The Cold War Against the Jews

Across the street from my house in Skokie, Illinois, is a small middle school in Evanston’s District 65. Since my family and I moved into our home six years ago, our relationship with the school has been quiet. On some mornings we exchange pleasantries with students and teachers passing by, but little more. In April 2024, however, two incidents pulled us into the school’s orbit. The first took place on the last day of Passover. My children were playing basketball in our driveway with children of friends who were visiting us from Boston. As they played, a bus pulled out of the school’s driveway and a child stuck his head out of its window. “The Nazis are coming for you!” he screamed. Unsure what to do, our children ran inside.

When our children told my husband and I what happened, we reached out to the principal, hoping that she would swiftly address the issue and we would reach an amicable resolution. The matter was simple, we assumed. The school’s buses are fitted with cameras, and the school could easily identify the child, enact some disciplinary measure, and treat the incident as an opportunity to educate its students about antisemitism.

Our first meeting with the school principal went well. She listened to our story sympathetically, and assured us that she would take action and provide us with an update soon. One week went by, and then two. After hearing nothing, we sent the principal an email to check in. Shortly afterward, we received a response from the assistant principal telling us that the principal was unavailable. The school had taken appropriate action, she added, but could not provide us with any information. She also could not, under any circumstances, she added, reveal the identity of the child who threatened our children.

Since we did not request the identity of the student in question, we assumed there was a misunderstanding. We explained that we did not ask for the child’s identity, but simply wanted the incident addressed. We also added that we live a few miles from the Illinois Holocaust Museum and could help arrange for a student visit to the museum or coordinate an educational program with its docents. The school’s assistant principal responded by ignoring this offer, and again insisted that the matter was closed. She could not reveal the student’s identity, she repeated, since doing so would compromise his safety.

At this point, we decided to contact district administrators to apprise them of this situation. They gave us the same Kafka-esque answer, again insisting that they would not provide information about the student’s identity. No matter how many times we clarified that we had no interest in the student’s identity, we continually received emails which implied that our requests derived from a desire for vengeance—answers that seemed designed to gaslight us and put us in the wrong.

After two months of back-and-forth emails with school and district administrators, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. This request, we reasoned, would compel the school to own up to whether they had ever responded to the incident outside our home. Three weeks later, the school responded to our FOIA request by releasing our prior correspondence with the school, with no additional material.

Our futile efforts were especially concerning in light of a second incident that pulled us into the school’s orbit. A week after our children were threatened, one of our daughters was walking past the school with her great-grandfather when they passed a distraught woman exiting the school. The woman’s cheeks were stained with tears. “Are you Jewish?” She asked my daughter. When my daughter answered in the affirmative, the woman pointed to the school’s building. “I endured being called a baby killer by my own students for the past six months. I complained about it to school administrators, but they refused to take action. Today, I got fired.”

Ruminating on how to handle our own situation with the school in light of this second incident, my husband and I were flummoxed. Was the incident between our kids and the boy on the bus isolated, or representative of something bigger? And was it significant that the same school was also tolerating the bullying of Jewish teachers, whose students accused them of being genocidal maniacs?

It didn’t escape my notice that similar incidents were taking place at schools across the country. In my own field of higher education, I was hearing about case after case of Jewish faculty members being targeted and isolated on the basis of their affiliation with Israel, and of administrators tolerating this behavior. Bullying was fine, as long as the victims were Jews—who by definition, had done something to deserve it.

Jewish students at Harvard, Penn, MIT, and of course Columbia routinely awoke to find their dormitory doors defaced with swastikas and tagged with “free Palestine” tags—the same combination of rhetoric that was seeded in the school across our street. On campuses across North America, Jewish spaces were vandalized, campus grounds were littered with signs advocating for the globalization of the intifada, and professors used their classrooms to test Jewish students’ loyalty by asking them to condemn Israel as a colonialist oppressor, all of which were treated as normal, or understandable. Students who invaded and defaced school property, or who barred other students from accessing school facilities on the basis of their group identity, were routinely let off the hook, allowed to graduate, and restored to good standing, on the basis of their targets being Jews.

Since Oct. 7, countless academic societies have saved their harshest condemnations for Israel rather than for Hamas, and have routinely depicted the war as an attempt by bloodthirsty Israeli fanatics to fulfill their genocidal fantasies against innocent Palestinians. On that basis, academic societies are excluding Israeli scholars from global conferences, and in some cases are informing them that their presence is unwelcome in academic spaces. Jews who submit articles and book manuscripts for peer review are experiencing a soaring, and increasingly disproportionate, rate of rejection. Collaborative partnerships that were once routine have now dissipated.

