JVP Academic Council Open Letter of Deep Concern to the NAIS

29 January 2025

Debra Wilson, President
National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

Dear President Wilson:

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) writes with deep concern about the NAIS letter of December 12 repudiating Dr. Suzanne Barakat and Dr. Ruha Benjamin for speaking with integrity at the NAIS’s People of Color conference about the Israeli state’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.  As scholars, we find harmful errors in both the evidentiary claims and reasoning in the December 12 letter.  

Most fundamentally, the letter errs by (i) conflating criticism of Israeli military actions with antisemitism and (ii) dismissing recognition of the Israeli state’s genocide in Gaza on this basis, that is, dismissing it as antisemitism, rather than recognizing this claim as documented truth.  We take these two points in reverse order.   

That the Israeli military has carried out genocide in Gaza over the past sixteen months has been carefully documented by the world’s leading human right organizations, including Al-Haq, Amnesty International, Defense for Children International Palestine, Genocide Watch, Human Rights Watch, the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide, and Médicins Sans Frontières.    

Genocide denial is, in all cases, morally and intellectually reprehensible.

The charge of antisemitism leveled at recognition of the genocide is, moreover, a result of the harmful conflation of antisemitism with criticisms of Israel and its military.  Antisemitism is hate or discrimination directed at Jews because they are Jewish.  Like all forms of hate and discrimination, it is reprehensible and must be named and opposed at every turn.  But Israel and its military are, respectively, a state and a military, not Jews or Judaism (not a people, not a religion). Criticisms of Israel and its military actions are thus distinct from antisemitism.  The dishonest claim otherwise is a weaponization of charges of antisemitism to mask or hide, and thus support, the crime of genocide, at the expense of Palestinian lives and rights. 

A key point in the NAIS letter of December 12 is its stated concern for Jewish students who, reportedly, felt discomfited and even, it is said, attacked by the presentations of Dr. Barakat and Dr. Benjamin.  We know that the accuracy of press accounts about this matter has been questioned by persons who attended the conference, and we think it is unfortunate that the December 12 letter did not take on the responsibility of setting the record straight.  We know, for instance, that students did not attend Dr. Barakat’s session.  That said, as teachers ourselves, we also know that students who enter discussions of Palestinian suffering with a deep identification with Israel may well feel or hear criticisms of Israel as “antisemitism.”  And again, especially as teachers, we care deeply about these students and their feelings.  Yet, however strong and genuine the feelings of these students may be, we also know, as noted above, that criticisms of Israel’s military actions are not criticisms of Jews or Judaism.  

One salient indication of this is that Jewish students without an identification with Israel — the increasing numbers of non-Zionist Jewish students — do not experience criticisms of Israel and Israel’s military as criticisms of them as Jews.  Indeed, we know that large numbers of proudly Jewish students have been active over the last sixteen months in campus protests against the genocide and in support of Palestinian freedom and equality.  Put simply, the salient factor in students finding criticisms of Israel discomfiting is not being Jewish, but holding Zionist political views.  

A counter-argument here is that Zionists hold, and no doubt genuinely feel, that an attachment to the modern Israeli state is integral to being Jewish. The flaw in — and the harms of — this counter-argument can be seen by considering several analogous cases.  Some white southerners, for instance, say that symbols of the Confederacy are a part of their “cultural identity.”  We know, however, that calling for the removal of these symbols from public places is not an attack on those persons as “white people” or “southerners,” but very differently, an attack on white supremacism and anti-Blackness. To give a second case, it is true that some white people hear “Black Lives Matter” as meaning that white lives do not matter — rather than hearing this phrase as an urgent and beautiful call to reject anti-Black racism as part of building a future where all lives matter.  In these cases, we see that white identities serve — or better, have been made to serve — as shields protecting racism and oppression from legitimate and urgent rebuke.  White identities so deployed, and the genuine strong feelings they engender, have a claim on our attention — and when dealing with our students, even our compassion — but they have no ethical or legitimate claim on our acceptance or validation.  Rather, we must pair our concern with identities and subjective feelings in these cases with a clear-sighted recognition of their role in reproducing systems of privilege and oppression.  

Jewish identities must be treated no differently than other identities.  When they are pressed into service to provide a protective shield for Israeli state violence against Palestinians, they have no legitimate or ethical claim on our acceptance or validation.  Thus, when a Zionist student tells us that they feel that criticism of Israel and Israeli genocide is an attack on them as a Jew, our responsibility as educators is to educate them — which means providing them, in a manner they are able to hear, the critical thinking skills required to understand that criticisms of a state and a state’s misuse of its military are not criticisms of a people or a religion.  Here, Dr. Benjamin was precise and insightful when she said that Zionist students’ subjective reactions or feelings in response to hearing criticisms of Israel reflect “a failure on the part of their teachers and administrators to equip them with the ability to wrestle with difficult realities.”  The specific critical thinking skill these students needed — and still need — is what we have discussed in this letter: the capacity to think clearly about the differences between antisemitism, on the one hand, and criticisms of the Israeli state and its military actions in Gaza, on the other.

Because of our deep commitment to sorting out this harmful conflation, the JVP Academic Council is concerned that the December 12 letter defers to the Anti-Defamation League.  While masquerading as a civil rights organization, the ADL has a long history of fomenting anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and anti-Black hate. It advocates for widespread government surveillance of Muslim communities; has a long history of attacking Black civil right organizations, from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to the Movement for Black Lives; it illegally infiltrated organizations that were fighting South African apartheid and has illegally spied on Arab-American organizations; and despite its protestations to the contrary, it has steadily conflated criticisms of Israel with antisemitism, in order to smear advocacy of Palestinian rights with the false charge of antisemitism.  Increasingly, moreover, the ADL disregards, or even excuses, actual antisemitism when it comes from those supportive of the Israeli state — as evidenced, most recently, by the ADL’s reprehensible response to Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. 

We are in a dangerous moment when the NAIS’s stated commitments to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are being tested.  An emboldened extreme right in the U.S. is pursuing a legislative and cultural push to curtail commitments to social justice and anti-racism.  In this context, we are disappointed to see the NAIS bow to the ADL’s reactionary pressure, and we urge the NAIS to renounce, and work to remedy the harms of, its letter of December 12: we thus endorse the “Call on NAIS to Correct the Record and Stand Against Hate,” posted by the Zinn Education Project. 

As Jews, we know that Jewish safety cannot be gained at the expense of Palestinian safety and liberation.  As Jews, we know that none of us are securely and sustainably free until all of us are fully free, no exceptions.  As Jews, we call upon the NAIS to meet the fundamental responsibility of educators to tell the truth and expose lies — by joining JVP and Drs. Barakat and Benjamin in recognizing and standing against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

We look forward to your timely response to this letter, and we welcome the opportunity to work with the NAIS moving forward to support honest teaching about antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, and genocide in the schools that the NAIS serves.

Sincerely, 

Daniel A. Segal

On behalf of the Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.