A wave of intensified repression has engulfed university campuses since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza in October. To frame discussion of Israeli colonialism and Palestinian freedom as “anti-Jewish hate,” these efforts unite a diffuse set of tactics: megadonors, corporate advertising, lawfare, civil rights complaint—and astroturfing, meaning they work through dozens of small, opaque organizations simulating a grassroots movement. The result is a new ecology of antisemitism watchdogs that is reshaping the terrain of US political, academic, and cultural life. But their playbook is familiar from other battles against the right, and so are the possibilities for resisting their assaults.
The campaign to cancel the 2023 Palestine Writes literary festival exemplified donor-organized demands that universities shut down forums for Palestinian perspectives. Catalyzed by billionaire Marc Rowan—who has donated unspecified millions to the Anti-Defamation League in the past several years and gave at least a million to Trump in 2021, and in the preceding decade bankrolled the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies with a quarter million dollars—the campaign set off the implosion of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s administration. Those attacks set the stage for right-wing donors to push even further, fueling Harvard megadonor Bill Ackman’s ongoing campaign against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policy, which Ackman crudely explains as “the whole oppressor-slash-oppressed narrative.” Ackman’s campaign includes attacking Harvard president Claudine Gay as an unqualified “diversity hire” and charging that DEI is the framework that permits criticism of Israel. The same donors have pushed universities to attack and surveil Jewish students and faculty who protest genocide.
Meanwhile, discrimination claims brought by Zionist students against universities that fail to fully suppress Palestine-related protests are proliferating at a breakneck pace, now backed by white-shoe law firms working with lawfare organizations. The campaign to recognize and protect “Zionist identity” is increasingly offered as rationale for discrimination claims. Lawfare is often backed by megadonors, although it also runs on pro bono work by a handful of conservative law firms who pop up in case after case. The Brandeis Center (founded 2012), StandWithUs (whose lawfare arm was set up in 2013), and Zachor Legal Institute (founded 2015) are major generators of lawfare cases. All are funded by Adam Milstein, the right-wing billionaire whose other projects include Turning Point USA, Praeger U, the Heritage Foundation, The Leadership Institute, and Americans for Limited Government, as well as anti-Muslim and pro-Israel groups who position themselves as antisemitism watchdogs. As Alberto Toscano writes, this war on educational institutions is “bringing together the political center and far right” while distracting from Israeli scholasticide, layered atop mass murder and imposed famine, in Gaza.
US Zionist institutions have a long history of smearing students, faculty, and movements that contest Palestinian erasure as “intolerant” or “terrorist.” Over the last decade, though, the landscape of pro-Israel and Zionist advocacy has been significantly changing. A growing network of antisemitism watchdogs is repurposing right-wing strategies pioneered by the Koch brothers. Often borrowing the rhetoric of DEI, these organizations are staging civil rights claims to advance right-wing demands from censoring teaching to banning leftist student organizations. In keeping with Koch-funded strategy, they coordinate a diffuse, expanding set of organizations and individual complaints to suggest that such right-wing framings are simply common sense—and to claim that they are “not political.” Like Koch strategy, Zionist strategy is best resisted by refusing to accept its terms, and instead looking behind the curtain.
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Astroturfing is, in part, a numbers game. According to journalist Arno Rosenfeld of the Jewish Forward, at least forty-nine new watchdog groups have been formed in the United States since 2015, from tiny websites to major operations. About three dozen are active organizations. The number is even larger if we include conservative Jewish-identified and other organizations that campaign against critical race theory and “woke ideology,” using “opposing antisemitism” as their rationale.