The case of my own academic society, the Society of Biblical Literature, is illustrative of this trend. With over 10,000 members, the Society of Biblical Literature is the biggest consortium of biblical scholarship in the world. It is also unique from other academic disciplines in that its members include a high percentage of Israeli academics. Yet the SBL’s response to Oct. 7 produced a mass resignation of Jews. In the days following Oct. 7, the SBL made no public statement to its members or on social media. Finally, on Oct. 16, nine days after Hamas’ attack, the SBL issued a statement that expressed sympathy with Israeli victims:

The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) vigorously condemns the terrorist attacks in Israel initiated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The slaughter of innocents, taking of hostages, wanton destruction, and the ongoing atrocities against civilian non-combatants are horrific and opposed to the values we espouse as human beings and as a professional society dedicated to the advancement of scholarship on the Bible. We are concerned by the subsequent upsurge in anti-Semitic violence in the United States and globally, and encourage each one of you, our scholarly community, to stand firm against such actions in your own academic institutions. As a professional organization, we stand in solidarity with the people of Israel and wish to support all impacted by these tragic events, especially our members and their families. SBL resolves to develop appropriate educational media, publications, and conferences challenging the use of biblical and other authoritative texts to justify hatred and intolerance in any form. As SBL’s governing board, we pledge our support and send strength to members of our organization in Israel whose family members are missing or held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, and we mourn with our colleagues impacted by these tragic events and all other innocent victims of the conflict.

Four days later, on Oct. 20, the SBL’s Executive Council issued a statement titled: “Statement Concerning the Ongoing Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza and Israel”:

SBL Council Statement Concerning the Ongoing Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza and Israel
The Society of Biblical Literature’s Council is saddened and horrified by the ongoing humanitarian crisis and human rights violations unfolding in Israel and Gaza. Of particular concern are the ongoing violence, loss of innocent life, and deprivation of basic shelter, safety, food, water, electricity, medical supplies and other life essentials currently experienced by innocent victims in Gaza.

We recognize that the realities currently experienced by Palestinian and Israeli communities have
complex historical and geopolitical origins that are not easily resolved, and that some of these communities have been subject to military occupation, forced migration, and other atrocities.

Critical examination of the ways the Bible and other scriptural texts have been used to justify anti-Palestinian / anti-Israeli, and anti-Muslim / anti-Jewish sentiments as well as violence against other religious and cultural communities across the globe must be critical dimensions of the work we undertake. As biblical scholars, we must develop strategies to mitigate the ill effects of marginalization and diaspora.

Therefore, as SBL’s governing board, we affirm again the Society’s resolve to develop appropriate educational media, publications, and conferences challenging the use of biblical and other scriptural texts to justify hatred and intolerance in any form. As the situation on the ground leads to more suffering and more death, we hope for the immediate release of all hostages, the preservation of lives, and a swift end to military activities.

Many members have expressed their concern to us. Although we are not able to respond individually, we wish to assure you that your letters have been read carefully and your concerns are heard. We hope that our statement addresses some of these concerns and we express support and sympathy to all our members who are directly involved, and enjoin all of us to act with peace and justice in this time.

The SBL’s second statement suggested that Israel was engaged in a war of vengeance that targeted the innocent—a position that even left-wing Israelis who opposed Netanyahu’s government could not entertain, because it is simply untrue. Angry that the second statement removed any empathy for Israelis who were reeling from the attack, professor Vered Noam of Tel Aviv University issued the following response on Oct. 24:

[This statement] creates a despicable equation between barbarism and civilization, between a society which desires life and a regime that glorifies death; between base murderers and rapists on the one hand and those who defend their land and people on the other hand ... The SBL has failed to distinguish good from evil ... I request that you suspend my membership in the SBL immediately.

On Oct. 31, 2023, the SBL issued a third statement which declared that its first two statements were not contradictory:

Dear SBL Members:

At a time when both silence and words are subject to multiple interpretations, often contradictory ones, we regret the pain and indignation our successive statements have caused to many of our members. Council does not wish to issue further statements about the tragic events in Israel and in Gaza. Rather, Council wishes to clarify that both of its recent statements stand side by side.

