On December 5, 2023, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Anti-Semitism.” This hearing was a setup aimed at suppressing and silencing the righteous wave of protest on college campuses against the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people, which is continuing right now.

Then, on May 1 of this year, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the so-called “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” (the “AAA”). The vote was 320 for, 91 against. It called for the Department of Education to force colleges and universities to suppress anti-Israel protests and speech on their campuses. It threatened to cut off federal funding for schools that did not do that. The bill defined "anti-Semitic" speech,  among other things, as saying that “the existence of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Or that drew comparisons between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, and how the Nazis treated Jewish people.

Exposure of Israel’s crimes against humanity, and protest against them, is attacked not only with police brutality, censorship, and blacklisting, but also slandered as anti-Semitism. When police attacked protesters at Columbia University, Genocide Joe Biden told reporters, “I condemn the anti-Semitic protests.” After police attacked a march of thousands of protesters while Congress hosted and cheered on Israel’s rabidly genocidal Prime Minister Netanyahu, Kamala Harris attacked the protesters saying, “I support the right to peacefully protest, but let’s be clear: anti-Semitism, hate and violence of any kind have no place in our nation.”

Eric Cheyfitz is a distinguished professor at Cornell University in New York, and an activist in opposing Zionism and Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Last February, in the aftermath of the House hearing (and the subsequent forced resignations of the presidents of two prestigious universities, Harvard and Penn), he authored a letter to The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper at Cornell, titled “Anti-Zionism is Not Antisemitism.” It was signed by an additional ten Jewish professors at Cornell. 

In conversation with revcom.us correspondent Alan Goodman, Professor Cheyfitz discussed the actual difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. That conversation has been edited for clarity.

Alan Goodman: Let’s start with this, what is anti-Semitism?

Eric Cheyfitz: Traditionally, until this present moment, when the term has been corrupted, I think, and I'll try to explain that, anti-Semitism was simply the hatred of Jews for being Jews, based on certain myths, blood libel, for example, and stereotypes, like “the greedy Jews.”

Blood libel was the Christian myth that Passover matzahs, which is a traditional food at the Jewish holiday Passover, celebrating the Exodus [a foundational narrative in Judaism of the Jewish people escaping from slavery in ancient Egypt], actually, that those matzahs were baked in the blood of Christian children. So, in essence, what this accuses Jews of doing is killing Christian children for ritual purposes. And that became a stereotype of Jews, one of the myths that backed up the stereotype and rationalized the hatred of Jews for being Jews. 

So, anti-Semitism is the simple hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism is a form, and its traditional meaning, and I think its just meaning, is a form of racism. It's no different than anti-Black feelings, anti-Asian, anti-Latino, etc., etc. All of those are based on a simple hatred of those communities buttressed by stereotypes and myths. And that's what anti-Semitism was in relationship to Jews.

AG: What is Zionism, and how do you see the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism? 

EC: Zionism is a late 19th century political movement within Judaism, but not subscribed to by all Jews. All right, so the first issue here, and it's a political movement. It itself, if you read Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State, which is sort of the Bible of Zionism from the late 1890s, you can get a good picture of what it was. It projects what a Jewish state would look like.

But Zionism comes in reaction to traditional European anti-Semitism. In other words, Herzl and Zionists said, look, we're not welcome here in the West. Let's get out. Let's form our own state. So, one of the ironies, I think, today of confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is that Zionism itself was a reaction to traditional anti-Semitism.

AG: After World War I, as the victorious imperialist powers were racing to divide up and colonize the Middle East, British colonialism embraced Zionism in what is known as the “Balfour Declaration.” It declared that England viewed “with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” and began to enable that.

EC: Of course, this was supported by Europe. All right, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which, you know, “gave,” I'll put that in quotes, gave Palestine as the place for that Jewish state, comes out of British anti-Semitism. 

They didn't want the Jews in Britain. In fact, from 1290 until 1655, Jews were not allowed in Britain. There's a long history of anti-Semitism there. So, that is part of the context for Zionism as a political movement in the late 19th century to propose a Jewish state. 

AG: Do you see Zionism as a form of racism?