Even a cursory search suggests that all but a handful of the new groups nominally concerned with fighting antisemitism are in fact focused on advocating for Israel. Their work can be roughly categorized as lawfare (like warfare, but using law as a weapon), student and parent organizing, institutional advising, and advertising. Lawfare isn’t new—the Lawfare Project and StandWithUs’ Saidoff Legal Department have been operating for over a decade—but since 2020, lawfare organizations have multiplied with at least four new shops. Among them, the Legal Network Initiative Resource Center is a project of an NGO supported by the state of Israel; its board includes former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Another group, The Deborah Project, is led by Jerome Marcus, who is also “program dean” at the right-wing Tikvah Fund and a fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum, the billionaire-backed project to push Israeli laws hard to the right, modeled on the Koch brothers’ American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Lawfare infrastructure is complemented by several new groups organizing Zionist students and parents, who provide both complainants for legal action and aggrieved publics that demand, ostensibly as an educational right, that educational institutions support Zionism and repress discussion of Palestine. Mothers Against College Antisemitism (MACA), for instance, was launched as a Facebook group last year; it now has tens of thousands of followers and its messaging is cross-posted to tens of thousands more pages by the Lawfare Project’s messaging arm, EndJewHatred. MACA’s calls to action can generate a diffuse blast of complaint, which its organizer Elizabeth Rand has called a “wild sting,” carrying its messaging into institutions as personal experiences of discrimination. This messaging recasts protests against violations of law—including genocide and sales of land in Israeli settlements—as efforts to attack and intimidate Jews. Hunter College sociologist Heba Gowayed recently traced a MACA call to action to a statement from Hunter’s president declaring student anti-genocide protests to be antisemitic. (The college acknowledged that protesters had also been physically threatened, Gowayed notes, but it did not address the threats nor defend students and faculty against the orchestrated charges of antisemitism.) Such declarations in turn fuel lawfare.
Legal claims and public uproars have manufactured the narrative that the United States is being overtaken by a dire crisis of antisemitism. In one stark example, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote recently that efforts to hold Israel accountable for “categories like imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy” arise not from Israel’s own history and current genocide against Palestinians, but from “the human impulse to point the finger.” Precisely because charges of antisemitism are taken seriously across US academic institutions—and not ignored, as complaints have implied —several institutional advising groups have emerged to guide campuses’ responses, broadly repackaging Israel advocates as DEI and civil rights trainers. One such group, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), merges Israeli, Trumpian, and Christian Zionist leadership. It advocates against “woke ideology,” advises political leaders to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism (according to which anti-Zionism and criticisms of Israel are antisemitic), and specifies zero tolerance for “violations.” CAM’s footprint is significant: virtually every campus organization “opposing antisemitism” is listed as a member, dozens of mayors have attended its US and European policy summits, the US Special Envoy on Antisemitism has sent high-level representatives to CAM’s policy symposium, and the White House has touted CAM as a validator of its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released last May.
Another advisory group, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), counsels university administrators on academic freedom even as it “engages, educates, and empowers US university and college faculty and staff to oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel.” AEN has a deep bench of well-connected advisory board members in academia, politics, and Zionist institutional leadership. They include names like Larry Summers and Donna Shalala, both former university presidents and US cabinet secretaries; Irwin Cotler, former Canadian attorney general and special envoy for Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism and a CAM advisor; and Geri Palast, director of the Israel Action Network, which is jointly organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, umbrella groups overseeing much of the funding for Jewish community organizations and local Jewish politics. AEN convenes university administrators for seminars, takes administrators on Israel trips, builds consultative relationships with universities, and provides major funding for student groups replicating its messaging. It claims to work on 300 campuses. When AEN invites university administrators to consult on campus antisemitism, it’s hard to imagine those administrators declining the offer.
