Public attention remains focused on the ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, as well as the Israeli military’s operations in Rafah and the continued crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protestors. What’s fallen through the cracks, however, is a dangerous new bill on antisemitism that threatens American Jewish safety.
The legislation in question is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed the House of Representatives last Wednesday with majority support from both Republicans and Democrats. While innocuous in name, the bill threatens First Amendment rights and reinforces a connection between Jewishness and Zionism in a manner that is misaligned with American Jewish interests. It’s incumbent now on the Senate to reject the bill accordingly.
The Antisemitism Awareness Act attempts to address antisemitism on school campuses. To do that, it first defines antisemitism and then gives the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) the ability to suspend funding if it determines a school does not act against students who violate that definition. Essentially, the bill gives the DOE new tools to threaten or punish schools that don’t take the department’s definition of antisemitism seriously.
But here’s the rub: In giving the DOE these new powers, the bill codifies a definition of antisemitism that is hostile to both Palestinian rights and Jewish safety.
The bill adopts the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which has been criticized for “conflat[ing] Judaism with Zionism in assuming that all Jews are Zionists.” In fact, many scholars in Jewish studies (and related fields) have since advanced an alternative definition of antisemitism, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, in order “to strengthen the fight against antisemitism by clarifying what it is … and to protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine.”
For those who see antisemitism and anti-Zionism as synonymous, or who are trying to use the IHRA definition to undermine opposition to the State of Israel, passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act could be an important victory. But the new bill has been opposed by the ACLU, which rightly sees it as an attack on First Amendment rights. One would think that establishment American Jewish leaders, even if they do not agree with the demands of pro-Palestinian student protestors, would subordinate their support for Israel to their support for American democracy, especially in a time of rising authoritarianism.
Instead, establishment Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Conference of Presidents have praised the bill. And as Slate’s Emily Tamkin adroitly shows, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, is more broadly “insisting on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and it has made this conflation central to the ADL’s work.” Although not focused on the Antisemitism Awareness Act, Tamkin argues that Greenblatt’s approach subverts the safety of Jews who do not identify with Zionism.
But this legislation should worry any American Jew who takes their American and Jewish identities seriously.
One implication of the bill is that it strengthens the legal relationship between Jewishness and Zionism, building upon a decades-long process that scholar Shaul Magid terms the “Zionization of American Jewry.” Here, American Jewish identity is increasingly bound up in a connection with the State of Israel. As Tamkin’s analysis suggests, making a connection to the State of Israel critical to American Jewish identity may be exactly what some American Jewish leaders desire. But I don’t think these members of the Jewish community are taking seriously how such efforts — particularly when they are legally enshrined — risk undermining the community’s position in the U.S. and, by extension, our safety.
Collapsing Jewishness into Zionism implicitly accepts the precept that Jewishness is a nationality — and, by extension, that Israel is the state of the Jewish people (as codified by the 2018 Israeli nation-state law). In presuming that all Jews are either Israeli nationals or Israeli nationals in-waiting, efforts to synonymize Jewishness and Zionism risk provoking questions of dual loyalty in the U.S. — the idea that Jews aren’t really loyal to the country in which they reside. Given the long history of antisemitism, the Jewish community should be extraordinarily wary of supporting any kind of legislation that intimates, however remotely, the notion that Jews are not true Americans.
In the past, leading American Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee took a non-Zionist stance precisely because they rejected the premise that Jews were a nation. In his review of Geoffrey Levin’s new book on American Jewish dissent against Israel, Magid notes that this stance meant the AJC “was not in principle against the Israeli state, even as it was harshly critical of the treatment of the Palestinian minority inside Israel; but the organization was opposed to Jewish nationalism being the raison d’etre of American Jews.” Establishment Jewish leaders would do well to remember those positions and return to them now.
As a graduate student studying race and citizenship in American and Jewish politics, I find it troubling that so many in our community refuse to distinguish Jewishness from Zionism. This refusal scares me because it lends support for Israel’s horrific assault on Palestinians in Gaza. It also raises the risk — however remote — that at some point, Jews might not be seen as true or equal Americans in the eyes of our neighbors.
I know this may sound misguided or alarmist. But those supporting the Antisemitism Awareness Act would do well to more deeply interrogate the presuppositions behind their positions, and the risk that comes with indelibly identifying oneself with a country (Israel) where we do not live, where we are not citizens, and which is presently engaged in a horrific campaign of mass violence against Palestinians.
I have seen personally how scared some are by the current pro-Palestinian protests on campus. But supporting patently illiberal bills that reinforce a connection between Jewishness and Zionism will not make us safer. Instead, we should renew our coalitions with non-Jewish Americans and seek equitable partnership with Palestinians.
Our communal safety in the U.S. is inextricably connected with that of our neighbors, not the State of Israel. I hope that our community can recognize this, and tell their senators to oppose the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
Miko Zeldes-Roth is a Jewish American doctoral student in political theory studying the intersections of race, sovereignty and citizenship in American and Jewish politics.