Upcoming, Announcing, and Scholarship from ICSA

Another Week, Another Set of Resources

UPCOMING

(1) TIME-SENSITIVE: The four-volume foundational encyclopedia moves forward! Early May we will begin sorting through the many proposals and expressions of interest (EOI) we have received so far, so if you’d like to contribute please get in touch soon! The call for papers 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 up to $2500 is available for accepted chapters!

(2) The sixth and final installment in ICSA’s fantastic webinar series, “Antizionism: The History of an Ideology,” is coming up next week:

Thurs, May 7, 7-8 PM ET

Adam Louis-Klein

“Tying It All Together: Antizionism, A Holistic Ideology”

Register here: https://www.chaimitzvah.org/events/tying-it-all-together-antizionism-a-holistic-ideology/

If you can’t make it live, preregistering will get you a link to the recording after. (And please spread the word!)

ANNOUNCING

(1) ICSA hopes to produce an undergraduate academic conference on antizionism next year, but in the meanwhile there is the following opportunity. Budding critical scholars of antizionism are encouraged to submit! If you know of any potential such scholars, please share this information and encourage their work … (and please direct them to me, as I would like to get more undergrads involved in ICSA as well…):

The UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies will be hosting its online 8th Annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference in Israel Studies on Wednesday, June 17th, 2026, from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, Pacific Time. The conference is an excellent opportunity for undergraduate students from any university in the United States and abroad to present their research on any aspect of modern Israel.

The winner of the Best Paper Award will receive $600, the runner-up will receive $400, and two honorable mentions will receive $150 each.

Applicants should submit their abstract by Sunday, May 17th @ 11:59 PM, Pacific Time, through the link below. Abstracts should outline the paper’s premise, research methods, and thesis.

Learn More & Submit an Abstract Here: https://bit.ly/UCLA_June-17_8th-Undergrad-Conference

(2) An ICSA member encourages ICSA members to submit to the following conference, noting that “I had a great time at the Popular Culture Association (PCA) conference last week and wanted to ask if you could share their next annual conference CFP with ICSA. The theme (below) is likely to generate a lot of one-sided [antizionist] narratives and I think it would be a great place to share some counternarratives. The conference is huge and there does seem to be room for everyone, or at least that is what the board members told me.”

PCA 2027 Annual Conference, March 24-27, 2027.

https://pcaaca.org/

“We look forward to welcoming you to Boston for Revolutions and Revisions in Popular Culture, an exploration of how popular culture is continually reshaped by rupture, reinvention, and reinterpretation, and how these forces transform the stories, identities, and systems that define our world. Note: Conference papers do not have to fit the theme.”

August 1: Paper submissions and early registration opens

October 31: Submissions deadline

SCHOLARSHIP

(1) Hot off the presses, Ellen Ginsberg Simon weighs in on the antizionist dog-and-pony show conferences that are springing up all over—Yale, NYU, Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Princeton, and most recently at her alma mater, Brown. This one was “The Future of Holocaust and Genocide Studies After October 7,” sponsored by Brown’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs and hosted two weeks ago by antizionist poster child Professor Omer Bartov, who “as a Jew,” as an Israeli, as a former IDF soldier, and as a bona fide “genocide scholar” is the celebrated darling of the antizionist crowd. (ICSA eagerly seeks someone who can do a thorough scholarly takedown of Bartov, if that is you please get in touch.) Bartov invited a whole slew of not-necessarily-genocide-scholars to disseminate their scholarly antagonism to the Jewish national project.

One of them openly endorses global violence against Jews, basically—but apparently that’s okay, because she does so “as a scholar.”

See Simon’s analysis here:

https://icsa.substack.com/p/despair-or-hope-in-the-battle-against

(2) Erez Levin offers an original piece to ICSA, “The Linguistic Shell Game.”

Levin contends that the term “antisemitism” has been diluted through overuse, blurring distinctions between minor slights and serious threats. He urges a shift toward identifying explicit “Jew-hatred” and argues that contemporary antizionism in fact is more dangerous than antisemitism, as it functions as a sanitized form of eliminationist ideology. Proposing a “hierarchy of harm,” he distinguishes between tropes, legitimate policy critique, and dangerous movements. The strategy of “saving our ammo” calls for calls for reserving strongest condemnation for genuinely existential threats to maintain moral clarity and impact.

Read it here:

https://icsa.substack.com/p/by-erez-levin-the-linguistic-shell

(3) A beautiful, painful, heartbreaking letter from an ICSA colleague, about the despair over having an academic career in the https://icsa.substack.com/p/by-erez-levin-the-linguistic-shelldominant atmosphere of antizionism when one is an Israeli, not an antizionist, and generally just a sane and decent person.

Read it here:

https://icsa.substack.com/p/despair-or-hope-in-the-battle-against

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That’s it, for now.

Remember: We need teams of scholars producing reams of scholarship about antizionism.

We need ICSA.