viewpoint: ben cohen

Scholars against anti-Zionism

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Over the years, I’ve spoken at or attended a number of academic conferences on the subject of rising anti-Semitism. Parleys like these are essential for boosting our understanding of why, seven decades after the end of the World War II, the taboo around anti-Semitic invective—whether directed at Jews as Jews, or through code words like “Zionists”—has been broken.

Historians, sociologists, and political scientists, along with scholars from similar disciplines, all play a decisive role in determining how the trajectory of anti-Semitism changes even as its core themes, like its implacable opposition to Jewish sovereignty and its dark warnings about powerful Jews working against the national interest, remain the same.

These topics are again under the spotlight, at a major conference at the Indiana University Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, under the able direction of Professor Alvin Rosenfeld. The papers being delivered suggest that the conference is digging deep into the weeds: Over four days, attendees are discussing why anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism exercise little attraction in countries like Japan, India, and China; examining the manipulation of the Holocaust in public debates around Israel and Zionism; and revisiting, through such subjects as Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1946 on the future of the land of Israel, the historical foundations of anti-Semitism in our own time.

All very interesting and perhaps even a little obscure, you might think, but don’t make the mistake of believing that a conference like this one is a purely ivory tower affair. The very title of the conference—“Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization”—makes clear what the conference organizers correctly regard as the heart of the current problem. “Our goal is to open more eyes toward what is happening,” Rosenfeld told the Algemeiner, “to get more people to start paying attention to contemporary anti-Semitism and the role that hostility to Israel plays in generating it.”

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