The Anti-Zionist Agenda at the Heart of UC Ethnic Studies

A UC Merced professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies is calling for the “dezionization” of the University of California, explicitly comparing his project to the “denazification” of postwar Germany.

In an extraordinary essay published this week on the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council’s Substack, with the Council itself sharing the byline, Council member Sean Malloy proposes severing university relationships with organizations that support Jewish students, including Hillel, rejecting donations from foundations and individuals that support Israel and restricting individual faculty research with Israeli-linked entities. He also calls for establishing a new “University Committee on Dezionization,” independent of UC’s administration and Regents that is empowered to implement changes. Indeed, Malloy questions whether university leaders he considers complicit in Zionism should be allowed to continue governing UC, declaring that “a major overhaul of the governance of the UC system” is “part of the point.”

Most disturbingly, he declares that any group working toward the dezionization of the university must “explicitly commit to anti-Zionism as a core principle. Anti-Zionism can and should be a litmus test in this respect.”

Malloy maintains that he is targeting Zionism, not Jews. He even acknowledges that some students, faculty, and staff might “feel uncomfortable” in a “dezionized” UC, comparing their discomfort to what some might feel at a university embracing diversity and scientific inquiry rather than “white supremacy and religious doctrine.” But when Jewish campus organizations are singled out for exclusion because of their relationship with Israel, and when equal treatment for independent pro-Israel student groups is called into question, the implications are deeply troubling, not only for Jewish students and faculty but for the entire university community.

What makes this manifesto particularly alarming is not simply its extremism. It is that the academic movement from which it emerges is deeply embedded in the University of California itself.

The intellectual foundations of this movement are evident in the work of Christine Hong, a UC Santa Cruz professor and co-founder and co-chair of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council. Hong recently guest-edited “Zionism from the Standpoint of Ethnic Studies,” a special issue of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism described as “elucidating the fight for critical ethnic studies in California as a key site of anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist struggle.” Eight of the issue’s contributors, including Malloy, are UC ethnic studies faculty from campuses throughout the state, five of them members of the Council’s leadership team. The Council itself authored one of the pieces.

In her introductory essay, Hong rejects the idea that ethnic studies is primarily about promoting multicultural understanding. The “first principle of ethnic studies was Third World anti-imperialism,” she writes, tracing the discipline to the revolutionary struggles of the 1960s. Critical ethnic studies “takes justice as its method,” requiring scholars not merely to study and critique imperialism, but to condemn it. And because Hong portrays Zionism as inherently colonial, exclusionary, and genocidal, opposition to Zionism becomes not a position to be examined and debated, but an integral part of the discipline’s academic mission.

Nor does Hong separate political activism from classroom instruction. She approvingly recounts how the political commitments developed in a San Francisco State ethnic studies classroom contributed to the Gaza encampment and a student-led divestment campaign. Hong quotes the professor’s declaration that the encampment was “not separable from the ethnic studies classroom,” but rather an extension of ethnic studies pedagogy.

Hong is hardly alone in defining the discipline this way. The national Critical Ethnic Studies journal describes the field as “an urgent political education project,” while the Critical Ethnic Studies Association’s mission statement explicitly links scholarship, institution-building, and political activism.

This is the fundamental problem with the conception of ethnic studies advanced by Hong and other influential practitioners at the University of California and beyond: Political commitments are not simply subjects for scholarly examination. They are built into the discipline’s understanding of legitimate scholarship and teaching. The classroom becomes an instrument for advancing political causes rather than a place where those causes are freely examined and debated.

The UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council has translated that academic philosophy into organized political action. Just nine days after Hamas’s October 7 attack, the Council demanded that UC administrators retract their characterization of the attack as terrorism and instead “uplift the Palestinian freedom struggle.” In May 2024, it issued a statement titled “The University Is Ours! All Out for the Encampments!” demanding a UC-wide academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The Council’s political campaigns and Malloy’s chilling plan to “dezionize” UC expose the consequences of the conception of ethnic studies advanced by Hong and other leading practitioners, which makes anti-Zionist political struggle part of the discipline’s academic mission. The university itself becomes the object of that struggle, with Malloy proposing to enlist its authority and resources to eliminate Zionism from campus life, academic relationships, and ultimately its own governance.

UC must not wait for that vision to become reality. A problem rooted in the academic mission of university departments cannot be solved simply by reining in the political activities of individual professors. Departments that make political warfare their mission have no business wielding the power and authority of a public university.