Post-Passover Updates, Resources

So much scholarship, so little time

ICSA now has over 170 scholars on the roster and over 3500 followers-subscribers on the substack, the latter from 63 different countries! Let’s keep growing this community, so please refer any potentially interested scholars our way, including graduate students. We are also looking for potential funders to allow ICSA to endure beyond the first year, so if you know of any ….

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(1) The foundational encyclopedia moves forward! We have received some 40 expressions of interest (EOI), and eagerly solicit more! Please review the call for papers and get in touch with an EOI, either for one of the proposed chapters or, if you have another idea, propose your own. We will start sorting through them early in May and begin the process of assigning chapters, so please get your EOIs in soon!

The call is here: https://icsa.substack.com/p/the-foundational-book-project-launches?utm_source=publication-search

If your interest is in a chapter that likely belongs in Volume 3, please send your EOIs both to me and to Prof. Cary Nelson: crnelson@illinois.edu. His call is here: https://icsa.substack.com/p/from-cary-nelson-a-call-for-contributors.

Remember that compensation is available for accepted chapters.

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(2) So much scholarship to share ….

(i) ICSA’s mission includes documenting and analyzing antizionism “as a movement,” and one thing that movement does is harass, marginalize, ostracize, and expel “Zionists” from organizations, jobs, campuses, and the public square. The strategy is simple: Make Israel and Zionism toxic, then use antizionism as a weapon to go after Zionists, i.e. Jews. It worked in the USSR, in the MENA region, in 1968 Poland—and it is happening here.

This outrageous story really needs a community response.

“An Antizionist Witch Hunt in Manhattan”:

An Antizionist Witch Hunt in Manhattan

(ii) Also on the “movement” front, one of its favorite tactics is to boycott everything Israeli, including academics. Yale professor Evan Morris fights back by leading a trip to Israel (and the Israel academy) in the aftermath of October 7, and producing a short documentary:

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/new-documentary-brings-yale-professors-together-with-israeli-peers-to-discuss-academic-boycotts/

https://www.indivisibleyale.com/

(iii) This important story, highlighting the work of iconic groundbreaking scholar Phyllis Chesler (who saw what was happening long before most people), is perhaps best summed up in Chesler’s quoted phrase: “Every single area of feminism in America has been wrecked, ruined, and is involved in boilerplate filth against Israel and the Jews.”

“Feminism’s Jewish Problem”:

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/feminism-jewish-problem

(iv) Samuel Hyde is fast proving himself a leading voice on antizionism from the left, with this new piece:

“The Radical Left’s Merger With Islamic Despotism”:

https://fathomjournal.org/the-radical-lefts-fathering-of-islamist-despotism/#_edn3

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(3) Finally, ICSA seeks to be a nonpartisan big tent, welcoming scholars with diverse opinions on many things, including Israel, ranging from left to right, united only by the belief that antizionism needs close scholarly scrutiny. In that spirit I was very glad when an ICSA scholar wrote to me objecting to my casual statement during a webinar that ICSA’s ambitions including something like “saving the West.” While I believe I can defend that allegation at some length on an ideological level, there may well be some questions about whether it is tactically wise to speak this way in certain contexts. In any case the scholar followed up by drafting a short essay, requesting to remain anonymous. I post the essay here, and also at the link, and welcome responses (best via commenting on the linked post).

Reflections from a Jewish-American PhD Student

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” - Walter Benjamin^[1]

This excerpt from German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), the first reading assigned to me in a graduate seminar as a fresh-faced PhD student, resonates violently in context of the academic and cultural debris now piled up on my desk, in my notes, and in the finished podcasts that have accompanied much of my transit and cooking these past two years. Finally awakened to the machinations of institutional and ideological Antizionism following inexcusable headlines justifying as retaliatory the attempted murder of Jewish children in a reform synagogue in Michigan—my “Herzl moment,” I suppose—I have begun watching the thrilling emergence of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism (ICSA) with both optimism and what I hope is a healthy dose of skepticism toward transnational advocacy networks in general.^[2] I am especially grateful to Andrew Pessin for this opportunity to express my concern and spark dialogue regarding the language of “saving the West.” I suspect it to be true that, as black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde cautioned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”^[3] I posit (a powerful word I now get to use in all its Austinian appropriateness) that when we say “West” in the context of ICSA, we risk implicitly confirming a bias that the “other side” is being taught to look out for, which undermines our earnest attempt to build a viable countermovement. I also posit that a deeper understanding of who we are as a people is a key to resisting systematic ideological steamrolling, but that is beyond the scope of what I wish to explore here.

