Introduction
On March 19 and April 17, 2025, faculty from African American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Ethnic Studies (A.G.E.S.) at the University of California, Berkeley, participated in two Rise Up for Education Rally/Teach-ins organized by the Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn. A.G.E.S. faculty offered speeches and hosted teach-ins on academic freedom and free speech, defending our disciplines in the university, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Here, we reproduce three speeches from the department chairs.
The Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn is a coalition of faculty from UC Berkeley coming together out of a sense of mounting alarm at the wholesale attack by the Trump administration on higher education around the country. We have mobilized to support our University and defend the fundamental freedoms to learn, teach, and research in safety. We rally to defend our right to think freely, to disagree constructively, and to teach, learn, and conduct research without censorship, loyalty tests, or threats. We will leave no one behind. We need everyone to join this struggle for higher education, justice, and democracy. (Source: Berkeley Faculty for the Freedom to Learn website: https://speaklearnteach.org/2025/04/16/about-bff2l/.)
Ula Taylor, Chair, African American Studies
Remarks on March 19, 2025
We are so thankful that all of you are here. You are here because all across the country, and the world, people are rising up. Today, we are here to talk about how this worldly chaos is impacting our academic community. As a professor of Black Studies, I have somewhat of an advantage in this political moment. Our very right to be on this campus emerged from student protests, alongside research efforts, and scholarship that detailed uncomfortable truths. Today, we are constantly being told that uncomfortable truths divide us as a nation. Black Studies does not divide, but rather unites, through a recognition of shared struggles and the collective effort to rectify historical wrongs. I hate to say it, but we in Black Studies saw it coming when they tried to ban our Black Studies Graduation. Today, I am welcoming you to the fight. It’s a fight that can be summed up in five words: Academic Freedom is under assault. When we accepted the honor to teach and conduct research at this public university, we did so because of the long history and commitment to Academic Freedom. You see, Academic Freedom is foundational to igniting transformative knowledge and ideas that we are all worthy of, and therefore none of us will be left behind, in this political moment. You might not see yourself right now in this struggle, but look to you left and right: we are all vulnerable, and if we don’t have academic freedom, none of us have it, from African American Studies to Zoology!
We must let the Regents of the University of California know that they should represent us and not control or chip away at our Academic Freedom.
Leslie Salzinger, Chair, Gender and Women's Studies
Remarks on March 19, 2025
The March 19th 2025 Freedom to Learn rally ended with readings of three texts, Mario Savio’s historic speech of December 1964,; Mahmoud Khalil’s March 18th, 2025 letter from a Louisiana detention center; and last, Martin Niemoller’s 1946 poem, “First they Came.” This was the context for the comments below, lightly edited here for a written rather than an oral text.
My name is Leslie Salzinger, I am the Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies, and I am here today because our job as scholars is to think about what is happening now in the context of history, to understand and to interpret it and to place it into a larger frame. And to that end, I want to read a poem that I think is probably familiar to many people, and which places the letter by Mahmoud Khalil we just heard read in its historical lineage.
The poem was written in 1946 by Pastor Martin Niemoller, and it goes like this:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
And then they came for me
Because there was no one left
To speak out for me.
Those words speak loudly to us here today. They help us understand what is actually going on. They help us contextualize and frame what is happening to Mahmoud Khalil and to all the people who are being ripped from their communities, and to place that violence in its long and devastating genealogy. The poem reminds us how important it is that we stand up as a community for the rights for all of us to think, to speak, to teach, to learn, together. We stand here today committing to that community – we will speak freely and fully, and we will leave no one behind as we do so. In the words of the great Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales, “this time it’s all of us or none.”
Keith P. Fledman, Chair, Ethnic Studies
Teach-in on April 17, 2025, Contextualizing the Campus Antisemitism Crisis
Today marks one year since students set up an encampment at Columbia University demanding the university divest from Israel and call for an immediate ceasefire in the war on Gaza. Encampments proliferated in the days and weeks that followed, with Palestine solidarity encampments emerging at over 130 schools around the country. (1)
Let us recall that this proliferation of nonviolent civil disobedience arose in response to an Israeli military campaign intent on the virtual obliteration of Gaza as a site of inhabitation, a campaign understood as genocidal by leading human rights organizations, (2) a campaign supported financially, materially, and diplomatically by the Biden administration, including in ways that breached US law and left the US vulnerable to international opprobrium and censure. (3)
This extraordinary outpouring of political engagement and moral clarity regarding Palestinian human rights, human dignity, and human flourishing; the overwhelming concern over the ways the US was implicated in war and atrocity; the abiding thirst for knowledge about the context and conditions leading to this moment; the popular education undertaken in this moment, filling a longstanding educational vacuum about Palestine: this all was met at the federal level by attacks on universities, on their leadership, their policies, on the very ways in which they’re governed and funded.
