Webinars, Conferences, Books...
We're underway
Welcome to the fourth substack of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism (ICSA)! And welcome to the many new subscribers since the previous issue … In these early days the newsletters will be aimed at getting people up to speed and providing some initial resources, but they will grow gradually more substantive as ICSA begins to bloom. So…
Some Updates
Watch your inboxes, since ICSA is about to launch its foundational book project, and the call for papers will be going out soon! ….
AND
ICSA’s inaugural webinar series, “Antizionism: The History of an Ideology,” launches in just under three weeks! Please register for the first talk, and SPREAD THE WORD! (If you can’t make the talk itself, it will be recorded and sent to those who registered.)
Sunday Feb 22
12-1 PM, Eastern time
Prof. Richard Landes
“The Great Lethal Projection: Antizionism’s Debt to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”
Registration link: https://www.chaimitzvah.org/events/the-great-lethal-projection-antizionisms-debt-to-the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion/
The webinar series is generously sponsored by the Chai Mitzvah Scholars Circle. (If you can support them with a few dollars that would terrific.)
Recent Updates
ICSA has obtained a fiscal sponsor! Stay tuned for info on how to open your (or others’!) wallets!
ICSA has added many new scholars to its roster since our last substack!
ICSA has obtained some speakers slots at a major fall conference, so will shortly be recruiting scholars to fill those slots! Look for the call for papers shortly.
ICSA just got the green light from a major educational institution to produce an 8-session foundational course on the history of antizionism! This will be put together over the summer, filmed in the fall, and released by spring of 2027.
What is ICSA?
ICSA is the newly launched initiative to produce, promote, and disseminate scholarship in the critical study of antizionism. It aims to be housed in or affiliated with a proper university (talks are underway), and to change the current dominant academic discourse (which is deeply anti-Israel and anti-Jewish), with the goal of ultimately reclaiming the academy and even saving Western Civilization (yes, it is that ambitious).
To learn more about ICSA, visit www.icsaz.org and follow us on X @InstituteCSA and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/icsa48/. If you think you might want to be part of it—either as a scholar, a donor, or in any other capacity—please DM me. Currently more than 80 scholars have expressed interest (and I’ve only just begun recruiting), and numerous other people are volunteering their skills and services.
ICSA has officially launched with a seven-webinar series featuring prominent scholars, generously sponsored by the Chai Mitzvah Scholars Circle, starting with a foundational webinar offered by myself a few weeks ago. A recording of that webinar is available here. The rest of the series continues shortly, and its dates and details soon to be announced, on X, on this substack, and elsewhere. (Per above: Sunday Feb 22, at 12 noon Eastern time, will be the first one—mark your calendar!)
Some Background
If you’re interested in understanding how we got here, my recent two-volume book might be useful. In Israel Breathes, World Condemns I document and analyze the trajectory that led to the horrific campus response to the October 7 massacre (endorsement and celebration rather than horror and condemnation), then document and analyze what campuses have become in the aftermath of the massacre (the phrase “cesspools of Jew-hate” comes to mind). They’re currently available in inexpensive editions; they’re being republished in more expensive academic editions this spring, so get them now! Volume 1 (The Trajectory) is here; Volume 2 (The Aftermath) is here.
You can also get some background from my recent conversation with Shai Davidai—a true hero in the battle against campus antizionism—which you may find here.
Some Resources
The interest in antizionism—especially the critical study thereof—is growing quickly. You’ve probably already noticed if you’re on social media, particularly through the work of the activist groups Movement Against Antizionism and StopAntizionism. (Check them out, and follow them on social media.)
