Various departments and programs at UCLA are sponsoring a talk by Rutgers professor Noura Erakat styled Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination. And given Erakat’s record, “Revisiting” means “Endorsing the Notion that Zionism is a Form of Racism.” There are two commentators on her talk. There is no pretense of academic debate here, each of them is ideologically sympatico.
To be blunt, this is antisemitic propaganda disguised as an academic talk. It’s the 2025 equivalent of reconsidering whether Jews really bake the blood of Christian children into matzah. Like the blood libels of old, it’s a libel invented and spread (in this case by the USSR) to justify mass violence against Jews. For those interested in the origins of the libel and why it’s antisemitic in both its origins and intent, see the addendum below.
Of course, Erakat has a First Amendment right to say antisemitic things, and people, in general, have a right to invite her to do so. But look at who is sponsoring her talk. The English Department? The David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy? The Asian American Studies Department?
Even if one wanted to be generous and argue that this is a legitimate academic talk rather than essentially inviting Nick Fuentes in leftist drag, why are departments and programs with no obvious academic connection to Zionism or “Palestine” sponsoring this talk, other than to direct university resources to support Erakat’s point of view?
University administrators should not be permitting this. As David L. Bernstein and I recently wrote:
For rather obvious reasons, academic departments should be ideologically neutral and thus should not take a position on political issues. As subunits of the university, departments have no claim to academic freedom. University policy should prohibit academic departments from taking stands on issues of public import. A related issue is university departments hosting controversial speakers. In general, universities should tread lightly in regulating speakers. However, we believe that university administrators can step in when the event the department wishes to sponsor is political rather than academic in nature….
Political groups on campus organized by students or faculty have the right to engage in such activity. But academic departments are not supposed to be political. Perhaps more important, unlike, for example, a student pro-Palestinian group, academic departments are subunits of the university administration, and their actions represent the university. University administrators therefore can and should order departments not to expend university funds on events that primarily serve political rather than academic purposes. Administrators may follow the lead of Wake Forest president Susan Wente. She instructed Wake Forest departments to cancel their October 7, 2024, lecture by Rabab Abdulhadi, who had praised Islamic terrorists and had organized an event where her students could make posters that said, “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers.”
I reserve judgment as to whether Erakat’s speech qualifies under a loose definition of an academic talk, but I am quite certain that it does not qualify as an academic talk within the field of English or Asian American Studies (which, admittedly arbitrarily, does not include the Middle East). UCLA should be especially sensitive to departments sponsoring antisemitic events far afield from their academic missions, given that its under federal investigation for cultivating an antisemitic environment.
Finally, what’s up with UCLA Law School? In addition to the Epstein program (directed by Sunita Patel), the Critical Race Theory program (directed by LaToya Baldwin Clark, and which apparently does not apply critical theory to antisemitism, at all) is sponsoring the talk, as is, ironically, the Promise Institute for Human Rights (directed by Catherine Sweetser), which apparently doesn’t believe that Jews are among those who deserve human rights. Dean Michael Waterstone really needs to clean house.
ADDENDUM
First, a definition: Zionism, historically, is support for a Jewish national home within the historic Land of Israel. Zionism succeeded in 1948, in that a Jewish national home was established, the State of Israel. Zionism today means supporting the continued existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish national home. With that framework, there is an extremely wide range of opinions among “Zionists” ranging from extreme liberals to chauvinistic extremists.
There is nothing inherently racist about Zionism, at least any more so than support for any other nationalist movement or existing country.
Second, some history, relying on the work of Izabella Tabarovsky (e.g.). Starting in the 1960s, the USSR chose to cultivate support in the Arab and Muslim world by championing the cause of forces hostile to Israel in general, and the cause of displaced Arabs from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, newly given the identity of “Palestinians,” in particular. At the same time, and especially after the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviets also sought to clamp down on nationalistic/Zionist sentiment among its Jewish population, which had been the victims of Soviet repression of religion and nationalism in general from the beginning, and institutional antisemitism since Stalin’s time.
To promote this agenda, the Soviets hired the experts: antisemitic Russian nationalists who had been imprisoned in gulags during Stalin’s time, but released by Kruschev. Before the Russian Revolution, Russian nationalists had been the leading purveyors of state-sponsored antisemitism in the world, including authorship of the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
These hired intellectual goons had an inspired agenda. Many people around the world empathized with the Jewish people, and therefore Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust. To blunt and indeed reverse this dynamic, they did not engage in Holocaust denial. Rather, engaged in Holocaust inversion.
The Nazis, per Soviet doctrine, were the epitome of Fascism. The Holocaust was Fascism manifested in racism. Israel, rather than being heir to the victims of Nazis, were in fact the heirs to Naziism, as the Jews who founded Israel adopted their own version of racist Fascism, Zionism.
Adding “racism” to the allegation of Fascism (the Soviets called all of their enemies “Fascists”) was inspired. The history of antisemitism for hundreds of years has involved depicting Jews as a demonic force, which in turn meant in practice that antisemites attributed whatever was most evil in their mindset to Jews. So to antisemitic Christians, Jews were Christ-Killers. To capitalists, Communists. To Communists, capitalists. To conservatives, revolutionaries. To revolutionaries, reactionaries. To believers in traditional sexual morality, licentious beasts responsible for prostitution and pornography. To sexual liberationists, the font of repressive religious sexual morality. And so on.
By the late 1960s, among left-leaning intellectuals, “racism” as the most grievous of all sins. So the Zionists were depicted not just as Fascists, but as racist Fascists. Unsurprisingly, Soviet propaganda in this vein also relied on imagery and tropes directly out of traditional Russian (and Nazi) antisemitic propaganda.
In turn, this very successful propaganda campaign led to the infamous United Nations vote in 1975 that “Zionism is Racism,” the context for Erakat’s talk.
