For most of my adult life, I have had a front row seat to the waxing and waning of campus antisemitism and have participated in and led efforts to counter it. As a Jewish student activist at Ohio State in the late 1980s, I participated in protests, planned events, handed out leaflets, and confronted the hostility toward Israel that intensified after the First Intifada. I did not imagine that nearly four decades later I would still be grappling with the same problem, much less that it would become so deeply embedded in university life.
My professional career kept bringing me back to campus. At the American Jewish Committee in Washington, I worked with universities facing controversies over Israel, including an early divestment battle at Georgetown. From 2010 to 2014, I led the David Project, which educated and trained college students in campus engagement around Israel. Later, as CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, I addressed these challenges through the network of local Jewish community relations councils. In 2021, I founded what was then called the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values to challenge an ideology that had developed on campuses and was spreading through other American institutions that neatly divides the world into oppressed and oppressors and foments hostility toward Jews. I wrote about it in my 2022 book, Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, a full year before October 7th, when the problem was laid bare.
I am describing an ideological evolution, some of it explicitly directed at Jews and some of it not, that made influential campuses less hospitable to Jewish life.
Not everything I discuss in this account rises to the level of antisemitism. Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, and neither is activism on behalf of Palestinians. I am describing an ideological evolution, some of it explicitly directed at Jews and some of it not, that made influential campuses less hospitable to Jewish life. Understanding that evolution requires looking beyond the latest offensive slogan or confrontation. We have to ask how universities came to reward certain ideas, discourage others, and make hostility toward the Jewish state a credential of moral seriousness.
An early warning
One episode at Ohio State during my undergraduate years has stayed with me. Fliers announced that Stokely Carmichael, by then also known as Kwame Ture, would speak on campus. The former civil rights leader had become a radical Black nationalist and an outspoken enemy of Israel. I already knew enough about his rhetoric to be concerned. Nevertheless, I went alone. During his talk, Carmichael denounced America, the colonialist West, and the Zionists. At one point, he announced that Zionist infiltrators were in the room. Then he declared that “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.” I was a recognizable Jewish activist. He had effectively identified people like me as targets, and the audience applauded.
What I remember most clearly is anger, rather than fear. How had public threats become acceptable? I later learned that the university’s Black Studies department had paid Carmichael to speak. I did not object to his right to express his views. I objected to an academic department underwriting a known antisemite’s performance. In an interview with a student newspaper, The Lantern, I argued that the university should no more sponsor Carmichael’s racism than that of the extremist Jewish nationalist Meir Kahane, who had shown up on campus a week earlier.
A university can protect someone’s freedom to speak—even rent them a room on the same basis as others—without rewarding a racist with institutional sponsorship. What disturbed me was the apparent exemption: language that would have been recognized as outrageous coming from another political camp could pass as liberatory rhetoric when directed at Zionists. The applause suggested that the problem extended well beyond the speaker.
The ideological campus takes shape
Little did I know then that the campus culture I encountered had a history. In November 1968, the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State launched a strike that lasted five months. The settlement helped establish the institution’s pioneering ethnic studies programs. The movement addressed a real failure: universities had neglected the histories and experiences of Black Americans and other minorities. Correcting that neglect was necessary.
But a consequential agenda accompanied these changes. Was the purpose of a department to study an experience through open inquiry, or to advance a political struggle? When scholarship is expected to deliver a predetermined political conclusion, the range of permissible questions begins to narrow. In a 2013 case study, scholar and activist Tammi Rossman-Benjamin examined how identity politics and social justice activism at San Francisco State could contribute to hostility toward Jews. She contrasted activist approaches with the commitment to academic rigor associated with Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Harvard. Her argument was that programs organized around political identity and liberation could encourage the targeting of groups classified as oppressors.
I recognized the mechanism from my own experience. Jews could be accepted as a historically persecuted minority, then reclassified as powerful and suspect when Israel entered the conversation. The complexity of Jewish history disappeared into a political sorting exercise. A movement that promised to give overlooked people a voice could become remarkably uninterested in what Jews had to say about themselves.
This was not the character of every university program—though it has become increasingly commonplace—nor did it describe every professor. But it was a common tendency. I would spend years treating campus antisemitism and Israel as separate controversies before fully appreciating the ideas connecting them.
The Oslo vacation
For a time, events in the Middle East seemed to offer a way out. After working briefly on the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992, I joined the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington in October 1993. Just weeks earlier, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat had shaken hands on the White House lawn. The Oslo process promised negotiations and incremental steps toward peace. The television images were powerful enough to make a dove out of a hawk.