Consistent with much of US politics, the new set of antisemitism organizations includes at least eight new megadonor projects. (In addition to those described here, other megadonor projects include Maccabee Task Force, SchoolWatch.me, and Facts for Peace.) Each heavily invests in advertising strategies to popularize pro-Israel discourse about antisemitism and the Gaza genocide. Their high-dollar corporate-style ad campaigns—as seen in #EndJewHate and “blue square” billboards —popularize the language of Zionist grievance now being articulated on campuses. Megadonor funding also appears to be behind the doxxing trucks now circulating on US campuses to declare students and faculty “leading antisemites.” Collectively, these ad campaigns assert that US Jews are marginalized as a group—without distinction as to race, class, or other factors. They call for protective solidarity from the public in the same register as the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag hails the public’s obligation to oppose anti-Blackness; some even explicitly draw this parallel. But their claims transgress the divide between left and right rhetoric on race: in addition to demanding action grounded in antiracism, they assert that Jews have been harmed by “intersectionality,” erased by social justice movements, and marginalized in college classrooms—all blithely conflating Jewishness with Zionist politics.
Alana Lentin has characterized this rhetoric as the Zionist version of “great replacement theory.” Heike Schotten has termed it a form of “right-wing annihilationism” that shares a core ideology with TERFism and white nationalism: the notion that Palestinians, along with anti-Zionist Jews and “the left,” pose an existential threat to Jews and thus must be eliminated. This is the framing of the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who told MSNBC anchor Katie Phang in October 2023 that “anti-Zionism is genocide.” In March 2024, Greenblatt went so far as to repeat the neoconservative claim that keffiyehs are swastikas.
This is also the framing fueling Israel’s actual genocide in Gaza: from Netanyahu’s bible-thumping call for Israeli forces to “wipe out the memory of Amalek” to an Israeli soldier’s video celebrating the destruction of “a vast territory, [killing] tens of thousands of the Amalek.” As Mohammed El Kurd has said, “[Palestinian] boys in such a world are men, and girls are men, and the women are men too. Not only men but fighters who all seem to a sniper’s eye view to be plotting a second holocaust.” The messaging pumped out by Zionist public relations projects is reissued as deeply felt personal experience by students and parents and amplified as social justice commonsense in more formal spaces like DEI trainings and media reporting. Those who fail to respond to such “grassroots” complaints—Palestine solidarity protesters, universities, courts—are charged with opening the gates to a second Holocaust.
The success of the new antisemitism watchdogs is a function of their integration into a well- established infrastructure for pro-Israel advocacy. One part of this institutional landscape includes academic institutes and posts, seeded over decades by Israel and Zionist donor networks and conservative organizations like the Tikvah Fund. Another part, exemplified by the Anti- Defamation League (ADL), flies the banner of civil rights while primarily advocating for Israel and conservative domestic policy.
Far from nonviolent, this mode, which might be called civil rights–washing, has contributed to the militarization of policing over the past decade. In 2022 and 2023 alone, Congress allocated $555 million to the Non-Profit Security Grant Program, shepherded into existence by the Jewish Federations of North America, which funds partnerships between “nonprofit organizations that are at high risk of terrorist attack” (mostly synagogues and Zionist Jewish institutions) with anti-terrorism policing units. Civil rights-washing has also been used by Zionist groups to attack critical race theory (CRT), conjoining these groups with the right-wing movement led by the likes of Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo. Over the past several years they have gutted the California ethnic studies mandate, passed into law in 2019 after decades of work by community organizers and educators. And it has produced bipartisan rhetoric that relentlessly links unconditional support for Israel to a Jewish right to self-determination that preempts any Palestinian right to self-determination—the rhetoric used to justify sending an additional $14 billion to cover Israel’s military costs rather than demanding a ceasefire.
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Claims of antisemitism have long been used to accomplish conservative ends, from portraying broad-based movements for social justice as “extremist” to intensifying police power. But their impacts have been ratcheted up in striking parallel with the Trump-era rise of white Christian nationalist conservatism. In tandem with the anti-CRT movement’s assaults on teaching about racism and its claims of discrimination against white students, Zionist advocacy paints the teaching of (Israeli) colonial history, state violence, apartheid, and (Palestinian) resistance as discriminatory.
