The Jewish Scholars Emboldening the Academic Assault on Zionism

Amid calls of “ceasefire” and an end to the “occupation,” encampment demonstrators at the University of Pennsylvania last April waved the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) while chanting “Al Qassam, make us proud,” invoking Hamas’s military wing and its mission to destroy Israel. That night, a rabbi and a student attempting to pass through the encampment were physically harassed.

Just hours before, two prominent Israeli genocide scholars, Brown University Professor Omer Bartov and Stockton University Professor Raz Segal, lectured at that same encampment about the weaponization of antisemitism. That May, Bartov defended the demonstrators, stating, “There’s nothing threatening about opposing occupation or oppression.” Such rationalizations have been voiced within academic circles.

In an October 2024 Al Jazeera documentary entitled “How Israel Won the West,” five Jewish scholars—among them Segal and Bartov—denounce Israel as genocidal, racist and settler-colonialist with a tone of certainty. American complicity in this presumed evil is treated as a foregone conclusion.

How do Jewish and Israeli scholars—and students—find themselves at anti-Israel protests or aligned with anti-Zionist groups? The answer lies at the intersection of academic theorization, identity crisis, and the pressure to undergo a modern-day conversion.

Embedded within the surge of anti-Zionist activism on university campuses lies a broader intellectual reckoning with Jewish identity in the modern era—one that seeks to divorce Judaism from the State of Israel. Increasingly common views aired today are refrains of Judaism ≠ Zionism and anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism. In various humanities circles, this movement manifests through two evolving frameworks: non-Zionism and post-Zionism.

Simply put: Non-Zionism acknowledges that Jews may possess ties to the land of Israel but rejects the idea of a Jewish state. Post-Zionism, on the other hand, holds that the Zionist project concluded with the founding of Israel and that continued attachment to Zionism is obsolete. Combined, they promote the notion that the answer to what comes after Zionism may lie in what came before it.

These ideas are not new. Traces of non-Zionism are found in the biblical passage Jeremiah 29, when the prophet instructs the Israelites to “prosper” in the diaspora in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile, awaiting the divine hand to facilitate their return: God says, “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce …When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you … plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

This view contrasts with Psalm 137, which laments the exile and demonstrates a deep yearning to return to Zion, for no tradition can be practiced in the diaspora: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion … For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion … How shall we sing God’s song in a strange land?”

Eastern European Bundists and other late-19th-century Jewish thinkers helped reintroduce non-Zionism, challenging the notion of a Jewish nation state as the solution to Jewish identity and security. Non-Zionism has been maintained by certain sects of Orthodox Jews who believe that political Zionism disrupted the Messiah’s task of returning them to Israel on a divine timeline. But history proved brutally unforgiving—first during the Holocaust, and more recently on Oct. 7—underscoring that the Jewish people have no option but to assert their sovereignty and harness their security.

While non-Zionism and post-Zionism are not inherently antisemitic, post-Zionism carries an eerily dystopian irony: Nearly eight decades after the founding of the Jewish nation-state, segments of the Jewish intellectual elite take particular delight in questioning—or even seeking to dismantle—its very essence and existence.

Jews today may indeed feel a strong connection to the diaspora. They may also call for a ceasefire in Gaza and criticize Israeli government policies. But those Jews partaking in anti-Israel protests or intellectual movements are not expressing merely diasporic connections or political critique.

Consider the February 2025 conference, “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions,” hosted by Brown University’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Its stated goal was to explore the “changing relation to Zionism and the State of Israel” among Jewish communities around the world. Brown University student Maya Rackoff attended the conference. She noted, “the characterization of Zionism as inherently racist and genocidal went unchallenged,” as academics “attacked the founders of Zionism and their adherents as genocidal, Jewish supremacists.”

Panels at the conference included titles like “Disillusioned Zionists,” and the scholar lineup featured distinguished speakers with records of anti-Israel activism. Bartov, who organized the conference, has accused Israel of genocide and participated in anti-Israel protests. Israeli scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay serves on the advisory board of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), an anti-Zionist organization that characterizes Israel and the United States as inherently oppressive, racist and settler-colonial. Other non-Jewish scholars also joined the conference, including Yale Law School’s Aslı Ü. Bâli, President of the pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

The saturation of these panels by representatives from explicitly anti-Zionist organizations unmasks the innocent intentions of “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions.” It merely sets the stage for parading anti-Zionist ideology under the guise of scholarly exploration.

The Jewish scholars at the conference are aligned with what Brown University Chair of Palestinian Studies Beshara Doumani dubbed “Global Israel:” the “north star” of “rising global fascism.” These statements are upheld by Israeli scholars like Adi Ophir, who added that to truly “liberate” Jewish identity, one must first become an anti-Zionist. Shaul Magid of Harvard, a

former Orthodox rabbi, recently published “The Necessity of Exile,” positing that Jewish flourishing may require rejecting the idea of a Jewish nation-state.

