Silencing dissent does not make Jews safe
The California Legislature is considering several explosive bills regarding K-12 and higher education. Supporters claim they will reduce antisemitism. In fact, if passed, these bills will muzzle freedom of speech and silence valid criticism of Israel in our schools and universities. We should know: we are Jewish college professors (one of us is Israeli) specializing in the Holocaust and Israel/Palestine.
Take Senate Bill 1277. This bill addresses required Holocaust and genocide education in grades 7-12. The state requirement for such curricula is important: learning about grave injustices, including antisemitism, helps students become more empathetic and socially responsible citizens.
The problem is that the bill entrusts this education to a group of private organizations, including the ADL, which has a grim record of using charges of antisemitism to advance a pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian agenda. Above all, the ADL and its sister organizations conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, an approach that flies in the face of scholarship.
Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews as Jews; criticism of Israel, however harsh, is not in and of itself antisemitic, as stated clearly by hundreds of scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust and genocide, and the Middle East. Jews themselves can and do hold a range of political positions about Israel, especially Israel’s killing of 40,000 Palestinians since October 7. Many Jews regard solidarity with Palestinians as an integral part of their Jewish identity, a way of fulfilling the Jewish precept of tikkun olam (repairing the world).
Should the ADL and its sister organizations control California’s Holocaust and genocide education, students and teachers who are critical of Israel, even Jewish ones, will find themselves labeled as antisemites. Moreover, considering the ADL’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, this bill would prevent Palestinians from being acknowledged as victims of a genocide in California schools. This, despite the fact that both the International Court of Justice and increasing numbers of scholars, among them distinguished Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, have stated that Israel has plausibly crossed the Genocide Convention’s threshold of genocide.
Another bill, Assembly Bill 2918, which was recently withdrawn but will certainly resurface in the next year, similarly allows interest groups unprecedented say in determining the content of high school Ethnic Studies curricula. Like SB 1277, this bill purports to curb antisemitism, but in fact alarmingly minimizes the role of educators and scholars in crafting evidence-based curricula.
No less egregious is Senate Bill 1287, which would enable public college campuses to restrict campus protests, including where, when, and how protests may occur, limiting areas of campus on which protests may take place, and, most concerningly, allowing administrations to decide what kinds of speech are deemed “hostile” and punishable.
This bill, a clear backlash to the Palestinian solidarity protests in the spring, would have a chilling effect on freedom of expression and academic inquiry. It would give administrators wide latitude to decide what constitutes hate speech, and would lead them, especially under pressure from donors and external political forces, to crack down on minority and dissenting views. These policies would be particularly harmful to our most vulnerable colleagues, those without tenure or permanent contracts. Small wonder that SB 1287 is opposed by an array of organizations, including the American Association of University Professors and unions representing university faculty and staff.
Free speech and academic freedom are hard-won rights, foundational to democratic education for the past sixty years. While the campus protests of last spring felt jarring to some, they built on a long history of student activism against injustices, from the Vietnam War to South African apartheid. We know from this history that repressing student dissent is profoundly counter-productive. Past campus demonstrations ended with changes in political conditions, not by muzzling student and faculty speech.
Yet another bill, Assembly Bill 2925, would require college campuses to offer training about discrimination against marginalized groups, including Jews. This is a laudable goal, except it excludes mention of Islamophobia, despite a significant increase in anti-Muslim incidents over the last year. Antisemitism and Islamophobia must be addressed together, as two sides of a shared history of racism.
These bills might appear progressive at first glance, not least because they are authored by Democrats. Yet taken together, it is hard to see these bills in any other light than reactionary attempts to police conversation by and about Palestinians and to misuse legitimately held fears of antisemitism to advance a political agenda.
We are about to re-enter the classroom to begin what is sure to be a volatile year. Israel’s catastrophic assault on Gaza continues and escalations with Lebanon and Iran risk a wider regional conflict, all while our presidential election is heightening tensions. These issues will inevitably surface in our schools and colleges. As scholars of the Holocaust and the history of Israel/Palestine, we know firsthand that conversations can be fraught. But we do not serve the students of California by restricting what they can say and learn or by ignoring the needs of one group under the false pretense of protecting another.
Shira Klein is associate professor of history and department chair at Chapman University, author of Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge, 2018), and a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Julia Shatz is assistant professor of history at California State University, Fresno, a scholar of the twentieth century Middle East and publishes on child welfare in interwar Palestine.