Seminar papers I wrote three months ago, while trying in earnest to adopt the professional language of my field, now legitimately terrify me, specifically because the language I seek to adopt as a marker of professionalization and belonging has been co-opted and recoded unbeknownst to me. Seemingly reasonable conclusions, such as “ICE is bad” based on videos of agents shooting Americans point-blank, now may justify my own destruction, provided my colleagues take seriously organizations such as Philly Writers Against War in Gaza, an organization that publicly claims “supporting the abolishment of ICE means saying Free Palestine.”^[4] I do not wish to align myself with any dogmatic ideological movement, a position I proudly attribute to a lifetime of diverse Jewish education and experience. However, if I do not see the bizarre and widespread hate-fueled assault on my notion of “common sense,” I will be inadvertently complicit in my own oppression, regardless of whether the relentless microaggressions against Jewish students on campus are recognizable by the institutions designed to prevent such activity. This is why I have become hypersensitized to rhetorical patterns that seem earnest but may have been surreptitiously recoded. I would love to scream “f*ck ice” as a valid expression of my worldview and collective trauma as an American citizen, but I do not wish that expression to also invite my own murder on American soil. Such is the paradox of being both Jewish and American in 2026.

I do not believe we need to burn down the institutions, but I do believe we need to reconsider their assumptions when the conclusions seem incoherent (yes, I was going to be a medical doctor at one point). This week, I attended a wholly traumatizing lecture by a tenured faculty member who presented an hour of Antizionist libel (Jewish expansion conspiracy, genocide stated as uncontested fact, suggested anti-Zionist reading, claiming Zionism emerged simultaneously with Nazism to imply some sort of ahistorical conspiracy, claiming an essentialist “Israeli drive to conquest and control,” some offhand comment about Jews having Superman that was supposed to be funny, and so on… it was so bad, people) as fact to a room full of enthusiastically nodding students, faculty, and two keffiyehs (I have an endearing and enduring hope that the people wearing them are distinguishable from what the material objects often symbolize, but I presume this is either Berlantian “cruel optimism,” reverberating Buberian subjectivity, or evidence I have been listening to way too many “Unpacking Israeli History” podcasts) amorphously asking about the “October 7th uprising” alongside analogous “resistance” movements in Minneapolis and Los Angeles (my heart was pounding so hard at this point and the effort not to vomit made it difficult to take notes on the professor’s response, but I did my best to document the event). Claiming that ICSA is an “academy-and-western-world-saving endeavor”^[5] flattens what I believe we–both Jews and our allies–are trying to do. What “West” are we saving and from whom? We risk everything when we let people fill in those implied lacunas on our behalf. I worry that messianic language will do more harm than good as we attempt to establish ourselves in opposition to the intersectional frameworks that have systematically excluded Jews, our complex story, and the notion that the contemporary world in general is complex. When the libel is expansionism and world domination, making that part of our stated mission feels counterproductive.

We want to engage in dialogue, not turn people away who believe they have learned a new version of history. My first response to post-October 7^th Antizionist propaganda (even though I did not know to call it by such a name at the time) was that one cannot recast the past. I now know that this is the very premise of decontextualized Saidian, Islamist, and Soviet worldviews currently in mainstream global circulation, one that dangerously closes the door to intellectualization as a strategy, which, at one point, I thought was foundational to the institution of higher education. As a Jewish student in classrooms right now, feeling like I cannot ask a question for fear of my own safety seems wholly preposterous, but it is my lived experience, and it is part of a larger pattern that ICSA seeks to document and understand. Hopeful to a fault, I posit we embrace a worldview that acknowledges as fundamental the complexity of our shared global circumstance, rather than a supersessionary one. Two Jews, three opinions is both low-hanging fruit for a comedian or Jewish educator and also an apparently radical contribution to what seems to be a deterritorialized “Western” imaginary, particularly in the context of post-colonial theory, cultural Marxism, and a historiographic consideration of “American exceptionalism.”^[6] When we talk about the “West” without defining the term and specifying the genealogy of our positionality, we presume the very universality that undergirds the problem.

