians whose land and lives they have dispossessed.
An opposing political tradition of Jewishness, the Jewish Labor Bund, was also founded in 1897. Instead of fighting fascism head-on, many Zionist leaders co-opted antisemitism to promote Jewish emigration to Palestine. The Bund condemned the Zionists’ defeatism and escapism. In contrast, the Bund diagnosed antisemitism as a historical, political, resolvable problem and responded to the problem by embracing diasporism. Through the principle of doikayt or “here-ness,” they saw wherever they lived in the diaspora as their home, and fought there alongside other marginalized peoples for equality, justice and liberation for all, creating Jewish safety through transformative solidarity. In addition to the Bund, the US has a long history of many organizations that built anti-Zionist Jewish alternative movements, continuing through the present movement for justice in Palestine.
Antisemitism is a specific, historically produced political project. Antisemitism’s historical roots are in European Christianity. From earlier Christian-supremacist demonization of Jews, such as through the "blood libel" myth, antisemitism has evolved into conspiracy theories that deflect people’s anger about their oppression away from the ruling class and toward a scapegoat of "the Jews," imagined as an all-powerful, evil cabal against whom they can "punch up."
Antisemitism is intertwined with other forms of oppression. White supremacists promote conspiracy theories about how Jews are supposedly promoting racial equality and immigration as a means of "destroying the white race." Anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ movements use antisemitic conspiracy theories about malevolent elites conspiring to overwhelm the borders of the nation-state and to defile the traditional Western boundaries of gender, sexuality and family.
We believe that the only way to respond to antisemitism is through an intersectional approach that builds solidarities across movements for dismantling these oppressive systems. In doing so, we aim to continue liberatory traditions of solidarity between particular Jewish and non-Jewish communities. For example, in the 1920s, working-class Jews in New York City established cooperative housing, reserving apartments for Black families, protesting anti-Black housing discrimination and building a kindergarten to support working mothers. Recently, Jews have protested ICE and border camps under the principle of "never again." Anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews have organized in intersectional solidarity by reckoning with our multiple complicities with settler colonialism — building relationships of solidarity with Native American and Indigenous Palestinian peoples against the U.S. occupation of Turtle Island and the U.S.-supported Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Inspired by those who have taken up the emancipatory values of Jewish and other movement traditions, we seek to follow in their footsteps in the place where we live. In Durham, Jewish well-being has been bound to the freedom struggles of others in the American South. During the Civil Rights Movement, while some Jewish people took the side of the segregationists and others were indifferent to Black people’s struggles, many Jewish people organized in solidarity with Black people. Some Jewish students engaged in civil disobedience, such as Joseph Tieger, a Duke graduate who was arrested twenty-three times protesting for desegregation. After he and a half-dozen Jewish students were arrested for a sit-in that blocked traffic, the judge who sentenced him to jail said that he had "the dubious distinction of having the most arrests in Orange County" for civil rights. We hope to follow in their example.
To support the creation of an alternative, non-Zionist and anti-Zionist, diasporic Jewish community, we have formed a new group: Duke Jewish Solidarity Movement. We are students, staff, faculty and alumni, including Jews and non-Jews. Our group continues emancipatory traditions of Jewishness, intertwined with other liberatory movements. We commit to liberatory values, which we interpret in new ways as we study and practice them through organizing.
We take inspiration from past and current Jewish movements that act in coalition for collective safety and liberation. Jewish groups like IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace (including its Triangle chapter) and Breaking the Silence are refusing the assumption that Jewish safety requires the oppression of Palestinian people. We are affiliated with one such group, Judaism On Our Own Terms, a network that seeks to empower Jewish communities that are "both in solidarity with all oppressed and colonized communities across the world and radically inclusive of many different notions of, experiences with, and ways of relating to Judaism."
We see our movement for justice bound up with decolonization as a transnational movement across Palestine, Turtle Island and other settler-colonial situations. In Durham, we aim to organize with Duke NAISA, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Duke SJP, Duke ASJP, Duke Divest Coalition and others, helping to build solidarity across movements for decolonization.
With doikayt in mind, we ask how we should be present at Duke, with each other, in solidarity and common cause with others.
Abi Human, Bindu Thota, Eli Meyerhoff, and Matthew Slayton are representatives of the Duke Jewish Solidarity Movement.
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