From a Jewish perspective

Why anti-Zionism is not to be equated with anti-Semitism.

In the fall of 2004 I edited Bad Subjects #70, an issue that featured essays on a wide variety of topics including a piece by Rebeca Siegel about the correlation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. At the time, there was (and still is) a great deal of controversy taking place in academia because various scholars/teachers had been pushing their respective universities to divest funds from Israel because of their treatment of Palestinians, and their continual defiance of U.N. law. In addition, a growing number of scholars were beginning to raise general concerns about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. While anti-Zionist perspectives had been most clearly articulated by, and thus associated with, faculty and students in Middle East Studies and Ethnic Studies programs, there were more professors outside of these fields that were becoming visibly upset about the policies of the Israeli government and the general project of Zionism. Among those dissenters were Judith Butler, a well known and respected Jewish academic who teaches at U.C. Berkeley. In an essay entitled “The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique” Butler spoke out against the manner in which anti-Zionism had been publicly conflated with anti-Semitism by a wide variety of public figures including Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard.

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