Undermining the Fight Against Antisemitism: Alyza Lewin’s Campaign to Stifle Solidarity
By Forrest Terrell
It was an uncommonly crisp and warm March evening several weeks ago when I sat down to interview Zoe Selig 27’. Dimple-framed and buoyant, Zoe’s smile is infectious, and she always wears it. I was uplifted to meet with a friend and fellow activist; the first spring light was streaming into the Biblio and I realized then that for some time I had been in a dark mood. Two months into this second Trump regime and winter was mocking, tickling me as if with cold, corpse-like fingers. Spring had felt like a green dream. Several weeks prior, for reasons that are still unknown, plainclothes undercover Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers detained an international student attending Muhlenberg College less than one hundred miles away.1 Dickinson, like all institutions of higher learning, was––and is––under threat. Though we are fortunately as of yet untouched by ICE, the right-wing’s assault on students and higher education has also made its way onto campus disguised in plain clothes––not to imprison people but language.
Alyza Lewin, president of the Brandeis Center For Human Rights Under Law, invited by the College president and hosted by the Judaic Studies Department, spoke that Monday on Erasive Antisemitism: Challenging the Denial of Jewish Identity and History. The talk did not––as one might expect––address the promulgation of antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theories by right-wing ultranationalists, nor their role in inspiring mass shootings at the Tree of Life and Poway synagogues.2Instead, Lewin focused almost exclusively on allegations of antisemitism against student activists for peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights protesting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Among many others, students like Zoe and myself.
Under the guise of combating antisemitism, Lewin sought to collapse any distinction between Zionism and Jewish identity itself. She asserted that Zionism––the belief that there should be a Jewish ethno-nation-state in historic Palestine––is inextricable from what it meant to be Jewish. To say otherwise, she argued, is to negate the existence of Zionist Jews, an act of “erasive antisemitism.”
Zoe and I dispensed with check-ins somewhat quickly; we were anxious to discuss our recent visitor to Dickinson. Zoe is Jewish. And she is a critique of Zionism. So, I asked her what she made of Lewin’s trivialization of religious, anti-Zionist Jews like herself. She began twirling her hair as she often does when measuring her responses.
“I’m not indigenous to Israel,” she said, “I’m from Durham. Tikkun Olam, ‘repair the world’––that’s what it means to me to be Jewish. Leave the world better than you found it.”
This might sound uncontroversial, and that’s because it should be. But for Lewin, Zionism is the defining feature of Jewish identity, and any deviation from this orthodoxy is treated as suspect, even traitorous. To enforce this narrow definition, she and others like her are doing precisely what they accuse anti-Zionists of: misrepresenting history, silencing dissent, and reshaping Jewish identity to serve a political agenda.
For decades, well-funded and well-connected Zionist organizations like the Brandeis Center have invested millions of dollars into smearing or litigating Jewish critics of Israel on flimsy allegations of antisemitism. Much of their strategy hinges on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) controversial definition of antisemitism.
Lewin insisted that this definition provides a clear framework for identifying antisemitism, particularly in campus rhetoric critical of Israel and Zionism. Numerous civil rights advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Palestine Legal have argued that efforts by Zionists to police such expression is itself discriminatory. Kenneth Stern, a lawyer and human rights advocate who acknowledges that antisemitism can manifest as criticism of Israel, warns that the IHRA definition suppresses free speech, exposing universities to civil rights investigations merely for allowing discussions critical of Israel.3Stern helped draft the very definition he now criticizes.