Around the signing, I ran into Amir, a Palestinian American who had been one of my adversaries at Ohio State. He had once called me a “semi-skilled Zionist propagandist” in The Lantern, a line I had to admit was pretty good. Now he was a well-dressed lawyer at a Washington firm. He greeted me warmly and expressed hope for peace. I answered, “Inshallah.”
That encounter captured the moment: we could imagine putting the old enmities behind us. Campus tensions did not vanish, but the peace process lowered the temperature and gave advocates a shared horizon. If Israelis and Palestinians were negotiating, their American supporters had reason to live amicably with each other. Looking back, I think of those years as an Oslo vacation. The underlying campus ideologies had not disappeared. Developments overseas had temporarily made their most confrontational expressions less compelling. We mistook a favorable political environment for a more durable change in campus culture just as we treated a negotiated settlement in the Middle East as an inexorable march to peace between the two peoples.
After the collapse
The failure of the Camp David summit in 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada ended that holiday. Israelis faced suicide bombings and other attacks; Palestinians endured military operations, restrictions, and mounting casualties. The conflict returned to American campuses with an intensity many Jewish students had never experienced.
In a May 2003 Washington Jewish Week article, I described a Jewish community initially caught off guard. Students raised during the Oslo years were suddenly expected to defend Israel in an atmosphere of angry demonstrations. After one ugly protest, a student leader asked me to join a peace vigil. I said that the moment called for standing up publicly for Israel. A campus professional told me I was “generationally inappropriate.” Yet not long after, I had become more optimistic as I saw students slowly rising to the occasion. Hillels mobilized, foundations invested in leadership training, and Jewish students began building alliances. I wrote about Georgetown students cooperating with the campus NAACP and about a student on Chris Matthews’s Hardball delivering an impressive defense of Israel. My generation had learned activism during the First Intifada; this generation was learning quickly too during the second. I believed we were in good hands.
Meanwhile, anti-Israel activism was developing a more durable infrastructure. Electronic Intifada, co-founded in 2001 by Ali Abunimah and others, became an influential online platform. The first Israel Apartheid Week took place in Toronto in 2005. That July, Palestinian organizations issued the formal call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. These efforts connected campus campaigns to a broader movement with common arguments and recognizable tactics.
The apartheid analogy was particularly effective. It invited students to locate the conflict within a familiar moral story, with an obvious villain and an established remedy. Debating Israeli policy could give way to debating how quickly a university should distance itself from an allegedly illegitimate state. That shift had implications for Jewish students whose connection to Israel was part of their identity. I encountered the movement directly when Georgetown hosted the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s conference in February 2006. As the director of the American Jewish Committee regional office in Washington, I urged President John DeGioia to distinguish the university’s position from the organizers’ views. I opposed divestment while defending their right to meet. Georgetown invoked its expression policy and explained that access to facilities did not constitute endorsement.
We witnessed an increasingly sophisticated strategy. Speakers urged activists to enlist sympathetic Jews and Israelis to strengthen their legitimacy and counter accusations of antisemitism. The effort was about expanding influence beyond the existing activist circle. For me, Georgetown reinforced a lesson that would shape my later work. A successful response required supporting Jewish students and challenging the movement’s arguments while maintaining a credible commitment to free expression. We also needed to understand the larger campus audience. Most students at that time were neither hardened Israel opponents nor committed advocates.
When I became head of the David Project in 2010, an organization committed to working with Jewish students on campus, I wanted a clearer picture of that audience. Were campuses engulfed in hostility, as some communal accounts suggested, or were Israel’s supporters winning, as others maintained? Our 2012 report, “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” tried to move beyond that argument.
Speakers urged activists to enlist sympathetic Jews and Israelis to strengthen their legitimacy and counter accusations of antisemitism.
The phrase we used was “pervasive negativity.” On a number of influential campuses, Israel was accumulating negative associations through classroom discussion, student programming, and ordinary social interaction. The dramatic incidents were pertinent, but they were not the whole story. Students did not have to endorse BDS to absorb the impression that Israel was an unusually oppressive country. We did not claim that most Jewish students on most campuses lived under siege. Many students were disengaged, and militant anti-Israel rhetoric sometimes alienated the very people activists hoped to recruit. Defeating a divestment resolution—and we were able to defeat many—did not necessarily mean that Israel had gained friends.
This distinction changed how I thought about advocacy. We could train students to win an argument and still lose the wider audience. Relationships, sustained engagement, and exposure to actual Israelis offered opportunities that a barrage of talking points did not. People could encounter a complicated society rather than a symbol in someone else’s political drama. At the time, many students seemed inclined toward what I later called “soft postmodernism.” Everyone had a story. They wanted to hear different perspectives and avoid choosing sides. I found that outlook intellectually thin, but it left room for conversation. If students were prepared to hear Palestinian stories, they might also hear Israeli ones. We could work with that.
