Volunteers, Services, Getting Noticed, New Books, News and Recommendations
So much critical-study-of-antizionism goodness to report!
6-17-26
I. SEEKING VOLUNTEERS
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Now that the Foundational Encyclopedia chapters have been assigned, we are about ready to create a peer-reviewed Journal for the Critical Study of Antizionism!
We will need several people to serve on the Editorial Board. Job description details TBA, but please email me if you are interested and willing, and feel free to add a couple of sentences explaining why you are particularly qualified. Our first choice will be people with Ph.D.s who are active or retired professors, but we may be open to independent scholars as well with the right experience.
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II. SERVICES AVAILABLE
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An ICSA member, for whom I can vouch personally and professionally, is seeking editing and manuscript development work … He is a first-rate scholar with an impressive scholarly record, and a really terrific person to work with. Here’s the blurb. If you are in need of his services, email me and I’ll connect you:
I am a scholar, specializing in political philosophy, and a writer, who has published extensively on higher education, including the BDS movement. I am open to freelance developmental editing and manuscript evaluation/feedback work.
My experience includes:
Academic writing: Books with Cambridge University Press and Princeton University Press. Articles in leading academic journals of politics and political science. One of my books was among Forbes’s Best Higher Education Books of 2021 and The Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the February Bookshelf.
Public writing: contributor to Commentary Magazine’s blog, 2013-21; published in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, Mosaic, Jewish Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Dispatch, and The Bulwark
Consulting: for the Bipartisan Policy Committee’s Campus Free Expression Project, I assisted in writing and editing “roadmaps” on campus speech policy for presidents, trustees, faculty, and student affairs administrators.
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The support network spawned by ICSA is up and running, and growing. Here is a recent announcement from them about their meetings. If you’d like to be connected, please email me and I’ll connect you.
International support network for Jews, Israelis and our allies facing marginalization and discrimination in academia: state of affairs.
The network is growing steadily, with 40 members now based in Canada, USA, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Israel, and Sweden. Cooperation is currently being sought with Jewish networks in Great Britain, Norway, and Australia, and more countries are on the list.
There’s indeed a great need out there for a network that offers support/solidarity to Jewish academics, especially in Europe, where it seems nothing quite like it exists on a transnational scale. This is, in a way, hard to believe: there must be similar pockets of organization happening out there independently of each other. But how difficult it is for us to find each other illustrates how little coordinated effort there is on this front. There is much work to be done.
It is intolerable that any Jewish academic resorts to leaving a promising career, resigning from a leadership post, or retiring early due to the spread of antisemitism/antizionism. But this is currently happening. Much worse is that anyone resorts to leaving a position specifically because they find themselves alone, resourceless, and hopeless in the face of bigotry, aggressions that go well beyond the micro-, and existential delegitimization. And that is happening, as well. We hope that this network can at least provide a source of hope and help forge some survival strategies to help those who are currently struggling.
The network now meets twice a month on Zoom: once for an official meeting and another time for a casual meetup. We are currently working on defining our goals and our identity as a network (including finding a name). Digests of meeting discussions go out to all members, so those who can’t attend may keep abreast of developments.
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III. ICSA IS GETTING NOTICED!
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Elder of Ziyon, my vote for the best pro-Israel blogger out there, a one-man Critical-Study-of-Antizionism machine, had a piece out this week talking about us and our sister organizations, the Movement Against Antizionism and StopAntizionism!
Read it here:
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I had the privilege of appearing on the podcast, “Unapologetically Jewish”—a first-rate podcast whose host, Shana Meyerson, asks questions that are like nuclear bombs that explode inside your brain.
Give it a listen here:
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IV. NEW BOOKS!
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Judge Roy Altman recently exploded onto the scene, with an incredible personal story and an essential new book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. If you can catch him on a webinar, you must—he’s a great speaker, eloquent, knowledgeable, and charming. Please pick up a copy of his book, and order it for your university and local public library!
Here’s a blurb:
In his new book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law, an instant New York Times and USA Today national bestseller, U.S. District Judge Roy Altman applies the same legal methodology that governs courtroom practice across the country—with its reliance on burdens of proof, reason, and evidence—to the six primary claims against Israel: that Israel is a colonialist state; that Israel’s founding was illegitimate or aberrational; that Israel has prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state; that Israel occupied Gaza before October 7, 2023, or that it had turned Gaza into an open-air prison or concentration camp; that Israel is an apartheid or white-supremacist state; and that Israel committed genocide (or otherwise violated the laws of war) in Gaza. Each of these claims, as Altman points out, is, at its core, a legal claim that demands legal analysis and reasoned proof—not slogans, vitriol, or diatribe. Israel on Trial produces that proof and shows, step by step, how each claim falters under objective legal scrutiny. As John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary Magazine, has written: “Roy Altman’s book makes the definitive case for the historical necessity of the state of Israel and its actions in its own defense. Altman provides—as only a federal judge can—what everyone wants and needs from a great ruling: A strict adherence to the facts of the case, a comprehensible legal justification for the findings in the case, and the moral framework that brings the facts and findings together masterfully. A tour de force.”