For twenty-five years Stern served as the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) lead on Antisemitism and hate studies. In 2001, he was an official member of the United States delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on Combating Intolerance which drafted the “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” later adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016. Since then, he has repeatedly protested its use to intimidate universities (most recently before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions),4 calling it “one of the most significant threats to the campus today, and to Jewish students and faculty.”5 In 2021, a collection of historians in related fields (preeminent Holocaust historians Omer Bartov and Dors L. Bergen among them) met to amend the “working definition” of antisemitism and correct its historical revisionism. They drafted the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, asserting that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” is not, on its face, antisemitic. While criticisms of Israel could indicate antisemitic animus, they could also manifest as responses to innumerable and credible charges of human rights abuses, or the emotions evoked from Palestinians from their oppression by the state of Israel.6 Since every interpretation of history necessitates omission, Lewin’s argument that criticisms over-focusing Israel––rather than, say, North Korea––rests on ideological rather than deductive claims. The Kurds do not not have their own state, nor do numerous ethnic groups around the globe––Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Tamils, and countless others. Few would argue that opposing Scottish nationalism constitutes anti-Scot bigotry. Ethno-nationalism is not the sole model for statehood; it is widely recognized as exclusionary and often dangerous. Lewin, living in the United States––a prototypical civic nation where citizenship is not defined by ethnicity––knows this.
In 1948, following its Declaration of Independence, Israel articulated itself as both a “Jewish” and “democratic” state. Scholars have long argued that this dual identity contains an inherent, possibly irreconcilable tension: a state cannot simultaneously privilege one ethnic group and offer equal democratic rights to all.7 Indeed today, the West Bank and Gaza, segmented into cantons and enclaves with no connection to East Jerusalem, the de jure capital of Palestine, are subject to jurisdiction of separate authorities to their Israeli counterparts: Israeli Jews live under civilian law; Palestinian civilians live under military law. This meets the definition of legal apartheid.8 This has been the case since 1948. To Lewin, however, and those who propagate a fallacious definition of antisemitism, it challenges a core Zionist myth: that “the initial intent of Zionism was not to ethnically cleanse Palestine,” as she averred in her talk. Her proof? A selective quotation from Chaim Weizmann’s 1937 speech at the 20th Zionist Congress, in which he framed Zionism as a civilizing, colonial mission––essentially a variation of Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.”
Today, the effort to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism depends on a revisionist history so counterfactual that even early Zionists would scarcely recognize it. Weizmann’s own speech makes this clear. Addressing the British, Chaim positioned Zionism as a colonial project explicitly aligned with British imperial interests, warning that its failure would “undermine the foundations” of its Empire. He echoed the paternalistic rhetoric of European colonialism, insisting that Arabs “cannot stand on [their] own feet unaided” and had “only benefited” from Zionist development––dismissing Palestinian resistance as irrational and obstructive.
The dispossession and displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians, the partition of their ancestral land, and the razing of over five hundred of their villages was not an unintended consequence of Zionism but its logical conclusion, as nearly forty years of historiography on Israel-Palestine has observed.9 The historical record makes clear what Lewin must obscure: it is not just critics of Israel who call Zionism a settler-colonial project; early Zionists themselves did.
Lewin’s frankly bizarre coverage of historical events extended into current events. The month before Lewin’s visit, at CPAC, Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire heading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), made a gesture unmistakable in its implications if not its intent: “an outstretched arm with the palm down,” as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes it.10 A Nazi salute––made not once, but twice.
The ADL is unambiguous on what constitutes a Sieg Heil. Yet its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt––who had no trouble identifying Nazi salutes when they were performed by high schoolers in Mountain Brook, Alabama, in 202211––felt compelled to contrive maginative excuses to exonerate Musk. On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter––which Musk owns––Greenblatt dismissed the gesture as merely an “awkward” display of “enthusiasm,” nothing more.12 hen Jodi Rudoren, a journalist for independent Jewish publication Forward, pressed him on how he determined that Musk’s salute was not, in fact, a Nazi salute, Greenblatt’s response was telling: “I saw what I saw. That’s all.”13 During the Q&A portion of Lewin’s talk, a student raised a pointed question: was Musk’s Nazi salute antisemitic? Lewin equivocated: “Sometimes,” she pivoted away from Musk, implying his detractors, “people jump to use the term.” She lamented how politicians weaponize accusations of antisemitism for political ends. “I’m much more focused on the impact on people,” she added––an astonishing claim, considering that a Nazi salute, broadcast to millions by the world’s richest man currently dismantling our government, is definitionally impactful.