From stories to power
Around the fall of 2014, the atmosphere suddenly changed. The professionals involved in our campus work reported that students who had once been receptive were becoming distant or hostile. Relationship building was encountering a different kind of obstacle. The question was increasingly whether a relationship itself violated an ideological obligation. In Woke Antisemitism, I described this as a transition from soft to hard postmodernism. The earlier preference for multiple narratives had given way to a more rigid account of power: privileged and marginalized, oppressor and oppressed. Stories no longer received an equal hearing. They were judged according to where the speaker stood in that hierarchy.
The emergence of Black Lives Matter, the protests following Ferguson, and the growing importance of social media, especially Tumblr, helped define the period. The movement against racism had become deeply ideological and was increasingly defining the larger campus culture. The activists’ goal was to translate those grievances into a universal template before applying it to conflicts it barely understood.
Intersectionality, a concept that I originally encountered in graduate school, now came to function as a demand for solidarity across causes. In theory, attention to overlapping experiences of disadvantage can illuminate reality. In practice, campus coalitions often treated support for the Palestinian cause as a condition of participation. Israel was assigned to the camp of colonialism and racial domination; Palestinians to the camp of liberation. Jewish experience fit poorly into that arrangement. Jews could be vulnerable to prejudice while also being relatively successful. Israel could be militarily powerful while facing enemies committed to its destruction. Israeli Jews could include families displaced from Arab countries, survivors of European persecution, and descendants of communities with ancient roots in the region. These facts complicated the categories. The categories almost always won.
I increasingly concluded that better Israel messaging could not, by itself, solve the problem. An intellectual environment that discouraged complexity would eventually discard our complexity too. By the time I founded the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values in 2021, I saw the defense of liberal principles and open inquiry as central to the defense of Jewish life.
After October 7
The response to October 7, 2023, exposed how far this transformation had gone. While Jews were absorbing news of Hamas’ massacre and hostage-taking, more than 30 Harvard student groups endorsed a statement holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The statement appeared on the day of the attack; by October 9 it had become a national controversy. What shocked me was the speed of the verdict. Before students could seriously consider what had happened, before the scale of Israel’s military response could possibly be known, an established political framework supplied the answer. The victims’ nationality determined who could be blamed. The ideological habits I had watched develop for years were now being applied to exonerate an atrocity and shift blame to the victims.
Another part of this story involved what the Reut Institute called the Red-Green alliance: cooperation between radical left movements and Islamist organizations despite their profoundly different social commitments. Its 2022 report argued that shared opposition to Israel and Western power could sustain this partnership. Student movements on campuses populated mostly by progressives were being led by radical Muslim activists. What was once an amorphous ideological orientation now developed a constituency and a coalition aimed primarily but not exclusively at Israel and Jewish students.
Before students could seriously consider what had happened, before the scale of Israel’s military response could possibly be known, an established political framework supplied the answer.
In spring 2024, encampments spread across campuses. Encampments were areas that began as protest spaces but were taken over and controlled by radical student groups who restricted who could come in and out. Many students stayed overnight. A friend and I visited one such encampment when his son graduated from Johns Hopkins. The Hopkins students there were clearly not as radical as their peers at Columbia University, where the confrontation culminated in the occupation of Hamilton Hall and the administration’s request for police intervention that April. There were dozens of unoccupied tents in this corner of the campus quad, which students had apparently abandoned so they could study for finals. My friend and I wondered how deeply the enmity toward Israel and American Jewish support for Israel had really sunk in among this generation of young people outside a few universities known for their culture of activism.
But the tensions boiled over on many campuses. Students had every right to protest the war and the suffering of Palestinian civilians. The issue was how universities handled disruption, intimidation, and exclusion of Jewish students, and whether their commitment to equal treatment extended to Jews. Hillel gatherings themselves became targets. In September 2024, protesters followed students attending a Baruch College Hillel welcome-back dinner to a kosher restaurant. The student protestors surrounded the entrance, blocked diners from leaving, and shouted accusations of terrorism; Baruch’s president condemned the incident as harassment and intimidation. At Berkeley Law, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky described a poster depicting him with a bloody knife and fork and blood around his mouth, imagery he identified as invoking the blood libel. Students then disrupted an April 2024 graduation dinner in his backyard. Chemerinsky defended the offensive poster as protected speech while rejecting the claim that free expression entitled students to commandeer his home. Administrators could not discharge their responsibility merely by announcing that they supported dialogue or free speech.