Some recent articles have been especially interesting or useful:
(1) The Movement Against Antizionism’s latest dispatch, “Dispatch #10”: “How Jewish Discourse Misdiagnoses Antizionism: Antizionism isn’t ‘waiting to become something else’”
Our Failing Discourse
Jewish discourse is struggling to name antizionism directly, and the result is a public conversation full of hesitation and euphemism. Too often, we treat antizionism as a “threshold,” a “mask,” or a half-formed gesture toward older hatreds rather than a coherent ideology with its own history, logic, and object of attack. Out of concern for Jewish safety, this dispatch urges readers to change their language—not with blame, but with clarity—by breaking down the most common rhetorical mistakes we make when speaking about antizionism and showing how these habits inadvertently leave our community exposed. To illuminate these patterns, we include screenshots and excerpts from public posts, tweets, and published materials; these examples are offered purely as analytical case studies, not as personal critiques. Our aim is not to shame, but to surface the rhetorical structures shaping today’s discourse—and to empower readers to speak more accurately and confidently about the hatred that stalks us.
Rhetorical Failure #1: “Cross the Line” Discourse
“Cross the line” discourse treats antizionism as presumptively legitimate until it is said to “cross” into classical antisemitism or overt violence, casting the problem as one of excess rather than substance. This framing normalizes antizionism as a reasonable stance rather than recognizing it as a coherent ideological system, constructed on libels, that has historically produced anti-Jewish harm….
Read the rest here.
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(2) Turning to issues on the right, we have David Azerrad, “The Return of the Jewish Question”:
At the gut level, most of our politics can be reduced to a simple question: “Whose fault is it?” Conservatives and liberals blame one another, nationalists point the finger at globalists, and for the woke left, it’s always the fault of straight white men. In the fever swamps of the internet, an age-old answer is now growing in popularity: the Jews. Indeed, in the past year or so, it has become impossible not to notice the number of influencers—led by Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens—who are aggressively pushing, with varying degrees of subtlety, what the kids call the “Jewish Question,” or JQ for short.
According to contemporary proponents of the JQ, Jews have been behind every left-wing cause and degenerate social trend since Marx launched his assault on Western civilization. In America alone, we are told, Jews bankrolled the civil rights movement, which destroyed the Constitution; championed open borders and the resulting demographic transformation of the country; and are behind the soft-on-crime policies that have ruined countless American cities. Jewish intellectuals devised and promoted communism, psychoanalysis, sexual liberation, feminism, critical theory, multiculturalism, and a host of other corrosive ideologies that have rotted the American mind and destroyed the fabric of society. Meanwhile, Jewish control of the media and Hollywood allows them to deceive honest gentiles (to say nothing of what their seedier cousins in the porn industry have done to public morals).
In The Culture of Critique, arguably the foundational text of the modern JQ, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald argues that Jews have promoted radical leftism as a survival strategy to undermine host societies….
Read the rest here.
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(3) Matthew Segal, “The Anti-Zionism Exception: A court decision just carved Jews out of civil rights law”
Civil rights law has an anti-Zionism problem. In cases alleging discrimination, courts typically allow civil rights plaintiffs to use a contextual test—assessing what the U.S. Supreme Court has called the “totality of the relevant facts”—to prove that discrimination in fact occurred. And when key facts are disputed, courts rely on juries to resolve them. Juries are quintessential finders of fact, and discrimination is a quintessential fact question.
But now, for Jews and Israelis, there is an emerging exception to the customary contextual test. Under this exception, behaviors styled as “anti-Zionism”—opposition to Israel’s continued existence—are deemed inherently not discriminatory…
Read the rest here.
That’s it, for now. Please share this substack and spread the word about ICSA to any interested persons—we’re going to need the whole community involved in the battle, it’s all hands on deck at this existential moment—and feel free to reach out with any questions or to get more involved.
Andrew Pessin
I think this equates to 4am in Sydney, Australia. Can this series PLEASE be recorded so we (me) can listen to the series of lectures?
Interesting approach to frame antizionism as a distinct ideology rather than just antisemitism in disguise. The "cross the line" rhetorical pattern the Movement Against Antizionism identified is someting I've noticed too, where ppl treat it as a spectrum issue instead of recognizing the underlying structure. The idea of it being its own coherent system with historicl roots makes more sense when you look at how it operates independently.