Academics Against Israel And The Jews

First-hand testimonials by scholars in the US who have been targeted by the Israel lobby over the content of their teaching, scholarship, activism, and/or activities as public intellectuals. An important contribution to the current debate on and off campuses about academic freedom and free speech, as well as to the growing prominence of the Israel-Palestine conflict in public discourse.

The first collection to take critical look at the international movement to boycott Israel.

The Conflict over the Conflict offers a unique view of the threat to free speech, academic freedom, and the future of the academy posed by those on both sides of the Israel/Palestine campus debate.

Moshe Shokeid narrates his experiences as a member of AD KAN (NO MORE), a protest movement of Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University, who fought against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, founded during the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). However, since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the later obliteration of the Oslo accord, public manifestations of dissent on Israeli campuses have been remarkably mute. This chronicle of AD KAN is explored in view of the ongoing theoretical discourse on the role of the intellectual in society and is compared with other account of academic involvement in different countries during periods of acute political conflict.

1. This book is an exposition of the actual and personal consequences of the BDS assault on university campuses. 2. Its authors include a senior scholar in American history and a senior scholar in philosophy. Both are strong followers of the BDS movement on American college and university campus. Pessin maintains a news outlet on matters concerning Jews and Israel. 3. Work on antisemitism is an important component of our Jewish studies list. Books in this area provide a unique contribution to understanding the resurgence of religiously motivated violence and hate speech.

Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on ‘no platforming’ by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel. This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.

Crossovers compares Jewish anti-Zionism and Palestinian anti-Semitism from political and philosophical points of view. The authors' goal is to expose what is unique about these phenomena, and what they share, so that both ideologies and their practical impact can be better understood. The authors identify a symbiotic relationship between anti-Semitic Palestinian doctrines and those Jews who are anti-Zionists. There has been a great deal of research on these as separate phenomena, but there has thus far been no research that has noted their similarities. Palestinian anti- Semitism and Jewish anti-Zionism may stem from different sources, but they have similar consequences. Palestinian views derive from religious Islamic as well as nationalist- Arab roots, while the views of anti-Zionist Jews grew out of an ideological-Marxist-Trotskyite background. But both share a common goal: the destruction of the Jewish-Zionist nation, and a common strategy, to achieve a bi-national state as a first stage in the march to this goal. Jewish history is replete with examples of how Jews have ignored repeated threats and acts of violence against them. That characteristic of Jews reflects their Messianic belief, but it lacks a basis in history. That belief has resisted change even in the face of threats that were obvious and that have endangered Jewish lives in the past. Contemporary anti-Zionists share this optimistic outlook. Paradoxically, while the Jewish-Zionist State of Israel contends in public that another Holocaust will not happen and is patently impossible, the lesson of recent Jewish history is that a Holocaust can happen again. This work is unrelenting in its criticisms and tough minded in its assessments of the future. It merits careful, serious reading.