AMCHA LAUNCHES NATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO COMBAT FACULTY ANTISEMITISM
170 University Presidents Letter & Two Educational Videos on Faculty for Justice in Palestine Released Today; New School Rankings Based on Faculty Abuse Coming Soon
Contact:
communications@AMCHAinitiative.org
Santa Cruz, CA, November 19, 2024 – AMCHA Initiative today announced a national campaign against Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), a network of nearly 200 faculty chapters launched after October 7th 2023, whose members are abusing their positions to escalate antisemitism and spread propaganda undermining the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.
“According to our antisemitism tracker, since 10/7/23 physical assaults on Jewish students have surged 2500% and violent threats have risen 900%. And while attention has focused on students and student-led groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), it is in fact faculty who are, on many campuses, at the root of the Jew-hatred and harassment our students are experiencing,” stated Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, AMCHA’s director and a faculty member at the University of California for nearly two decades.
AMCHA Initiative just completed research that found FJP plays an astonishing role in escalating antisemitic incidents and fomenting anti-Israel activity.
To launch the campaign, AMCHA coordinated a letter from over 120 organizations to 170 university presidents whose campuses play host to an FJP chapter. Sent today, the letter warned of new FJP findings and urged university heads to “establish robust safeguards and enforcement mechanisms to prevent those faculty members from using their academic positions and departmental affiliations to promote ideologically-motivated activism that directly targets their own students and colleagues - your own campus community members - for harm.” The signatories are faculty, student and community groups, as well as civil rights and religious organizations, including the Alliance of Blacks and Jews, AEPi, American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, B’nai B’rith, Beverly Hills Synagogue, Chabads, Hillels, SSIs, Faculty and Staff Against Antisemitism at NYU, Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism, Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA, Jewish Studies Zionist Network, Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, Daniel Pearl Foundation, OU, Rabbinical Alliance of America, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Zachor Legal, and World Jewish Congress.
AMCHA also today released to the public an educational video on the dangers of FJP, and has created a video on the harms of academic BDS. Soon, AMCHA will be releasing a new ranking system that rates schools by level of faculty abuse.
The new AMCHA campaign to combat faculty antisemitism will include comprehensive efforts at the campus, K-12, state and federal levels to promote the establishment of policies and laws preventing faculty from using their academic positions, university resources and taxpayer dollars to engage in politically motivated behavior that incites antisemitism and stifles the educational opportunities and free speech of their students and colleagues.
Established by the U.S. affiliate of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) — which is linked to five U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including Hamas — FJP is now active on 170 campuses. The primary mission of FJP members is to use their academic positions and departmental resources to actively promote the academic boycott of Israel (academic BDS) by engaging in actions to purge their campuses of Zionism and Zionists. Many of these same faculty are behind efforts to use ethnic studies curricula in K-12 schools to teach biased anti-Israel courses that incite hatred of Jews.
AMCHA’s researchers found that FJP’s presence on college campuses increased by more than seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults on Jewish students” and increased by over three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death. FJP also “prolonged” the duration of encampment protests, which were likely to last over four and half times longer on campuses where FJP faculty were free to influence and provide logistic and material support to students. Professors at FJP schools also spent 9.5 more days involved in protests than those at non-FJP schools, and academic boycott calls were nearly 11 times more likely in student demands, indicating academic BDS campaigns are faculty-driven. FJP’s academic boycott extends beyond Israeli institutions, targeting pro-Israel students and faculty on U.S. campuses for exclusion, shutting down educational and research opportunities, refusing dialogue with Jewish organizations and bullying students and faculty who support Israel.
AMCHA Initiative’s previous research shown that the presence of anti-Zionist faculty who publicly support an academic boycott of Israel is strongly associated with anti-Zionist student activism and behavior targeting Jewish students for harm. The establishment of an FJP network acts as a catalyst for campus unrest and antisemitism, by providing a platform for coordinated faculty efforts to normalize antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism, institutionalize academic boycotts, and target Jewish and pro-Israel campus members for harassment and exclusion.
“This research is quite damning. FJP faculty are fueling dangerous antisemitism. And while students are transient and university administrators can be fired, tenured faculty abuse has long-lasting impact. If we truly want to get control of the antisemitism spreading like wildfire on our campuses, we must stop and prevent shameful faculty abuse. Policymakers and administrators must establish safeguards against academic BDS and faculty abuse, in order to preserve academic integrity and ensure campus safety. And this campaign aims to do just that,” stated Rossman-Benjamin.
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 600 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 8,000 antisemitic incidents on college campuses since 2015, which can be accessed through its Antisemitism Tracker.