Testimony

• Helen Raizen | October 1, 2025

  My name is Helen Raizen. I’m a retired software engineer, live in Jamaica Plain and I’m a member of the Boston Ward 19 Democratic Committee. I’m the daughter of a Holocaust refugee, who left Vienna in the fall of 1938, by herself, meeting her father in England four weeks later on her 14th birthday. My grandfather owned a bookstore in central Vienna and his father owned a paper factory that had been in continuous operation since before World War I. The bookstore was appropriated by a non-Jewish employee and the factory forced to be sold to a non-Jewish minor partner, both in 1938.

  I mention these details because ten years later, thousands of businesses and factories belonging to Palestinians were subject to similar confiscations and appropriations during and after the founding of the Zionist state of Israel. That the founders of Israel did to the Palestinians what the Nazis had done to many European Jews, including my own forefathers, is a reality that pains me to the depths of my secular, Jewish being. And adding to that pain is the much more recent bombing destruction of Mosab Abu Toha’s Edward Said Libraries in Gaza. Like my grandfather, Toha loves books and the culture that they represent. Like my grandfather, Toha’s work has been destroyed by those who would not recognize his humanity.

  In 1939, my great-grandfather and his wife, were forced to move from their home in the 7th district of Vienna to the 2nd district, and while he died in 1940 due to lack of access to insulin, my great-grandmother, who might have escaped if the US Consulate in Vienna hadn’t closed in July of 1941, was deported by train to Lodz, Poland, in October of that year, where she likely died of starvation, before even being moved to a nearby killing camp. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their villages and homes by the guerrilla and military forces of the new state of Israel, transported not by train, but on foot. And the descendants of many of those refugees are now dying from lack of medication and from starvation in Gaza in a genocide that belies the cry of “Never Again” and dishonors the deaths of my great-grandparents.

  What is the relevance of my family history to the work of your commission? With your recommendations you have chosen to make the IHRA definition of antisemitism a model for combatting antisemitism in K-12 schools in Massachusetts. And that definition would classify what I’ve just recounted as antisemitic. I’ve compared what was done to Palestinians at the founding of the state of Israel and what that state is doing today in Gaza to what the Nazis did to my family. The IHRA definition’s list of contemporary examples includes these words: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” But my comparisons are germane, not antisemitic! I urge you to rethink your reliance on this IHRA definition for combatting antisemitism in Massachusetts.

  Antisemitism is real. I’ve experienced it many times in my 76 years. But what this commission has been doing is not combatting antisemitism so much as it is attempting to ensure Jewish safety at the expense of others, especially Palestinians and Jews who support equal human rights for Palestinians. As many others have told you, this makes Jews less safe. Singling out Jews for special treatment is likely to encourage, not discourage antisemitism. And your tactics seem to unfortunately align with the Trump administration’s weaponization of accusations of antisemitism to deport US residents and attack institutions of higher learning, such as Massachusetts’ own Harvard University. In contrast, combatting antisemitism using an anti-racist framework of solidarity with all oppressed human beings, insures the safety of us all and distinguishes completely from the Trumpist attacks. I urge you to drop the use of the IHRA definition from all of your past and future recommendations and thereby uphold my right, and that of all other Massachusetts residents, to compare what happened to my family in the Holocaust to the tragedy that has and continues to befall the Palestinian people.

• Daniel Lee Kleinman, Professor of Sociology, BU | September 29, 2025

  I am a proud Jew. Most Jews (including me) have had some experience of antisemitism, but we are not a homogeneous group. We do not all support the actions Israel has taken since October 7th, and we do not all believe that criticizing Israel is antisemitic. If the Commission takes as given the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, its work will have the effect of stifling free speech and lead to the mischaracterization of a wide array of statements and actions as antisemitic. I urge the Commission to instead base its work on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

• Anonymous | September 28, 2025

  I am concerned by rumors that the Special Commission is going to recommend criminalizing all criticism of Israel on the dubious basis of combating antisemitism. If we criminalize any questioning of the state of Israel on the basis of protecting Jewish people, it’s going to single them out and create antisemitism — and it sets a precedent for suppressing other forms of free speech, as well! It’s straight out of Trump’s fascist playbook and tramples on the voices of the many, many Jewish Americans who object to the conduct of the Israeli government. Can you imagine being a critically minded Jewish American who wants to question aspects of the war in Gaza and being told that you can’t speak because it’s “antisemitic”? Although I am not Jewish, I have many Jewish friends, and not one of them supports the war in Gaza — they don’t just oppose certain policies or actions, they want the whole damn thing over and done with! Don’t silence real Jewish voices in the name of protecting them. Support free speech in all its forms!

• Renee Kasinsky, Member of Mass Teachers Union for Higher Education | September 27, 2025

  Public Comment to the Special Commission on September 25th

  I am testifying as a Jewish member of the Boston Workers Circle, an emerita faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Department of Criminal Justice and a parent of a Jewish Peruvian young adult with autism. The backdrop and context of participation in this Commission has been totally influenced by the political conflict in Gaza for the past almost two years, yet it appears to be the elephant in the room. It has created sharp divisions between those persons who support the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza and those who are opposed to Israeli’s actions. It has also witnessed sharp fractures within the Jewish communities of those who support zionism and those who are opposed to it.

  Since October 7, 2023 we can see this conflict played out in the US between organizations and universities who have adopted the Holocaust definition of anti-semitism and those who have opposed its use. My Jewish community has opposed the use of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism because it conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel, including opposition to Zionism. Its author never intended it to be a basis for legislation or policy. Those who support IHRA claim it represents a Jewish consensus. Those who oppose it claim it is being weaponized to silence legitimate debate. Other academic and legal bodies also see the acceptance of the IHRA definition as a threat to free speech, and our first amendment rights.

  The American Association of University Professors, of which I belong, have condemned IHRA as a threat to academic freedom. The Harvard University scholars of Jewish Studies in their amicus brief in Harvard’s federal lawsuit contend that IHRA misrepresents Jewish diversity as well as violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Jews are subjected to harmful stereotypes about what constitutes an “authentic” Jewish identity.

  I think IHRA views Jews as victims and not as actors capable of inflicting racism and violence on Palestinians and others. This framing results in being blind to other types of racism such as Islamophobia. It threatens constitutional protections against state establishment of religion by setting the boundaries of Jewish identity, belief and belonging. We don’t do this for any other ethnic groups. As an educator, I value a wider framework that acknowledges all the different forms of hate and discrimination including anti-Muslim, anti-Black, Zionism, anti-Palestinian, etc. as they are all derived from the same source.

  In order to eradicate the roots of this hatred and institutionalized discrimination the solutions to combat anti-semitism need to be seen as part and parcel of the same struggle. This is the world my Jewish ancestors fought for in their era. A world in which everyone can live together with equal rights and dignity and protect one another. Everyone’s safety depends on the safety of everyone else. Jewish safety in Israel and here in Boston depends upon the safety and well-being of Palestinians and all other marginalized groups.

• Carrie, Member of Boston Workers Circle | September 26, 2025

  Public Comment to the Special Commission on September 25th

  Many thanks to the commissioners for holding this open session. Being able to share my thoughts with you, during the Jewish Days of Awe, is so deeply meaningful to me. I’ve lived in Sudbury for over 30 years now, attending Congregation Beth El for some 25 of them. I grew up on Long Island, where being Jewish was so normative that I was protected from the antisemitism my mother assured me still existed in the US. But then I lived as a young adult in 2 different Midwestern states, in places where my neighbors had never before met someone Jewish and my 7 year old daughter was told by a classmate she’d be going to Hell for failing to accept Christ. It was disconcerting and very uncomfortable.

  These days, unfortunately, I’m back to feeling not just uncomfortable but outright unsafe. It seems our state is being pushed by this commission toward a compulsory political stance, namely, one that interprets the bulk of pro-Palestinian advocacy as antisemitic because, it is asserted, the state of Israel and the modern political ideology of Zionism are universally and necessarily central to Jewish identity. Key to this push is the promotion of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, recently criticized as an easily abused threat to free speech by none other than one of its lead drafters, Kenneth Stern. And erased in this push are the thousands of Jewish residents of Massachusetts who are non- or anti-Zionist, and who understand Zionism very differently than does the Commission.

  As someone who is proudly Jewish and vocally opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I find that I’m not only not protected by but actually in the crosshairs of this problematic framing of antisemitism. Unlike the far more vulnerable Massachusetts residents who have been targeted or punished for their advocacy, I’m retired and white, without job, college degree, or visa to worry about. But I know from history that being typecast a “bad Jew” is dangerous, an antisemitic trope, especially at a time when the (often antisemitic) Christian Zionist right is ascendant and our federal government has been wielding accusations of antisemitism against its targets.

  A strategy for combating antisemitism should uphold the rights and values of a multiracial democracy, not eerily evoke past “Enemy of the State” designations for disfavored political stances and groups. That is not a path to safety, for Jews or anyone.

• Elana, Jewish Resident of Boston | September 26, 2025

  I am a Jewish woman who has had strong ties to Israel throughout my life. In that context I want to state unequivocally that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. This includes stating that US tax money should not be defending Israel’s wars or that Israel’s behavior in Gaza has similarities to previous war crimes, or even that all residents of Israel and the occupied territories should have equal control over their fates such that it is not necessarily a Jewish controlled state. None of this is inherently antisemitic – it is political. Some people who say it, may be antisemitic, but many are not. And even if it makes some Israel-identified Jewish people or some evangelical Zionists uncomfortable, that still does not make it antisemitic.

  Secondly, as a Jewish person whose family suffered through antisemitism in Eastern Europe, and multiple pograms, I can tell you that the more Jews are singled out as needing special protection or attention, the more antisemitism will grow. The only thing that has ever lessened antisemitism is open societies where people can say what they believe even if it is offensive. I wish people didn’t hate Jews. But I know that some people do and because of the freedom in the society I grew up in, I have never had to confront anything more than discomfort.

  I appreciate the Commission’s efforts to address antisemitism in schools, but I am terrified that if the IHRA definition and its examples is codified or a hotline for reporting any discomfort related to Judaism or Israel is established in schools, we Jews will be the ones to pay the biggest price. 

• David J. Weinstein, American Jew | September 26, 2025

  I am an 80 year old Jewish American. I was raised to see Israel as critical to the survival of the Jewish people. Acting on this belief, I voluntarily participated in the 1967 Six Day War which led to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I believed this occupation would be short and lead to peace between Israel and its neighbors. I was sorely mistaken. 58 years of occupation has corrupted the morality of too many Israelis and led to a state of permanent conflict. The attack by Hamas on October 7 was an unjustifiable war crime. The Israeli response has been equally criminal but on a scale to become genocidal. Therefore, to criticize the war on Gaza or other actions or policies of the Israeli state is the opposite of anti-semitism. Such criticism is upholding a core Jewish value: the sanctity of all life.

• Michelle Golden, Jewish Retired Public School Teacher | September 26, 2025

  Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s, my Jewish Sunday School education taught me that Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land”; and that contributing each week to the Jewish National Fund was bringing much needed forests to the land of Israel. No mention was made of the 700,000 Palestinians who were forced to flee from land they then had confiscated, nor that the the very old, life-sustaining olive trees of the Palestinians were destroyed planting those JNF forests. It has taken me many, many decades to learn the truth. What I will be asked to do now, if the current recommendations of this panel are passed, is unlearn (or at least not speak of another truth)–that Israel is committing a most horrible genocide in Gaza, and that even saying that could label me an anti-semite.

  I love my Jewish religion. It has taught me to question and speak up, to value justice, and to work for the betterment of the world. It has also taught me that when one is hungry, it is my duty to feed them. I can not believe that in this country and at this time, when free speech is so under attack, that I could be accused of antisemitism for speaking up about the injustices occurring in my name and with my tax dollars.

  Having watched numerous hearings of this committee, I witnessed people being called out for criticizing legacy Jewish organizations. But, what if those organizations do not speak for me and the overwhelming majority of the people who testified yesterday. Stacking the committee with people who already have a preset position that the IHRA definition does define antisemitism makes these hearings seem like a hoax. Indeed, attaching the need for this commission to a budget bill made it seem, to me, that the recommendations were a forgone conclusion.

  There is real antisemitism. The rise of nationalism of the far right is a real fear. And yet, this is not addressed in the recommendations. The consequences for teachers, students, people of conscience, not to mention the Palestians of adopting your recommendations is severe. Please listen to the clear public opinion even though it differs from that of the panel members. Thank you.

• Anonymous | September 26, 2025

  Supporting Palestine is not Anti-Semitic. This trope is being used to support the destruction of Gaza. As Jews, we of all people should be able to identify and stand up against ethnic cleansing.

• Naomi Scheman, Retired Philosophy Professor, Member of Boston Workers Circle | September 25, 2025

  Public Comment to Special Commission on September 25, 2025

  It may be clueless or disrespectful to schedule this opportunity for community input during the most sacred days in the Jewish calendar, but I want to respond in a way that takes the obligations of these days seriously. As a secular Jew, there are aspects of Judaism and its traditions that are deeply meaningful to me, that lie at the heart of who I am as a person. The obligation, especially during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to engage in moral accounting is one of them. What have I done, or failed to do, that falls short of the person I am called upon to be? Who have I harmed in the pursuit of my own interests? To whom have I failed to show empathy? How have I failed to adequately speak out against harms that are being carried out in my name?

  When I face up to what we now need to acknowledge is genocide being committed against Palestinians, especially the people of Gaza, I am obligated as a human being—and especially as a Jew —to speak out, to do whatever I can to try to put a stop to it. It is abhorrent to everything that holds me in my Jewish identity to try to secure safety for Jews at the expense of other people, as it has long been the stated policy of the state of Israel to do. Unfortunately, according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and the clear bias of this Commission, when, in fulfilling a Jewish obligation, I speak out against Zionism, I am guilty of antisemitism. You’ll tell me that many Jews disagree with me. Of course! We’re Jews—arguing, often passionately, is what we do. But what we don’t do—must not do—what it’s shameful (in Yiddish, a Shonda) to do—is to try to use the power of the state to shut down those who disagree with us. 