To codify this view, lawfare agencies have filed lawsuits demanding that “Zionist” be recognized as an identity like race, sexuality, or religion rather than a political one, complementing the progressive-coded messaging of faux-grassroots groups like Zioness. The Deborah Project, for example, has argued that protecting this identity in the classroom requires not only banning discussion of opposition to Zionism but prohibiting “any language, in any teaching materials…asserting as a fact that the Jewish State is guilty of committing such horrific crimes against others as ethnic cleansing, land theft, apartheid or genocide, or that the Jewish people are not indigenous to the land of Israel or to the Middle East.” This strategy—asserting an identity- based right to circumscribe the rights of others—is familiar from religious attacks on LGBTQ rights. The Deborah Project would thus ban from the classroom Palestinian voices describing life under Israeli rule and Palestinian resistance, not to mention virtually all leading scholars of indigeneity and settler colonialism and many Israeli and Middle East historians. The case is still pending.
Such legal claims complement efforts to shape public discourse: redefining “indigeneity” so that it can refer to European Jews, “settler colonialism” to assert that Israel cannot be counted as a settler project, “white” to assert that European Jews are people of color, and “marginalized” to claim that Jewishness, including in North America and Israel, is an inherently subjugated identity. A new wave of Title VI investigations and federal civil rights lawsuits expands these strategies. As one recent lawsuit against NYU lays out, allegations of faculty antisemitism include speaking at a student protest and forming a faculty organization for justice in Palestine, while allegations of student antisemitism include calling students ‘”Zionist” or “white” and saying “you support genocide.“
Some of the wins produced through these claims of harm are less directly traceable, but important to note. Fueled by complaints about academic departments posting statements opposing Israeli genocide and colonialism, the public University of California (UC) system is considering, and the private Barnard College has recently adopted, a policy that would require university administrators to approve any text posted on department websites. In the UC system, Regent Hadi Makarechian asserted that this policy was a direct response to departments’ “political statements related to Hamas and the Palestinians.” These are academic expressions that the UC president’s lawyer, ignoring the First Amendment, found it appropriate to quash simply because “the University would feel uncomfortable” with them.
The fruits of this work may appear spontaneous and diffuse, as if the result of preexisting mass consensus, but in fact they are products of “a social movement from above,” as Hil Aked helpfully puts it in Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (2023). The common presumption that ethnic groups think and operate as political blocs lends itself to this strategy. Politicians and media often fail (or refuse) to distinguish between groups that reflect an organized community and astroturf groups that set up shop without a community base. Instead, astroturf groups are established with boards of highly-placed business and political actors who can catapult them into policymaking spaces. This strategy, described by the late neoconservative strategist Penn Kemble as “a blizzard of letterheads,” allows policymakers to do their friends’ work while claiming that they are responding to popular demand. When groups claim to represent Jewish communal efforts to defend against racial harm or group mistreatment, questioning their legitimacy becomes costly. And although the astroturf groups reflect a new trend, the claim that right-wing groups represent Jewish interests trades on a longer history.
Excising the Jewish left has been the project—stretching over three-quarters of a century—of legacy US Jewish institutions like the ADL. The result is that conservative Jews are connected to longstanding Jewish institutions that can speak for them politically and “Jewishly,” effectively conflating Jewish identity with Zionism, unconditional support for Israel, and other conservative views. Although US Jews are increasingly opposed to the conservative politics of Jewish institutions—polling in 2020 and 2021 found that 68% wanted to stop US aid to Israel from being used for West Bank settlement expansion, and 20% supported a single democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis—few organizations are available to represent them politically.
However, important groups are working to fill this space: among them, Jewish Voice for Peace has 300,000 members and a million social media followers, and says it is rapidly expanding; If Not Now has grown into a national movement from its small origins in 2014 (and is now gaining visibility as the subject of the feature film Israelism); and a new 25-member coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish progressive political groups just formed with the intention of countering the immense electoral impact of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Many young Jewish progressives don’t organize with Jewish organizations at all, but instead in anti-Zionist organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. These are all grassroots organizations whose funding is a tiny fraction of those backed by megadonors; they work through base-building rather than networked high-level connections. They are also countering a political and cultural infrastructure that has spent a century, and billions of dollars, stitching together US conservative politics and US Jewish politics.