The backlash and the response
For the first time in years, I see substantial pressure for reform alongside the familiar resistance. The backlash is uneven, and some proposed remedies create problems of their own. But universities can no longer assume that their handling of Jewish students will escape serious scrutiny. Several developments deserve attention:
Congressional accountability. The December 5, 2023, hearing with the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT marked a turning point. Elise Stefanik exposed a glaring double standard when she asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ bullying and harassment policies. The presidents retreated into arguments about context and the distinction between speech and conduct. Their sudden solicitude for free expression was difficult to reconcile with a campus culture that routinely curtailed speech deemed offensive or threatening to other minorities. Jews were being asked to accept a tolerance for hateful expression that favored campus constituencies were often spared. A consistent defense of free speech would have been credible. Selectively discovering it when Jews were the targets was not. The spectacle made institutional hypocrisy visible to a national audience and signaled that outside pressure would intensify.
Civil rights enforcement and federal funding. Under Biden, the Education Department reached agreements with institutions including CUNY to address shared-ancestry discrimination complaints but dropped the ball on numerous other cases. Under Trump, the administration moved to much more aggressive funding pressure, including the April 2025 freeze announced against Harvard. The ensuing litigation remains consequential: an appeals court heard arguments over the research funding dispute on October 5, 2026. I support holding universities accountable for discrimination. That objective requires legally sound procedures and remedies directed at the failure, rather than an unlimited license to control academic life.
Organized pressure and legal accountability. Northwestern offers an example of what happens when Jewish students, parents, and alumni organize rather than accept another reassuring statement. Michael Teplitsky, president of the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, described the university’s resistance to confronting campus antisemitism and the pressure that eventually forced a reckoning. His coalition helped sustain scrutiny, filing a brief supporting Jewish students in their lawsuit against Northwestern. The students alleged that the university had tolerated harassment and exclusion while failing to enforce its own rules. These were allegations requiring adjudication, but the lawsuit put concrete demands for protection and accountability before a court. Teplitsky’s account also describes congressional and federal investigations and the controversy over Northwestern’s subsequent antisemitism training. The lesson for other campuses is that a sustained coalition can turn individual complaints into institutional pressure through documentation, legal action, and public scrutiny.
The role of donors and trustees. Withholding a gift can send a message, but donors can also help change the intellectual culture that produced the problem. In SAPIR, Tao Tan and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg argue that the humanities, arts, and social sciences receive relatively little outside funding compared with the sciences, even as they exert enormous influence over undergraduate education and campus culture. That imbalance gives donors an opportunity for influence far beyond the size of their gifts. Funding research, fellowships, and programs in these fields can make neglected questions worth pursuing and help scholars build careers around them. The key is sustained support: a scholar cannot plan a career around a grant that may disappear next year. Donors concerned about antisemitism should think beyond withdrawing money or funding another building and consider a long-term investment in intellectual competition where it has been most diminished. [19]
New centers of intellectual life. Heterodox Academy’s December 2025 report identified 45 civics centers at 41 institutions in 25 states. These programs seek to create space for intellectual openness within universities where conformity can be difficult to resist. Many of the centers devoted to civic thought emphasize the Western canon, the American founding, and the philosophical foundations of free societies; others emphasize dialogue across differences and viewpoint diversity. At least in theory, their distinct missions—and, in some cases, organizational autonomy—give them room to pursue questions without submitting to the same ideological expectations that prevail in established departments. Their growth offers opportunities to strengthen civic education and viewpoint diversity. Their success rests upon their ability to withstand the pressure for conformity coming from academically monolithic departments, university administrators, and others trying to stifle rather than expand the academic enterprise. The jury is out.
Evidence of improvement. FIRE’s 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, based on surveys conducted in 2026, report an improving average score and substantial gains at several institutions. The broader picture remains troubling, and a speech ranking does not measure antisemitism directly. Still, an environment in which students can challenge prevailing assumptions gives us reason for hope. Reform should be assessed through campus conduct and experience, not simply through new statements of principle.
My front row seat has taught me that Jewish life on campus is inseparable from the university’s overall intellectual environment.
My front row seat has taught me that Jewish life on campus is inseparable from the university’s overall intellectual environment. We need protection against harassment and fair enforcement of rules. We also need universities where a student can question an orthodoxy without losing standing among peers or professors. Jewish students should not have to win an argument about the Middle East to belong. A university that takes open inquiry seriously is much better equipped to provide such an environment.
David Bernstein is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), which opposes illiberal ideologies and supports liberal values in and out of the Jewish community, and author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews. He is also a co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Values, a consortium of like-minded organizations supporting liberal principles. He is past President and CEO of Jewish Council for Public Affairs and former executive director of the David Project.