In an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Greenblatt likened the keffiyeh (a traditional Bedouin headdress with variable meanings––to pro-Palestine activists around the globe, it is an expression of solidarity against oppression) to a Nazi armband.14 The ADL, a self-declared nonpartisan organization which Lewin and her organization have allied themselves with, is plainly selective in its charges of antisemitism, wielding the term when politically convenient and withholding it when it is not. As Lewin herself noted, the term has been deeply politicized––though, crucially, she failed to acknowledge who is doing the politicizing.
For an hour and a half, Lewin denounced anti-Zionists as antisemites. Yet, when confronted with perhaps the most recognizable marker of antisemitism—from a man who, for three years, has used his social media empire to amplify antisemitic rhetoric and spread Great Replacement Theory conspiracies—her priority was not to condemn the act itself, but to express the discomfort she felt at hearing it named by those she disagrees with.15 She is not concerned with combating antisemitism, no matter its many formulations; she is concerned with maintaining ownership over the term. Lewin’s equivocation about antisemitism and her inability to condemn Musk was neither incidental nor a mere strategic miscalculation. It is a direct consequence of the ideological framework she promotes, one that prioritizes unwavering support for Israel above all else.
On March 5th, the day before I met Zoe, Lewin appeared before the Republican-led U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Brandeis Center to discuss rising antisemitism. In her opening remarks, Lewin dispensed with an obligatory, somewhat shoddy commitment to free speech and then immediately began to contradict it. Lewin agreed with Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Ashley Moody, Katie Britt, and Ted Cruz––all staunch Trump allies––that anti-Zionist protestors should receive severe punishment for, among other things, speaking “genocidal slogans,” like calls for ‘Intifada’––an common word which, in Arabic, simply means “shaking off” or “revolt”.16 Moreover, she supported the idea that Congress should use the threat of withholding federal funding from universities as leverage to compel them to silence anti-Zionist voices. Like all institutions of higher learning, Dickinson College receives federal money.
One must look back at the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence to retrieve that aphoristic retelling of the concurring opinion in Whitney v. California: ‘the best answer to speech you don’t like is more speech.’ The original quotation is more turgid: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”17 Louis D. Brandeis, for whom Lewin’s Brandeis Center is honored, authored this quote.
Despite decrying in her talk at Dickinson that Zionists like herself have been shut out of universities and public life (all the while sitting before an audience of several dozen people in the largest auditorium on campus, on invitation from the College president), Lewin is using the federal government––not signs and bullhorns––to punish people she disagrees with. Enforced silence, indeed.
Whether she knew it or not, Lewin exhibited a grim irony: while Zionist organizations claim to be fighting antisemitism, they have increasingly turned a blind eye to, and in some cases allied with, the American right-wing, the very forces responsible for the rise of white nationalism and the resurgence of antisemitism in the United States. Lewin and her ilk are so committed to ensuring unconditional support for Israel and enforcing a false consensus in the Jewish-American community that they have aligned themselves with a group of legislators who want to imprison and silence dissenters, many of whom are Jewish.18 Many more of whom are Arab or Muslim.
No sooner had the Senate Committee adjourned before three days later, on March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a student protestor who emailed Columbia interim president Katrina Armstrong expressing worries that ICE––who had been spotted around campus that week––was going to detain him.19 Armstrong did nothing, and the next day it happened; ICE agents surrounded Mahmoud Kahlil and his pregnant wife’s university apartment at Columbia before disappearing him into the night without due process, without even identifying themselves. For twenty-four hours, Khalil was untraceable until he reemerged in Louisiana’s notorious LaSalle detention facility, thousands of miles from his home.20 Khalil was never––and has yet to be––charged with a crime. Regardless, on April 11, a Louisiana US Immigrations Court Judge Jamee Comans ruled that the Trump Administration can deport Khalil despite no evidence indicating that he is a threat to national security.21 The political dimensions of this case became explicit when Trump took to Twitter to celebrate Khalil’s capture. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump promised.22 Indeed, as of April 12, Khalil is but among the first in a growing list of college students whom ICE has abducted or deported for no other reason than that they have protested the Israeli government’s genocide and are non-white: Momodou Taal, Rumeysa Ozturk, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri, Leqaa Kordia, Ranjani Srinivasan, Alireza Doroudi, Dr. Rasha Alawieh.