We cannot win—although I challenge even the language of battle and contest because that too plays into the tactics of the self-identified “other side”^[7]—if we offer another black and white reality, especially when our goal is not to uphold a broken system but instead try to offer a way for people to reclaim their own brains and hearts from offensively simplistic and frankly embarrassingly stupid ideological indoctrination and manipulation. There is something to question when a humanistic moral compass inherently points toward death and I, in all of my annoying optimism and engrained Jewish value of human life, cannot reconcile this worldview.

In Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998), political scientists Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink argue that “scholars of international relations should pay more attention to network forms of organization,” a charge I see ICSA directly addressing through its calls for papers and encyclopedia entries.^[8] As a vital source of my optimism regarding the emerging academic field of critical Antizionism studies, I think Keck and Sikkink are particularly useful, so I will summarize some of their conclusions for your consideration. They argue that distinctively transnational advocacy networks organized around a sense of shared values and discourses have emerged due to changes in both technology and culture, particularly as information and transportation have become faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The authors highlight a “boomerang” effect in which information bypasses local indifference and repression, consequently producing activists who may now “shop” the globe for venues and leverage points. Keck and Sikkink further suggest that core values perceived as “universal” drive activists to see their work as meaningful. Most importantly—and insidiously in the contemporary moment—transnational network actors seek to frame issues to fit into existing institutions, to resonate with broader publics, to engage symbols and information to reinforce claims, to identify appropriate targets, and to hold institutions accountable. This is exactly what I observe happening now and why I empathize more profoundly with Benjamin’s angel of history today than I did two years ago. How is it that scholars who have all of this knowledge at their disposal come to nod vigorously at fanatic racism, play dress up, and scream chants they do not understand in the name of “justice,” a concept that itself is increasingly difficult to define in the context of 21^st-century globalization? Has history not sounded enough alarms? Will we ever know better? The text of the Haggadah reminds us annually that the answer is probably no, but also that Jews have a responsibility to keep asking the questions.

While I do need to focus on my dissertation now rather than the relentless debris, I very much look forward to being a part of this emerging community of critically engaged scholars. Having spent some time learning about transnational advocacy networks and global revolutionary movements, and keenly heeding Brazilian Marxist educational philosopher Paulo Freire’s warning regarding sloganeering revolutionaries, I am justifiably wary of joining one myself.^[9] However, I believe that ship may have sailed a long time ago for the Jews, if not in 1948, certainly by 2023. If the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism is a 21^st-century expression of Jewish guerrilla intellectual warfare, I’m so in. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if everyone joined our global chavrusa? I’m kidding… but only sort of.

Chag sameach, chazak ve’ematz, and never stop asking questions. That’s definitely one of our superpowers. And space lasers that can engrave Bat Mitzvah gifts. The shop lady told me so, which means it must be true.

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That’s it, for now.

Remember, we need teams of scholars producing reams of scholarship about antizionism.

We need ICSA.

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^[1] Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1968. 257-258.

^[2] This may not have been the exact article, as there were many: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/synagogue-shooting-michigan-what-we-know/

^[3] Audre Lorde. “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1985.

^[4] See Philly WAWOG post here:

Philly Teachers Fundraise For Gaza Charity That Mourns Hamas Members

^[5] https://icsa.substack.com/p/barrelling-into-passover

^[6] Mugambi Jouet. “Theorizing American Exceptionalism: An Interdisciplinary Historiography and Intellectual History.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 14 (2025), 27, p. 2:1-2:75.

^[7] https://criticalzionismstudies.org/conference-on-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism-to-launch-new-institute/

^[8] Margaret E Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. “Conclusions: Advocacy Networks and International Society.” In Activists Beyond Borders. Cornell University Press, 2014.

^[9] Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. Herder and Herder, 1970. 134.