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But the public sense of crisis about overt white Christian nationalism, rising throughout the Trump era, has positioned conservative antisemitism watchdogs as a powerful political force. The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville made the white right unusually and frighteningly visible. It was closely followed by the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. The response was an outpouring of concern about right-wing antisemitism that boosted the public profile of the ADL and a handful of other watchdog organizations and made room for new groups. In the wake of the Charlottesville rally, the ADL reported an immediate ten-fold increase in donations; its annual donations jumped by nearly 17% and it quickly forged new partnerships with policymakers like the US Conference of Mayors. Although this era of white nationalism hasproduced anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim violence at much greater levels than anti-Semitic violence, state agencies and civic institutions have directed overwhelming public attention and resources to antisemitism. The US Conference of Mayors, for instance, maintained its ties with the ADL, and recently converted its antisemitism programming to a post-October 7th framing, drawing heavily on ADL analysis that Jews are endangered by opposition to Israel’s genocide. It does not devote any programming to other forms of racist violence. Indeed, official responses to antisemitism often work to the detriment of communities of color broadly as they ramp up policing and surveillance, and of Palestinians whose participation in civic life they often construe as a threat to be policed.
Revealingly, the new antisemitism watchdogs do not position themselves against white nationalism, but primarily against the left. For instance, StopAntisemitism.org, which appeared on Twitter in October 2018 a few weeks before the Tree of Life synagogue shooting (and has been funded by Adam Milstein since at least 2019), posted nothing about the shooter’s white supremacist motivations. Instead it briefly referenced the shooting in a call for UCLA to cancel a planned conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. The ADL, a legacy watchdog whose reputation rests heavily on its past tracking of white nationalists, has dramatically decentered this emphasis. At the ADL’s 2024 summit—which featured Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner—CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s State of Hate speech mentioned whitenationalists only to say that they were “cheering on anti-Zionists.” A few months earlier, Greenblatt directly adopted a white nationalist, anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, claiming that a global “day of jihad” was planned in December 2023. He continued to assert it even after it was debunked and its white nationalist origins had been traced.
Indeed, the new antisemitism watchdogs signal the formation of an organizational ecology centered squarely on the political right, so that public investments in opposing antisemitism become a platform to attack the right’s chosen targets, including but not limited to universities, the left, and opponents of Israel. In fact, their approach borrows quite plainly from strategies developed by the Koch network to attack universities. Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola document these strategies in detail in their 2021 book Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. Conservative donors pump funding and resources into platforms dedicated to the expression of right-wing ideas, using an array of strategies including policy-and-consulting groups like the RAND Corporation, public-facing think tanks like the Reason Foundation, and “relatable” content producers like Prager U. Through those diffuse outlets, they articulate the claim that those objecting to such ideas are violating their rights (co-opting free speech and academic freedom is part of the Koch strategy); propose that people who espouse right-wing ideas are a marginalized or vulnerable class; and manufacture a crisis that portrays universities as sites of indoctrination and intolerance. As a remedy, they demand that universities suppress opposition to conservative and debunked ideas.
For instance, the lawfare group Alliance Defending Freedom recently sued SUNY Cortland because its student government, gesturing to concerns about TPUSA’s racist and anti-trans activities, declined to charter a Turning Point USA chapter. In apparent response to the lawsuit, the student government stripped itself of the right to approve or decline new groups and transferred that power to a smaller Review Committee. Wilson and Kamola call moves like this lawsuit “a kind of jiu jitsu” that use universities’ core values against them, co-opting free speech or inclusivity for the pursuit of overtly conservative projects. At the same time, conservative donors offer universities funding—but with strings attached that transfer administrative power over curriculum, hiring, and funding to their supporters. (In 2022, StandWithUs faced an embarrassing rejection of such an offer at Temple University.) As students and faculty have discovered, such agreements are secretive and hard to track. Wilson and Kamola note that “the strategy works best when the interlocking parts appear to act independently of one another.”