This is what passes for academic discourse about Israel today. Impressionable students are influenced by credentialed authorities—several Jewish or Israeli—that the only way to be a moral Jew is to denounce Zionism. Furthermore, the progressive notion that if something is new, or new again, it is somehow good, contributes to the idea that there is a relationship between opposing Zionism, righteousness, and prestige. Thus, faculty and students join anti-Israel protests to feel as if they are displaying their knowledge and virtue.

These movements endorse a modern-day conversion. Believing that casting away Zionism will render them righteous, young Jews have embraced this identity makeover. But history offers sobering precedents. Jews who converted to Christianity seeking protection during the Spanish Inquisition, known as conversos, were not spared enmity for shedding their Judaism. Nor were the assimilationist Jews of the 19th century who believed similarly and faced the fate of the Holocaust. Relinquishing Zionism, a key pillar of Judaism, offers merely an illusion of moral clarity at the expense of historical amnesia.

The 2019 essay entitled “On Three Anti-Zionisms” by Hannah Arendt Center Associate Fellow Shany Mor offers critical insight into the dangers of framing a conference on non-Zionist Jewish traditions around voices—many of them Jewish—who are openly critical of Israel. Mor categorizes these three strands of anti-Zionism as Alpha, Beta and Gamma. “Alpha anti-Zionism” relates to non-Zionist Jewish traditions; “Beta anti-Zionism” characterizes much of the Arab Muslim world’s rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East; “Gamma anti-Zionism” accepts the existence of Israel but views its very creation as inherently sinful, playing on the notion of “original sin” from Christian tradition, rendering all of its actions immoral.

While distinct, these three strands overlap. Alpha anti-Zionism—now dressed in academic garments sewn by Jewish traditions—provides an insidious cover for the destructive beta and gamma anti-Zionism.

What has unfolded during the past several years is not just a challenge to Zionism from the outside—it’s a corrosion from within. Consider Bartov, who paradoxically identifies as a “Zionist,” while advancing the naive idea that if “the Palestinian issue were resolved, antisemitism would diminish.” He argues that the founding of Israel, intended to safeguard Jews, has instead exacerbated antisemitism. These claims ignore centuries of antisemitism that long predate the State of Israel. Most concerningly, these ideas flirt with the logic of exile-promoting thinkers like Magid, who render Jewish statelessness preferable.

What has unfolded during the past several years is not just a challenge to Zionism from the outside—it’s a corrosion from within.

Institutions like ICSZ and MESA do more than promote scholarship on Israel and the Middle East; they explicitly support anti-Israel activism. Both organizations actively support students participating in illegal campus protests and encampments. When such actions invite disciplinary or legal scrutiny, MESA defends faculty and students engaged in antisemitic conduct under the broad banners of “human rights” and “academic freedom,” promoting Palestine Legal.

It is hardly surprising that individuals affiliated with these institutions, such as Ariella Azoulay, whose conference presentation “Ima, Why Didn’t You Love Me in Ladino” nostalgically mourns a lost Ladino past, support groups like JVP and the rule-defiant students, including those allegedly linked to Hamas operatives, like Mahmoud Khalil. While diasporic themes may be emotionally resonant, they presently serve as a political tool.

Many Jewish scholars believe that by critiquing Israel, they are working toward a more just and equitable future for Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. And when grounded in reality, constructive criticism of Israeli policy is valuable and necessary. But attaching romantic nostalgia to the diaspora while aligning with movements that vilify Israel undermines Jewish safety and Palestinian well-being. The academic normalization of anti-Zionism—especially when expressed by Jewish or Israeli scholars lending it a veneer of credibility—only emboldens the dangerous fiction that Judaism and Zionism are incongruent.

When strands of non-Zionism or post-Zionism surface within the broader debate over antisemitism and anti-Zionism, they must be identified and forcefully challenged. After all, Zionism is not severable from Judaism. And, today’s Jewish state is far from an abstract idea but a thriving democracy engaged in a life-or-death struggle against Hamas, a terrorist entity aptly described by British author Douglas Murray as a death cult.

In a climate increasingly shaped by anti-Israel academic discourse, faculty—particularly those Jewish and Israeli scholars who affirm Israel’s legitimacy, its moral clarity in Gaza despite the humanitarian tragedy, and the importance of Jewish-diaspora ties—must insert themselves in forums promoting non-Zionist ideas. The integrity of academic inquiry demands that these perspectives be part of the conversation.

This is not merely a debate about Israel or politics, but the manipulation of scholarship in service of ideology, a betrayal of the humanities, academia, and intellectual honesty. At stake is the right of the Jewish people to exist fully, to claim a national identity like any other. Judaism is not a buffet of symbols and memories to pick from; it is a lived tradition, a way of life—and Israel is its modern anchor.

Those Jewish and Israeli scholars glamorizing Jewish statelessness and powerlessness as virtuous do not serve a noble cause. Their efforts have proven reckless with dangerous implications. The brutal attacks on the Jewish state and its people reveal how deadly that illusion can become.

Sabrina Soffer is a recent graduate of the George Washington University.