The Trump regime did not work alone to capture Khalil––they could not have. They had help. For months prior, university affiliate Shai Davidi advocated for Khalil’s deportation and subjected him to a profound doxing campaign. Ross Glick, CEO of Betar (a right-wing Zionist organization which even the ADL has labeled as a hate group),23 supplied Ted Cruz and other Zionist Congress people with Khalil’s name days before his detention.24 What could be more reckless than insisting that the safety of Jews depends not on solidarity with our black and brown peers, but on an alliance with the policies of the Trump regime and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza? When Zionist organizations silence anti-Zionist Jews and non-Jews, they do not merely exclude them from communal life, nor are they winning a battle in our war against antisemitism; they actively undermine the entire Jewish––and non-Jewish––community’s ability to confront genuine antisemitism.
Alyza Lewin’s visit to Dickinson College was not an invitation to dialogue. It was not a good-faith attempt to educate students about antisemitism. It was not an honest treatment of the history of Zionism or antisemitism. Rather, it was a performance of ideological gatekeeping, an attempt to dictate the boundaries of acceptable discourse on Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity. Moreover, it was an effort to chill student speech through cynical accusations of antisemitism, reinforcing an atmosphere of fear that stifles open dialogue on uncomfortable and painful subjects, namely, the ongoing genocide in Gaza. If a liberal arts college cannot foster critical engagement with the most pressing moral and political questions of our time, what then, precisely, is its function?
In American society, universities and colleges are the last bastion of free and open speech. It is an unenviable position for Dickinson administrators to be in, caught as they are between a punitive Trump regime and the overwhelming needs of our most vulnerable students. But they have an obligation to protect this essential function, not just of our campus, but of our civil society as a whole, to protect all the students who are its future. By making concessions, complying with a right-wing agenda, and inviting individuals to campus who share in their McCarthyite vision for a weakened First Amendment, they will only lay the groundwork for more recrimination, more reprisals. Jews on and off campus must be made safe, but preferencing their safety at the expense of other vulnerable groups does not make them safer––it makes everyone less safe.
Today, April 19, marks the end of Passover and, beginning April 25, the anniversary of Dickinson’s solidarity encampment for Gaza. During our interview, Zoe recounted for me the “order” (the meaning of “Seder” in Hebrew) of the ritual feast: the washing of hands, the prayers and blessings, and the recitation of the Haggadah, the narrative portion of the Talmud that tells the story of Exodus and supplements its scriptural precepts. Passover is the embodied reenactment of Jewish slavery and liberation: they eat the maror, a bitter herb, to recall the bitterness of slavery; they eat unleavened matzah––fleeing Egyptian bondage, their ancestors had no time to let dough rise; they recline at the feast, as Roman royalty had––the act of reclining, once denied to Jewish slaves, now affirms their freedom.
The biblical meaning of Passover, Zoe told me, for her, recalls the experience of modern Palestinians––the meek, the mournful, the impoverished, and oppressed––those who, like her enslaved Jewish ancestors in exile, bear their likeness because they too live under a state that reviles them, not for anything they have done, but for the sheer fact of their being. She sees in her advocacy for Palestine an unbroken chain of Jewish history––communion with ancestors, sacred texts, and traditions, bound by the pursuit of justice for all. Passover is an imperative: “You shall not wrong or oppress the stranger,” she recalled a passage from Exodus, “for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.”
This is the work of solidarity; to recognize yourself in the struggles of others. It is urgent and morally coherent––it is rooted in history, animated by empathy.
Keana Peña, “Muhlenberg Student Picked up by ICE,” Muhlenberg Weekly, April 11, 2025. https://muhlenbergweekly.com/news/muhlenberg-student-picked-up-by-ice/.
Jason Wilson, “Rightwing Personalities Use X to Bring Antisemitic Theories to Light in US,” The Guardian, November 21, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/21/great-replacement-theory-antisemitism-racism-rightwing-mainstream.