Buy it here:
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Trial-Examining-History-Evidence/dp/B0G8Y2XN1X/ref=sr_1_1
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Kara Jesella’s important new book is due out any day now, Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History. You may recall we featured a glowing review or two of it back in one of our earliest substacks.
Please pick up a copy, and order it for your university and local public library!
Here’s a blurb, from the author:
Though the feminist response to the brutal Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023 shocked onlookers, Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History establishes that antipathy toward Jews, Jewish women, and Israel existed even as the movement began, and shows how, as different versions of feminism competed, a feminism that does not seek mainstream feminist goals like equal rights has become predominant, particularly in academia. Long before Ibram X. Kendi became a household name, or “intersectionality” became a buzzword, radical Black, women of color, and antizionist Jewish feminists, influenced by Black Power and socialist thought, sought to marginalize Jews by establishing different rules for different identity groups that dovetailed with their theories related to “whiteness” and race, which positioned Jews, Jewish women, and Israel as the enemy: capitalist, colonialist, imperialist, racist. Feminist Antisemitism shows how Women’s Studies deprioritized truth, rationality, and expertise, which influenced feminist and queer theories developed by charismatic intellectuals like Angela Davis and Judith Butler, and tracks how these theories became essential to leftist activist spaces and movements like Black Lives Matter, and to discussions around free speech and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. It also shows how older feminist concepts converged with new feminist theories around rape to produce the feminist denial and justification of sexual violence against Israelis on October 7th.
Buy it here:
https://www.amazon.com/Feminist-Antisemitism-Studies-Contemporary/dp/1041001207/ref=sr_1_1
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V. NEWS AND RESOURCES
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This is a story every critical scholar of antizionism must know – about the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to infiltrate the West, the United States, not by the sword but by stealth – a plan the FBI recorded them hatching in a meeting in the early 1990s, and then we all watched it happen in slow (but accelerating motion), there being a straight line between that meeting and the antizionism we have been seeing grow on campuses over the past decade and especially since the October 7 massacre.
Not just watching, but openly participating – even giving them millions, in this telling by “Behind the Narrative.”
Absolutely must-read:
The FBI Wired a Secret Meeting to Build an Islamist Network in America. Thirty Years Later, Gavin Newsom Gave It $26 Million of Your Tax Money.
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Kevin Deutsch is a fantastic journalist who is covering many stories of interest to critical scholars of antizionism! Here is one. There is a reason I was pushing you to order the two books above at your local public libraries—because they have been captured by antizionism like just about everything else. (It’s kind of like a zombie infestation.)
Check out the story here:
The Antizionist Hate Movement’s Capture of American Public Library Systems
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National Students for Justice Palestine recently released a detailed position paper, laying out their plan basically to take over universities. (See item #1 above!) In my view they’ve largely already succeeded, but you should read this thing: it’s chilling, and disturbed, and disturbing, and (in my view) grounds for the immediate expulsion of every SJP student on every campus everywhere.
Happily A.J. Caschetta subjects it to a scathing critique here:
National Students for Justice in Palestine ‘Position Paper’ Is a Declaration of War Against Higher Education
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(4)
Law professor David Bernstein has done some of the best critical-study-of-antizionism work in the legal arena out there. Here is a brief thread where he addresses what he rightly calls “An American Jewish Emergency,” and the failure of our Jewish establishment to adapt to it and address it. Though he doesn’t explicitly refer to it as a failure to understand that antizionism is the proper target for us now, it strikes me as directly sympathetic to that conception. And in general anything he writes is a treat:
Read it here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2064160956997947557.html
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(5)
Speaking of Elder of Ziyon (again), here he is doing his thing, taking down “As A Jew” Extraordinaire Peter Beinart, who always does his web appearances with a full set of the Talmud in the background, in case the words he is saying don’t already make you throw up in your mouth a little. We featured that terrific Sam Harris piece in the last substack. Beinart attempted to respond to it. Elder puts him in his place.
Read it here:
Sam Harris asked a question. Peter Beinart spent 3,000 words to avoid answering it.
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2026/06/sam-harris-asked-question-peter-beinart.html
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Finally, I have discovered an absolutely fantastic mission-aligned blog. Melissa Brodsky is turning out fantabulous critical-scholarship-on-antizionism at a truly impressive rate. Check her out and please subscribe to her substack!
This is a particular piece about serious problems with Facebook and antizionism, but her entire substack is worth the follow:
Facebook Extremism Can’t Handle the Truth
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There’s still plenty more, but that’s it, for now.
Remember: We need teams of scholars producing reams of scholarship about antizionism.
We need ICSA.
You are one of the most prominent figures in the fight against antizionism in academia and are changing the trajectory of higher education and the future of America. It was an absolute honor and a pleasure to have you on the show!
I tried to pledge $8/month but was never asked for my credit card info. How does this work?