NEW BOOK CHAPTER REVEALS LONG-OVERLOOKED FACULTY ROLE IN FUELING CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM
Six studies spanning more than a decade show faculty academic BDS support predicts where campus antisemitism is most likely to intensify – revealing a faculty-driven problem that long predated October 7 and gained reach through classrooms, departments and organized faculty groups
Contact:
amcha@berlinrosen.com
Foster City, CA, September 28, 2026 – October 7 and the explosion of campus protests and encampments that followed put campus antisemitism on display for the country to see. But a new book chapter shows that one of the forces fueling it had been developing in plain sight for years: anti-Zionist faculty activism. For more than a decade, AMCHA Initiative has tracked how faculty support for the academic boycott of Israel is connected to antisemitism on campus, finding that the same anti-Zionist faculty commitments repeatedly predict both where the antisemitism is most likely to intensify and how anti-Zionist activism gains academic authority through classrooms, departments and, more recently, organized faculty groups.
A new book, Toward the Last Encampment: Campus Culture and the Jews Before and After October 7, features a chapter by AMCHA Initiative Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin that brings together, for the first time, six studies examining the longstanding faculty role in fueling campus antisemitism. Taken together, the research finds that faculty academic BDS support consistently predicted where antisemitism would emerge and intensify on campuses across the country.
AMCHA began building a national database of faculty who publicly endorsed the academic boycott of Israel in 2013, using that support as an objective measure of faculty anti-Zionism. It was particularly well suited to that purpose: endorsements were public and verifiable, academic boycotts - as opposed to economic boycotts - called for concrete action within the academy, and their explicit goal of “de-normalizing” Israel and Zionism in the academy made them a clear indicator of anti-Zionism in the academic sphere. Over the following decade, researchers used the measure across six studies to examine how faculty anti-Zionism relates to campus antisemitism and how its influence manifests throughout campuses.
The findings repeatedly pointed in the same direction. Taken together, the studies found that campuses with more faculty academic boycotters experienced higher levels of reported antisemitic activity. Most strikingly, the number of faculty boycotters was a stronger predictor of the targeting of Jewish students for harm than even the presence of an anti-Zionist student group. The research also found that departments with academic boycotters were significantly more likely to sponsor events featuring BDS-supporting speakers, while courses taught by academic BDS-supporting instructors had a median of 78 percent of required readings authored by BDS supporters, compared to 17 percent in courses taught by instructors who had not supported BDS. Campuses with five or more academic boycotters were also approximately seven times more likely to have a department issue or endorse an anti-Zionist statement. The report defines anti-Zionist statements as those containing rhetoric that denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state or demonizes and delegitimizes Israel, Israelis, Zionism or Zionists.
Rossman-Benjamin’s chapter also examines how the problem intensified when individual faculty activism became increasingly organized following October 7. AMCHA found that campuses with more pre-October 7 academic boycotters were significantly more likely to form Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters. Where FJP groups were present, the likelihood of physical assaults on Jewish students was more than 7 times higher, and protests and encampments lasted nearly three times as long as on comparable campuses. AMCHA describes the findings as a “two-step dynamic,” in which individual faculty boycotters helped launch FJP chapters and those chapters then served as coordination hubs that amplified their campus impact.
“For years, universities have treated campus antisemitism largely as a problem of student activism or isolated incidents, while one of the most consequential forces has received far less scrutiny,” said Rossman-Benjamin. “October 7 did not create this problem. It exposed a problem that had been building inside our universities for years, with faculty playing a critical and largely overlooked role. Across study after study, faculty support for academic BDS emerges as an extraordinarily important indicator of antisemitism – and the evidence shows that its influence can reach from individual professors into classrooms, departments, organized faculty networks and the broader campus environment.”
Rossman-Benjamin argues that the findings of AMCHA’s studies require universities to look beyond individual incidents and student activism when confronting campus antisemitism. Faculty have the ability to shape curricula, lead departments, sponsor programming and use their institutional positions to give anti-Zionist activism greater reach. After more than a decade of research, the chapter concludes that faculty boycott activity functions as both a “signal and a driver of campus antisemitism,” with organized faculty activity amplifying its effects, making visible a faculty dimension of campus antisemitism that AMCHA argues universities have overlooked for years.
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AMCHA Initiative is a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. The organization monitors more than 750 campuses for antisemitic activity, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the U.S. government. AMCHA is not a pro-Israel advocacy organization, nor does it take a position on current or past Israeli government policies; criticism of Israel that does not meet the IHRA and U.S. government criteria is not considered antisemitic by the organization. AMCHA has recorded more than 12,000 antisemitic incidents on college campuses since 2015, which can be accessed through its Antisemitism Tracker.