• Lise Brody, Retired High School Teacher | September 25, 2025

  Public Comment to Special Commission on September 25, 2025

  I’m Lise Brody. I’m Jewish, and I’m terrified. Antisemitism flourishes in unstable times and authoritarian regimes, and I’m as scared as I’ve ever been.

  We’ve been repeatedly assured that the commission will not play into a racist, repressive agenda, but there’s been no word as to how it will safeguard against that. Commissioners have asserted that criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Yet over and over, presenters and commissioners have failed to differentiate between people experiencing violence because they’re Jewish, and people ostracized for their political stance. To maintain credibility, the commission must acknowledge that “Zionist” is not a protected identity, and social tension over political views is not oppression. Muddying those waters sets the stage for devastating damage to civil rights.

  At the last hearing a group of actual antisemitism experts offered a roadmap. Instead of listening in good faith, or asking meaningful questions, commissioners bullied them, willfully misinterpreted the panel’s words, rebutted claims the panel had not made, and shouted them down when the panelists tried, again, to clarify that they were not downplaying the horrors of antisemitism: they were warning that it is on the brink of becoming a crisis, that the historical circumstances are already lined up, and that the commission’s approach will accelerate that descent. We know what can happen. We should be scared.

  I would like to trust that this commission has all Jews’ interests at heart. But it’s hard to believe this when, over and over, only certain Jews are seen as worthy of respect or protection, and when a core tenet of Judaism – honoring our interconnectedness with other oppressed peoples, including those being massacred in Gaza – is disregarded in the interest of protecting a foreign government. Thank you.

• Billy Grossman, K-12 Educator & Jewish Massachusetts Voter | September 25, 2025

  Public Comment to Special Commission on September 25, 2025

  My name is Billy Grossman. I recently moved to MA and live and work in Greenfield as an educator at a public charter school for grades 7-12. I’m a Jew and I’m deeply concerned about this special commission that is supposed to be combating antisemitism.

  At age 32, I’m lucky enough to have only experienced antisemitism in the context of people mistakenly conflating Judaism with Zionism. They were only trying to criticize Zionism. Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing and antizionism is not antisemitic or Judeophobic.

  I learned from my grandparents and Hebrew School teachers that Jews have been scapegoated for many years. We make an easy target for scapegoating because our torah has strong values rooted in social justice, tikkun olam, and tochecha- the loving rebuke. We are not willing to see injustices happen before our eyes without speaking up. This makes others see us as different and unique and sometimes it makes others fear us and scapegoat us. While I’m proud of being unique, I don’t want to be seen as different in a way that makes others fearful, and I definitely don’t want that for my Jewish students. That is a recipe for a disaster – othering, scapegoating, and bullying.

  The best way to combat antisemitism is to create an environment that is welcoming of Jewish values – repairing the world and calling for justice for all. This commission’s recommendations do just the opposite. They create an environment where Jewish values of speaking out against injustice, racism and genocide are shunned and criminalized. These recommendations are straight out of Trump’s fascist playbook. I moved here to escape the fascism that is taking over much of the rest of the country. I feel disappointment, anger, and dread about this commission. Shame on this commission for attempting to turn Massachusetts into a fascist state. For the wellness and safety of all students and teachers, and all Semitic people, including Jews, I suggest that it be disbanded.

• Cole Harrison, Massachusetts Peace Action | September 25, 2025

  Public Comment to Special Commission on September 25, 2025

  My name is Cole Harrison. I’m a staff member for Massachusetts Peace Action, which represents 2400 members in the Commonwealth who provide financial support for our work.

  We call for an end to US support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The US provides the bulk of the planes, helicopters, missiles, bombs, shells, and bulldozers that Israel is using as we speak to level Gaza and starve its population. Israel has long since turned away from any policy that would enable Jews and Palestinians to live together with equal rights in Israel-Palestine. It has settled on a policy of annihilation. It has attacked many neighboring countries in the past two years, including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and most recently, Qatar. US taxpayers are paying for all this, with support from both Democrats and Republicans in Washington.

  The American people demand a change in the policy of genocide. 41% of Americans, including 67% of Democrats, believe that Israeli military actions in Gaza constitute either “genocide” or are “akin to genocide”, while only 22% of Americans and 7% of Democrats think Israels’ actions are justified. Protests across Massachusetts erupted to demand political leaders, universities, and the media stop protecting genocide.

  To suppress these protests and confuse the issue, politicians charged that protesters supporting Palestinians’ rights are antisemitic. They formed the Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism to make sure nobody can criticize Israel without being called an antisemite. Has any commission member spoken out against Israel’s atrocities and US support for them? If not, I suggest that your commission is stacked. It is out of step with the people of Massachusetts.

  The government of Israel paid Senator Velis $6,000 to visit in January to plan together how to make sure it’s safe to defend Israel’s occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, in Massachusetts. Senator Velis should recuse himself because it’s unethical for a legislator to accept payment from a foreign government and then write the laws of Massachusetts to benefit that government.

  Antisemitism is real. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us”. The Tree of Life synagogue murderer was motivated by Holocaust denial and white replacement conspiracy theories. Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute. Donald Trump has a long history of antisemitic remarks. So does Kash Patel. But Trump is pro-Israel. The commission ignores the real threat of antisemitism, which mostly comes from the far right, anti-DEI, anti-immigrant forces, in its quest to defend Israel at any cost.

• Elizabeth Zoob | September 25, 2025

  I am a Jew who has watched several of your hearings, and they are a McCarthy-esque kangaroo court. You might as well call this “the commission to silence pro-Palestinian voices.” And for people who are so concerned with antisemitism, why have you scheduled your final hearing during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are known as the Days of Awe? I don’t understand why you apparently care more about antisemitism than you do about Islamophobia or anti-Black racism. This is the kind of “special treatment” for Jews that fosters antisemitism; it does nothing to help eliminate it. 

• Lisa Guisbond, Executive Director, Citizens for Public Schools | September 25, 2025

  Public Comment to the Special Commission, September 25, 2025

  Good afternoon. I am Lisa Guisbond, Executive Director of Citizens for Public Schools. I’m sharing our Board’s concerns about the impact of your recommendations on fighting antisemitism, as well as on academic freedom and freedom of expression in our schools. Right now, when such freedoms are increasingly under assault, we must work to protect our nation’s foundational values.

  I have experienced antisemitism. CPS itself started as a program within the Massachusetts chapter of the American Jewish Congress. CPS believes public schools are the foundation for a healthy democracy. We believe students should experience vigorous, respectful discussion of the issues of our time so that when they become adults, they can be active participants in civic life. Our democracy should encourage discussion about matters that may evoke strong emotions. Through this lens, we fear that this commission’s actions could suppress discussion of Israeli gov’t actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

  Antisemitism’s existence is not a reason to shut down discussions about one of the most important issues of our time, one in which our government plays a decisive role. Former US ambassador Alan Solomont told the commission that college campuses suffer from “a lack of training and preparation that students receive before they enter college to engage in civil discourse and dialogue across differences.” He said, “Some allegations about Israel may make Jewish students uncomfortable, but the exercise of free speech should not make Jewish students on campus unsafe.” CPS calls for discussion of difficult issues in history and current events. Such conversations must not devolve into personal attacks. But the solution is not to avoid the issue. Our students should be encouraged to engage with controversial ideas and to think for themselves.

  Specifically, we ask that any recommendations go through the legislative process. And we ask that you reject recommendations that criminalize or label education about US policies towards Israel/Palestine as “hate.”

• Johanna, Jewish Massachusetts Voter | September 25, 2025

  I am a Jewish Massachusetts resident, married to a teacher, following the Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism’s proceedings and I am writing again to share my concerns about its work. It is very important to hear public comment and take a range of views into serious consideration so it is extremely disappointing that this opportunity, one of very few, for public comment falls in the midst of the days of awe!

  I have been appalled at the tone of the hearings and how the Commission has moved forward with its K-12 recommendations without meaningfully responding to the concerns which have been raised. I strongly oppose the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, or any other definition that includes criticism of Israel or Zionism. Such interpretations of antisemitism that equate antizionism with antisemitism are used to justify suppression of political speech and to censor fact-based education. Stifling discussion, education, and silencing different opinions regarding Israel and Palestine will not address the real problem of antisemitism.

  In our current national context, where fights against antisemitism are often used as a pretext for dismantling civil liberties, it is crucial that Massachusetts takes a different path. We can and must combat antisemitism within a framework of safety and freedom for everyone. To do this, we need leaders willing to listen to a variety of experts, and to the public, and to consider the issue with nuance, not according to the Project Esther playbook. As we see attacks on free speech escalate in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, I ask that Massachusetts lawmakers not enact Trump’s agenda.

  Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond, with the full support of the US, and it must be ok to criticize an apartheid state. My Jewish values, shaped by my family and in Hebrew School, center around tikkun olam – repairing the world. I was taught “Never Again” means never again for anyone and that if we see injustices we must speak up. Misrepresenting this issue is dangerous.

  Thank you for your attention to these concerns.

• Sophie | September 25, 2025

  The commission has relied almost exclusively on flawed data from the ADL, a Zionist organization while ignoring complaints and opinions from non-Zionist Jews. One of Judaism’s main values is Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). Promoting a nation state (Israel) that is ethnically cleansing Palestinians completely goes against our beliefs. As does censoring the speaking out against it. Anti-semitism is a real problem, but we are not threatened by the liberation of another group of people. We are threatened when speaking out against those things is punished. The commission needs to stop focusing on anti-Zionism rhetoric, as so many Jews (myself included) themselves identify staunchly as anti-Zionist, and focus more on actual reports of antisemitism that are rooted in white supremacy.

• Anonymous | September 25, 2025

  Like the state of Israel, I am almost 80 years old. I grew up in a home with a first language Yiddish speaking father and a Zionist mother. They are no longer alive, but they handed me a religion that I cherish. During Rosh Hashana, I am reminded of the heart of what Judaism is. During the service I attend we do a chant. It is a list of attributes that includes: compassion, patience, forbearance. This isn’t just a list of attributes, they are the names of God Himself. After Moses receives the tablets at Sinai, he asks God what his name is, so he can tell the people. God answers with this list of attributes. Starting with Compassion. Slaughtering thousands of people, innocent or not, is not compassionate. It is not Jewish no matter what anyone calls it. Israel calls itself a Jewish state. That does not make it so. It calls itself a homeland to the Jewish people, that does not make it so. It claims to protect the Jewish people. It is making the world more dangerous for us.

  Obviously, these are complicated issues. What does it mean to be Jewish? What is the role of the so-called Jewish state? There are many opinions about these things. Which there should be. So let’s hash it out. Please don’t oversimplify a very complicated thing. Don’t repress differences of opinion and call that protecting us from antisemitism. Not acknowledging that the Jewish people are individuals with many differences of opinion about many things, including Israel, is itself antisemitic. We are dehumanized when we are not allowed to express our moral outrage about what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people. All people, Jewish or not, have the right (and perhaps duty) to express our moral beliefs.

  I was an Adult Educator in Massachusetts for many years. My classrooms were filled with people of varying nationalities, races, religions, and class backgrounds. We found safety in listening to each other and respecting everyone’s experiences and ideas. This is safety: respecting everyone’s input; understanding other people’s perspectives; not assuming that people of a particular background all think alike. Don’t be fooled: Antisemitism has nothing to do with the criticism of Israel. It needs to be addressed within the context of the oppression of all minority or vulnerable people. Isolating Jewish issues will only alienate us. Together we will figure it out and help diverse communities in Massachusetts thrive.

  Thank you for considering my opinion.

• Anna Cooper, LICSW | September 25, 2025

  Public Comment to the Special Commission, September 25, 2025

  My name is Anna and I am one of the observant Jews who have chosen to be here, despite the conflict, because I am so troubled by the actions of this commission.

  I’m here to say, on the record, that you don’t have the support of the Jewish community in what you’re doing here. I think that is abundantly clear from the speakers today. The vast majority of speakers today have voiced strong opposition to your approach, just as they did at the Commission’s last opportunity for public comment, and just as they did to the IHRA bill sponsored by the Commission’s very own Steve Howitt.

  I suspect some of you know that you don’t have our community’s support, and I am sorry to say, you don’t seem to care. But for those of you that are confused about all the opposition to this Commission from Massachusetts Jews, let me offer this.

  You have the support of some Jewish institutions, sure. But what of it? The ADL and the JCRC and the Federation – these are not elected bodies that represent Massachusetts Jews, they are not our clergy, and they are not our friends.

  These organizations have no claim to special legitimacy in the Jewish community. Where is Jewish Voice for Peace on this Commission? Where is If Not Now? Where is T’ruah? Where is Bend the Arc? Where are Rabbis for Ceasefire? Where are the voices of the thousands of anti and non Zionist Jews in this state?

  This Commission cherry picks the data and then you say the data supports you. You praise supposedly expert witnesses, but then you belittle and dismiss the Jewish experts who disagree with your pre-set opinions. You raise anecdotes to the status of proven fact, but then you dismiss the experiences of non and anti Zionist Jews, whose concerns seem not to matter to you at all.

  You know that we’re also Jews right? You know that we also experience antisemitism?

  Your commission does not accurately represent the true diversity of Jewish experience across this state, and as such, you cannot speak for what is in our best interest. You may have some institutions at your back, but your project here – political to its core – does not have the mandate of the people.

  What you’re doing here is disingenuous and dangerous.

