I’m an Israeli professor. Why is my work in Harvard’s antisemitism report? |

When I archetypal saw the Harvard report connected antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, I didn’t expect to find myself successful it. But I did, albeit without my name, my scholarship, oregon adjacent my individuality arsenic a Jewish Israeli world being acknowledged.

The study was compiled and published successful effect to wide unit from donors and pro-Israel advocacy groups. It claims to papers a situation of antisemitism connected campus. But what it really reveals is Harvard’s willingness to redefine Jewish individuality successful narrow, ideological terms: to exclude and erase Jews who dissent from Zionism.

I cognize this due to the fact that I americium 1 of them. For respective years, I taught successful the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) astatine Harvard Divinity School. Our programme approached peacebuilding done heavy engagement with histories of structural unit and power, with Palestine/Israel arsenic our cardinal lawsuit study. Our students work widely, traveled to the region, and met with a scope of voices – including Jewish Israeli veterans from Breaking the Silence, Palestinian artists resisting taste erasure, and Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish activists challenging racism wrong Israeli society.

It was, by design, intellectually and politically challenging. It exposed students to the complexity of the portion and the diverse, often conflicting, ways Jews and Palestinians narrate their pasts and ideate their futures.

But according to the authors of Harvard’s report, this was not morganatic assistance nor liable pedagogy; it was, essentially, simply antisemitic ideological indoctrination.

How the study supposedly arrives astatine and justifies specified characterizations of our programme illustrates however slanderous distortions are routinely deployed to suppress the arguments and identities of ‘the incorrect kind’ of Jews. The study quotes from nationalist events we hosted arsenic portion of RCPI, including a webinar connected my book astir American Jewish activists who prosecute successful Palestinian solidarity enactment because of—not successful spite of—their Jewish identity. Rabbi Brant Rosen, a Reconstructionist rabbi and laminitis of Tzedek Chicago, and Dr Sara Roy, a distinguished student of Palestine and girl of Holocaust survivors, offered thoughtful responses.

Yet the study reduced that lawsuit to a vague statement of “one speaker” praising “Jewish pro-Palestinian activists,” ignoring that the talker was me—a Jewish Israeli professor—and that my interlocutors were besides Jewish. Rosen’s reflections connected his disillusionment with Zionism were dismissed arsenic a “conversion narrative,” arsenic if spiritual oregon ethical improvement were grounds of antisemitism.

In another webinar I moderated, Rosen and the Jewish student Daniel Boyarin debated the spot of Zionism successful synagogue liturgy. Boyarin disagreed with Rosen’s liturgical revisions but affirmed their shared ethical commitments. The study cherry-picked Boyarin’s comment—“I americium profoundly successful sympathy with your governmental and ethical positions”—to suggest the lawsuit lacked “viewpoint diversity.” The irony is hard to miss: a speech betwixt 3 Jews, from precise antithetic traditions, becomes grounds not of diversity, but of its absence.

This selective framing is neither accidental nor a one-off enactment of malice. It reflects a broader pattern: Harvard’s determination successful January of this twelvemonth to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) explanation of antisemitism, which conflates disapproval of Israeli policies with antisemitism itself. In doing so, the assemblage has not lone taken steps to further suppress important governmental and ethical code that confronts the world of Israeli unit against Palestinians; it besides efficaciously embraced a governmental litmus trial for who counts arsenic a morganatic Jew connected campus.

It’s wide that I’m the ‘wrong benignant of Jew’ astatine Harvard. At each juncture, my world and governmental commitments placed maine extracurricular the bounds of acceptability. I was excessively critical, excessively engaged, excessively consenting to situation ascendant narratives. And I americium acold from the lone one.

The study goes further still. It dismisses not lone the work, identities, and experiences of module and scholars but besides the experiences of our Jewish students, including those who participated successful our course’s survey travel to Palestine/Israel. One Jewish pupil described the acquisition arsenic “formative, painful, and powerful,” recounting the ways Israeli apartheid undermines not conscionable authorities but the precise anticipation of taste beingness for Palestinians. The study presents this reflection not arsenic grounds of learning, but arsenic impervious of indoctrination.

The accusation is clear: Jewish students who travel to captious conclusions astir Israel are not autarkic thinkers. They’ve been misled. Manipulated. Infantilized.

Ironically, this is itself an antisemitic trope: that Jews cannot deliberation for themselves unless they conform to a sanctioned ideology.

The study besides erases the affluent diverseness of Jewish voices we brought into our classrooms. It claims our programme focused connected “non-mainstream Jewish perspectives,” dismissing radical similar Noam Shuster Eliassi, a Mizrahi Jewish Israeli comedian whose enactment was supported by our fellowship programme and is present featured at the Sundance Film Festival. It ignores events that engaged profoundly with Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish experiences, including our commemoration of the Israeli Black Panthers’ Passover Haggadah—a almighty awesome of anti-racist conflict successful Israeli history.

And it wholly omits our programming connected antisemitism itself, including a discussion of alternate definitions of antisemitism similar the Jerusalem Declaration, which, dissimilar IHRA, cautiously distinguishes betwixt disapproval of Israel and hatred of Jews.

In short, Harvard’s study does not conscionable mischaracterize a program. It attempts to redraw the boundaries of Jewish legitimacy.

It sends a chilling connection to students and faculty: if you are a Jew who questions Zionism, you are suspect. If you prosecute successful solidarity with Palestinians, you bash not belong. If your assistance complicates the tidy motivation communicative of a beleaguered Israel, you are not conscionable unwelcome—you are dangerous.

This is not a defence of Jewish safety. It is an effort to constabulary Jewish dissent.

But I garbage to beryllium policed. I volition proceed to teach, write, and signifier alongside Jews and Palestinians warring for freedom, justice, and dignity. I volition proceed to situation institutions that assertion to support against antisemitism portion perpetuating different forms of racism and repression.

And I volition bash truthful not contempt being a Jew, but due to the fact that I americium one.

• Atalia Omer is prof of religion, conflict, and bid studies successful the Keough School of Global Affairs astatine the University of Notre Dame. She is simply a halfway module subordinate of the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.