The Society of Biblical Literature was bumbling and mealy-mouthed. Yet its panoply of statements was in fact much milder than those issued by academic associations in the wake of Oct. 7, including associations pertaining to the history and archaeology of the Middle East. Most of these associations did not vote to boycott Israel as a sign of its ire, simply because they had already done so well before Oct. 7. The Association for Asian American Studies, the American Studies Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and others had established themselves as leading proponents of an academic boycott.

Nevertheless, Israel’s response to Oct. 7 generated fresh condemnations. The American Anthropological Association, for instance, which had voted to boycott Israel in March 3, 2023, affirmed its position on Oct. 16, 2023. In January, the Modern Language Association similarly condemned Israel in an emergency motion.

In November 2023, I became involved in a small community of Jewish academics who were concerned about these developments. Rather than expending our effort on debating with academic associations, we decided to focus on developing one of our own. In January 2024, I joined 22 North American scholars on a solidarity mission to visit academic campuses in Israel. Our group consisted of faculty members representing Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Hebrew Union College, as well as Emory University, Bard College, Washington University at St. Louis, and other colleges across North America.

Our visits to campuses across Israel were sobering. As we listened to Israeli professors and administrators share story after story about their exclusion from global academic communities, we became increasingly attuned to the situation’s tragic irony. The same faculty and administrators who had been boycotted as progenitors of apartheid had devoted their careers to producing pluralist campuses. Twenty percent of the undergraduate population of Achva College, which is just a few miles from the Gazan border, is Israeli Bedouin. Tel Aviv University, one of the most elite universities in the world, also serves a diverse student population, 16% of whom are Arab Israelis. Forty percent of the University of Haifa’s student body is Arab Israeli.

The trip convinced us that we are dealing with a global issue that runs not only up and down the educational ladder, but also around the globe. Excluded from journals, conferences, and public gatherings, pressured to change their public writings to conform with others’ sensitivities, and gaslit by administrators who inform them that all of this has nothing to do with antisemitism, we had discovered that to be a Jew in academic spaces was to embody provocation—and that provocation, we were told, had to be suppressed for the sake of everyone’s comfort.

This trend was also surfacing in literary circles outside of academia. In March 2024, the journal Guernica greenlit Joanna Chen’s essay “From the Edges of a Broken World,” a reflective memoir by an Israeli leftist that expressed empathy with both Israeli victims of Oct. 7 and with Palestinian people. The essay’s publication sparked a mass resignation of Guernica’s staff that culminated in a public apology from the journal’s editor for publishing “Genocide apologia”—though there is no evidence of a genocide being committed by Israel, nor was Chen writing apologetics for Israel or the actions of her government. Most recently, Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was blacklisted among booksellers for being tainted by the Zionism of its author. Zevin, though Jewish, has made no public statements in support of Israel.

Around the same time that my children were told that the Nazis were coming for them, and that the Jewish teacher working across the street was fired, something else happened to me. A representative of the Jewish Publication Society, a historic press with a reputation for bringing outstanding Jewish scholarship to wide English-speaking audiences, contacted me about applying for the position of their editor-in-chief. Aware of what had been taking place in Jewish literary circles, I jumped at the chance. I was offered the position three months later.

When news of my new position was shared in July, I was inundated with hundreds of emails, text messages, and phone calls from authors of children’s books, poetry, young adult novels, fiction, philosophy, ethics, Bible, religion, and history. All of them sent warm congratulations, but many were more interested in sharing their concern. What was the Jewish Publication Society going to do to meet this critical moment?

I’ve been thinking about this question myself. It’s clear that some of what JPS will achieve in the coming years is going to depend on partnerships with other organizations and institutions. With the right allies, JPS can develop an authors’ cohort, a college research internship, and maybe even a podcast. But more than anything, the question of how JPS is going to meet this moment depends on books. And to publish books, we need Jewish authors to keep writing. In response to exclusion, Jews must build their own centers of knowledge. Every person who cares about Jewish ideas, moreover, should view themselves as a repository of creative knowledge, and view the production of knowledge as an act of resistance against the scourge of antisemitism wending its way through academic circles.

As Jews continue to find themselves isolated in schools, professional spaces, and even in their front driveways, we must recommit ourselves to building communities that foster the production of great Jewish ideas. This is my answer to well-wishers who have reached out to me voicing their concern about the Jewish future: Be creative. Build communities. Go write.