• Bob Mason, Retired Clinical Social Worker & Member of Jewish Voice for Peace Boston | September 24, 2025

  I appreciate this opportunity to express my concerns to the Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism. The Special Commission’s charge to develop recommendations to combat antisemitism is very important and, to me, very personal as a Jew who has experienced incidents of this prejudice a number of times. These have included the drawing of a Swastika on my garage doors, threats made to my children by schoolmates, references to Jews as “kikes”, and numerous jokes that rely on negative stereotypes. I have friends who were directly affected by the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where I lived for many years. And I realize that Jews are not unique in experiencing acts of prejudice that have also targeted African Americans, the Gay and Transgender community, Muslim Americans, and many others. A lifetime of experiences and my social work profession have taught me that no one group of people is safe until all people are safe. In fact, isolating one group for special protection can actually decrease their safety. As a Jew that is one of my fears. I am also apprehensive about the Commission’s adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism which includes criticisms of the Israeli government as potential examples of this scourge. In contrast, the Jewish community has always held diverse opinions about the establishment of a nation-state for the Jewish people, from the beginning of the Zionist political movement. As a Jew who is heartsick about the Israeli government’s slaughter and starvation of civilians in Gaza and has protested many times, I have been accused, via bullhorn amplification, of supporting rapists and baby killers and told I couldn’t be Jewish. In other words, I have experienced hate speech from, ostensibly, other Jews. The IHRA definition presents a very real threat to me and other Jews who make a clear distinction between our religion and a nation state. It also represents a stifling of Palestinians’ free speech and the right to assembly. Of equal concern is that the membership of the Commission doesn’t reflect the full diversity in the Jewish community and other Jews who represent that diversity not only haven’t had as much opportunity to testify but have also, at times, been criticized by the Commission members.

  In closing, I call on the legislature to carefully analyze not only the recommendations of the Commission, but also the bias in membership and the process exhibited during its hearings. I am advocating that the Commonwealth’s next steps should correct this and be more inclusive, more transparent, and more constructive.

  Specifically:

  1. Recommendations should be reviewed and potentially amended through a legislative committee and public hearing process;

  2. Insist that policy recommendations address antisemitism within an anti-racist framework that doesn’t treat it as an exception to other forms of hate;

  3. Reject any policy recommendations that equates Zionism with Judaism or Jewish identity;

  4. And, reject recommendations that criminalize or label education about or advocacy on US government policies towards Israel/ Palestine as hate. This would be a profound attack on free speech and having an educated electorate.

• Michael Felsen, Federal Attorney (retired) & Past President of Boston Workers Circle | September 22, 2025

  My name is Michael Felsen. I’m a first generation American Jew, the child of two parents who were refugees from Nazi Germany and who lost many family members in the Holocaust, including my aunt, Johanna Felsen. I’ve lived in Boston for the past 50 years. I have reviewed this Commission’s initial findings and preliminary recommendations, as well as the analysis of that document and the alternative recommendations put forward by Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts (TIM). I did not participate in any way in the discussion or drafting of the TIM document, but I find it well-reasoned, well-supported, and persuasive. I have previously presented my views to the Commission, and published them, for general consumption, at The Times of Israel. They mirror, in very truncated form, much of what TIM criticizes in the Commission’s preliminary findings, and endorse the alternatives TIM presents. During these truly perilous times, with the Trump administration deploying autocratic means to crack down on protected speech, and its transparently cynical claims of fighting antisemitism to force universities to bend the knee, the last thing this Commonwealth needs are entrenched policies – like formal adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism – that will inevitably stifle the kinds of legitimate political disagreements and political speech that an inquiring and robust civic education demand. The best way to fight antisemitism – hatred of Jews because they are Jews – is to fight all forms of such hatreds, including hatred of blacks because they are black, or Muslims because they are Muslim – in a unified way, rather than an individualized way. As Israeli-born Eyal Press put it in a recent article in the New Yorker, “it is hard to imagine a more effective way to breed anti-Jewish animus” than to single out Jews as “entitled to protections that other groups apparently don’t merit.” Let’s not fall into that dangerous trap.

• Amy, Massachusetts Voter and Educator | September 22, 2025

  Any K-12 curriculum that addresses anti semitism should also address ALL forms of racism including Islamophobia. The rights of Palestinians need to be addressed in any discussion of Israel. Lack of support for Israel is NOT anti-Semitism. The far right (MAGA, white Christian evangelicals and Zionists) must NOT dictate who is a Jew and who is not a Jew. This practice is itself anti-semitic. These actions are calculated attempts to crush dissent, weaponize anti-Semitism and to advance white supremacy.

• Mariel Barnesky, Synagogue Board Member | September 19, 2025

  I have spent time in Israel and Palestine and strongly believe that Israel is an apartheid state, with Jewish Israelis granted rights that are routinely denied to Christian and Muslim Israelis. I have witnessed firsthand the brutality of the occupation. I have seen the genocide in Gaza livestreamed to my cell phone. It is my obligation as a Jew to speak out against these atrocities. Does this mean that I am antisemitic? Any definition of antisemitism that would paint my advocacy as antisemitic is inherently flawed and must be re-examined.

• David Greenberg, Retired Educator | September 19, 2025

  Although I am a non-practicing Jew, I strongly believe in Jewish morals, which do NOT include genocide! Criticism of the state of Israel, including of the ever-growing settlements on the West Bank and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, does NOT constitute antisemitism. Antisemitism, to me, means hating Jews for the sole reason that they are Jews. Criticizing state actions, whether they be in Israel or any other country, is the responsibility of all who value every human life. This Commission should make it clear that criticism of Israel does not constitute antisemitism. Thank you for your consideration.

• Aaron Shakow, Ph.D. | September 18, 2025

  Letter to the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism (Published in the Boston Review)

  To the Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism and its Co-Chairs, Senator John C. Velis and Representative Simon Cataldo:

  I write as a longtime member of the Jewish community in our state, the parent of a child in the Cambridge Public Schools, and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School with doctoral training in Middle East history, including the modern history of Israel and Palestine. I am descended from Rabbi Akiva’s student, Yochanan Ha-Sandlar, and my family has played a role in the Jewish community for centuries. For example, when my great-great grandfather expressed skepticism about Zionism in a sermon at the Great Synagogue of Pinsk, a young man named Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president, threatened him with violence.

  I mention all this to emphasize my deep personal and professional investment in the subjects of the Commission’s work.

  After observing your latest hearing in person at the State House on September 8, however, I have come to the conclusion that the Special Commission should either dramatically revise its approach or be disbanded. Its rhetoric is toxic; it has empowered commissioners whose use of evidence and testimony is careless and even unethical; it lacks basic knowledge about the context of its inquiry; and its co-chairs seem intent on exploiting the prejudices and fears of a particular faction of the Jewish community to aid their political careers. During the hearing, I heard commissioners assert charges of “assault” as fact when they have been contradicted by video evidence and rejected in court, misrepresent public data to muddy the testimony of an expert witness, and attempt to turn political disagreements into a “crisis” that justifies emergency rule in Massachusetts schools. With our nation’s democratic order in danger, this Special Commission cannot be trusted to meet the moment.

  The testimony of a student at Harvard Law School, whom the commissioners selected to represent the perspective of Jewish students at Harvard, was illuminating. The student was apparently chosen due to her disagreement with other Jewish students at the school. “The residue of that year in the aftermath of October 2023 seeped into my law school experience,” she testified. “Some people refuse to engage in a conversation about Israel unless you acknowledge the genocide in Palestine.” But why was her viewpoint regarded by the Commission as uniquely relevant to an understanding of the atmosphere for Jews at Harvard?

  To drill down on the problem, allow me to inspect one of the student’s polemical claims and the Commission’s response. The student asserted that anyone who uses the phrase “from the river to the sea” at a demonstration is “ignorant” of a hidden genocidal meaning known to pro-Israel Jews. But this is a matter of historical record, and the student who testified to the Commission is on the wrong side of it.

  “From the river to the sea” has never been a commentary about human rights or military strategy. Rather, it is a statement about territorial sovereignty. Those who founded the Irgun terrorist group in the 1930s called for Jewish rule on “both banks of the Jordan,” as is evident from the Irgun’s logo from that era. (See the top of the second page of this file in the archives of the Jabotinsky Institute.) After the independent state of Jordan was recognized in 1946, the geographical frame of such pronouncements moved westward. When the West Bank and Gaza Strip were conquered by Israel in 1967, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan announced in the Israeli Knesset that “the land of Israel between the Sea and the Jordan cannot be divided” and that Israel’s military would occupy it permanently.

  A decade later, Irgun commander Menachem Begin took power as prime minister of Israel, and his Likud Party stated formally that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” Somehow this stance is not taken to have an occult genocidal meaning, though there are many in the Israeli settler movement who make that association explicit, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly echoes their language.

  Meanwhile, the Arabic phrase “from the water to the water” (min al maya lil maya) appeared in Palestinian folk tales to describe the area that the storytellers inhabited. After the British declared the region “Mandatory Palestine” under their sovereign authority and announced an intention to create a “national home” for Jewish people there, the slogan “Palestine is Arab from the water to the water” was remembered, pointing out among other things that 90 percent of the local population were not Jews. The phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” appears in popular discourse only after the 1980s and would appear to be a translation of and response to what was by then a common Israeli statement of territorial absolutism.

  The commissioners should also know—as reported in the New York Times, for example—that many Palestinians and Israelis today use the phrase “from the river to the sea” to call for a state of all of its people in which there is no gerrymander for a particular ethnicity. Its use in this sense can be seen widely on protest posters in Tel Aviv as well as in front of the Massachusetts State House, where a group called “Pro Peace Boston,” consisting of Palestinians, Muslims, Israelis, and American Jews, has used the phrase almost every Sunday since October 2023.

  My intention is not to criticize the Harvard Law student who testified before you for the holes in her historical and cultural knowledge. She is studying to be a lawyer, and it is not her fault that she has been asked to give her opinions on matters where she has no expertise. My point is that the Special Commission has shown itself to be unfamiliar with the background of current political controversies in our state, unable to assess whether the information it is getting is accurate, and oblivious to the complex dynamics within the Massachusetts Jewish community. The Commission’s co-chairs seem insistent on becoming the patrons of one particular faction of Massachusetts Jews—not only providing a platform for them to dominate a different faction but also empowering them to use their access as “court Jews” to destroy the right to free expression in our state. According to the student, the hidden genocidal meaning of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is so unambiguous that the state legislature should intervene to prevent its use. Clearly she has not yet arrived in her legal studies at Article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, or, in the public school context, M.G.L. C.71§ 82. Yet the commissioners subjected her testimony to no critical inspection, treated her most polemical assertions as an empirical reality, and praised her proposed resolutions.

  In a call after Monday’s hearing, partisan Jewish organizations—and Senator Velis himself—complained of “gaslighting” by four Jewish scholars affiliated with Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff (CJFS) whom the commissioners crammed into a fifteen-minute panel: Hilary Lustick, Jeremy Menchik, Frances Tanzer, and Jonathan Feingold. I did indeed witness gaslighting in Room A-2 of the State House, but it went in a different direction.

  Throughout the long hearing, other than Professor Lustick’s redirection of a question by Senator Velis, there was no mention of the actual reason for the intense political conflict in our state over the last twenty-three months: the fact that Israel has almost completely destroyed the Gaza Strip, displaced its two million inhabitants, killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians with explosive weapons, and established a state of siege in which thousands of others have died without access to food and urgent medical care, all as an act of revenge for the October 7 attacks. No reference at all was made to the glaring fact that every significant human rights organization in the world, including in Israel, has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza or that on August 31, the leading international scholarly association of genocide scholars made a similar assessment.

  The failure to mention the actual context in which the Commission’s inquiry is taking place is rightly described as “gaslighting.” In particular, it is the context for the objections to the Commission’s recommendations made by CJFS members, whose scholarship the co-chairs dismissed with such unearned and, frankly, undignified disrespect, casting the legislature of this Commonwealth into disrepute.

  For almost two years now, the actions of Israel’s government have been supported by one faction of the Jewish community, which has now come to the legislature for protection against those who find those acts outrageous. This faction has strategically conflated the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 with nonviolent expressions of solidarity with Gaza and outrage at the unchecked killing of Palestinians. And it has coordinated with organizations such as the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which were working closely with the Israeli government well before October 7, to impose its views on U.S. higher education. (On July 25, 2023, top officials of the Brandeis Center, Hillel, the Zionist Federation in the United States, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations spoke to this effect in a hearing before the Knesset.) Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has made substantial funding available to these and other groups to influence the regulation of political expression on American campuses; the current minister, Amichai Chikli, is a political operative who has openly allied the government with white supremacist European parties.

  To illustrate the devastating effects on the broader Jewish community in Massachusetts of this faction’s participation in influence campaigns by the Israeli government and other right-wing institutions, allow me to offer a personal example. In December 2023, my son was in his elementary school classroom when an airplane passed overhead pulling a banner reading “Harvard Hates Jews.” The stunt was part of a campaign targeting Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay and aiming to control political expression on campus on the grounds that nonviolent protest was making students sympathetic to Israel feel “unsafe.” During the bus ride home, my son, who is bilingual in Hebrew and English, argued with an Israeli classmate, previously his friend, who insisted that Harvard affiliates opposing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza were Hamas supporters. His classmate told my son that he was also a Hamas supporter, and they got into an altercation. When I picked him up at the bus stop, he was inconsolable.

  What I want to emphasize to members of the Special Commission—and also to the officers of the legislature who should be overseeing it more closely—is that the campaign by a faction of the Jewish community over the past twenty-three months to systematically label political outrage as “antisemitism” is causing destruction at every level of civil society in our state. The Commission’s wholesale and uninformed advocacy of this faction’s point of view in its recommendations threatens to institutionalize such destructive conflict permanently in our schools—first among K–12 students like my son, and soon in our institutions of higher education. Moreover, the Commission has refused to solicit testimony from the Jewish community as a whole. So far as I can tell, Senator Velis and Representative Cataldo agreed to hear briefly from Jewish academics affiliated with CJFS only so that the Commission could subject them to ritual denunciation on social media.

  This failure to consider the Jewish community in Massachusetts in its totality is important, because it means that the Special Commission’s K–12 recommendations would actively discriminate against a broad segment of the Jewish community, including my son, in the practice of our religious and cultural identity. As Professor Menchik pointed out, current statistics put non-Zionist Jews in Massachusetts as high as 40 percent of the state’s Jewish population. Indeed, based on my anecdotal observations among Jewish Harvard students over the last twenty-three months, as well as national polling, Israel’s actions in Gaza and the intolerance of its supporters have likely increased that proportion. This should not surprise us since, as political scientist Mira Sucharov has indicated, American Jews’ identification with Zionism seems to be heavily dependent on the way it is defined. When the definition accurately describes the current reality, i.e. “Zionism means the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” Sucharov found that 69 percent of Jewish respondents opposed it and only 10 percent supported.