And the rationale for such an attack was concern over the wellbeing of Jewish students. Never mind that many of the students involved in the encampments were themselves Jewish. Never mind that standing against state violence, or the policies and ideologies that drive them, or the histories out of which they emerge are utterly distinct from questions having to do with Judaism per se as a religion or Jewishness as an identity or even a people--but rather reflect concern about the actions of a nation-state.
As Jewish Voice for Peace noted: “Opposition to the political movement of Zionism and/or the policies of the state of Israel is no different from criticism of any other political ideology or policies of any other nation state, such as the settler colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy at the foundation of the United States." (4)
The crisis of something called “campus antisemitism” warranted not only exceptional federal scrutiny, but, as we’ve seen in the last year and a half, and only amplified in the last 85 days, extraordinary attempts at federal intervention.
Claims that expressions of concern over the impacts of the ideologies and practices of the Israeli state on Palestinians are antisemitic have their own lengthy genealogy. (5)
They first gained a purchase in the United States in the aftermath of the June 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors – a war which resulted in Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. While broad swathes of the American public celebrated the outcome of the war as miraculous, movements resisting racism, militarism, and war expressed grave concern over this new dispensation, and infused their concern with solidarity with the Palestinian people in support of Palestinian freedom. (6) Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League in 1974 called these kinds of critiques of Israel and solidarity with the Palestinian people the “new anti-semitism” and saw universities and Left movements concerned with racism and colonialism as the most dangerous ferment for its rise. (7)
In the interest of time, let us flash forward to the early 2000s. By this point we have seen the veritable collapse of the so-called Oslo peace process, and the rise of the Second Intifada, and the deepening of Israel’s matrix of control in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. And in the US, we see the formation of new student-led groups that place the horizon of Palestinian freedom as their lodestar, organizations that build on a robust history of prior formations. (8)
In the early 2000s, we began to see the expansion of the use of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964--one overseen by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. This set of laws is meant to protect all students from forms of severe, pervasive, or persistent harassment and discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, including shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics. In order to create a hostile environment, the harassing conduct, which may include speech or expression, must be so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program or activity. Title VI began to be used as a frame to address widespread anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and the targeting of Sikhs--as well as antisemitism on college campuses. (9) This expansion was due in large part to the work of Kenneth Marcus, who then served in the Bush Administration, later joined the Trump Administration, and founded and now directs the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
Then, as now, with regard to antisemitism, the argument goes something like this: a core feature of Jewish identity is Zionism, understood as a commitment to Jewish territorial sovereignty and national self-determination in the land of Israel. Speech acts that challenge the ethical, moral, and legal implications of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians are interpreted as an attack on Jewish identity, and a persistent pattern of such speech acts suggest a hostile environment for Jewish students.
This kind of argument relies on the premises baked into the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, drafted initially in 2004 and given institution heft in 2016. The IHRA definition of antisemitism reads:
Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
Fair enough. However, to guide IHRA in its work, the document continues: “[While] criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic, ... manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” Other examples IHRA flags include considerations of Israel as a “racist endeavor." (10)
Here, we begin to run into some problems. Does not the state of Israel define itself as a Jewish collectivity? Does it not narrate itself, through its history, its laws and policies, as a state for the Jews? As recently as 2018, the Israeli Knesset codified a Basic Law stating unequivocally that the “realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people." (11) In doing so, the Knesset effectively enshrined a second-class status for one-fifth of its citizens. And what to make of the territories in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, understood under international law as under the overarching sovereign control of the state of Israel, and whose responsibilities under international law fall on Israel to manage? What to make of critiques, including foundational critiques, of Israel’s occupation, its expanding settlements, its besieging of Gaza? What to make of the Jewish Israelis and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, or the organizations like Amnesty International (12) or the Israeli organization B’Tselem, (13) who name and assess the apartheid structures of rule in force in Israel?
No less than the lead author of the IHRA working definition, Kenneth Stern, the Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, has been an outspoken critic of the ways the definition has been used to chill speech critical of Israel. “I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it,” he wrote in 2019. “[A]s the American Jewish Committee's antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the ‘working definition of antisemitism.’ It was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders." (14)
Indeed, as scholars and students, we know that data collectors need definitions to know what they’re looking for, to distinguish what's inside the scope from what's outside. We also know that what counts as data, and how that data is framed, has everything to do with the implications and conclusions one draws. But Stern continues, the working definition “was never intended to be a campus hate speech code.”