EC: In fact, if you read Herzl's The Jewish State, he talks about a binational state, a democratic binational state [a country with two nationalities]. Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, always wanted a binational state and himself was a Zionist. But in the end, those people lost the cause, so to speak, or they were overruled by a certain view of Zionism proposed by an early philosopher of Zionism, Zev Jabotinsky [Jabotinsky organized Zionist militias in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s and advocated evacuating the great majority of Jewish people in Europe to Palestine before his death in 1940]. If you read his writings, he said, look, the Palestinians are the indigenous people, they're going to resist us coming in, us Jews coming in and settling there, so we're going to have to build an “iron wall,” he used that phrase metaphorically, between them and us. So essentially, he advocated a militant relationship to the Palestinians. 

And slowly but surely, and we see that today, I think it's pretty obvious today, that relationship to the Palestinians ultimately became racist, looked at them as less than human, which is, you hear today, “human animals” from the Israeli hierarchy, etc., etc. So, I would say Zionism does not begin as a racist ideology at all, but that it winds up because of Israeli policies becoming precisely that.

AG: The bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives is based on a definition of anti-Semitism developed by an organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Committee (IHRA) which claims to base its definition on the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, the mass murder of millions and millions of Jews. Can you speak to how their definition distorts the actual meaning of anti-Semitism?

EC: I would have your audience look at two documents. I would have them look at the IHRA definition. It tends to confuse at certain points, criticism of Israel, or criticism of Zionism with the simple hatred of Jews. And in opposition to that, as I wrote in the letter to The Cornell Daily Sun, there is The Jerusalem Declaration On Antisemitism, signed by 350 distinguished scholars of Jewish, Holocaust and Middle East studies. 

The Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism is: “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” This is the definition that should stand. 

The Jerusalem Declaration goes on to explain, “It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants ‘between the river and the sea,’ whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.” 

The danger is that expanding the definition to cover political critiques of Zionism and/or Israel corrupts the historic definition by expanding its meaning to include legitimate political speech, thus inviting a rejection of “antisemitism” as a term that fundamentally represents a form of racism.

AG: In your view, what is the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism?

EC: I think that there's a kind of collaboration, which should be noted, that the Zionists, instead of saying, you know, this is our home in the West, you know, you're not going to put us out of here and we're going to stand up against anti-Semitism right here, you know, where we were born, where we live, where we have homes. The Zionists, Herzl, came up with the idea, okay, you want us out, we'll get out. And I think in 1917, with the Balfour Declaration, which ceded Palestine without talking to Palestinians, of course, as a Jewish state was a collaboration between Herzl and the Zionists and Western Europe to actually leave. So, yes, I would certainly say it is a collaboration. 

All Jews, of course, are not Zionists, needless to say. For example, the ultra-Orthodox Jews in and outside of Israel aren't Zionists for that matter as well as millions of Jews, like myself, living around the world. 

So, to equate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is itself anti-Semitic in that it homogenizes [makes them seem like the same thing] all Jews as pro-Israel or pro-a Jewish state. And I think that's an important point to note too. These, you know, people who conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are saying implicitly all Jews are Zionists.

AG: People who say what you are saying are targeted. What compelled you to speak out in the ways you have?

EC: I'm listed on the Canary Mission. That's a sort of hit list created by right-wing Zionists, if that isn't a redundancy saying right-wing Zionists. I have a prominent place on that list. What they used to call me, I used to get a lot of hate mail, was “self-hating Jew.” But now I think that has migrated to become Jews who are themselves anti-Semitic, although that's a contradiction in terms, in effect. So, I am Jewish. I have children in Israel, so I am concerned about their safety and well-being.

But, you know, I was raised in a, let me put it this way, I was raised in a left household, and Judaism for us was a secular as well as a religious tradition of social justice, and what's going on in Israel completely violates that tradition. I think I say this in the article I wrote to The Cornell Daily Sun. So, I think a lot of Jews, Jewish Voice for Peace, the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement, there are plenty of Jews in these movements who come from the same place that I come from and see Judaism traditionally as having a social justice core that is being violated by what's going on in Israel.