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On Friday, a conference titled “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Politics,” sponsored by the Departments of African American Studies and Comparative Literature, will be held at Princeton. Its description suggests a scholarly exploration of anti-Zionism, which has roots in the thinking of Jewish leaders and philosophers — among them Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt — who, long before Israel came into being, questioned the wisdom of establishing an exclusively Jewish nation-state.
In the past, it was more possible to study the question of Zionism without engendering the kind of politically motivated controversy we are now facing. There may have been objections from Hillel or professors or students, but, for the most part, academic freedom was understood to protect the teaching of controversial subjects and students were expected to experience the discomfort of facing ideas they disagreed with as part of the experience of a college education.
But recently, anti-Zionism has become increasingly equated with antisemitism. I have found that it has become almost impossible to have a serious, public conversation about the limits of the Zionist project, even among scholars. This is because of a movement, now led by the Trump administration in the name of combating antisemitism, to silence any discussion that might criticize Israel’s policies, among them and most urgently the genocidal war in Gaza.
Antisemitism is the charge leveled even against Jews like myself who condemn Israel’s long standing mistreatment of Palestinians. Emboldened by the Trump administration, genuine antisemites have jumped on board, hypocritically claiming that the comfort of Jewish students on campuses is their highest goal. Painting engagement with Palestine as “antisemitism” has become their weapon of choice — the Trojan Horse, as the anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj recently put it — in the campaign to destroy the critical role higher education should play in a democracy.
So it is disturbing and disappointing to find the leader of Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life (CJL) raising the specter of antisemitism to attempt to silence scholarly discussion of a topic he does not like. In a public message to his constituents about Friday’s conference, Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91 wrote that “while we do not yet know the full list of speakers or the specific content of the presentations, the framing and language of the conference have already raised serious concerns for many alumni and others in the Jewish community.”
And he insinuated more than just discontent. By specifically speaking of “many alumni and others,” Steinlauf invokes those who are more likely to have financial ties to Princeton, rather than the CJL families he is emailing or the students who are on campus for the event. By starting his email noting that these individuals already have “serious concerns,” Steinlauf is communicating that university officials should carefully listen to him — or perhaps risk losing these donors.
The Rabbi goes on to assert that questioning Zionism will have a harmful impact on Jewish students by undermining their very identities. If the University cares about its Jewish students, he warns, it will take measures to assure their comfort and safety.
The anti-intellectualism of this claim is astonishing coming from someone who works in an academic community. The mission of a university education is to expose students to ideas they haven’t encountered, and to engage in evidence-based critical conversation. It is not intellectual comfort and safety that is the mark of a quality education, but rather the hard and often uncomfortable work of learning how to think critically and reason carefully.
That hard work of thinking critically and reasoning carefully is protected by academic freedom — the freedom to pursue research and teaching, to learn new things, and to express one’s views, however controversial — without politically motivated intervention.
Yet it is political intervention that Rabbi Steinlauf pursues, undermining the protections that academic freedom affords from within the University itself. He reports to his community that: “In recent days, I’ve been working behind the scenes, reaching out to University leadership, faculty, and department heads — not only to raise concerns about how this event is framed, but to press for a thoughtful and accountable approach to the serious challenges it presents.”
He continues with sentences even more troubling: “When a conference centers ideas that question the legitimacy of what is, for so many, a core dimension of Jewish identity, it demands more than academic neutrality. It calls for visible leadership on the part of the sponsors that affirms Princeton’s commitment to fostering a campus where all students, including Jewish and Israeli students, feel seen, respected, and supported.”
The idea that the protection of a group’s identity requires certain speech from academics, and thus the sacrifice of academic freedom, is shocking — and a position that eats at the central tenets of a university.
Nor can any university tolerate the suppression of free speech, one of those constitutional rights we are all supposed to enjoy. Even if, for Rabbi Steinlauf, the conference topic constitutes a form of hate speech, the U.S. liberal democratic answer to hate speech is more speech. Instead of calling on the university administration to give up “academic neutrality,” the Center for Jewish Life ought to organize a scholarly conference of its own — perhaps to follow Rabbi’s Steinlauf’s line of argument — on “Zionist Identity as Jewish Identity.”
Academia thrives on more speech. And although there are probably plenty of faculty and students — Jewish and non-Jewish — on campus who would dissent from the implications of that framing, I’d hope those dissenters would not mount a campaign to silence the event.
Although Steinlauf’s demands could be characterized as “more speech” on behalf of Jews, this is not quite right. When he says that the conference “demands more than academic neutrality,” he calls into question one specific type of speech and demands more of another type.
We are in a treacherous moment, one in which democracy and the rule of law hang in the balance, one in which authoritarians want to eliminate universities’ ability to nurture critical thinking. It is only by continuing to think critically that we can offer some form of resistance to attempts to curb free discourse. That means being willing to entertain ideas we don’t always like or agree with, and giving them the time and space to be heard.
The call that impugns the motives of the April 4 conference undermines the very principles that must continue to constitute the mission of the university in a democratic society. Without those principles, we are lost.
Joan Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is a long-serving member of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Among her recent books is “Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom.”
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