Kenneth Stern, “I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it,” The Guardian, December 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect.
Kenneth S. Stern, “Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, Director, Bard Center for the Study of Hate,” testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, March 27, 2025.
Kenneth Stern, “Kenneth Stern: Antisemitism, IHRA, and Free Speech,” The Boston Globe, February 15, 2024; Kenneth Stern, Conflicts Over Conflicts: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: New Jewish Press, 2020), 149.
Seth Anziska et al., “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism,” last modified 2020, https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/.
Stewart Reiser, “Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and Political Action” in Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Politics, and Culture: Books on Israel Vol. III, ed. Ian S. Lustick & Rubin, (State University of New York Press, 1996): 63–73. 63.
John Dugard, “Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid,” United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law (United Nations, 2008). https://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/cspca/cspca_e.pdf.
Most notable among these were the New Historians—such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Schlaim, Tom Segev, and Simha Flapan—a loosely defined group of Israeli scholars, some of them Zionists, who challenged dominant narratives of Israeli history, particularly regarding the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and Arab peace overtures. Today, this scholarship enjoys a potency and incontrovertibility that cannot simply be dismissed. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine ( Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006); Tom Segev, On Palestine: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, (London, UK: Picador, 2000).
Anti-Defamation League, “Hitler Salute (Hand Sign),” ADL, accessed April 12, 2025, https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/hitler-salute-hand-sign.
Jonathan Greenblatt, “Nazi Salute? Blame the Jewish Student,” Medium, February 9, 2022, https://j0nathan-g.medium.com/nazi-salute-blame-the-jewish-student-47a32c10c8da.
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “ADL Statement on Twitter/X,” X, March 21, 2023, https://x.com/ADL/status/1881474892022919403?lang=en.
Jodi Rudoren, “What the ADL Should Have Said in Response to Elon Musk’s Salute,” The Forward, January 24, 2025, https://forward.com/news/691318/elon-musk-adl-anti-defamation-league-antisemitism-trump-inaugaration/.
Samaa Khullar, “Everything You’ve Heard About the Keffiyeh Is Wrong,” The Nation, July 24, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/keffiyeh-truth-palestinian-resistance/.
Blake Montgomery, “Elon Musk agrees with tweet accusing Jewish people of ‘hatred against whites’,” The Guardian, November 16, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/16/elon-musk-antisemitic-tweet-adl.
Senate Judiciary Committee, “Never to be Silent: Stemming the Tide of Antisemitism in America,” hearing, March 5, 2025, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/never-to-be-silent-stemming-the-tide-of-antisemitism-in-america.
Louis D. Brandeis, Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 377 (1919).
Marjorie Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism. Ed. 1. Vol. 24 (New York: NYU Press, 2024).
Prem Thakker, “SCOOP: Emails Show Mahmoud Khalil Asked Columbia for Protection a Day Before He Was Detained,” Zeteo, March 10, 2025,
American Civil Liberties Union, “Inside the Black Hole: Systemic Human Rights Abuses Against Immigrants Detained & Disappeared in Louisiana,” August 26, 2024, https://www.aclu.org/documents/inside-the-black-hole.
Jonathan Allen, “U.S. Immigration Judge Rules Palestinian Columbia Student Khalil Can Be Deported,” Reuters, April 11, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-immigration-judge-decide-whether-columbia-student-mahmoud-khalil-can-be-2025-04-11/.
Thakker, “Emails Show Mahmoud Khalil Asked Columbia for Protection a Day Before He Was Detained,” Zeteo, March 10, 2025.
Nechin, Etan. “’Embraces Islamophobia, Harasses Muslims’: ADL Lists Far-Right Betar USA as Hate Group.” Haaretz, February 21, 2025. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2025-02-21/ty-article/.premium/embraces-islamophobia-harasses-muslims-adl-lists-far-right-betar-usa-as-hate-group/00000195-2a1d-d05a-ab9f-2e1d09680000.
Anna Betts, “Pro-Israel Group Says It Has ‘Deportation List’ and Has Sent ‘Thousands’ of Names to Trump Officials,” The Guardian, March 14, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump.