Practicing Pedagogies of Resistance and Liberation: The Critical Study of Zionism

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Tina: [00:00:00] Welcome to Nothing Never Happens, the Radical Pedagogy podcast. I'm your host, Tina Pippin, along with co-host Lucia Halseth. This podcast is a dual release between Nothing Never Happens and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism's Unpacking Zionism podcast. Lucia reached out to the founding director of ICSC, Dr.

Emmaia Gelman, and founding collective member, Dr. Yulia Gilich, who graciously agreed to collaborate with us. The Institute examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions, beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Emmaia Gelman has taught at New York University and Sarah Lawrence College.

She researches the history of ideas about [00:01:00] race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, and law. anti terror measures, and war. Emmaia is at work on a critical history of the Anti Defamation League from 1913 to 1990. She is the co chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism and a longtime activist in New York City.

Yulia Gilich is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They are a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. They received their PhD in film and digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where they are currently a lecturer teaching courses at the intersection of critical race and media studies.

Our conversation includes the genesis of [00:02:00] ICSC and its interventions into institutional norms around the study of Zionism. The creation of their no IHRA toolkit, the weaponization of anti semitism through definitions and other repressive means, and examples of creative and critical pedagogies investigating Zionism in higher education classes.

There is so much depth to the work of ICSC and the ways they connect research, organizing, Pedagogies and Activism. Here is our conversation. Emmaia and Yulia, welcome to Nothing Never Happens. We are very excited to have you here today to talk about the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. If you could introduce yourselves and your organization.

Emmaia: My name is Amaya Gelman, Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and I live in New York City where I've been at various times an activist and [00:03:00] also an academic. So the Institute is kind of a merger of those things. It's a research institute. That is about the project of trying to understand and make clear how Zionism works as a politics and a power structure and an ideology.

And then not just to study it, but to operationalize, make use of that information, make use of that knowledge, because it is also a, as a power structure, it's a way that capital is moved, that people are repressed, that land is taken and organized. And, you know, to sharpen that, it's a colonial and racial, racist, uh, power structure.

So we don't just want to look at it, we want to do something about it. The reason that knowledge is actually so important as an activist tool is because one of the ways that Zionism has worked, and indeed that power structures work, is that it kind of hides and obscures information [00:04:00] about itself. So our job is to study it, to unravel some of the mythologies that it has built around itself, and then also to try and figure out how to use that kind of truth telling to help change the conditions of it.

So we work both in academia and with organizing and also we want to make really clear that research and knowledge comes from both places.

Yulia: My name is Yulia Gilich. I am a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the founding collective of the Institute. And for me, I have arrived at anti Zionism both through scholarship and movement work.

So for me, the work of the Institute, like, make a lot of sense as a combination of the two that doesn't actually see knowledge production separate from organizing, separate from social movements. For me like the anti Zionist politic is [00:05:00] actually what gave foundation and a direction to my work overall and it's an explicitly kind of anti imperialist and anti racist orientation and so What I've noticed with the work of the Institute is that, you know, some of the kind of key people who are active in the work of the Institute are people that we already organize with.

So it's people that we know through the political commitment to collective liberation. And, just the production of research and knowledge in service of the movement.

Emmaia: We're in a moment now where it's extremely clear after a year of genocide and anti genocide movement and repression of that movement and a kind of extraordinary construction of, of lies about the anti genocide movement that are, you know, repeated in the press and completely run [00:06:00] counter to anything that anybody.

Who's been part of that movement understands about it. So, you know, lies that it's violent lies that it's anti Semitic, et cetera. That makes it really clear that we need this kind of space to protect talking about Zionism and study of Zionism and trying to actually figure out what's going on and telling the truth about it, that we need to protect it from.

Much more powerful forces than academics and activists in many cases, because there is a really powerful force trying to shut it down, right? Collective powerful force of right wing politics, colonial politics, but that's not new to the past year. And so the impetus for setting up the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism comes from a really long trajectory of Scholars who are working on this who get shut down, who, who can't get funded, who have to sort of choose that if they're going to do this work that like they're not going to have a celebrated career, who don't get support from their institutions, whose, you know, whose work is questioned and queried in a way that nobody else's is, [00:07:00] and who are constantly facing these emergencies where Zionism is doing violence that we have to respond to.

At the same time, over the last bunch of decades, there's been a really concerted effort by Zionist and right wing and pro Israel funders to create Zionist knowledge, to create departments that say they're Jewish studies and Israel studies, but actually they're Zionist Jewish studies and Zionist Israel studies, and become part of the sort of structure of what kind of knowledge and research universities validate.

So we don't have many resources going in the other direction. So we decided to create the Institute because we need institutions. We need institutions that are anti Zionist and that can protect us and and gather us and advance our work. That's the origins of the Institute, the decades really leading up to this.

And I'll just say I'm Jewish, I'm a New Yorker, And I have spent the last 20 years, 24 years since the beginning of the new intifada, trying to do this [00:08:00] work and finding that. The pushback on reality is so intense. We thought we discovered that like collectively in the post factual era of Trump, but actually Zionism has been post factual for a lot longer.

So I, I feel it quite personally.

Lucia: Thank you so much for those. that, that really helpful kind of framing of who you are and the origins of, of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I am wondering if you all could expand on something that I think came through in Emmaia, your, your, um, your words just now and Yulia, some of what you said, which is that there has been a study of Zionism happening within many of our institutions of higher education and not just higher education, but that, that study has been coded as a kind of neutral knowledge.

How does the ICSZ imagine in as, as you [00:09:00] respond to that, as your collective sort of response to that and creates resources, how have you all I'm curious how you thought together about the relationship between the kind of research work and the movement work that you're doing in concrete ways I hear it kind of being brought together in this in this term study, which of course can have a kind of radical valence to it of research movement serving each other and I'm also curious how you might reflect there's there's research work and movement work, and then there's a question of kind of What people will think of as political education that happens in organizing spaces and the kinds of classroom spaces that we see in institutions of higher ed that are often being kind of right now extraordinarily repressed as spaces for like policing things like Bias.

So how does, that's a lot there, but sort of thinking about neutral, not neutral knowledge formations and interventions to that. And then within that political work, vis a vis movement work, political education, vis a vis [00:10:00] classroom education, what would you say about that from your vantage point in the ICSC?

Yulia: I think the departure point is actually naming the fact that Zionist knowledge production is not neutral. And one of the kind of primary intellectual impetus behind the work of the Institute is to decouple the study of Zionism from Jewish study, from Israel study. And as Amaya said, to understand it and study it as an ideology.

as a power structure, as a colonial racial and racist project that is materially affecting people's lives. So I think kind of naming that is really the first step from which then can emerge a critical Zionism study or an understanding of a critical Zionism study as also a not neutral project, [00:11:00] but a project that is studying power itself, studying how power operates.

So I think that is also something that unites not just critical Zionism studies, but various critical disciplines with movement work, like Black studies, like critical race studies, right? These are fields that have explicit goals and explicit commitments to liberatory practice. right? These are explicitly liberatory fields.

I see critical Zionism studies as a kind of addition to that constellation, which politicizes and kind of questions who we call an expert and what is expertise. what kind of knowledge is recognized and valued. And this is the framework through which this kind of [00:12:00] neat separation of political education and formal education actually falls apart.

Because if we do understand knowledge as explicitly political, as having political stakes and liberatory goals, then it doesn't matter where we engage in that knowledge in the classroom or outside of it. Movements produce knowledge. Recognizing, engaging with that knowledge and elevating that knowledge.

is something that Critical Zionism Studies is really invested in. When we first launched a podcast that the Institute produces, that's called Unpacking Zionism, in one of the very first conversations with Lara Kiswani, the executive director of AROC, the Arab resource She highlighted that Palestinians and Arabs more [00:13:00] broadly historically had to become experts on Zionism by necessity.

In order to fight this kind of power structure, we need to understand it. And so this is a long lineage of struggle and of knowledge production that we emerge out of. And on a lot of campuses that saw encampments emerge over the last year, I think that became very clear that the students who were engaged in this really critical and political project of study of power applied those lessons in order to fight their institutions, their administrators, the police that they had called on them.

Um, so this knowledge actually traverses. the confines of the classroom. And that's the goal.

Emmaia: I'll come at it a slightly different way, which is I [00:14:00] think that what we teach in the classroom and what we learn is often so basic, right? Especially when we're teaching someone's first encounter with a topic, which often is how we're teaching.

about Zionism, right? So often that entry point where people are just beginning to encounter, it really is political education, even though we're doing it in the classroom, even though we're looking at what are some of the primary sources, what's the historiography, like that actually is the work of political education.

And in fact, it's the work, you know, Palestinian youth movement has undertaken an enormous. Amount of political education in the last year in the context of trying to sort of build the movement and capture the energy that's coming in. There are lots of new people seeing what's going on, seeing the genocide, seeing the total intransigence of the political class and institutional leaders and wanting to get in, right?

So the job of the organizer is to make sure people know whereof they speak. And so there's been a lot of. that kind of organizing happening in, in movement spaces. And it really reflects exactly how you [00:15:00] would approach something in the classroom. I mean, maybe it doesn't do quite, you know, it doesn't do both sides thing, which is something that we tend to, to sort of look to sometimes in the classroom, but like their Palestinian youth movement recently published work translated for the first time in English that was fodder for reading groups and discussion all over the world.

So the political education that movement groups. are doing really looks like classroom teaching. And for us, there's something sort of in the other direction, which is in the space of the academy, we have been really encouraged to start from not only zero, but like negative one, every time we start to talk about Zionism, right?

Like is Zionism settler colonialism, or is it not? No, that's done. We've, we've arrived. Zionism is settler colonialism. It announced itself as such. All of its originating leaders announced that they were going to colonize Palestine and they talked about civilizing the barbarians that, you know, it's not, it's not news.

In fact, it's a diversionary [00:16:00] tactic to get us to not look more deeply at knowledge about Zionism. So when the institute started, we gathered as a community that was not going to do that. And in the course of organizing our conference, our first conference, our launch exactly a year ago on October 13th, if you can believe that, we realized that we needed to preserve space to have deeper conversations by saying, look, these are our starting points.

Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the U. S., Israel is a settler colonial state. That will not be debatable in these spaces because if we begin there, we'll never get past it, right? Studying Zionism, its direct work for the Israeli state and its other work, meaning how it operates in the United States, whatever, is politically necessary.

Like, we're not going to talk about, is Zionism, you know, the aspiration of my grandmother's heart to see Jerusalem? Like, maybe it was for her. That's not what it is right now. It's a state and a power structure. Academic research is not politically or morally neutral. We're not going to have a conversation about like, are we going to talk about every side of this in the same [00:17:00] way that we don't need to necessarily study, you know, white nationalist screeds in order to understand racism.

We should, we should look at them because they're primary sources, but we're not looking to them to see if they, you know, do they make sense to us? Like that we're not looking in that direction. So we laid some groundwork. which I think of as political education for academics.

Tina: Yeah, I really appreciate you, your conversation here about inside and outside the classroom where these pedagogical moments occur.

And so with the encampments, can you take us into a classroom that would inform what the pedagogy looks like that is informing the students in the movement and other people in the movement and how that conversation flows?

Emmaia: On my campus, there was not an encampment. The students at Sarah Lawrence, where I was teaching, decided that they would put their energy into other kinds of organizing.

And that doesn't mean at all that they didn't do enormous amounts of political education. I will say that when I look at the [00:18:00] movement, it's, it created space for us to talk frankly about Zionism in a way that we didn't have before. That's a cumulative effect of the encampments insisting on talking about Zionism and not sort of paring it down like, oh, we're going to talk about Israel and pro Israel forces.

No, we're going to talk about Zionism. That was an incredible opening that encampments made for us through this collective study.

Yulia: Yeah, the encampment was a heterogeneous, a kind of formation with people coming from different fields of study and coming with different tactics and strategies and ideas of how to win and what victory is.

But what was really important is that specifically Students for Justice in Palestine. On my campus, there is a coalition that's called UC Divest. There is a group of students that formed last year that's called Jews Against White Supremacy. [00:19:00] And folks in those groups have led conversations, teachings, reading groups, not just about Palestine, but about what Zionism has to do with policing.

How do we understand our university as directly complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza? Like, what does it actually mean and why is it important for us? in Santa Cruz, California, to be encamped and how does it help anyone in Palestine? Those were the questions that emerged out of this really transnational study of power.

that originally came out of a classroom space. But if we do understand our goal as educators to introduce and to politicize this knowledge as a liberatory tool, as an organizing tool, this is the outcome [00:20:00] that I want to see. I want to see my students continue these conversations outside of the classroom while organizing, where they are based.

and engaging in a local meaningful fight that is actually materially implicated in what's going on in Palestine. Making those transnational connections was really critical for how those students approached the encampment. And the other thing is that I, I really appreciated that students did not think of the police abolitionist movement or queer struggle as a separate issue.

They did not say, Oh, you know, student groups who engage in anti racist struggles. This is not your day. No, it is a collective struggle. And we are going to figure out what's at stake for all of us. And, you know, there were conflicts and divergences [00:21:00] in these conversations. And I think that's also productive.

And I think we also saw the punishment for that kind of work being unequally distributed. And yet, this is what solidified this movement and allowed the students to regroup and come back to school this year, ready to continue the fight. Despite the fact that on our campus, students for justice in Palestine were banned.

for two years. Because they were able to build this really robust movement, they're all ready to continue the fight stronger than they were before.

Lucia: Yeah, I mean, there's something profoundly radicalizing that just exposes the connections of all of these liberation struggles when you're in an encampment and your university sends the police to brutalize, to brutalize you and your, your colleagues and your friends.

And all of a sudden. police abolition movements, anti settler [00:22:00] colonial movements, Palestine liberation struggle, all of and more, all kind of begin to come, begin to come together. And in a lot of ways, the, the, the encampments and the different strategies used became, I think, Yeah, both, both an experience of radicalization and kind of object lesson, unfortunately, in, in the ways that, that power, the different kinds of power are, are, are entangled.

So thank you for, thank you for highlighting that. Maybe we can talk a little bit about institutional reactions to the student uprisings. as they have related to the continuation of certain forms of Zionist political education through the mechanisms of university administrations and other kinds of like anti bias, anti anti Semitism trainings, etc.

I was thinking in, in advance of our interview about the kinds of workshops that my institutional sort of dean level folks have invited me to attend this year on [00:23:00] teaching and. One kind is a sort of combating anti Semitism, where anti Semitism is collapsed with Zionism sort of training. And another one is kind of how to manage conflict in case Zionism comes up in your classroom and people get into a fight about it.

Like that's the sort of un, unstated subtext. And it's hard not to receive those correspondences as. as warnings to, to not, not step off the institutional line. So I'm given that context. A, I'm curious what y'all have been seeing within the members of your collective in terms of how institutional responses have been more solidified and codified over the summer so that people are navigating new things this year.

And what kinds of guidance or encouragement would you give to folks who are trying to work and teach in solidarity with the aims of ICSZ. are a little, a little trepidatious about the, the, the [00:24:00] retaliation that might be, might be waiting for them. That's so

Emmaia: real. I mean, there is retaliation awaiting, and the difficulty that we have right now is that it's not just university administrators acting on their own.

There are all these other, you know, organizations outside of universities who are acting on students, they're acting on anti Zionist students, they're acting on faculty who dare to, you know, talk about Zionism and or are actually anti Zionist. They're also acting on Zionist faculty and administrators, advising them, resourcing them, just to name some of what's going on.

There's law fair organizations which have, you know, kajillions of dollars. I think that's the official amount, kajillions, to help design and prosecute both lawsuits, charging civil rights violations, and also Title VI complaints at the Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, both of which are expensive for schools and time consuming for the people who are involved in them.

They're defamatory of the people who are named in them. They're really [00:25:00] easy to file. Title VI complaints especially are really easy to file. You don't have to be. connected to the school even to file a title six complaint. So there's this sort of rain down of discipline, disciplinary actions that's affecting both anti Zionist and Zionist parts of the campus community with its thumb on the scale to just shut everybody up from talking about these things.

So on the one hand, we understand universities as businesses that are trying to manage risk, right? So if it seems like you can avoid several million dollars in legal fees by creating a policy that says, don't say the word Zionist unless you're saying it in a cuddly way. Like maybe you're going to implement that policy.

That's what's the sort of legal risk side. And then there's the other sort of reputational part of it. And the, which is tied to both the public image of universities and also to their capacity to leverage donors. which says like, well, we're going to call you anti Semitic and tell everybody that you're horrible and racist, basically, [00:26:00] unless you capitulate to this set of right wing politics.

Those are the pressures that don't even come from within the university, although they certainly play on the profit structure of universities and the fact that university administrators are not necessarily devoted to scholarship, but in fact are business managers often. So how does that work? When people are actually trying to just teach and learn, it's very difficult as you point out.

You can't really say to somebody, well, just go ahead and see how it works. Like, you know, people are going to be attacked. We know it already. We know that there's a ton of surveillance that students have been sort of turned by by outside NGOs, like the Anti-Defamation League into surveillance of their own classrooms.

Sometimes it's casual and sometimes it's quite orchestrated. Actually heard about today, just today, we heard about faculty member who was working with students in their class to try and sort of help them understand their positions, like explore. information about Zionism and anti Zionism. [00:27:00] And then it transpired that those students were working with either administration or somebody sort of on a larger level to surveil and document those kinds of conversations inside the classroom.

So it's really, you know, it's tough. It's tough, right? It's, it's dirty and it's tough. The question that you're asking of like, what do we do to support folks? I mean, I think that this is a moment where you have to be forthright, right? Like, this is not a moment for the week of art. You have to decide what kind of protection you need versus what kind of risk you can take in a moment that is really a defining historical moment for the world.

And then you have to sort of look around and see who is available to protect you. So we do actually have law on our side, right? I mean, there are, however bankrupt. The civil rights laws might be. They actually do protect us and they protect speech, political speech. They protect people against being attacked on the basis of their identity, right?

They're, they're not good enough, but, but we can use them [00:28:00] and we haven't used them sufficiently. I mean, I think that's something that we are. We as a movement are working on, there's a, you know, a limited number of lawyers who are available. We have limited resources, much less than Zionist and right wing forces have, but there is a movement to push back.

There are also academic freedom organizations weighing in. The AAUP, the American Association of University Professors, which had been under Zionist leadership for a long time and then was sort of reticent about weighing in in a sort of overly political way, has now stepped up to say, like, there's no way to do academic freedom without taking some stance here.

So AAUP has, has statements and guidance. There's also academic labor organizing. Not all academic labor organizations are doing the kind of work that they should be doing to protect their members, but some are really stepping up. And there are synergies. The Coalition to End Zionist Repression is the sort of gathering.

of all of these movement organizations across academia and labor and [00:29:00] legal and grassroots and students trying to stand up for each other. I guess that's my bottom line there. Like, how do we protect each other is by being together. If you're isolated, it's very hard to find protection, but it's also super important to do this and to not surrender our students to the predations of organizations that are just trying to suppress resistive knowledge.

That's our job, right? I want to mention one more resource if I can. There's a brand new campaign called Drop the ADL from Schools. It is a K 12 focused resource. It is organized by teachers, teachers who come from all different sort of perspectives, Muslim teachers, Palestinian teachers, Jewish teachers.

teachers who just care. And in the same way that we were talking about political education, in many ways mirroring what we might do in a classroom where people are first encountering something, the language and information that K through 12 educators have assembled about [00:30:00] what's wrong with equating anti Semitism and anti Zionism are useful to anybody, right?

Like, talk, tell, explain it to me like I'm five, right? And they, they do. So I just want to highlight that as a resource for, for teachers who are trying to figure out how to navigate this stuff.

Yulia: I want to echo Emmaus point that we need to organize. We need to protect each other. We need to build power. We need to talk to each other.

So if you have a union, talk to your union, politicize your union, make sure that your union is anti Zionist and is prepared to defend you and your colleagues. Start a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter. get resources and get the expertise from the national umbrella of the organization. And also for faculty, I think we need to understand the risks that faculty are facing, but also get a grip and understand the risk that Palestinians on the [00:31:00] ground are facing, that now people in Lebanon are facing, that our students are facing when they are protesting, when they are building these encampments and these movements.

There's a graduate student at Cornell who is facing deportation because they were suspended for Palestine solidarity organizing. And also the one tenured professor. who got fired, and Maura Finkelstein was actually technically fired for an Instagram post. So, are you willing to censor and limit what you say, not just in the classroom, but everywhere you go?

Because this is what we co sign to do if we're not fighting back. So Yeah, I think kind of getting like a really big picture of like what's at stake is really important. But then, yeah, let's, let's [00:32:00] organize and build power to protect each other.

Lucia: I wonder if you could draw any lessons from the movements that are ongoing and also previous to stop right wing attacks on education.

I think about in California, the sort of ethnic studies, protecting ethnic studies stuff, the various kinds of various kinds of organizing that teachers have had to do to be able to teach history in their classrooms?

Emmaia: No, there is a, there's so much to be learned from the movement, certainly from the ethnic studies movement, which I'll talk about in one second.

And also from the movement to push back on the, like the sort of Koch funded networks of right wing attacks on campuses. There's this, uh, there's a book that I, I recommend everywhere that I go, which is by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola called Free Speech and Coke Money. And Ralph Wilson comes out of the Un Coke My Campus movement, which [00:33:00] really did pioneering research on how right wing money pushes into campuses using the fact that campuses are starved of cash, right?

By the, by the sort of neoliberal university model. I think it's really interesting to read their book because. The playbook that they describe, um, that's sort of pioneered by those, that network of organizations is in fact the same playbook that Zionist organizations are using. They create organizations that are not necessarily identifiable as part of that network.

They say that they're advocating for both. for rights, you know, they'll, for their right to participate or their right to be part of campus life, despite the fact that what they're doing is kind of counterfactual. And they pump money into it so that students who need scholarships or who need research funding are attracted to it and then become part of it.

And then they use that framework to sort of pump out knowledge that validates the repressive politics that they're pursuing. And then if somebody says, don't do that, they're like, why are you against academic freedom? [00:34:00] So the, the strategy that they offer in fighting that network is like, stop taking the bait.

Basically, this is not a conversation about rights. Like we could spend all day responding to charges that we're stifling speech by saying that, you know, somebody shouldn't talk about why climate change isn't real. Let's not have that conversation, right? Instead, let's look at who's funding it. Let's look at what the political agenda is.

that those funders have. Let's look at how the people, the organizations who are instantiating this are connected to larger political movements, and then let's talk about those movements. It turns out that the same strategy works very well, although it's not been pursued enough to, to make clear what Zionist institutions are trying to do as they push into campuses.

And I include in Zionist institutions, you know, now we're in sort of a different universe where like, You know, the, the hard right, the Heritage Foundation is part of the network of Zionist institutions like that are jumping on the bandwagon of the [00:35:00] sort of current Palestine scare, as my friend A. J. Bauer has called it, to tear the guts out of academia.

So if we start to look at how Zionist institutions are operating on campuses, the ones that come up to the fore are the Academic Engagement Network. which is a consulting organization that is working with hundreds of colleges and universities, advising them on their antisemitism policy, advising them in theory on like DEI and academic freedom.

The Academic Engagement Network is a project of the Israel on Campus Coalition. Its purpose in life is advocacy for Israel, but that's not, you know, sort of created this other organization that says that it's about, you know, campus climate. academic freedom. And then there's another arm of that, I believe, which is faculty against anti Semitism, which suddenly is doing counter work to faculty for justice in Palestine.

Also Hillel, which many people understand as a Jewish cultural organization on campus. And, you know, it did start that way all those years ago. It is [00:36:00] currently simply a pro Israel organization squashing other Jewish organizing on campus, including anti Zionist organizing and progressive organizing. And it's also doing that kind of advising and working with college administrators, and they're part of a, you know, once you start to Google, it becomes clear that there's a lot more going on.

We just saw an announcement from the American Jewish Committee, Hillel, the Anti Defamation League, and ACE. They had just gathered 100 plus college presidents for a conference on how are you going to deal with antisemitism. So there, there's a sort of process of creating policy from the top and having it filtered down repressively through campuses.

So that's the strategy. Just to circle back to your question, that we get from, from looking at how previous right wing movements tried to capture campuses and how people successfully pushed back. Just to touch briefly on ethnic studies, you know, that battle is not done, right? Like, ethnic studies is under severe attack in California and California is being used as a staging [00:37:00] ground for how it can go to the rest of the country.

The thing that I think has been really. sort of effective in destabilizing the argument that Zionist organizations are making against ethnic studies. The argument that they're making is that by including Palestinian voices that are talking about their own colonization by the state of Israel, and by not having a section on Jewish studies in particular, or anti Semitism, that they're marginalizing their mark.

Well, they say it in different ways. Sometimes they say they're marginalizing Jews, and sometimes they say they're marginalizing white students. I think the thing that's been really helpful in that case is to make clear how directly that rationale and even their organizing is connected to the anti critical race theory movement and the white nationalist movement.

Lucia: Yeah, I appreciate how your keyword series has really highlighted that sort of the connections with Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, Hindutva, and these other kind of right wing ethno nationalist projects that end up fighting themselves on the same boards.

Tina: Yeah, the term [00:38:00] anti Semitism is like the elephant in the room, and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the IHRA, their working definition is that elephant, and you have a no IHRA toolkit.

Could you talk about it, what it is, how you utilize it, and how you push back against the pushback that you've talked about?

Emmaia: When we first started out, even before we created the institute, we asked Scholars and activists, what do you need? What do you need this institute to do in order to make space for critical Zionism studies?

And the first thing that people said was we need to do something about the IRA definition. We need to push back on the way that it's sort of marching across campuses because we can't even talk. Like we can't study. We can't talk. We're, we're being criminalized. by the IRA definition. And just to sort of back up a little, the IRA definition is a definition of antisemitism that was devised, I think in 2016, that has several [00:39:00] examples in it of what constitutes antisemitism that basically say that criticizing Israel, criticizing Zionism, saying that Zionism is racist, et cetera, is denying the Jewish people self determination.

Well, we know that's ridiculous because Yulia and I are Jewish and we're not Zionists. Just to use this very small case study, right? Zionism is not self determination for us. Indeed, anti Zionism is self determination for us. And additionally, beyond those examples, the definition is so vague as to be completely useless.

I think it says something like, you know, anti Semitism is hatred of Jewish people. No, no.

Yulia: It is a certain perception of Jews or other people. It is so, it is so nonsensical. It literally means

Lucia: nothing, right? Nothing except for it can be used to, to criminalize

Emmaia: people. Exactly. To put it in historical context, the push to adopt the IHRA definition to, to push it into policy, which has been largely pursued by the [00:40:00] Israeli government and its partners in the United States and the Anti Defamation League is a response, clearly a response, to the success of Palestine Solidarity organizing and particularly the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, right?

The play is like every time the arguments stop working about Israel, reintroduce antisemitism in a new way and say like, you have to support Israel or you're being anti semitic. It's not, it's not. And so the IRA definition is yet another go at this, but it has been kind of supercharged by the fact that the Palestine Solidarity Movement also represents the anti racist left.

And there's so much in it. interest in pushing back on that, right? Like when, when movements actually start to gain power, the forces that are aligned against them start to gin up. And so the IRA definition has spread like a wildfire. It's useful for policing. It's useful for criminalizing. There's federal legislation pending, actually not tracking up federal legislation at the moment, but there has been legislation pending [00:41:00] that would deport somebody who was arrested.

For at a, you know, at a protest where they were accused of violating the IRA definition or defunding universities that are accused of permitting violations of the IRA definition. So it has real, it's become like a real material cudgel. And the thing that's just wild about it is that it, I mean, as we said, like it's so meaningless that if you tried to define anything else in law that way, you would, it would immediately be laughed out of the room.

Lucia: One of the places I might like to go from here is to ask you about, this is kind of circling back to a pedagogy question, but I think you're through your know, our toolkit, which is available and that will link in our show notes and the keyword series that you all are Thank you. putting out through the Unpacking Zionism podcast and the Know IRA podcast that kind of runs run is also one of your, your projects.

There's been this one reason, one reason I really appreciate those resources is their emphasis on a kind of critical [00:42:00] reading and critical literacies of the language that We are using as teachers and organizers and researchers and people who are, who continue to learn about Palestine liberation struggles, but also people who are situated within institutional contexts and contexts of power, where language is constantly shifting and morphing as, as a program of both to sort of confound radical movements and also to co opt them.

And one, one example of this that I, that I was thinking about when you were talking is the sort of rebranding of antisemitism, antisemitism to Jew hate, which you, which there's, I can't remember which, which episode it is, but one of your, one of your guests kind of digs into this. What can you say, and are there specific strategies that you might offer some of our, our listeners around kind of.

[00:43:00] Using pedagogies of critical literacy and discourse analysis to be able to cut through a lot of the chatter that washes over people like a wave when they start to step into this space of anti Zionist struggle.

Yulia: So as a continuation of the Battling IRA project, one of the things that the Institute is working on right now is a journal that we're about to publish at the end of October.

It's a journal for critical Zionism studies. And the first two issues of the journal, for the most part, contain the proceedings from our inaugural conference, Battling the IRA Definition. So, not only are we including the definition itself in the journal, that is collectively annotated, that includes kind of critical conversations like on [00:44:00] the margins that is marked up like in red pen that also links to different resources that actually talk about either specific words or verbiage or kind of how this language and discourse is used and has been weaponized.

So that's one resource that we're working on. Another resource within the journal is a micro syllabus and we're hoping to include a micro syllabus around a key word in every issue of the journal, but for the inaugural issue, the term that we're working with is And it's a term that our comrade and colleague Taika Shotten coined, I think, and it's antisemitism industrial complex.

And I think it's also kind of the idea behind the keyword series that we're working on the podcast, but thinking through specific terms, their [00:45:00] genealogy, and how they have been operationalized. I think really reveals so much about how Zionism operates and how we could potentially fight it. And so through thinking about antisemitism industrial complex, we were able to kind of very explicitly draw connections between anti Zionism and the police abolitionist movement, anti capitalist movement, anti colonial, anti imperial movements, anti militarist movement.

So I think this kind of critical literacy work that actually is interested in meaning, discourse, genealogy, And how language is operationalized to advance and further Zionist political goals is really something that I'm happy that the Institute like takes this work so seriously. And I think we have been able to kind of [00:46:00] zoom in on that project and hopefully deliver some of the Resources in the way that are accessible and that was something that I was hoping the podcast specifically the keywords in critical Zionism study series would do rather than having, you know, just kind of broad conversations.

about themes or events or texts, even though we're always grounded in those things, but offering people a very clear and particular entry point through a keyword into the entirety of kind of the discourse around it, I think has been a really useful way to make that knowledge more accessible and hopefully useful.

Emmaia: I would add to that that I think there are so many, there are sort of surrounding ideas that are enabling. this moment that we're in. So yes, we're talking about Zionism, but [00:47:00] actually the groundwork has been laid for a long time in other discourses. And particularly the one that I focus on, partly because my work is on the ADL, is hate.

And I actually think, um, that preceding the anti Semitism industrial complex, there's a rights industrial complex that, that the ADL created beginning in the 1980s. The shift away from from talking about racism to talking about hate is a key shift that completely stripped out of all of our discourse of, of race and egalitarianism and, you know, inclusion or whatever, stripped power out of it in a way that equated like someone's racial hostility toward, uh, you know, like a white gentrifier who just displaced their family from the black neighborhood equates that with a KKK member.

burning out a black family from their home because they're racist. Like the hate discourse is about putting those things on the kind of the same line and saying that they're just about [00:48:00] hostility and erasing all of the sort of systemic structures behind them, erasing states, erasing who has power in what situation.

And if we didn't have that, if that had not been seeded in U. S. conversation, and displaced the kind of conversation about structural racism that we were getting from, you know, studies from the Black Power Movement, then we wouldn't be having this conversation about anti Zionism, anti Semitism right now.

Because the, the ability to erase colonialism from Zionism is absolutely dependent on the idea that you can have a conversation about civil rights without looking at who has power. So when we're thinking about critical study, I actually think You know, if people are coming to this for the first time and trying to get a handle on it, asking that question of like, what is actually the difference between talking about racism and talking about hate?

I think it's a really crucial entry point. The transition from talking about anti [00:49:00] Semitism to the language of Jew hate, which is something that was very deliberately constructed around 20, 16, 2017 by the Lawfare Project in an effort to try and leverage the kind of discourse that Black Lives Matter had generated for Zionism.

Like if we can see how that worked, then it becomes much easier to understand how we're being sort of stage managed in the present. So I do think that critical literacy is, is essential. I don't think it starts with Zionism. I think it starts with

Tina: Yeah, I want to echo what Lucia said before. Your podcast is essential, I think, for understanding the panels, the keywords, the resources you have on your website.

So I want to direct our readers to do some deep listening and learning, because I learned some things. I think. didn't, hadn't quite figured out and it was really useful. I'm still mulling over things. So, last question before our last question. If you, there are [00:50:00] so many resources and so many groups coming together on, you know, pushing against each other.

Uh, if you could talk about one, the coalition to end Zionist repression and, and tell us a bit about that.

Emmaia: Sure, the Coalition to End Zionist Repression is a U. S. wide effort that includes in it legal organizations, academic organizations, community organizations, student groups, and its purpose is to identify the fact that we're doing two things at once, right?

We're fighting a genocide and then we're fighting the machinery that's stopping us. that that's reinforcing it in the United States and that is standing deliberately in the way of popular movements to stop the genocide. I just want to be super clear. The United States has sent something like 18 billion in weapons to Israel this year in the course of the genocide.

Just to put it in context, actually, I'll borrow numbers from the U. S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which had a call [00:51:00] earlier today. You know, the The cost, the, the FEMA shortfall in hurricane aid was something like 9 billion. It was just announced on the same day that the U. S. sent 8. 7 billion additionally to Israel for weapons.

Like we can see very directly how Zionist, Repression is trans, it's like a capital process. It's a material process and it's affecting our lives. In addition to the ways that those of us who try and speak out against it are marginalized and punished, sometimes violently policed, fired, evicted, deported, right?

So the coalition to end Zionist repression is a recognition. of the interconnection of those forces and the need for all of us to sort of gather. Now you would think that we were already gathered and we were in many ways, but it has turned out that the coalition itself and particularly the campus and academia table of the coalition has been an essential way for those of us who are already doing work to talk to each other [00:52:00] and to figure out like what, what actually are our resources, how to map our resources.

We've been in a year of absolute emergency and everybody has been running, right, the whole year. And so to be able to talk together, strategize, even learn from each other about what are the forces in play, super important. The coalition has, it is doing what I think is a huge lift of work, which is, it has a incident report form.

that you can fill out on its website. If you've been experiencing an instance of Zionist repression and the coalition will try and sort of match folks with resources to support. And it's also a place for, for sharing knowledge. We have on our launch calendar, which is a Bitly website, bit. ly slash campus dash Alliance.

There's a calendar of events. I think something like 20, 20 events where we're. People are talking about different aspects of how Zionist repression works and trying to sort of push back on that includes drop the a DL [00:53:00] from schools. There's a Drop Hillel resource about to be launched. There's a drop, the academic engagement network resource being launched and um, tons of sort of entry level informational resources.

So that's what the coalition is doing and really it'll do whatever, everybody who joins it. wants it to do. So it's an invitation.

Lucia: Is there anything that we have, before we get to our last, last, last question, is there anything that we have not asked or that has come up that you want to make sure we get on the record, um, before, before we, we move to

Emmaia: I want to ask you guys for a little bit of insight on what's been useful to you.

I mean, I heard you, Tina, say that the podcast was useful to you. I'm curious to understand better how it's working because if we're talking about pedagogy, right, and you're dipping into these resources that are, that are our pedagogy, it would actually be really helpful to learn how you received them and how they fit into what you're experiencing.

[00:54:00] Sure, I can, I

Lucia: can say a little bit. I think for me, there, I mentioned before in one of my questions, the feeling of when organizing alongside students, when teaching in my classes, and also in just navigating the sort of volume and gravity of institutional response to that. And, you know, I've worked at two different, I was on, I'm at Brown right now, but I was at Skidmore for a semester last year and that's my normal job.

So I've been in different kinds of institutions with different sort of levels of faculty mobilization and capacity and sort of experience. And so even if I have my kind of toolbox that I carry around with me of like, I know how to, I know how to like cut through and like read the sort of transfer from the language of racism to a language of hate.

I know how to think critically about Are these [00:55:00] really grassroots movements or are they astroturfed movements? A word that I learned from, from your podcast about sort of well funded institutions that disseminate information and outrage in a way that makes sort of Uprising seem like it's coming from kind of popular, popular will, but is actually kind of manufactured from above.

Is that, is that a fair definition of astroturfing? So like, I think that some, I think that for me, one of the ways that I've listened and it's not only, this is not the only way, but I find myself listening as a kind of reminder of what I know and the tools that I have so that they feel closer at hand in moments where the kinds of forces we are talking about fighting against and dismantling are up in my face.

Like, it's like listening to, it's like listening to something that's like, okay, yeah, I, Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like, [00:56:00] it's all, it feels like reinforcement sometimes. And then there are also moments where like, Oh, wow. Like I didn't know that word. I didn't know that particular number. I didn't know that history that adds new knowledge.

But I think what's particularly valuable for me right now is the way that the resources that y'all have collected, kind of bring it all together and assemble a chorus of voices coming from different angles. To clarify, to, yeah, to clarify the sort of multifaceted nature of this struggle. I'll give one example.

So, I'm writing a piece right now about, I was asked to do a, I was asked to do a retrospective on how I'm thinking about the themes of my book, which came out about 18 months ago, now. Um, like, it only came out 18 months ago, like, why are we, why am I having to reflect on it now? But, of course, the only context that I can reflect about it in is, is Israeli genocide.

And in fact, the first chapter of my book is about the history of fair trade being started by a bunch of Mennonite [00:57:00] missionaries, 10, 000 villages started by some Mennonite missionaries working in Palestine, employing women in refugee camps to create needlework crafts that they would then sell. to generate an income for these women and they would sell them through U.

S. church networks, but increasingly what sort of catapulted the organization to, to sort of global fame is selling Palestinian needlework crafts to IDF soldiers and settlers and U. S. tourists to, to Palestine is specifically to the sort of post 1967 West Bank area. And so the sort of history of fair trade and capitalist social responsibility runs through this.

that runs, runs through Israeli genocide. And so I was trying to sort of think about, think about that and think about what that means now in relation to all these calls for divestment. And I kept, I was writing and I kept using the word, the way that the Mennonite Central Committee talks about its work is working with quote unquote refugees and Palestinian refugees.

And [00:58:00] I was writing it and I thought, you know, like I'm writing this term refugee. It doesn't feel totally right here. I don't know exactly. I don't have. My brain is a little saturated. I need better tools about thinking about why. I wonder if the ICSC has done anything on the word refugee. That feels like it should be in the keyword series.

If it's not, then maybe they should add it. And then, sure enough, there was, what's the name of the scholar that Renat Vermeulenem, yeah. had a whole conversation about what is the term refugee, what's the political history of the con, the term refugee, how is the UN classified refuge, Palestinian refugees differently from other refugees.

And, um, so I listened to her and I thought, yes, okay. That was like right there. I was, you know, I was, about, you know, a foot from being able to, like, reach that and know it, and now I do. I can, I can, I can speak in a more informed and focused way, even if it's just adding a hyperlink to the piece that I was going to write.

So that's a very concrete [00:59:00] example of how I've used it to just kind of, yeah, kind of capacity build and sustain. Is that

Emmaia: helpful? I absolutely love that story. It's so good to hear. I mean, first of all, The scholars who have been, and the activists who have been on the podcast. I mean, I think of the activists as scholars too, but anyway, everyone who's been on the podcast talking about their, their work, like they do incredibly deep and detailed work and they've also found ways to talk about it in thought supporting ways, generative ways, like the, what you're talking about.

Whenever I do a podcast episode, whenever I do an interview, I always leave absolutely buzzing. Yeah. I love the sort of affirmation that other people are hearing their work. in the same kind of generative

Tina: way. Yeah, I'll jump in for, for me, just two, two main things. One is how to push back against and understand the rhetoric, especially at my college.

There's, there's this huge rhetoric around safety and being [01:00:00] some, not all, Jewish faculty feeling unsafe. And so this weaponization of safety was very useful to me to learn, you know, okay, that's a term. I can, now I know how to package it in my head. The other thing, and you can help me clarify this, hopefully, one of the panelists, maybe it was at the American Studies Association or somewhere, they're all kind of merging together here, talking about, you know, courses in anti Semitism or anti Semitism and Islamophobia, to think differently about that and, and more intersectionally and assemblage y, if that's a word from the assemblages term from Puar's book and Deleuze and, you know, other theorists.

So. I might need a little, a little more help on what that would look like in my own institution. Uh, not that I have any power to get that to happen. However, how to push for [01:01:00] something like that to create more of a, uh, a space, a brave, braver space for, for students. students and faculty to to come together on these issues.

Yulia: I just wanted to say like it's really great to hear that this knowledge that we're trying to like produce and distribute widely is useful and you know another way we are trying to share knowledge and kind of translate more specialized and academic knowledge into knowledge that can be absorbed and be useful to the movement is we're producing these kind of slide decks or zines for social media.

And one of our, like, most popular zines is the one that was made from the article, also by our comrade Heike Schotten, on TERFism, Zionism, and right wing annihilationism. [01:02:00] And, like, a couple months after we posted it, and it went pretty viral for, for the content that we produce. But I was at this like Palestine solidarity dinner for activists, and I heard people talk about it.

And it's people who didn't know that I'm affiliated with the Institute. And I just noticed that the conversation about Zionism and TERFism actually, I don't know, really advanced. And, you know, I think the way that the queer struggle really has absorbed and used the language and analysis of pinkwashing has been a result of tremendous work by scholars and organizers.

But seeing that happen, like, with that knowledge as well on the connection of Zionism and TERFism has been really incredible. And so I hope that we [01:03:00] can continue making those connections and like advancing the knowledge. that is maybe produced in like more specialized spaces and operationalizing it and making it useful to all of us.

Lucia: Yeah, it feels like a, you know, one of the things we talked about, or we mentioned before, is just sort of like how quickly the co optation discourse machine works. And this is like, this is like really in a lot of ways, Accomplishing the work of like invigorating the way the vocabularies, we use the forms of analysis that we have, the tools at hand for naming reality.

And that is, so, I feel like that's just so important. And so I'm not surprised that you overheard people talking about talking, like using the terms of the podcast and, and finding it useful because I I know that's, I certainly, that's true for me. That's true for like my family who I keep passing the, the, the episodes onto the organizing crew at.

Like, you know, I feel like I, every episode you all, you all release, I [01:04:00] send it to, you know, a dozen people and it, and it helps our conversations. So thank you. I will move to our last question, which is what you are reading, listening to, watching, otherwise consuming that may or may not have to do with anything we've talked about just now that you would like to lift up and recommend to our listeners.

Emmaia: I'm reading two completely divergent sets of things, because I'm in the process of writing this book about the ADL's political history. And I, and because again, this sort of foundational question of race and how we talk about racism is at the heart of this. I've been reading Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma.

which is the 1944 foundational text of colorblind racial liberalism. It's 1500 pages. I'm not reading the whole thing. And it really, when you sort of get into the text that underpins all of the kind of, the [01:05:00] colorblind, like, let's just all be the same and erase all of our differences stuff that, that is now getting trotted out again.

It's really telling, but the other thing that I'm reading and have been reading for absolutely ever is Isabella Hamad's novel, The Parisian, which is perhaps the most beautifully written novel I have ever read in my entire life. I highly recommend it if you want to read about Palestine in a historical, a historical way in relation to, I don't know, culture, global politics.

It's just gorgeous.

Yulia: I'm teaching a course that I call Palestinian Media Studies this quarter. You know, I, I'm a lecturer, so I get hired to teach things and I typically don't know what they're going to be until it's time to teach them. And this quarter I was hired to teach, and I quote, special topics in media studies.

Uh, and I was like, well, this is very special to me. So [01:06:00] here we go. Yeah. So I, I designed this course. And this week we're talking about archives. And so I'm rereading and rewatching the work of Azel Hassan. And she's about to publish a book that's called Visual Remains. She has a really gorgeous interactive article that's called Working with Visual Remains that thinks about, yeah, what, what does it mean to find remnants of looted Palestinian archives, be they images or video or film.

and how to work with them as a historian, archivist, or an artist. And she has this really beautiful documentary that is also kind of in search of the looted Palestinian PLO Film Institute archive that was [01:07:00] stolen and partially destroyed by the Israeli military in Beirut in 1982. And the film is called Kings and Extras.

And so I'm just so grateful that I get to teach that. And I get to talk about this work with my students. So that's, that's something that I'm really stoked about and then both me and Amaya are part of a work group of the Institute on the work of Fayez Sayed, who is a Palestinian philosopher, and I maybe think of him as historian but I'm not a philosopher so I, yeah, I don't know how to.

But he, he is kind of most well known, I guess, for his work that's called Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. And the one that I was reading earlier this week is Zionist Propaganda in the United States. And It's just [01:08:00] incredible. It was published in 83, but it was written maybe like about a decade prior and it could have been written today and it's, it's both kind of insightful and extremely upsetting, but yeah, strongly, strongly recommend his work.

Emmaia: We'll send you the link. Great,

Tina: well we've got Tina. Okay, a friend of mine who teaches at Emory, whose sister in law teaches women gender studies at Duke, recommended this book to her, who recommended it to me. Her sister in law is Palestinian. Anyway, this is a novel that I just started by Susan Abulhawa.

It's called Mornings in Janine, and I don't know, you may be probably familiar with it. So I've just started it, and it's a way to Kind of being a different head space than the course that I'm teaching this semester, which is the politics of apocalypse, which was probably not a good decision to do this fall with the [01:09:00] election.

And we're, we're studying Christian Zionism and the political implications. Anyway, all the connections. crazy stuff. So, and I'm also working on a, on a paper for a conference that's in a very short time. It's a panel on utopia. And so I'm, I do work in the last book of the Bible and I'm kind of a naysayer about that book, put it lightly.

So I'm, I'm talking about the utopia and the Christian Bible, the New Jerusalem and the exclusivity of it. And I'm going to have a section on, um, Francis Ford Coppola's new film, Megalopolis and the Utopia in that film, and I am watching, to decompress from all of that, the new rom com, Nobody Wants This is the name of it.

It's a Jewish rabbi with a shiksa. Anyway, Kristen Bell is in it. It's, it's one of the better rom coms, actually. I recommend it for fun. So, Lucia, you're next.

Lucia: [01:10:00] Um, always reading a lot. I will say, since this came up, since this came up earlier in our podcast, I'll say that I've been trying to read my way down like a few works every week of the Palestinian youth movement's history of popular resistance.

reading list, which we already mentioned here, but we'll link in the show notes that there are direct hyperlinks to this sort of trove of resources, some of which were familiar to me and others, others that, that were not that just kind of continuing to educate myself and kind of build up my own, my own knowledges around Palestinian resistance.

as a longstanding, longstanding tradition in which these contemporary uprisings are rooted. So that's been a really, that's been a really grounding and also upsetting, but also activating kind of, kind of practice to spend some time every weekend going, going through the next thing down on the list.

Tina: All

Lucia: right.

Tina: It really is time to say [01:11:00] goodbye for now. We hope to continue this conversation over many years. I hope. Thank you so much for being with us today. Great questions. Thanks. Talk to you soon. Great. You've been listening to Nothing Never Happens, the radical pedagogy podcast, and our joint podcast with the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Our audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our intro music is by Lance Eric Haugen, performed by Lance Eric Haugen with Aviva and the Flying Penguins. Our outro music is by the band Akraisis. Max Bowen raps guitar. and Mark McKee, Beats and Trumpet. And the song is called Unnervous from their album Children Singing in Hell, available on Bandcamp.

com. Thank you so much for listening.

Akrasis: Can't contained or rather destination can't be tamed. The [01:12:00] blood stain mark bar before I step towards space will last longer than the chalk. Look on your face, saw you, the carpet, minus the Starship, named Icarus trying to find the truth of the dying sun fly. So close, but too cold to roast. No lesson about hubris to confess to my folks.

Was it in Tahiti, that I saw, Was it in Tahiti, that I saw? This is for my friends who are punished far too harshly.