The new antisemitism watchdogs have emulated this right-wing infrastructure. Messaging about Zionist “marginalization” is routed via advertising into Zionist pop culture and then into mainstream culture. In one stark instance, the move to replace the term antisemitism with the more jarring Jew hatred can be traced to its 2020 origins in a New York City group created to trade on the success of Black Lives Matter messaging. “How can we replicate this for the Jewish people?” queried an attorney for The Lawfare Project, the anti-Muslim organization behind the new effort. As one Times of Israel blogger writes, the adopters of the term “consider it strong and clever branding, jarring and unapologetic,” intended to induce an escalated reaction. More virulently than “antisemitism,” it can be employed to name anything that antisemitism watchdogs find objectionable—whether DEI or Palestinians describing their experiences of genocide—as virtual Nazism.
The pathway of the term Jew hate/hatred illustrates how high-profile megadonors and astroturf groups use networked resources to make ideas appear popular. After its launch, reportedly at a 2020 religious protest against COVID restrictions, right-wing billionaire Ron Lauder endorsed the new terminology in a video that was widely pushed out by the World Jewish Congress (WJC), which Lauder leads. In 2021, organizers of the #EndJewHatred hashtag and website recruited a larger set of Zionist antisemitism watchdogs to amplify their messaging on social media, and in 2022, megadonor Archie Gottesman (who has called for Gaza to be burned) adopted “End Jew Hate” for a national billboard campaign by her organization JewBelong, which targets progressive Jewish audiences. In 2023, billionaire Robert Kraft put $25 million into another national ad campaign urging the public #StandUpToJewishHate.
That campaign amplifies not only the new terminology, but also the Anti-Defamation League’s opaque and discredited count of antisemitic incidents. The ADL regularly announces major increases in antisemitic incidents and claims that US Jews are “the most targeted religious community.” In 2024, the ADL formalized a policy of counting anti-Israel protest in its data; its most recent claim that antisemitism had increased by 360% was two-thirds comprised of Israel-related events. ADL reporting also often masks the full available dataset, hiding the fact that Black and LGBTQ people report vastly more incidents. The Kraft-funded ads touting this data have been disseminated in partnership with the National Governors Association, AARP, AFL-CIO, and other major national groups, and through massive ad buys in mainstream venues like Times Square. The high-profile adopters of the term “Jew hate,” using strategic advertising visibility and pushout by smaller groups on social media, have been effective in propelling the term into common use by media, consultants, and student and parent groups.
As the fear-inducing message that unchecked antisemitism is endemic in US life spreads, the advocacy network recaptures the product—grassroots grievance—through lawfare and other watchdog organizations that organize discrimination claims. The aim is to translate a narrative manufactured by billionaire-backed ad campaigns into personal civil rights complaints. In 2019, Lauder—who, in addition to leading the WJC, is a former Pentagon official, as well as a one-time board member of (as he puts it) “just about everything you can think of in the Jewish world”—put $25 million into a new project, the Antisemitism Accountability Project (ASAP), to closely monitor individuals and institutions and, “at the grassroots level,” exact “a price” from those who challenge Zionism. ASAP has no recent public footprint, but the right-wing organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) uses that name for its doxxing truck project.
Expanding on the Koch strategy, the Zionist strategy trades on the moral power of the US abhorrence of Nazism following World War II, and in turn the popular interest in opposing antisemitism. This helps to recruit a much wider set of allies than more overt conservatism. Since 2019, for example, the battle over California ethnic studies has been a testing ground for Zionist institutions seeking to coalesce conservative and liberal-identified groups. In this adaptation, manufactured crises of free speech and academic freedom are replaced with manufactured crises of antisemitism. While the battle began with attacks on the inclusion of Palestinian voices in a draft model curriculum, it expanded into a Zionist-led campaign against teaching about racialized and colonial power. The ADL, StandWithUs, and the Amcha Initiative were key organizers. Adapting the Rufo strategy of opposing critical race theory and antiracist education in the name of defending white children, the coalition cast itself as “opposing antisemitism.”
While Rufo’s movement openly declares its interest in “laying siege” to education, though, the campaign against ethnic studies purported to support it—but to demand a “reasonable” version, one that celebrated ethnic groups’ contributions to the state, rather than “going negative” with the study of colonialism, or worse, anti-colonial resistance. Instead of invoking the specter of an all-threatening “wokeism” overtaking US universities, it portrayed the field of ethnic studies as a rogue element that could be excised with the coalition’s help.
Coalition members have at times used the rhetoric of the right (even echoing cries that opposing racism is “socialism,” by charging that ethnic studies is “Soviet”), but they continually gesture to opposing antisemitism, and calling for inclusiveness, to frame their work as civil rights advocacy. These framings have appealed to a wider range of groups that object to structural critiques of capitalism and liberalism, including the ethnonationalist Hindu American Foundation and Greek, Korean, Armenian, and Assyrian groups. An additional set of letterheadorganizations joining the coalition—such as Black Americans for Inclusive Ethnic Studies and Latinx for Quality Education—helps imply an even broader base. This performance of a multicultural coalition seeking inclusion has laundered right-wing, anti-left attacks on education, while encouraging policymakers and the public to view them as progressive. It has also laundered organizations. The Amcha Initiative, for instance, is right-wing Zionist attack group that has spent a decade harassing ethnic studies scholars. But following the ethnic studies battle, Amcha Initiative can now claim a track record of advising state officials on education policy and racial fairness.
Meanwhile, Zionist antisemitism watchdogs’ arguments against antiracist policy have extended beyond academia. Last month the American Academy of Dermatology announced that it was considering a proposal to abolish all of the organization’s DEI policies (such as developing trainings to support entry into the profession) in part because of “perceived antisemitic elements” in the “current DEI system” and because the “DEI movement”—without reference to any particular policy—is “perceived as being filled with antisemitism.” As a matter of fact rather than perception, as physician and advocate Oni Blackstock noted, “Black docs account for 3.6% of all dermatologists, and Latinx/Hispanic docs just 4.6%”—despite accounting for a much larger share of the US population. Though the proposal was voted down earlier this month, the narrative that antiracist policy harms Jews is being weaponized against the small measure of institutional power racial justice efforts have won.
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The astroturf network doesn’t only draw on narrative power. Its effectiveness comes from its capacity to surveil institutions and individuals, and impose costly consequences on them: lawsuits, donor withdrawals, high-profile takedowns. Nodding along with Zionist groups' claims that it is antisemitic to discuss Palestinian existence and Israeli colonialism—as university presidents Magill and Gay did—is not a useful defense. Instead, doing so hands moral authority to a political right wing that is bent on repression, not reconciliation.
To contest the Koch network’s grip on universities, Wilson and Kamola suggest focusing attention on who is producing the conversation and why, rather than engaging with the crisis narrative they’ve created. They call for scrutiny of shared funding sources and overlapping boards and connecting disingenuous “rights advocates” with their overtly racist and anti-intellectual projects— in short, approaching resistance as a political project. While a handful of activist researchers and journalists have taken up this research, not much mapping of Zionist astroturf organizations has yet been done.
Antisemitism watchdogs relentlessly resist recognition of Zionist organizing from above, calling it a trope about Jewish control. In reality, this pattern of advocacy uses the playbook that the white nationalist, neoconservative, and socially reactionary right has deployed for decades, from the Koch brothers to the National Rifle Association and beyond. In this sense, there is nothing special about antisemitism advocacy. The important difference is that a significant amount of scholarship and reporting have exposed other right-wing networks to widespread public scrutiny. Demystifying the astroturf antisemitism watchdogs will return their messaging to the realm of right-wing politics, and make room for the questions of power, race, state violence, and global capitalism that have been sidelined and repressed by their work.