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American Jewish organizations on Monday slammed a recent report by the National Communication Association’s Task Force on Academic Freedom and Tenure in which Israel is portrayed as a “settler-colonial state” engaged in “genocidal violence,” saying the report peddles “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
In a joint statement, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Academic Engagement Network (AEN) called the suggestion in the academic organization’s report that ‘Zionists’ are engaging alongside white supremacists in efforts to undermine academic freedom “outrageous.” The NCA, a not-for-profit academic association, describes itself as an “indispensable community of thousands of communication scholars and teachers” from the US and worldwide.
Israel has been the target of a flurry of academic boycotts since Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza. More than a thousand boycotts of Israeli researchers and institutions have been tallied over the past two years by an Association of Israeli Universities task force dedicated to combating boycotts.
The war also sparked widespread anti-Israel protests on campuses across the US, with many of them featuring antisemitism and targeting of Jewish students. US President Donald Trump has led a crackdown on schools that tolerated antisemitism, although critics have charged that he is using the issue as an excuse to undermine the colleges.
However, the NCA report represented “an egregious moral lapse” that “resorts to antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to account for the current state of academic freedom at American universities,” the Jewish organizations said.
The NCA’s 60-page report charges that academic freedoms are under attack by what it describes as “organized networks of disinformation and hate from the right” aiming to silence scholars who challenge established power.
It seeks to redefine the concept of academic freedom, arguing that the greatest threats facing US and global universities are rooted not merely in political interference, but in the “underlying whiteness of Western knowledge production” and “settler colonial-capitalist-imperial” structures of the academic institution itself.
According to the report, this “whiteness” perpetuates an exclusionary system where tenure pathways and merit systems systematically exclude and undermine academics from marginalized groups, including Indigenous, Black, migrant and gender-diverse scholars. Thus, it argues, movements to enforce academic freedom by the Trump administration and members of the political right are a form of “white backlash” designed to “silence the critiques of whiteness.”
Targeting Israel, the report charges that complaints of antisemitism by political actors are “mobilized to silence conceptually informed critiques of Israel and its settler colonial practices.”
The report charges that antisemitic incidents on campus function as a pretext for targeting and deporting protesters, and that “powerful donors, trustees and politicians” strategically “mobilize the trope of antisemitism” to suppress academic speech.
The document also includes a forceful condemnation of the “Israeli genocidal campaign” in Gaza, referencing the destruction of Palestinian universities and the “murders of Palestinian academics” as evidence of the threat academic institutions face.
It notably recommends the NCA establish a “Legal Fund for Palestine scholarship” to defend against the perceived “Zionist attack on academic freedom” and urges the association to explore ways to “place the necessary pressure on Israeli institutions” concerning the destruction of academic infrastructure in Gaza.
The report does not discuss Jewish identity or experience outside of this political context.
In the joint response, the ADL, AJC and AEN called the report “an egregious moral lapse for an academic association’s report to resort to antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to account for the current state of academic freedom at American universities.”
“The repeated use of these contested terms and conspiracy theories forecloses critical inquiry rather than advancing it, while advancing unfounded accusations against Israel and its supporters that have become vehicles for anti-Jewish animus in academic communities and beyond,” the statement read.
Equally concerning is the report’s dismissal of extensive evidence of surging antisemitism as “inventions or manipulations designed to suppress criticism of Israel,” the joint statement said.
“They also invert the problem: instead of acknowledging that antisemitism is resurging, the report suggests that Jews (or “Zionists”) are weaponizing antisemitism claims to exert control,” the response read. “This narrative is not only false but dangerous, reinforcing harmful patterns of victim-blaming that excuse wrongdoing and shift responsibility away from perpetrators.”
The NCA report’s use of language from long-standing antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence operating behind the scenes to control institutions is “deeply irresponsible,” while calls to isolate or penalize academic institutions based on political considerations “are fundamentally incompatible with the principles of scholarly freedom, the open exchange of ideas, and research collaboration that the report claims to defend,” the response concluded.
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