From Cary Nelson, A Call for Contributors: "No Ivory Towers: Academic Disciplines Captured by Antizionism"
This promises to be an essential volume so please have a look
Prof. Cary Nelson is one of the true founders of the discipline of the critical study of antizionism, and certainly one of its leading lights. He is proposing what should become a foundational volume in that discipline. Proposals (or questions) should be sent to him directly via his email below, crnelson@illinois.edu. Those paying close attention will note that this proposal bears some resemblance to the projected Volume 3 of ICSA’s foundational encyclopedia project. That is nothing other than awesome, since (as I had noted) I would not have the bandwidth to work on more than the first two volumes of the encyclopedia in the year ahead. If this volume replaces Vol. 3, or leads to the evolution thereof, it is all goodness.
As a reminder, please review that previous call for papers as well, and send me in the near future your proposals, or expressions of interest, of contributing. (I’m happy to report having received almost 30 such proposals … keep them coming!):
https://icsa.substack.com/p/the-foundational-book-project-launches
And now here is Prof. Nelson’s call:
NO IVORY TOWERS: ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES CAPTURED BY ANTIZIONISM—A proposal and an invitation
March 2026
I have been thinking both about the things I should try to write about academic antizionism and about the projects I cannot do on my own that should urgently be undertaken collectively. At the top of my list of collective projects is a multi-author study and critique of those once vital academic fields that now persist in thrall to hatred of Israel.
It would be more than a daunting task for any one scholar to survey the range of disciplines now devoted less to the search for truth than for confirmation of their dominant political biases. Since 10/7/23 all these disciplines in one respect hold beliefs or slogans in common: Israel is an oppressive racist and colonialist state. It is irredeemable; it must be eliminated, it cannot be repaired. It is an apartheid state. It is the world’s worst violator of human rights. It has been carrying out genocide in Gaza.
But other than that, these disciplines often differ. They reached their current degraded condition by different routes and along different timelines. Some embody almost altogether 21st century stories. Others evolved over substantially longer periods.
For example: despite some obsessional overlap, anthropology and women’s studies are very different animals, driven by different self-definitions, different agendas, different histories, different utopian fantasies. Anthropology is preoccupied with indigeneity, generally a peripheral topic for gender and women’s studies. Anthropology is haunted by its exploitation of indigenous peoples in pursuit of its research projects over decades. Its investment in Palestinian indigeneity is compensatory, driven by disciplinary guilt. Nothing comparable organizes women’s studies. On the other hand women’s studies joins a few other fields, African American and Asian studies among them, in projecting its history of victimization and discrimination onto Palestinians. But women’s studies takes on a unique burden of self-betrayal when it discounts Hamas’s misogyny and its 10/7 violence against women. Some fields define themselves via a social justice agenda while others largely do not.
These histories are fundamental if we want to understand how these fields have gone wrong and what, if anything, can be done to repair them.
The disciplinary differences multiply when you add more fields to the list. The reason this issue is so important is unfortunately very clear: the main force behind radical antizionism on campus is the destructive work being done by antizionist departments with the support of their antizionist national disciplines. That is how antizionism is organized and gains a voice in higher education.
Those departments present a coordinated face grounded in hatred. They spread their vitriol on campus. They train students to take radical, eliminationist antizionism into future employment, corrupting nonacademic fields in the process. They continually seek new ways to express their agenda. They also organize social reinforcement for antizionist students and faculty.
But more fundamentally still, disciplinarity is the route to establishing the truth status of antizionism within academic culture. Disciplinary status wins people jobs and establishes institutional funding opportunities for antizionists.
Some antizionist heroes cross disciplinary boundaries, but others are primarily disciplinary agents. The standards for evidence are immensely varied across academic disciplines. I’m not convinced that my own discipline, literary studies, has had any applicable evidentiary standards as it has increasingly embraced antizionism.
The number of departments and academic disciplines energized by antizionism has gradually increased until surging after 10/7. Only a few years ago I would have listed medicine among those fields relatively unaffected. No longer. The hard sciences have largely been free of antizionist influence, but the multidisciplinary inertia displayed in 2024 may well corrupt still more fields before long.
Antizionism is a major force behind the overall polarization and politicization of the academy. That was the thesis of my 2025 book Mindless, published by the Jewish Quarterly. To understand the risk politicization presents to higher education we will need to track its influence within academic disciplines. And that means pooling our knowledge. It is a project of comparative antizionism.
Some disciplines will merit attention to how their antizionist evolution has varied from country to country. Others may not. Some disciplines, Mideast studies among them, may require more than one essay. Some fields may yet be in the early stages of capture. Others may well be so far advanced as to require virtual mothballing if they are to recover the potential for open dialogue.
I cannot at present know who might be interested in writing a history of antizionism in their own field. But I am inviting and proposing to gather individual one-page proposals to write such essays. Allowing a couple of months to gather proposals, we could target completion of the essays themselves over the next year or so. Length can vary anywhere from 3,000 to 9,000 words per essay. I do not assume that all essays on individual disciplines need to be of equivalent length,
We could include both essays on academic disciplines and on professional associations. It would be valuable as well to track how concepts like settler colonialism gained influence in groups of humanities or social science disciplines. Suggestions for relevant action are obviously important. A volume of such essays will alert faculty, administrators, and legislators to the problem. And it could encourage those constituencies to tackle the problem. It will make it clear how disciplinary antizionism threatens the core values that have long sustained higher education. The politicization of the academy is an international campus-wide crisis. It will not solve itself absent intervention.
If people send proposals to crnelson@illinois.edu I’ll set up a list to keep people informed of progress. I expect that some people will propose contributions that will be surprising. That is all to the good.