Moreover, Stern continues: “there’s a debate inside the Jewish community whether being Jewish requires one to be a Zionist. I don’t know if this question can be resolved, but it should frighten all Jews that the government is essentially defining the answer for us” (emphasis added). Let me pause for a moment on Stern's term “require.” Clearly there are a range of ways of being Jewish, of practicing Judaism, of orienting oneself to the world through Jewish ethical and philosophical traditions, some of which draw upon Zionism and others of which do not. The question, it seems to me, definitively cannot be resolved. Governments have no place in the consideration of that question, and neither should university campuses.
And yet, in 2019, the Trump Administration adopted the IHRA definition as a heuristic to judge antisemitism cases—doing so at the behest of Kenneth Marcus. (15) In the last few years, the IHRA definition is getting adopted and incorporated by states, by universities, and by the Federal government. It is included as part of settlement agreements coming out of Title VI investigations and Federal pressure campaigns. It is being done pre-emptively and, often with little public debate—despite hundreds of statements, op-eds, and scholarly articles that have been published in the last ten years critical of IHRA. (16) The earliest debates go back to 2015, when the University of California was considering adopting the definition. Despite then-president Janet Napolitano’s support for the idea, the UC Regents declined to move forward with such a proposal. As Harvard courageously takes the lead in challenging the Trump Administration, and should be celebrated and supported for doing so, it is worth noting that Harvard already adopted the IHRA definition in January 2025. (17)
A tool that purports to make campuses more hospitable for Jewish students, does so through chilling speech and precluding Palestinians from a fulsome expression of their humanity and their histories, and it precludes all of us from honest and wide-ranging assessments of the history, actions, and disposition of the state of Israel.
Rather than listening in good faith to social movements in support of Palestinian freedom, accusations of antisemitism have become a weapon to not only refuse--but even to punish--those who seek to do so. While this has been a practice for decades, over the course of the last year and a half, it has metastasized into a full-frontal attack on the very notion of the university as a place for the fulsome expression of academic freedom and free speech.
April 17 is also Palestinian Prisoners’ Day: a moment to reflect on those held in Israeli jails and raise awareness of their ongoing struggle for freedom. According to the prisoners’ rights group Addameer, nearly 10,000 Palestinians are imprisoned by Israel – over a third of whom are held in administrative detention, which means without charge or trial. (18) Today, we reflect on the government-led abductions of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mohsen Mahdawi, done in the name of fighting antisemitism. We see the abominable cruelty to which they are being subjected. We call on their immediate release, and we stand up in this moment, for academic freedom, for the freedom to learn and to teach and to speak, and against the cynical weaponization of Jewish safety today.
Footnotes, Keith P. Feldman
(1) Erica Chenoweth et al., “Protests in the United States on Palestine and Israel, 2023–2024,” Social Movement Studies 0, no. 0 (2024): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2024.2415674.
(2) Amnesty International, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” December 5, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/.
(3) Amnesty International, “Unlawful Use of US-Made Munitions and Violations of International Law by Israel since January 2023,” 2023, https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/4.29.2024-NSM-20-A....
(4) Jewish Voice for Peace, “On Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism and Dangerous Conflations,” November 10, 2023, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/11/09/antisemitism-dangerous/.
(5) Brian Klug, “The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Antisemitism,” Patterns of Prejudice 37, no. 2 (March 1, 2003): 117–38.
(6) Pamela Pennock, Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
(7) Arnold Forster, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
(8) Pamela E. Pennock, Rethinking Arab American Activism (New York: Routledge, 2025).
(9) Kenneth L Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
(10) “What Is Antisemitism?,” IHRA (blog), accessed April 18, 2025, https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism.
(11) “Full Text of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” accessed April 20, 2025, https://main.knesset.gov.il:443/EN/News/PressReleases/Pages/Pr13978_pg.aspx.
(12) Amnesty International, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,” February 1, 2022.
(13) B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid,” January 12, 2021, https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202101_this_is_....
(14) Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, December 13, 2019, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-execu....
(15) “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism – The White House,” accessed April 20, 2025, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-orde....
(16) The Foundation for Middle East Peace keeps a running tally of challenges to the IHRA definition of Antisemitism.
(17) Max J. Krupnick, “Harvard Settles Antisemitism Lawsuits | Harvard Magazine,” January 22, 2025, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harvard-settles-antisemitism-law....
(18) “Statistics | Addameer,” accessed April 20, 2025, https://www.addameer.org/statistics.