July 31, 2026

California’s latest fight over campus antisemitism was framed as a battle over free speech. But beneath that familiar slogan was something far more disturbing: an effort by the faculty union for California State University’s 22 campuses to weaken vital protections for Jewish students while claiming to defend student rights.

That effort took the form of AB 2551, which began as a health-care measure before being gutted and amended into a higher-education bill late in the legislative process. In its original rewritten form, it would have repealed the campus-safety protections added to California’s Education Code after the post-Oct. 7 explosion of antisemitism in public higher education.

After a swift statewide outcry, the repeal language was removed. But the bill still advanced — and its sponsor, the California Faculty Association, made clear that its larger goal had not changed.

At the Senate Education Committee hearing, CFA legislative action chair Melina Abdullah called the bill “a first step towards ending time, place and manner restrictions” that she described as “repressive and harmful to our students.”

Time, place and manner rules are not censorship. Properly enforced, they allow protest to coexist with everyone else’s rights. They distinguish advocacy from intimidation, rallying from blocking access, and protest from disrupting classrooms, libraries, residence halls and campus events. These are precisely the protections Jewish students have needed since Oct. 7, as anti-Israel activism too often moved from political expression into harassment, exclusion, intimidation and denial of access.

Before accepting CFA’s free-speech claim, Californians should ask what kind of freedom CFA is prepared to defend — and for whom.

In April 2025, CFA adopted a resolution demanding that CSU “immediately and permanently terminate” study-abroad programs in Israel and end academic and cultural partnerships with Israeli universities.

This was not a political statement. It was an academic boycott: a demand that the nation’s largest public university system use its academic infrastructure — study abroad, exchange, research partnerships and scholarly collaboration — to limit what and where students may study, which scholars they may learn from, which partnerships may exist and whether Israel may be encountered as a legitimate subject of university life. For Jewish, Zionist and pro-Israel students, cutting off those opportunities is a direct attack on their academic freedom.

But academic boycott and its harms reach beyond formal university ties. Its anti-normalization logic treats ordinary engagement with Israel — and Zionism itself — as illegitimate. On campus, that means pressure to stigmatize speakers, marginalize Israel-related scholarship and treat students who refuse to disavow Zionism as suspect members of the academic community, creating conditions in which abuse and harassment can be excused as activism.

That is the staggering hypocrisy at the center of CFA’s position. The union invokes free speech when anti-Israel activists want fewer rules, but shows no comparable concern when its own boycott campaign would trample the academic freedom and free expression of Jewish, Zionist and pro-Israel students, and help create the hostile conditions those rules are meant to prevent.

The hypocrisy would be disturbing from any faculty group. From CFA, it is far more dangerous. As the exclusive bargaining representative for CSU faculty, CFA has systemwide infrastructure, access to university leadership, organizing capacity, and legislative clout.

CFA’s boycott resolution was not simply a local union position. It carried out a campaign that PACBI — the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the academic-boycott arm of the BDS movement — had asked faculty networks to pursue: dismantling study-abroad programs in Israel and other academic collaborations with Israeli institutions and scholars. PACBI’s U.S. affiliate, USACBI, promoted the campaign on American campuses. CFA’s Palestine, Arab and Muslim Caucus, co-chaired by USACBI founder Rabab Abdulhadi, then drafted a resolution matching that demand. In effect, CFA used public faculty-union power to press CSU into a foreign-led academic-boycott campaign against the Jewish state, at the expense of CSU’s own students and faculty.

AB 2551 is not separate from that campaign. It gives legislative form to a defensive strategy the BDS movement developed. Through its “Right to Boycott” campaign, the movement portrays anti-BDS laws, antisemitism definitions and protest restrictions as attacks on political expression.

In academia, USACBI goes further. Its “Academic Defense” apparatus urges faculty, students and campus groups engaged in BDS advocacy to reframe antisemitism charges, sanctions and litigation as attacks on academic freedom, antiracist activism, faculty governance and university autonomy. AB 2551 follows that script: rules adopted to protect students from harassment and hostile environments are recast as repression, while activists constrained by those rules are recast as the injured party.

California lawmakers must not pass AB 2551 in any form. At this point, no legislator can honestly treat it as neutral free-speech legislation. It is the defensive side of the academic-boycott campaign CFA has already pressed CSU to adopt. That campaign narrows Jewish students’ academic freedom and then seeks to weaken the rules they need when exclusion turns into harassment, intimidation or denial of access.

And because academic boycott directly undermines public universities’ educational mission, lawmakers should not stop with defeating this bill. They should consider legislation, modeled on existing state precedent, that keeps taxpayer-supported colleges and universities in California from using academic programs, partnerships and exchanges to enforce political boycotts.

California’s public universities exist to expand knowledge, inquiry and academic opportunity. A faculty union must never be allowed to turn them into instruments of political coercion and exclusion.

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Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.

Nearly thirty years ago, when I was serving as rabbi at Oxford University, I hosted Boy George before approximately one thousand students.

He was already one of the most recognizable artists on earth. Culture Club had supplied the soundtrack of an entire generation. His voice, appearance, wit, and fearless individuality had made him a global icon.

But what struck me that evening was not merely his celebrity. It was his humanity.

Even then, his warmth toward the Jewish people was unmistakable. There was something deeply instinctive about it. It was not political calculation. It was not an attempt to curry favor. It was the natural sympathy of a man who understood what it meant to be different, publicly judged, mocked, ostracized, and yet determined never to surrender his identity.

George and I became friends, and we have remained in touch over the decades.

Now, at a time when so many celebrated artists have either remained silent about Jewish suffering or actively joined the campaign of demonization against Israel, Boy George has done something extraordinary.

He has released a new song, “Od Nirkod — We Will Dance Again,” declaring his solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people after the massacre of October 7. The reggae-inflected song invokes the promise that Israelis will dance again after the slaughter at the Nova music festival and includes the unambiguous declaration that, amid the world’s moral confusion, he stands with the Jews. Those are simple words. But in today’s poisoned cultural climate, they require enormous courage.

Boy George is not an obscure artist with nothing to lose. He is one of the defining cultural figures of the last half-century. Millions of people grew up listening to him. His music crossed continents, religions, races, and generations.

And he knows exactly what happens today when a prominent entertainer supports Israel.

The mobs arrive.

The abuse begins.

The denunciations pour in.

The artist is called immoral, racist, complicit, or worse. Professional opportunities can disappear. Friendships can dissolve. Social media becomes a sewer of threats and contempt.

Boy George knew all of this. He sang anyway.

That is moral courage.

It is especially meaningful because so many in the entertainment industry have chosen the opposite course. They have watched Jewish women describe rape and mutilation and responded with suspicion. They have seen photographs of murdered families and treated the killers as freedom fighters. They have watched babies, children, concertgoers, and elderly people dragged into Gaza and somehow concluded that the real moral emergency was Israel’s attempt to prevent the next massacre.

Many celebrities rushed to condemn Israel before the blood of the murdered had dried. Some repeated grotesque accusations without evidence. Others signed letters demanding that Israel be isolated from international culture. Still others offered tortured statements about “all suffering,” as though the deliberate murder of Jewish civilians could not be condemned without immediately placing the Jewish victims on trial.

Boy George refused this cowardice.

His song does not pretend that war is beautiful. It does not celebrate Palestinian suffering. It says something far more basic: when a nation is attacked, it has the right and obligation to defend its people. The song directly challenges the fashionable claim that Israel’s war of self-defense is inherently genocidal and criticizes artists who follow ideological fashion like sheep.

Predictably, the backlash was immediate.

Critics attacked the song as offensive and “nauseating.” Some portrayed George’s support for Israel as a moral stain rather than an act of conscience. Up But the ugliness of the response only proves why the song was necessary.

The modern campaign against Israel is not satisfied with criticizing a government or debating military policy. It increasingly demands complete ideological obedience. Artists may denounce Israel in the most inflammatory terms and be praised for courage. But let an artist defend Israel’s existence, acknowledge the horror of October 7, or declare solidarity with Jews, and suddenly he is told that his speech is dangerous.

That is not activism. It is intimidation.

And it has worked on far too many people.

Boy George refused to be intimidated.

There is something particularly poignant in his promise that “we will dance again.” Hamas chose a dance festival as one of its principal killing grounds because the terrorists were not merely attacking Israelis. They were attacking joy, music, freedom, sexuality, youth, and life itself.

The young people at Nova were dancing beneath the open sky. They were not soldiers. They were not occupying anyone. They were celebrating music when armed terrorists descended upon them, hunted them through fields, raped women, kidnapped survivors, and murdered hundreds.

In Jewish tradition, dancing is not frivolous. It is one of the most profound expressions of spiritual endurance. Jews danced after crossing the Red Sea. We dance with the Torah. We dance at weddings. Hasidim danced through poverty and persecution because joy itself was an act of resistance.

“We will dance again” therefore means more than returning to a festival.

It means that terror will not define Jewish life.

It means Hamas will not have the final word.

It means the Jewish people will not surrender our capacity for joy.

And it means that the civilized world must stand with those who dance rather than those who murder dancers.

Boy George understands that instinctively.

The Jewish community owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude. We are often quick to criticize public figures who abandon us, and rightly so. But we must be equally determined to honor those who stand with us when doing so carries a cost.

We should buy the song. Share it. Play it publicly. Invite him to Israel. Honor him at Jewish institutions. Thank him not quietly, but loudly.

Jewish gratitude must be more than a private emotion. It must become a public moral principle.

Too many allies discover that supporting the Jewish people brings punishment from Israel’s enemies but little visible appreciation from Jews. That must change. Those who stand with us should know that we stand with them.

I have known Boy George for roughly three decades. I saw his affection for the Jewish people long before the present war, long before social media mobs, and long before supporting Israel became a potential professional liability.

His new song is therefore not an opportunistic conversion. It is the public expression of something I witnessed many years ago at Oxford: a compassionate man with a profound instinct for the outsider and a natural bond with the Jewish people.

At a moment of frightening abandonment, he has given Jews something precious—the knowledge that we are not completely alone.

George sings that he does not feel brave; he is simply trying to behave like a human being.

But in an age when basic humanity has become controversial, behaving like a human being is bravery.

Boy George has stood with the Jews.

Now the Jews must stand with Boy George.

 

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Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international bestselling author of thirty-eight books, translated into more than twenty languages. He has been hailed as “the most famous rabbi in America” (The Washington Post, Newsweek), “arguably the most famous Orthodox Jew on earth” (The New York Observer), and named one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world (The Jerusalem Post). Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.