  There is no representative of non-Zionist Massachusetts Jewish residents on the Special Commission, and under the supervision of its co-chairs, its work product is likely to harm them directly. I can easily imagine that, had an anonymous “antisemitism” tip line such as the one recommended by the Commission been available in late 2023, my son’s Israeli classmate, or his parents, might have denounced him, leading to a mandatory disciplinary process. There is a term for this kind of state-sponsored discrimination against Jewish people, and it is in the name of the Commission itself.

  At several junctures in Monday’s hearing, the co-chairs and their witnesses posed a rhetorical question: “Why the special focus on Israel?” Apparently they believe, or pretend to believe, that because Gaza is not the only example of state violence on a large scale in the world, views and expressions which make supporters of Israel uncomfortable or feel ostracized are ipso facto antisemitic.

  As a historian with expertise in the modern Middle East, I do not find this view compelling. The names of Israel’s cities and those it occupied in 1967, including Gaza itself, are at the beating heart of Western culture. The country’s capital was for centuries in the exact center of many European world maps. Israel is also the demonstration project of the post–World War II international system, and the Holocaust of Jews under the Nazis is the reason that the Genocide Convention was created. The destruction and loss of life caused by the Jewish state in Gaza has been deemed by the world’s leading body of genocide scholars to violate the very international treaty that was designed to make sure the Jewish experience was never repeated, and the government of Israel is working actively to destroy the United Nations and other institutions that were created after World War II because of their opposition to its actions. Finally, and perhaps most important, Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world and the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the Middle East. For all of these reasons, Israel is exceptional, and the current public attention it attracts is very unsurprising to any objective observer.

  Due to the Special Commission’s partiality to a partisan faction of Massachusetts Jews, such nuances of the situation have remained obscure to its members. Your recommendations amount to patronage of that group. As Professor Tanzer rightly pointed out on Monday, such patronage looks very much like state-sponsored philosemitism—not just the conceptual flip side of antisemitism, but a form of it that causes resentment and is often a prelude to pervasive bigotry against Jews. All Jews stand to be harmed by this—including me, the other members of Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff, my Israeli-born wife, and my school-aged son. Through the Special Commission’s efforts to create a crisis atmosphere which might be seen to justify emergency rule in our school system, its recommendations would arguably become one of the most significant drivers of antisemitism in Massachusetts.

  I’d like to close with a few words from my grandmother’s grandfather, Reb Velvele Margolis, who was briefly the chief rabbi of Boston before he was lured away to New York. Prior to his arrival in America, he was one of the leading rabbis in Eastern Europe and the main legal authority at the Beit Din in Grodno (present-day Belarus). In 1898, Reb Velvele attended the Second Zionist Congress, where Theodor Herzl proclaimed that a central goal of the movement should be the “conquest of the [Jewish] communities”—specifically, by taking over the Talmud Torah elementary school system at the local level and replacing it with a Zionist curriculum.

  After the Congress, Reb Velvele became a fierce opponent of Zionism, a stance he held until his death in 1935. In a Hebrew article written shortly before his immigration to the United States, he characterized Jewish nationalism by quoting Scripture: “The violent predators among your people (b’nei paritzei amcha) will lift themselves up to establish the vision; but they will fail” (Daniel 11:14). Zionism, he went on, was like a “monstrously great machine . . . Herzl’s machine.” (The analogy was used by Herzl himself both in his diaries and in The Jewish State.) He defined the central mitzva of “Herzl’s Torah” as the “conquest of the communities” (kibush ha-kehilot).

  The Hebrew word he used here—kibush—is the same one applied today to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

  Certainly many Jewish people disagreed with Velvele at the time, and in twenty-first-century Massachusetts the Jewish community continues to be deeply split. But by aligning itself openly with a particular faction, the Special Commission has not only created recommendations that would impose viewpoint discrimination on all Massachusetts residents, harming our democratic values and creating an opening for authoritarian intervention by the Trump administration in our schools and universities. It has also interposed itself in the self-determination of Jews throughout the Commonwealth. The fact that the legislature’s Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism is proposing to officially anathematize views that were once held by one of Boston’s leading rabbinical figures—the person who, according to his biographer, inspired the fundraising campaign that built Beth Israel Hospital—is not just an irony: it completely invalidates its approach.

  I therefore repeat my request that the Special Commission either withdraw its present recommendations and dramatically revise its method of operations, or cease to exist.

  Aaron Shakow is a Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard. A longtime member of Partners In Health and former advisor to the World Health Organization, he is coeditor of Privilege and Impunity: The Struggle for Accountability in Global Health. 

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Christopher Macdonald-Dennis, Ed.D | September 8, 2025

  My name is Dr. Christopher Macdonald-Dennis. I have served in leadership roles in diversity, equity, and inclusion for over two decades. I am the son of a Jewish father and a Latina mother, I was raised working-class, and I am gay and disabled. My life has been shaped by navigating multiple, intersecting identities that do not fit into one dominant story. This lived experience informs my analysis and my commitment to equity.

  Antisemitism is real, dangerous, and persistent. However, it cannot be understood or effectively dismantled in isolation. Antisemitism has always been intertwined with other systems of oppression, including racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, each feeding on fear of marginalized groups. The same individuals and movements that promote antisemitism frequently advance anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and Islamophobia.

  We saw this clearly at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when protesters chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” The conspiracy theory behind that chant claimed that Jews were orchestrating demographic change by bringing in immigrants, Black people, and other communities of color to displace white people from positions of power. Here, antisemitism was inseparable from racism and xenophobia.

  We saw it again in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. The shooter targeted the synagogue because he believed Jews were helping bring immigrants into the United States to “dilute” the country. His antisemitism was inextricably bound up with anti-immigrant rhetoric and white nationalist ideology. These examples demonstrate a critical truth: when we silo antisemitism, we fail to grasp how it operates within a larger ecosystem of hate, and we forfeit the opportunity to build the coalitions necessary for lasting change.

  Education is another arena where our approach must evolve. In many Jewish day schools, Sunday schools, and synagogues, students are taught a singular story: one version of Jewish identity, and one view of Israel. When these students later encounter Palestinian narratives or histories of displacement, they often feel unsafe: not because they are under physical threat, but because they have not been prepared for complexity. Without opportunities to engage with multiple truths, discomfort is easily mistaken for danger, and our ability to build solidarity is undermined.

  Recommendations

  1. Deepen, rather than dilute, DEI analysis of antisemitism.

  In the face of political pressure, there is a growing temptation to remove antisemitism from DEI frameworks or retreat from equity work altogether. This is the wrong approach. Instead, we must become more rigorous, critical, and precise in our analysis. It is true that Jews can complicate standard notions of identity, and it is true that antisemitism does not always operate in exactly the same way as other forms of oppression. These realities should prompt deeper engagement, not withdrawal. We should be mapping in detail how antisemitism functions in relationship to racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and other forms of structural bias.

  2. Engage, rather than shield, Jewish students in moments of discomfort.

  Institutions must resist the impulse to silence competing voices when Jewish students express discomfort on campus. While the concerns of these students must be heard and respected, simply making the “problem” disappear, often by shutting down Palestinian or other marginalized perspectives, fails everyone. Instead, colleges and universities should develop curricular and co-curricular strategies that prepare students to engage across difference, grapple with contested histories, and sustain dialogue even in the face of disagreement. This requires intentional, facilitated engagement that builds the skills to navigate conflict constructively.

  Conclusion

  If we are serious about ending antisemitism, our approach must be intersectional, coalition-based, and unafraid of complexity. The safety of Jewish communities is bound to the safety of all marginalized groups. Our liberation is shared, and the only path forward is together.

  Christopher Macdonald-Dennis, Ed.D, DEI and Student Affairs Professional

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Hilary Lustick, Ph.D. | September 8, 2025

  A Bid for Restorative Dialogue in K12 and Higher Education

  My name is Hilary Lustick, and I am an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The views I am expressing today are mine and do not represent my University.

  I study the potential for restorative practices to heal interpersonal harm as well as understand how different groups have experienced oppression. My recent book on culturally responsive restorative leadership demonstrates that, without explicit attention to equity, restorative circles can perpetuate the same harm and bullying they are supposed to eradicate. We need to enter these dialogues with shared goals, norms, and definitions of terms—even if those definitions are part of what is contested.

  I want to share two scenarios from my research. The first is about sexism. The second is about antisemitism.

  A scenario I witnessed, not about antisemitism:

  Andrew, a ninth grader, had been making lewd comments and gestures in English class. His teacher brought him to a restorative circle. In addition to his teacher and an administrator, Andrew got to decide who would attend. He invited his basketball coach and a few friends and teammates.

  While Andrew’s teacher spoke to his specific behavior in class and how it affected her and his classmates, each of the other individuals spoke to Andrew’s potential in general. His older teammates recalled their own growth over the course of high school and why they no longer participated in behavior they used to think was funny in class.In this conversation, Andrew seemed to shed his tough front and listened with keen, respectful interest to his peers and coach. His teacher did not report any further disruptions from Andrew for the rest of the year.

  A hypothetical scenario, about antisemitism:

  During an assembly, students were asked to present examples of discrimination they would like to change. A Palestinian and Jewish student, working together, spoke about the number of children starving in Gaza because the Israeli government would not allow aid to come through.

  Later, a parent of another Jewish student in the school called with concerns about antisemitism. They said this criticism of Israel was taken out of context, neglecting to mention the actions of Hamas or the number of Israeli Jews still in hostage, and asked that the two students be suspended for making antisemitic remarks.

  The principal instead held a discussion with the two student presenters, their parents, and the parent who made the complaint, along with their child. Before the circle, the principal spoke privately with each of these individuals to ensure they were committed to the same goal: being heard and developing empathy.

  The circle focused on the following questions: What happened at the assembly? Who was impacted and why?What needs to happen to make it right?

  Each participant heard things they disagreed with, but the principal pointed out a number of commonalities: shared grief over the ongoing war, a desire for peace, an end to hunger and fear for innocent civilians, and a sense of peace and safety at school. At one point, the Jewish parent who made the complaint became upset and said the others were ganging up on them. The principal emphasized that criticizing a country’s policies is not antisemitic. He reminded everyone of the shared goals of the conversation and asked if all remained committed.

  The group continued and decided to start an ongoing dialogue with other parents to keep hearing each other’s points of view. While they still did not agree, they believed that the format of the circle allowed them to build understanding, trust, and empathy for those they disagreed with, because they could simply sit with each other’s human experience without needing to respond, and know they would be heard, too.

  These examples demonstrate how structured dialogue can help us build the stamina, in ourselves and in our children, to hold our own pain, build empathy, and create community across difference in ways that discipline, termination, shaming, censorship, and suspension do not. I look forward to talking to the Commission about how to ensure the K12 and higher ed guidelines support that work.

  Hilary Lustick, PhD, Associate Professor of Education, UMass Lowell

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Jonathan Feingold, J.D. | September 8, 2025

  Greetings Commission Members:

  Thank you for inviting me and my colleagues to testify today. I am a professor of law at Boston University and a scholar of racism with expertise on affirmative action, education law, and antidiscrimination law. The state of Massachusetts and the Attorney General have cited my work to support ongoing efforts to resist the Trump administration’s often lawless assault on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”(1)

  I am also a leading authority on “discriminatory censorship laws”—a term I use for state action designed to demean inclusionary values and deny students access to education about racism, gender identity and related topics. Notorious examples include Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and “Stop WOKE Act.” Though not my focus today, the IHRA definition of antisemitism functions to a similar effect and thereby corrodes the academic freedom integral to higher education and all scholarly endeavors.

  For the remainder of my time, I will offer a word of caution. I fear the Commission does not appreciate how it is playing into Trump’s hands. Universities are far from perfect. But at our best, we represent the promise of an inclusive, multiracial and interfaith society committed to persuasion over coercion and truth over demagoguery. To the President and allies like the Heritage Foundation, we are the enemy. And now they are weaponizing our collective anxiety about antisemitism to inflame division and instill distrust on our campuses, to crack leftwing coalitions and to tear down the institutions—specifically unions and universities—we need to check their authoritarian aspirations. Any serious approach to antisemitism today must account for these dynamics.

  For decades, the Heritage Foundation has labored to discredit and control higher education in America. Following 2020’s racial justice protests, Heritage led a network of rightwing think tanks, donors and officials who sought to recast America’s antiracist turn as a racist overcorrection. By summer 2023, the architects of these efforts—including the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, notorious for manufacturing a moral panic about Critical Race Theory—had celebrated victories in Republican controlled states.(2) They outlawed curriculum on racism and gender; eroded faculty protections like tenure; and transformed university governing boards from non-partisan bodies into an arm of the state’s Republican party apparatus.(3)

  But it was never clear how a movement animated by open nostalgia for a pre-Civil Rights America could puncture universities in liberal strongholds like California, New York and Massachusetts. However flawed, our institutions remained publicly committed to basic democratic values. There was a structural limit to MAGA’s anti-antiracist culture war.

  For an aspiring dictator like Trump, sites of liberal power—“areas where Trump does not control by ideology”—pose a serious problem. The question was how to nationalize an anti-civil rights agenda in Blue America.

  For opportunists like Rufo, the horrors of October 7th and the campus protests that followed offered a lucky break to exploit. In service of the right’s longstanding desire to seed public scrutiny of universities and progressive values, campus conflict over Israel and Palestine opened the door to recruit new and critical allies—like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—who offered the necessary veneer to manufacture a new moral panic about antisemitism on our campuses and to brand commitments like antiracism and “DEI” as not simply “anti-American” or “racist,” but also antisemitic.

  I want to emphasize how explicit this strategy was. On October 13, 2023, Rufo Tweeted the following: “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, B[lack] L[ives] M[atter], D[emocratic] S[ocialists of] A[merica], and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.”

  Rufo’s call to “attack, delegitimize, and discredit” foreshadowed Trump’s current assault on universities and the broader left—an assault that links political opponents and their ideas to the “terrorists” that attacked Israel. On October 7, 2024, Heritage codified this strategy in “Project Esther,” which outlines a plan to discredit pro-democracy organizations like the Open Societies Foundation as “decidedly antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American” and linked via the “Hamas Support Network”—an invented moniker. Like Rufo, Project Esther codes DEI and anti-Zionism as antisemitism:

  “[Hamas Support Organizations] have infiltrated their ideology into the U.S. education system across all levels. It is pervasive. The U.S. education system fosters antisemitism under the guise of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology.”

  But to successfully stigmatize basic inclusive commitments and discredit American universities, Rufo and Heritage needed more than message discipline on the right. They needed, in Rufo’s words, “the center-left [to] disavow” the students and organizations who advocate for Palestinian human rights and who protest Israel’s human rights abuses.

  The Commission’s reckless approach to antisemitism is giving Trump and his allies what they want. The Commission has endorsed a definition of antisemitism that rationalizes abductions and deportations, and invites rightwing groups to “hunt political speech with which they disagree.” The Commission has manufactured ammo for unfounded antisemitism accusations against our own educators and their union. The Commission unmindfully rehearses the ADL data and talking points that ground today’s misguided moral panic. This behavior does not equip our universities to combat antisemitism. To the contrary, it strengthens the forces in D.C. who pose an existential threat to our institutions, to our democracy and to all that makes us safe.

  Thank you for considering my thoughts. I would be glad to answer any questions.

  1. See Jonathan Feingold and Julie Park, How Universities Can Build and Sustain Welcoming and Equitable Campus Environments, The Campaign for College Opportunity (October 2024) (cited by Brief for Amici IL, CA, MA et al., National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education v. Trump, CA4 No.25-1189); Legal Scholars Memo re DEI Programs (February 2025) (cited by The Attorneys General of IL, MA, NY et al., Memo on recent Executive Orders and Dear Colleague Letter (March 2025), https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/publications/joint-guidance-re-school-programs-guidance-2025.pdf).
  2. See Jonathan Feingold and Joshua Weishart, Discriminatory Censorship Laws, 99 Tul. L. Rev. 585 (2025).
  3. See Isaac Kamola, Manufacturing Backlash: Rightwing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021-2023 (2024).

   

  Jonathan Feingold, Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Jeremy Menchik, Ph.D. | September 8, 2025

  Prepared Oral Testimony, Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism

  Thank you distinguished Commissioners for having me here today, especially to the Co-Chairs Velis and Cataldo. I have only a few minutes to speak so in order to make a more meaningful contribution to your labors I submitted a research white paper that I urge everyone to read.

  I am here because of my expertise in all the topics that you are not supposed to discuss at the Thanksgiving dinner table: religion, politics, bigotry, and the Middle East. I have been researching these topics for over twenty years, it’s probably why I have no hair, and it is not an exaggeration to say that I am among the state’s most qualified experts on combatting intolerance: it is literally my life’s work. I wish I had more time to share that work and I would be thrilled to follow up with each commissioner individually.

  Prior to graduate school I was the Assistant then Associate Director of the New York Regional Office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). I then spent seven years of graduate education researching intolerance and have published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on intolerance, as well as an award-winning book taught around the world.

  Today I am the Director of Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA), the oldest center of its kind in the US. Every week we workshop research on religion and world affairs. We are experts on religion and world affairs because of our scholarship, not because of our personal identities or anecdotal experiences. Having a bar mitzvah made my parents proud, and my being the target of antisemitism has gifted me with resilience and skills at dealing with bullies, but neither makes me an expert on antisemitism.

  My expertise comes from teaching, and publishing research tested through the peer review process. The researchers at CURA are diverse – Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, sociologists, anthropologists, and even economists! – but what unites everyone’s work is a commitment to engaging with serious scholarship, high quality data, and sound research methods. Because otherwise our findings have no validity.

  So, my first message today is a simple one. Massachusetts needs a data driven approach to fighting antisemitism. If you want your findings to be valid, your analysis of antisemitism must be based on high quality data, sound research methods, and serious policy analysis. Reliable data on antisemitic incidents, attitudes, and hate crimes must be the backbone of the commission’s work. But, based on the K-12 report, it has not been. By over relying on data that is widely known to be unreliable and systematically biased, the Special Commission’s work product thus far has misrepresented the character and severity of antisemitism in the Commonwealth.

  My second message is more complicated: survey data suggests that between 20% – 40% of Massachusetts Jews are not Zionist. That includes anti-Zionist Jews, post-Zionist Jews, and non-Zionist Jews. Non-Zionist Jews are frequently bullied, harassed, marginalized, or otherwise targeted for intolerance, often by Zionist Jews. Prof Hersh’s research demonstrated, for example, that anti-Zionist Jews were “twice as likely to agree with the statement that they hide some of their views to fit in at Jewish activities compared to students who did think there should be a Jewish state or to students who were not sure what they think.”

  What is especially challenging about this type of intolerance is that policies designed to combat antisemitism can increase the bullying of Jews by other Jews. This issue is well known in scholarship on minority protection and referred to as the challenge of “minorities within minorities.” Non-Zionist Jews are a minority within the Jewish minority, but as full citizens and full humans, they are just as worthy of protection as Zionist Jews.

  I would be happy to give you suggestions for how to approach this challenge in the Q & A, but for now will simply say that this commission should be vigilant to not take sides in the schism within the American Jewish community on this issue: that requires the commission to explicitly include the experiences of non-Zionist Jews in any full accounting of antisemitism and to encourage schools and universities to cultivate safe spaces for all Jews, regardless of political orientation.

  Conversely, policies like recommending the IHRA definition in schools or conflating political ideology and religious identity will reinforce discriminatory power dynamics within the Jewish community, further marginalizing the estimated 60 – 120,000 Massachusetts Jews that are not Zionist. This commission could  do important work by addressing this thus far overlooked form of intolerance. I hope you will.

  Thank you and I look forward to further discussions today and in the future.

  Jeremy Menchik, Ph.D., Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science; Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA), Boston University

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Frances Tanzer, Ph.D. | September 8, 2025

  On Philosemitism and Antisemitism Education

  I am a professor in Holocaust Studies and Jewish culture at Clark University in Worcester. I am testifying today, not as a representative of Clark University, but as a scholar of the Holocaust and antisemitism.

  I want to talk to you today about philosemitism.

  The Trump administration has made philosemitism a troubling centerpiece of their efforts to defund universities and suppress free speech.

  What is philosemitism? Put simply, it is the love of Jews – this might sound appealing. However, it is not a love of Jews as they are, in all their diversity. It is a love of stereotypes of Jews. Philosemitism is closely aligned with antisemitism. The two phenomena use the same arsenal of stereotypes, and both exclude Jews from the rest of society.

  While the antisemite might say that Jews do not belong in—and are dangerous to—an institution, school, or a country, the philosemite distinguishes Jews from everyone else by claiming that they are either exceptional or at particular risk.

  The Trump administration’s executive orders and attacks on universities deploy philosemitism. Deals that universities have struck with the Trump administration include, among other things, requirements of antisemitism training, the hiring of new Jewish studies professors, and the adoption of the troubling IHRA definition. These measures might seem positive. However, they are tethered to the Trump administration’s efforts control and defund universities, including, in one instance, crucial research on Parkinson’s that is entirely unrelated to any discussion of antisemitism or Jewish safety.

  What are the consequences of this reckless instrumentalization of accusations of antisemitism?

  I would like to raise a few that I foresee. I will also note that some of these observations echo an important article published last week by three Jewish Studies professors: Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt, and Ronit Stahl. This article is essential reading for the commission.

  First, the IHRA definition, which is central to the discussions that the commission has been engaged in, curtails meaningful research and education about antisemitism and the Holocaust. Because it turns criticisms of Israel and Zionism into potentially punishable antisemitic acts, it makes it potentially impossible to teach and assign some of our most canonical texts, written by scholars who experienced Nazi persecution because of their Jewishness: Hannah Arendt’s Eichman in Jerusalem and Victor Klemperer’s diaries, for instance. Both texts include criticisms of Zionism; both are essential to any class on the Holocaust. The adoption of the IHRA definition places educators in the disturbing position of having censor and silence victims of the Holocaust.

  Second, the requirement of special antisemitism training, separate from training about other forms of racism, singles Jews out and does not reflect current standards of teaching and research on the topic.

  Third, the expectation that Jewish studies or Holocaust history educators should be evaluated on their ability to successfully “combat antisemitism” holds them to a wholly different standard than other fields of inquiry—even more troubling when we consider the problems that Professor Menchik has identified with the data on antisemitic incidents.

  Finally, and perhaps most frightening, using accusations of antisemitism to defund, bully, or control universities and other institutions breeds resentment toward Jews.

  This situation terrifies me. This sort of treatment is historically a prelude to intense, violent antisemitic episodes.

  If the commission really wishes to protect Jews and to support Holocaust and antisemitism education, they will encourage legislators to increase labor protections for teachers and professors who come under fire in the Trump administration’s attempt to chill free and academic speech.

  This is a moment where Massachusetts must distinguish itself and uphold its values. We must not fall into these patterns of thinking about Jews in terms of Jewish difference and dividing Jewish communities into “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” Instead, we need a program for combatting antisemitism that considers Jews in all their diversity and does not reproduce the work of the antisemite by reducing us to stereotypes.

   

  Frances Tanzer, Ph.D., Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Culture, Clark University 

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Joanne, Massachusetts Voter | September 6, 2025

  As a Jew living in Massachusetts, I need to voice my opinion on the policy. The Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Anti-Semitism is trying to pass. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in this country and in Massachusetts, but does not justify the abduction of students, attacks on progressive politicians or withholding funds from universities. I feel that anti-Semitism is being used as a tool to further the far-right agenda. Silencing free speech on college campuses doesn’t make me feel safer. I cannot as a Jew, stay silent while witnessing the mass destruction and mass starvation of an entire group of people in Gaza. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about the hostages remaining. Both points of view can coexist. Please don’t use curtailing Free speech as a justification for fighting anti-Semitism. And don’t conflate anti-israeli government speech with anti-Semitism. Thank you.

• Patrick Young, Ph.D. | September 1, 2025

  Letter to Representative McMurtry, dated September 1, 2025

  I’m writing as your constituent about the ongoing work of the state’s Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, and its August 7 vote to approve its own recommendations for K-12 schools. Like a great many other educators at the K-12 and college levels, I am opposed to enacting those recommendations, for reasons of intellectual freedom and speech protection.

  As an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, I specialize in the History of Modern European and Global History. In that capacity, I teach multiple courses encompassing the histories of fascism and radical right wing politics, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, the Holocaust and comparative genocide, as well as European Empire. Having read the Commission’s recommendations, along with analysis of them by educational experts and advocacy groups, I can tell you that I feel deeply concerned about their potential for stifling or inhibiting discussion of difficult topics in educational settings, by weighting or even mandating certain (highly questionable) perspectives over others.

  This is most immediately evident in the Commission’s wholesale adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which has been widely criticized and even rejected by scholars, and by organizations of educators and advocates of antiracism and human rights. Basing its findings and recommendations on this intensely disputed definition contravenes the Commission’s purpose, and is going to lead to ongoing conflict and division in the implementation of policies at the school and district levels. Educational institutions are the optimal setting for difficult conversations about racism, violence and genocide, and the states and systems that perpetrate them; but the IHRA statement and the Commission’s recommendations effectively undermine that possibility in their enforcement of artificial limitations around what can be thought and said about the state of Israel in particular. I can tell you from my own teaching experience that there is already significant impediment to discussing “controversial” subjects in class, and that many teachers, professors and students often incline toward avoiding conflict or condemnation. The Commission’s recommendations will only reinforce that tendency, through placing institutional and disciplinary power behind certain political perspectives, and effectively mandating conformity from above.

  Countering the very real resurgence of anti-Semitism in recent time is a laudable goal, and one that my colleagues and I eagerly support; but these recommendations lack the legitimacy and consensus that are necessary to that end. As an educator in the state university system, I urge you to help in building a better and more inclusive set of guidelines that will more effectively counter anti-Semitism with authentic discussion and learning.

  Patrick Young, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History
  University of Massachusetts-Lowell

  Affiliations provided for identification purposes only. The opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to any organization or institution with which any speaker is affiliated.

• Charlotte, Massachusetts Voter | August 5, 2025

  To Chairmen John Velis and Simon Cataldo, other commission members.

  I am writing to ask you please to delay voting on the K-12 education recommendations. I do so because your promulgation of the IHRA definition is an assault to open discourse and learning about truth.

  Let me introduce myself. I am a proud, old, Jewish woman. I am an advocate for peace and for justice for both Israelis and Palestinians. Most specifically, I mourn for the Israeli hostages and I mourn for the horror at what the Israeli government is perpetrating against the Palestinian people in the West Bank and, now, most egregiously, in Gaza.

  Using this definition of antisemitism, the US Government’s Department of Homeland Security accusing me of being a supporter of Hamas and an antisemite.

  That might be laughable if it wasn’t so frightening for me and for people like me, all citizens of the United States.

  PLEASE DO NOT bring this down to the state level to have it filter down to the school boards and teachers in the Commonwealth.

  Definitions are dangerous. I have written several letters to you in the past about your adoption of the IHRA draft definition. I stand here, as a loyal Jew among others, telling you that your adherence to this definition is dangerous for all of us.

  Let me ask you: if you were recommending ways to address antisemitism in the schoolroom, would you start with a definition such as that of the IHRA? Do you mind that using that definition stops all meaningful discussion of right and wrong? Children in this country see starving Palestinians trying to exist in vast fields of rubble. Where do children learn to parse what they read and hear? Where do they learn about meaningful dialogue if half the dialogue would put their teachers in the dangerous category of antisemitic Hamas lovers?

  Of course children should understand that Hamas had committed an unmentionably heinous slaughter of innocent Jews. That Israel reacted as it did at first is certainly explicable.

  But, Israel’s present behavior should be part of the discussion in classrooms. Children can discuss whether Israel has gone too far: they should know that there is death, starvation, utter ruin in Gaza and burning, killing, and destroying by illegal settlers in the West Bank.

  What is more, there are children in these Massachusetts classrooms who have families in Gaza and the West Bank. Where are they in the discussion? If their feelings are not acknowledged, will they hate Jews? Will they go home worrying about their safety? How will their parents react?

  It is irrelevant whether I (or, in this case, teachers) are Zionists or not. Don’t ask me to love a government that commits crimes against humanity, even genocide. Am I not a real Jew because I complain that the Israeli government is acting against my moral code? Where is my free speech, guaranteed by my own government?

  I am asking you not to put such a burden on the teachers of our children. Do not continue the actions of our federal government by prefacing school curricula with the IHRA definition.

  There are many other reasons to go back to the drawing board before taking a vote on your policy recommendations. I am sure you will hear many others testifying on various other issues. Using the IHRA definition sits at the heart of those. And it’s dangerous.

  Thank you.

• Anonymous | August 5, 2025

  My mother was Jewish and my father German. When I was young my parents were friends with another couple until one day they made the assumption that we were not Jewish and talked about how bad Jews were. On other occasions, when visiting German relatives, my father was lectured about how unpatriotic he was for leaving Germany during Hitler’s time, in my mother’s presence. My mother, while being proud to be Jewish, was not a supporter of Israel. She had to flee Austria during the war, and I’m sure she felt discrimination in hiring in the US. It is absolutely necessary to fight antisemitism, both on a personal and legal level (discrimination), while remembering that antisemitism is not the same as criticism of Israel. The commission has not yet separated the two and still insists that educators (such as my mother, who was a high school teacher) have to give a “balanced” history of Israel. My mother would not have agreed with this interference by the commission, and it should stop.

• Anonymous | July 23, 2025

  State Representative, I write as a Jewish resident and voter in Massachusetts who is deeply concerned by rising antisemitism in the United States and in Massachusetts, much of which has been supported and instigated by President Trump, Elon Musk, and their white nationalist allies. I am vehemently opposed to the Trump administration’s attack on civil liberties, free speech, and democracy being done in my name–to “fight antisemitism”, when in reality, throughout history we know that political repression actively makes Jews less safe. In 2024, I experienced antisemitic verbal harassment in Somerville while waiting for a bus and wearing my kippah and keffiyeh. I am troubled by the Massachusetts Special Joint Commission on Combatting Antisemitism’s approach to addressing antisemitism in Massachusetts. This Commission has failed to accurately reflect the diversity–in identity and political opinion–of the Massachusetts’ Jewish community. At times, Commissioners have conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This is especially dangerous as it both obscures real, rising antisemitism and reinforces Right-wing censorship, which in turn only bolsters antisemitism. It is undeniable that the threats facing our Jewish community are inextricably linked to the threats facing people of color, immigrants, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, and others — and that’s doubly true for those in our community who hold those identities. Our Massachusetts’ laws and leadership must also recognize this. I am calling on you to ensure the MA Commission on Antisemitism defends civil liberties for all and protects free speech, with no exceptions, and takes seriously the diverse voices of the Massachusetts Jewish community. And, as one step to fight racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism, I urge you to support Reps Barber, Rogers, and Senator Gomez’ Dignity Not Deportations Act. Deporting our neighbors, classmates, and coworkers does nothing to keep Jews safe. Please join us in fighting for equality, justice, and a thriving future for all people in Massachusetts.

• Eric Fishman, Ed.M. | April 10, 2025, Public Comment

  My name is Eric Fishman. I’m speaking today as a teacher and as a Jewish person. I’m deeply concerned both by antisemitism, and by how antisemitism is being weaponized to justify deeply inhumane political agendas – agendas which also make Jews less safe.

  I grew up in Newton. I’ve been teaching for over a decade, over which time I’ve had the chance to work with students as young as 3rd grade and as old as 12th grade. I currently teach high school humanities in an independent school in Boston, and previously taught in Boston Public Schools.

  This is a hard time to be a teacher. We are doing our best not just to keep our students safe, but also to help them develop the skills they will need to navigate and transform the brokenness of our society. My teens look around and see a deepening climate crisis. They see an authoritarian federal government who is day by day undermining our civil rights. They see racist and anti-semitic white nationalists in office. Many of my queer students feel physically and emotionally in danger amid the homophobic and transphobic legislation and rhetoric of the Trump administration. My students watch the demonization of immigrants, and they watch as ICE disappears families, young people, and students in their communities.

  Our students are inheriting these overlapping crises – and we need them to be prepared, by helping them develop their political perspectives, and refusing “zero sum” agendas that say that some of us can be safe only at the expense of others. This applies for Jewish students too. Jews cannot be safe in a world with white supremacy. Jews also cannot be safe in a world in which Palestinians are being denied humanity and dignity. We need our students to feel and think in solidarity with people and communities who are different from them.

  Every day, I watch my students engage in nuanced conversations about the world – including about Israel and Palestine. We need a common sense policy on antisemitism, one that stands against bias and hateful speech towards Jews as Jews (such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism), while also allowing our educators and students to have real conversations about Israel’s apartheid policies – and American support for these policies.

  When Governor Baker endorsed the IHRA definition of anti-semitism in 2022, he supported a controversial and misleading understanding of antisemitism, one that conflates any criticism of the state of Israel and its policies with antisemitism. This is a dangerous choice for Massachusetts and for our students. It also is a dangerous choice for Jews, as it distracts from the antisemitism that is surging amid the national rise in white nationalism.

  When I watch university students who are accused of antisemitism for standing up for Palestinian human rights be abducted by ICE, I think of my ancestors who escaped the Holocaust. I wonder what they would think when they see a distorted version of antisemitism being used as a tool to justify the suppression of political speech, being used as a tool to disappear members of our communities. No doubt they would be horrified. I also think they would be horrified to see educators and students being silenced in their quest to work for dignity for all humans, including Jews, and including Palestinians. In Massachusetts, we must protect students’ right to learn and educators’ freedom to teach – it’s our only hope to move beyond our current crises and toward a more just world for all of us.

  Eric Fishman, Ed.M. has taught for over a decade in schools throughout Greater Boston and in Philadelphia. He has written about education for publications such as The Boston Globe, Rethinking Schools, and The Progressive. Eric is a member of Boston Workers Circle and IfNowNow.

• Citizens for Public Schools | Statement to the Commission

  Citizens for Public Schools, a statewide public education advocacy organization, believes our public schools are an essential foundation for a healthy democracy. Students should experience and take part in vigorous and respectful discussion of the major issues of our time so that when they become adult members of society, they can be active and constructive participants in civic life. Our democracy should encourage discussion even about matters that may evoke strong emotions.

  It is through this lens that we view with concern the activity of the Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism and follow-on moves in several school districts that could severely restrict discussion of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine. Antisemitism is a blight on society in America and elsewhere. But the existence of antisemitism is not a reason to shut down discussions about one of the most important and difficult issues of our time, one in which our own government plays a central, decisive role.

  Former US ambassador and Tufts University dean Alan Solomont told the commission at a recent hearing that our college campuses suffer from “a lack of training and preparation that students receive before they enter college to engage in civil discourse and dialogue across differences.”

  Solomont, a leader in the Jewish community, said, “Some allegations about Israel may make Jewish students uncomfortable, but the exercise of free speech should not make Jewish students on campus unsafe.”

  At the commission’s public hearings, some commission members have made statements that equate antisemitism with criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Some groups that support Israel’s military campaign are following suit by calling on school committees to ban materials that challenge the policies of Israeli governments past and present.

  Far from combating antisemitism, banning these materials can create hatred when students and teachers who oppose Israeli actions find their ideas shut down without being considered. We fear this will not end well for our democracy.

  What’s more, the commission, because of its narrow focus, has contributed to erasing all conversation about anti-Muslim incidents in our schools and the horrors Palestinians are enduring in Gaza and the West Bank, silencing some Palestinian students and faculty. Schools can combat both antisemitism and anti-Palestinian bias while promoting frank examination of what is happening in the conflict.

  CPS calls for open discussion of difficult issues in history and in current events. Such conversations must not devolve into personal attacks among students who have conflicting viewpoints. It can be hard for teachers to help students respect those who disagree on matters that evoke strong emotions. In the current crisis, some Jewish students and teachers are feeling attacked and judged for being Jewish and/or Zionist. Some Palestinian students and teachers feel attacked and judged for their identity and beliefs as well.

  But the solution is not to avoid the issue. To forge a freer and fairer future, our students should be encouraged to engage with controversial ideas and think for themselves.

• Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts (TIM) | February 10, 2025

  Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts (TIM) is a diverse group led by Boston Workers Circle, Massachusetts Peace Action, Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, If Not Now Boston, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, the Council on American-Islamic Relations – Massachusetts, Sawa: Newton-Area Alliance for Peace and Justice, MTA Rank and File for Palestine, with the support of more than 50 other groups across the state that came together around the belief that addressing antisemitism is essential, and must be done with care, reflecting the diversity of all Jewish people in the Commonwealth and within a framework that embraces equity and inclusion for all. We want to ensure that the Commonwealth’s next steps are inclusive, transparent, and constructive. To be clear, it is our deep and unwavering commitment to equality and justice for all–including Jewish people and Palestinians–that compels our work. 

  Thank you for giving us the opportunity to present a panel to discuss issues related to antisemitism in K-12 public and private education. We look forward to working with the Commission on this important topic and its potential to be a model for the nation in addressing antisemitism using anti-racist principles. 

  Commitment to Diversity of Jewish Voices

  Representatives on the Commission picked specifically to bring a Jewish perspective have affiliations with organizations, such as the ADL, AJC, and JCRC, that exclude and seek to delegitimize an important part of the Jewish community. The ADL is open in its belief that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This puts the ADL, and similar groups that purport to represent the Jewish community to the outside world, in conflict with the growing numbers of the anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish community, who represent around 20% to 69% of the American Jewish community (depending on survey methodology).

  The mainstream pro-Israel organizations represented on the Commission have been fighting antisemitism for decades, and yet they themselves say that antisemitism is worse than ever. Clearly, their approach isn’t working. Does it not make sense to have a new discussion, one that is more open and less accusatory, and one that brings in a range of voices of those directly affected by the work of the Commission?

  We would like to reiterate our hopes that the Commission will:

  • • conduct fair and open hearings so that everyone who wants to testify gets to testify. We believe that open discussion is the only way to develop a fuller understanding of antisemitism. Fair and open hearings are the norm for legislative and commission hearings; 
    • seek diverse views at every Commission meeting by encouraging presentations by groups and experts not affiliated with Commission members who bring alternative viewpoints;
    • support political systems that promote equality and uphold rights regardless of ethnic, national, or religious identity;
    • advocate for legislation and policies that protect students’ right to learn and educators’ freedom to teach, including critical examinations of the history or actions of the U.S. and other nations;
    • In alignment with state and national standards, encourage legislation and policies that protect pedagogical inquiry into subjects like race, gender, slavery, capitalism, apartheid and colonialism, while safeguarding constitutionally-protected campus discussions and protests on these topics.

  • Concerns about the potential direction of the Commission

    We recognize that the purpose of this Commission is to address antisemitism in Massachusetts, to protect members of the Jewish community and to educate Massachusetts residents to better understand and value the Jewish community’s history and culture.  However, due to the representation on the Commission, we are concerned that this Commission could in addition, or instead, become a vehicle to advance punitive measures and enshrine political support for the state of Israel in Commonwealth statute and policies.

    The members of Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts represent individuals and organizations who have witnessed firsthand, and in our communities, politically- motivated false allegations of antisemitism deployed as a way to silence, intimidate and punish actions that threaten US political support for Israel. There is a risk that political actors on or affiliated with members of the Commission will use this important state body to promote a discriminatory and anti-Palestinian agenda against the wishes of a significant part of the state’s residents.

    Labelling Palestinians who talk about their own life experiences as racist against Jews suggests that Jews are harmed by Palestinian humanity or that Jewish safety depends on silencing and erasing Palestinian humanity. This is a form of anti-Palestinian racism. Bigotry and discrimination against one group cannot be addressed by normalizing bigotry and discrimination against another group.

     

    Resources related to the National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism

    The National Strategy was developed with significant input by organizations that serve on our state commission. It promotes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition as the “most prominent” of several definitions of antisemitism and one the administration has “embraced.”  In this way, the National Strategy conflates criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel with prejudice against Jews. Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts unequivocally opposes the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which is used to justify suppression of political speech and to censor balanced, fact-based education. Some members of the Commission, including the ADL, place promotion of the IHRA definition among their top priorities, despite significant opposition. 

    • • • The ADL & the White House antisemitism strategy provides a thorough analysis of the National Strategy and its lack of focus on white nationalism.
        • National Plan Reflects the Debate Over Antisemitism examines the diversity of Jewish perspectives on its recommendations.
      • • Biden Embraces Antisemitism Definition That Has Upended Free Speech in Europe examines the impact of adopting the IHRA definition in Europe from 2017 to 2022.
      • • The Foundation on Middle East Peace maintains a continuously updated database of expert reports, articles, and letters challenging the IHRA definition. FMEP hosted a useful webinar on the IHRA definition and the National Strategy titled Palestinian Rights, the IHRA Definition, & the Battle Around Biden’s Antisemitism Strategy.
        • The IHRA definition is controversial and many experts say it violates the First Amendment. This includes the ACLU, Jewish educators, Human Rights Watch, and many others. The IHRA definition allows antisemitism to be weaponized, which is harmful to Jewish people, Palestinians, and, in fact, everyone else. Its codification is widely opposed, including by the more than 1,300 signatories represented by Concerned Jewish Faculty, which include a hundreds of  Massachusetts faculty members .
        • Jewish people disagree on many issues, including about what constitutes antisemitism and what to do about it.

    Resources related to the diversity of Jewish perspectives about the political ideology of Zionism and definitions of antisemitism

    While the Commission is exploring free speech considerations, as representatives of the Commonwealth, its members must abide by the other limits on state power set by the Constitution, namely freedom from a state’s “establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

    • • • The Jewish community has always held diverse opinions about the establishment of a nation-state for Jewish people, from the beginning of the Zionist political movement, to before October 7, 2023, and in the last year. 
        • Zionists have long equated opposition to Zionism with opposition to Judaism(pdf). That history includes Israeli government efforts to quash American Jewish opposition to the Nakba or to Zionism between the 1950s and 1970s, including by attacking the American Jewish Council which at that time “was publicly critiquing the Nakba and pushing Israel to afford full civil and human rights to Palestinians.”
        • Many religious Jews believe that Zionism, as a nationalist political ideology, is actually in conflict with the fundamental tenets of Judaism. Moreover,  there are more non-Jews who profess to be Zionists than there are Jewish people in the world.  According to the Religion Media Center, there are over 30 million Christian, predominantly evangelical, Zionists in the US, roughly five times the Jewish population. They support the gathering of Jews in Israel in order to usher in the “End Times” when Jews will be converted to Christianity (or die) and Jesus will return to rule for a thousand years. Many Jewish people find Zionism to be antisemitic for this reason.   

    Resources related to training and curricula on understanding antisemitism

    The risk of approaching antisemitism in the way advocated by some members of the Commission (for example, using McCarthyesque tactics to compare “antisemitism from the left” to Soviet-era propaganda) is that it will: a) not protect Jewish people from the major sources of antisemitism, which originate in the white nationalist right-wing and b) perpetuate and normalize anti-Palestinian racism. We believe that an antiracist approach to antisemitism uplifts all communities and does not harm one group for the supposed benefit of another. There are several sources for understanding antisemitism through an intersectional and/or liberatory framework. These are just a few:

    • • • Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (2024)
        • Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Understanding Antisemitism (2017) and Discussion Guide which provides historical and economic conditions behind some of the most prevalent antisemitic tropes (2021)
        • Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and the Collaborative for Jewish Organizing, Dismantling Antisemitism
        • Parceo’s “Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation”
        • Diaspora Alliance organizes workshops and resources on antisemitism
        • T’ruah, A Very Brief Guide to Antisemitism (2024) 
        • T’ruah, Criticism of Israel and Antisemitism: How to Tell Where One Ends and the Other Begins (2024)

    Resources related to data and trends of antisemitism

    • • • Unfortunately, our knowledge of the prevalence and nature of antisemitism in Massachusetts is limited, as demonstrated by the findings of researchers at Jewish Currents, The Forward, and by Wikipedia, among others, that the ADL is not a reliable source. 
        • The ADL misrepresents student protest against Israeli actions in Gaza as violent and anti-Jewish. The Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut, collects publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, strikes, demonstrations, riots and other actions. Their most recent study (pdf) analyzes data from nearly 12,400 pro-Palestine protests and over 2,000 pro-Israel protests in the United States during the period from October 7, 2023, to June 2, 2024, concluding that “the pro-Palestine movement has not been violent [and that] the rhetorical core of this pro-Palestine movement has not been a call for violence against Jews, but rather a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end to violence being inflicted upon them.” This was validated by a public letter by more than 750 students across 140 universities expressing solidarity with campus protests and encampments for Gaza.

    Resources about K-12 education (curriculum, DEI and censorship efforts)

    Educational institutions are fundamental to a healthy democracy, and our schools should be allowed to equip students with critical thinking and analytical skills to be able to engage with current and historical events and to develop their own well-researched opinions. Educators need to be able to present a diversity of factual resources as well as the skills to guide students in discussing difficult topics. 

    The Commission’s K-12 education recommendations must align with Massachusetts’ Social Studies Standards and the National Council for the Social Studies College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework Inquiry Arc. Inquiry-based education is a best practice whose “four dimensions are: (1) Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries, (2) Applying Disciplinary Concepts and Tools (i.e., civics, economics, geography, and history), (3) Evaluating Sources and Using Evidence, and (4) Communicating Conclusions and Taking Informed Action.” Through Inquiry Education, students are supposed to engage with a diversity of materials; ask questions and think critically; understand fact-based information and then formulate their own opinions. These skills are necessary for students to be effective citizens. It is impossible to meet these standards if certain words or perspectives are a priori considered hateful, such as “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism,” and therefore censored from discussion in the classroom.

    At the January 23, 2024 meeting of the  Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, a panel representing the ADL, AJC and JCRC offered policy recommendations that, if adopted, would reverse Massachusetts’ high standards and deprive students of benefitting from our state’s exemplary practices of inquiry, equity, and inclusion by dehumanizing Palestinians and erasing them from social studies, history and ELA curricula. Additionally, school administrators across Massachusetts are being pressured to impose disciplinary actions against students and educators for bringing these voices into the classroom. This has created a chilled environment akin to the fear educators feel from right-wing book bans and attacks on Black, brown, and queer students.

    • • • School administrators have faced calls for rolling back DEI initiatives under false allegations that DEI initiatives are “contaminated by antisemitism”. The Commission must resist calls to replicate right-wing tactics “in the name of “Jewish safety,” [… to back] a wave of McCarthyist repression targeting Palestine-related speech and activism at educational institutions.”  For example, see Political Research Associates, The Anti-DEI Movement and the Jewish Right: Weaponizing Antisemitism to Defend White Supremacy (2024) arguing that these efforts seek to “draw pro-Israel American Jews into its ranks, delegitimize racial justice movements, divide progressive coalitions, and neutralize its opposition as it moves closer to power.” (see also Harvard University example in “How the fight against antisemitism is now used to promote an ‘anti-woke’ agenda”)
        • The AJC and the JCRC have campaigned to censor Ethnic Studies in Massachusetts pointing to a similar campaign in California. Massachusetts legislators should note that the federal lawsuit targeting California’s Ethnic Studies Consortium and the local teachers union was recently dismissed (court ruling) concluding:

    “The Supreme Court has long recognized that the freedom to receive ideas, and its relation to the freedom of expression, is particularly relevant in the classroom setting.” Monteiro, 158 F.3d at 1027 n. 5; see Board of Educ., Island Trees Union Free Sch. Dist. v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 867, 102 S.Ct. 2799, 2808 (1982) (plurality opinion) (“[T]he right to receive ideas is a necessary predicate to the recipient’s meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom.”) (emphasis omitted). Students have a right to receive information and “lawsuits threatening to attach civil liability on the basis of the assignment of [curricular material] would severely restrict a student’s right to receive material that his school board or other educational authority determines to be of legitimate educational value.” Monteiro, 158 F.3d at 1028.”

    • • • Anti-education policies and actions advanced by ADL, JCRC, and AJC among others include lawfare (see California and Philadelphia cases), book banning, punishment of dissent, and other harmful practices that must be resisted to protect public education.
        • DESE’s Massachusetts’ History and Social Science Framework offers excellent guidance on navigating US and world history. The Fordham Institute commended Massachusetts in 2021 for “exemplary history and civics standards that…[do] not whitewash, downplay, or neglect the many painful chapters in our nation’s history.” Guiding Principle 2 of DESE’s Framework states that an “effective history and social science education incorporates diverse perspectives,” and Guiding Principle 8 states that history and social science teachers “have a unique responsibility to help students consider events—including current events—in a broad historical, geographical, social, or economic context” (pp. 13; 15-16). Excluding Palestinian history and narratives because they are inaccurately deemed antisemitic is inconsistent with Massachusetts standards.
        • We are concerned that the Commission will recommend or allow school boards or other educational authorities to take on teaching frameworks proposed by extremist groups, some of whom have institutionalized relationships with a foreign government. There is an active campaign in Massachusetts, advanced by ICAN, an Israeli-American lobby group, and the far right organization, CAMERA, to target the MA High School Social Studies Frameworks, and more. 
        • CAMERA’s education analyst proposes censorship of two 6th grade standards (pps. 89, 102) and a high school standard (Topic #7d, page 158) because they reference Palestine and Palestinians. She repeats claims that Ethnic Studies, racial justice/DEI organizations, social justice student clubs and groups like Amnesty International and Southern Poverty Law Center are “anti-Israel” and that “teaching about Palestine really means teaching anti-Israel bias and propaganda.” (See ICAN webinar starting at 1:08:00). Groups like ICAN are proposing alterations to Massachusetts’ Social Studies Frameworks to more closely align with Israel’s education system, which dehumanizes Palestinians and erases them from the historical record. This focus on censoring diverse voices and viewpoints is contrary to Massachusetts’ progressive and inclusive values and would undermine the integrity of our exemplary educational system. 
        • Massachusetts requires schools to integrate genocide education in different subjects from 6th to 12th grades. The frameworks requires the teaching of the conditions of genocide and “historical and contemporary genocides” and encourages students to “engage in an inquiry cycle to answer the question When and how should the United States intervene to address genocide?” Equating this legitimate education with hate, as expressed in the ADL’s recent statement, creates an environment of censorship and intimidation, effectively preventing educators and students from learning about current events in Gaza. Students and educators are silenced amid a climate of fear of punishment for engaging in timely and respectful discourse. We strongly believe that our classrooms must be safe places to engage in critical thinking based on these educational frameworks and reflective of the discourse among Holocaust and genocide (pdf) scholars. Some students may feel uncomfortable when encountering opinions they disagree with, but this discomfort is intrinsic to learning. Feeling uncomfortable must not be confused with being unsafe.

    Resources related to civil and Constitutional rights

    The First Amendment establishes Constitutional rights against a state’s abridgement of “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 

    • • • K-12 students’ ability to debate and protest also aligns with DESE’s educational vision, which includes connected, empowered engagement with social issues. 
        • Protection of diverse political opinions, and students’ right to speak and protest actions of their government, is also protected by law. ACLU of Massachusetts urges colleges and universities to defend free expression on campus (Dec 2024).
        • The ACLU, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA wrote a joint open letter to college presidents and administrators opposing the use of police force against student protestors. (Oct 2024).

    Because other states are looking to emulate Massachusetts’ path breaking Commission, the bar is set high. Our hope is that this Commission models an antiracist approach to addressing antisemitism, thereby uplifting everyone and bringing all communities together to ensure equality, dignity and safety for all.

    Thank you for considering our testimony. We would be happy to provide additional information, or provide testimony about any of these topics in more detail.

    Together for an Inclusive Massachusetts’ Leadership Team

    Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine 

    Boston Workers Circle

    Council on American-Islamic Relations, Massachusetts (CAIR-MA)

    If Not Now Boston

    Jewish Voice for Peace Boston

    Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA)

    Massachusetts Teachers Association Rank and File for Palestine

    National Lawyers Guild – Massachusetts Chapter

    Sawa: Newton-Area Alliance for Peace and Justice

    on behalf of tens of organizations statewide who advocate for an antiracist approach to addressing antisemitism

• Elsa Auerbach, Ph.D. | February 10, 2025

  I’m grateful for the work of this commission as we face what is arguably one of the most dangerous periods of our lifetimes, with the rise of white supremacists at the highest levels of government attacking the rights of immigrants, trans people, Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, and more. Our best hope in the face of these attacks is standing together.

  I want to start with two observations about this hearing.  While this commission repeatedly states the importance of presenting several perspectives, the most vocal members of the commission seem completely wedded to only one perspective.

  And I am struck by the fact that no one on the commission seems to be worried about the single greatest threat to Jews, namely the white supremacist antisemitism at the highest levels of our government.

  There are three aspects of my identity that I bring to my testimony today: I am a member of Jewish Voice for Peace – JVP; I am the daughter of Holocaust refugees, and I am a retired teacher educator.  I am a JVP member, an antizionist Jew BECAUSE I am the daughter of Holocaust refugees.  The Shoah is baked into my DNA.  That’s why I call for Palestinian liberation.

  JVP has 20,000 supporters in Massachusetts spanning 285 zip codes with members in 41 state senate districts and 140 state legislative districts. 

  We are fully committed to fighting antisemitism and envision a world where all people can live in peace as equals, where the safety of one group does not come at the expense of another group’s safety.  

  Like many Jews, I oppose all forms of religious or ethnic supremacy. That means I don’t believe that the US should be a Christian nationalist state.  I don’t believe that India should be a Hindu state. And, I don’t believe Israel should be a state that privileges Jews over Palestinians. Opposing Jewish nationalism doesn’t mean I am antisemitic anymore than opposing Christian nationalism means I’m anti Christian. It is critically important for students to be able to grapple with these same distinctions in the classroom.

  This brings me to my identity as the daughter of Holocaust refugees. I am named after my grandmother, Elsa Warburg, who like my parents fled Hitler’s Germany. The Warburgs were prominent Jewish bankers, scholars, and lawyers.  

  Most but not all of the Warburgs adamantly opposed Zionism. They argued among themselves about this. It was not an argument about religion; it was an ideological argument about whether or not Jews needed a “homeland” to ensure Jewish safety.  

  In fact, Jews have argued about Zionism since Zionism’s origin.

   This kind of debate and contestation are core Jewish values. You may know the joke: two Jews, three opinions. So when I hear the proclamation that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic” spoken as though it were a truism, I understand it to be entirely ahistorical – a complete distortion. Moreover, it casts some Jews as good Jews and others as bad Jews based on their support for Israel, comparing apples (a religion) to oranges (a country). I worry that shutting down examination of differences like these will endanger our democratic classrooms.

  I worry that teachers will be penalized if they show maps of Palestine or if they share the fact that more than 38,000 Palestinian children in Gaza are now orphans. Or if they introduce current cases before the International Court of Justice.  Censoring this kind of information is an attack on democratic education.

  Finally, I want to bring my identity as a teacher educator to this conversation.  As any educator knows, the most important thing a teacher can do is to teach students how to think for themselves, to investigate, and to analyze.  

  That means asking questions like: Who benefits from this narrative? Who is harmed by it? Whose perspectives are excluded in this story? Can these claims be verified? Even grade schoolers can grapple with questions like this.

  In my view, these are exactly the questions that you as Commissioners should be asking. When you hear someone say, as if it is a fact, that accusing Israel of genocide is a blood libel or when the ADL cites statistics premised on a disputed definition of antisemitism, it is incumbent on you to question the assumptions about antisemitism they are based on, NOT to accept them as facts. I wish you had interrogated the ADL with as much zeal and vigor as you interrogated the head of the MTA.

  I am not asking that this Commission agree with my views on genocide or Zionism. What I am saying is that it is not up to the state to adjudicate debates that have raged within the Jewish community for more than a hundred years. 

  It is not up to the Commission to declare that some Jews are good Jews and others are bad Jews – or that some Jewish beliefs should be penalized and others privileged.

  It is the responsibility of the Commonwealth to ensure that teachers have the space to teach students how to ask good questions and understand multiple perspectives. And it is the responsibility of this commission to focus its energy on the very real threat to all of us posed by white supremacists at the highest levels of government. 

  If this commission goes the route of privileging an Israel-centered approach to fighting antisemitism, it runs the risk of being seen as a partisan political tool and losing all legitimacy. At this dangerous moment in history, it is the Commission’s urgent task to ensure that critical inquiry is the core of our pedagogy. 

  Elsa Auerbach, Ph.D.

  • Professor Emerita, English and Applied Linguistics Departments, University of Massachusetts Boston
  • Coordinator Teacher Education for English Department (2007-2010)
  • Director, Freshman Writing Program, English Department (2007-2012)
  • Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, member (2010-present)

• Merrie Najimy, M.Ed. | February 10, 2025

  As an Arab-American veteran educator, I bring my own experience with racism that informs my pedagogy and practice along with 35 years of teaching experience developing and integrating anti-bias, anti-racism curriculum.

  Antisemitism- rooted in white supremacy- is real and must be fought as an intersectional struggle. It manifests as

  • Swastikas on school walls
  • Antisemitic insults leveled at school sports team
  • Setting fire to synagogues
  • The replacement theory
  • Musk’s inarguable nazi salute and Nazi-esque speech to the AFD in Germany

  What antisemitism isn’t:

  • Palestinians expressing their aspirations for freedom, equal rights and dignity
  • People standing in solidarity with these aspirations 
  • Criticizing the state of Israel and the system of Zionism  
  • Naming what the international court and human rights organizations call plausible genocide 

  Conflating the two- as some organizations here today do- is anti-Palestinian Racism, which erases Palestinians as people connected to their land, denies the Nakba, dehumanizes Palestinians- justifying violence against them, and defames them & their allies as inherently antisemitic, anti-democratic, and terrorist sympathizing.

  The well-coordinated attacks on MTA by ADL, JCRC, AJC, CAMERA, Sen Velis and others  are misguided. It has lead to doxing of and  death and rape threats to educators, and MTA members bullying other MTA members who stand in solidarity with Palestinians. I will be happy to share details. 

  Silencing discourse on Israel and Palestine through intimidation tactics is not fighting antisemitism. Rather it harms one group to elevate another and detracts from fighting real antisemitism. These tactics have engendered disgust and outrage at the organizations that use them, leaving us all unsafe.

  Instead  we must:

  • Teach antisemitism as one of many forms of systemic oppression,
  • Help students to developing critical thinking by interrogating history, 
  • Follow DESE’s Guiding History & Social Science  Principles and stopbullying.gov prevention strategies
  • Integrate humanizing stories- as early as preschool- where children can see the similarities and humanity  across identities
  • Introduce stereotypes & stereotype busting and explore social issues by mid elementary school
  • Study conflicts in middle & HS through  examining primary sources, multiple narratives, deliberating & debating as to make informed decisions 
  • Engage students in looking at their own identity & social position, considering what they know & where their information comes from to become aware of their own biases 
  • Approach situations that do arise w/ inquiry & empathy, making space for hard conversations,  
  • Follow the example of  Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan who walked through the encampments daily and wrote in an op ed “I made clear that if any (Jewish students) felt harassed, I would intervene. I also said that I could ensure their ability to pursue their education but that I could not protect them from being offended.”  
  • Create affinity spaces and have trusted adults available help all students process events in the world that impact their lives & to help them distinguish between comfort and safety

  I will be happy to go into depth with these ideas during a Q&A.

  Merrie Najimy, M.Ed. is an Arab-American, veteran anti-racist elementary school educator of 35 years. Her experiences of marginalization and alienation from a white dominant school curriculum and culture led her to develop an anti-racist pedagogy as an educator. Throughout her career, she has led grade level teams to develop curriculum units on topics like social issues, stereotypes & stereotype busters, and integrated curriculum on indigenous people in NE -past and present- which incorporated the history of the establishment of the Town of Concord. Merrie was  also trained through Peggy McIntosh’s National S.E.E.D project to facilitate professional development with educators on understanding systems of oppression and how to combat them.

  In 2018, she was elected as the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and served until 2022. She then went back to teaching as an elementary STEM educator. Outside of her role as an educator, Merrie runs workshops with educators, administrators, community organizations and corporations on Anti-Palestinian Racism.

• Emilia Diamant, LCSW | February 10, 2025

  First of all, I want to thank the Commission for hearing my and our testimony here today.

  I come to this conversation not just as a Jewish educator on social justice and antisemitism, but as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, a social worker trained in trauma informed care, and a proud product of the Massachusetts school system. My ancestors, my teachers, and my rabbis, taught me that fighting antisemitism is never just about protecting Jews—it’s about fighting the systems that enable it, the fear that fuels it, and the divisions that keep us from building real safety. 

  1. Antisemitism is real and it is unique, and its weaponization is dangerous. As an educator, I teach that antisemitism is a real and ongoing threat across political lines. But I also see how it’s too often used as a weapon— to divide Jewish communities from our natural allies, to silence dissent and criticism and to push a scarcity mindset that isolates us rather than builds solidarity. Antisemitism education is NOT a zero sum game–when we teach that antisemitism is interconnected with other forms of oppression, we deepen our collective understanding and strengthen all our movements for justice. I have found that when I teach this framing, teenagers come back to me with stories of stronger relationships with their non-Jewish peers, that they have been able to explain antisemitism more clearly to administrators and feel supported by their learning to do so.
  2. My grandparents’ survival was about resistance and relationships. One thing I carry from my family’s history is that Jewish survival has never been just about Jews. My grandparents, Maurice and Helene (of blessed memory) weren’t saved by Jewish exceptionalism—they were saved by those who resisted, by those who refused to comply with unjust laws, by those who saw their struggle as interconnected with others. They came to this country and joined unions, fought for civil rights, engaged in movements for justice, because they knew what it meant to experience hate. Their legacies are motivators for my own understanding of what it means to fight for a better world.
  3. We need an expansive framework, not a narrow one. When I talk about antisemitism, I always ask: are we fighting it as part of a broader struggle against white supremacy, authoritarianism, and all forms of oppression? And that is what I want this commission to consider as it continues this important task. 

  Some key things that I hope this commission considers putting into place as best practice for PREVENTION of antisemitism in schools:

  • Rapid Incident Response: Finding ways to call attention to, and increase awareness about hate violence in the immediate aftermath of incidents of violence is an important part of hate violence response and prevention. It can be important for impacted and allied communities, as well as city agencies and elected officials to respond with a unified voice against violence. Rapid incident response may include community alerts, town hall meetings, neighborhood safety events, and school-based and neighborhood education across multiple identities.
  • Data and Reporting: Data and information about the hate violence occurring in our communities is a critical tool for identifying strategies to end violence. Marginalized communities feel safest reporting incidents to community-based organizations, which can help them to make a safety plan and determine whether or not they would like to report to law enforcement or another city agency. Groups must be funded to do this data collection work. This includes support for training and access to data collection software, as well as support for community-specific hotlines to receive reports.
  • Community Education: Many incidents of hate violence occur in public spaces and go unchallenged by witnesses. Bystander/upstander intervention training empowers community members to safely ally themselves with individuals targeted as victims when an incident of hate or harassment is underway in public. 
  • Intercommunal Collaboration: A main driver of intercommunal tensions in neighborhoods where communities live close together is competition for scarce resources. One way to ease those tensions is to facilitate communities working together on projects that benefit everyone in the neighborhood. This can be done by making grants on a multi-year basis to community-based organizations for groups like religious congregations to come together for park beautification, food distribution or other pro-social activities. Working together toward shared goals will help people build relationships, learn to trust one another, and develop the understanding that we can collaborate across differences.
  • Restorative Justice Programs: Much of the current effort at stopping hate violence is focused on criminalizing acts of hate, while the root causes of hate violence remain unaddressed and the violence remains unchecked. Restorative justice is a means of giving all who are stakeholders in an incident – survivors, people who have done harm, and the communities to which they belong – a voice in how harm can be repaired and future harm prevented. Restorative justice can give survivors more of a voice and provide opportunities for healing while holding those who cause harm accountable for their actions. Creating restorative justice pilot programs focused on incidents of hate violence committed by minors that do not meet the hate crimes standard can provide opportunities for education, accountability, healing, and reform.
    

  To honor Jewish history—not just the trauma, but the resilience—we need to teach that fighting antisemitism isn’t about shutting down conversations; it’s about opening them up. My ancestors didn’t survive just so we could live in fear—they survived so we could fight for a better world. 

  I hope this commission considers my testimony here today as a charge to include diverse voices in your analysis and learning, to approach this crucial issue from a solidarity framework, and to consider how to encourage critical thinking amongst our student body. When I bring a solidarity framework of learning to my students of all ages I have found them to bring gratitude for the nuanced conversations they have, the ability to turn questions over and dive into new concepts head first with their classmates, rather than be told that there is only one right way to understand a concept. I am hopeful that this is the opening to a rich and fruitful conversation that we can continue here today and into the future. Thank you again for your time and consideration.

  Emilia Diamant, LCSW is a 20 year educator, social worker, organizer, and proud Bostonian. She has a degree in Informal Urban Education from NYU and a Master’s in Social Work from UNC-Chapel Hill.  She has taught in Boston, New York, North Carolina, Costa Rica, Italy, Israel, and Ukraine, working with learners of all ages, from pre-K to adults, with a focus in middle school through the mid 20s audience. She is a native Bostonian and currently lives in Waltham, MA.

• Sana Fadel, MPA | February 10, 2025

  My testimony will focus on three topics:

  • Weaponize IHRA definition in Title VI claims
  • Censorship of curricula
  • Political goals of silencing and censorship

  IHRA Definition

  The recommendations of Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism rest on defining antisemitism, strongly favoring the IHRA definition. This definition which we unequivocally oppose – whether adopted formally or used informally – expands the definition of antisemitism to include not only incidents of hate and discrimination against Jewish people but also certain criticism of the state of Israel. 

  Limiting the applicability of civil rights laws based on one’s political views about a foreign government is extremely troubling. A new category of “anti-Israel” hate is being used to threaten the basic tenants of a democratic society: (1) our right to criticize, protest and advocate to influence our own government’s policies and actions and (2) our children’s right to a robust education that prepares them to be critical thinkers to fully participate in our democracy.

  No other form of racism or hate incorporates attitudes towards a foreign government or political ideology, nor seeks to erase and criminalize an entire people (Palestinians). That would be no different than claiming that hostility towards Iran or Afghanistan is Islamophobic and imposing that view on discipline, curriculum and professional development.

  The formal adoption of “anti-Israel bias” in our state’s policies and administration would lay the ground for: (1) silencing and disciplining of students and teachers; (2) control of schools’ curricula through censorship and book banning; and (3) inflating and distorting data on antisemitism in schools.  This may make the classroom more comfortable for some students by avoiding difficult discussions about Israel and Palestine in the classroom, but adopting these recommendations does NOT make Jewish students safe. 

  Weaponize IHRA definition in Title VI claims

  We oppose using allegations of a “hostile learning environment” to advocate for the erasure and criminalization of Palestinian history, culture or humanity.  

  This conflation of “being” safe and “feeling” safe is reminiscent of the anti-equity arguments that discussing systems of oppression and supremacy and its legacy makes individual students uncomfortable. This argument assumes students are incapable of understanding systemic oppression as opposed to individual bias.  Similarly, a definition of antisemitism that is deeply intertwined with creating a new category of rights (namely “anti-Israel) leaves no space for students and parents, Jewish or otherwise, who do not adhere to its ideology.

  Teachers have been accused of promoting a “hostile learning environment” when sharing balanced classroom materials, which include Palestinian perspectives, or if students share  or even acknowledge empathy and identification with Palestinians. Examples include, 

  • A student spoke sympathizing with Palestinians and calls for peace
  • A Palestinian student before he even spoke about his own experience
  • Anyone who called for a ceasefire before Biden/Harris called for a ceasefire
  • Fabricated accusations against an educator to build the case for parental review of all curricular materials related to Israel/Palestine
  •  school issued a statement expressing concern for Israelis and included concern for Palestinians in the same sentence
  • A school that includes Palestinian narratives in its curriculum
  • A school worksheet referencing historic Palestine before 1948
  • The scapegoating of the MTA is a prime example

  The underlying theme in all these examples: a mere accusation was all that was necessary to upend a student or teacher’s life with the bigger goal of influencing the staffing and curricula in a school district. You too will hear these stories but they will be presented to you as examples of antisemitism and it is your job to dig into the facts and motivations behind these stories. It is not antisemitic for Palestinians to speak openly about their own life experiences, and to suggest as much serves only to silence Palestinian voices and heighten anti Palestinian racism.

  Censorship of curricula

  Campaigns to censor and control curricula and books are not new to Massachusetts schools, but the Commission must not appease calls to control educational materials that do not center and support Israel. 

  The distortion and misrepresentation of Palestinians’ culture and history and their political aspirations as antisemitic dangerously diverts attention away from acts of hate targeting Jewish people and institutions. 

  There is also a long-standing campaign to censor Massachusetts’ History and Social Studies framework This past summer CAMERA, a right-wing Israel advocacy group, summarized their approach. And I quote “teaching about Palestine really means teaching anti-Israel bias and propaganda.”

  Both the AJC and the JCRC blasted Ethnic Studies curricula in public schools mirror right wing attacks on the same ethnic studies curricula that address colonial histories in Latin America, Africa and Asia or arguments that teaching about slavery makes white students “unsafe”. This extends systemically by calls to censor history and social studies curricula that present Palestinian perspectives alongside Israeli perspectives. 

  Two months ago, a federal appeals court ruled that a curriculum that merely makes people feel uncomfortable is not discriminatory, nor does the inclusion of anti-Zionist material preclude students from exercising their religion. And I quote: 

  “The Supreme Court has long recognized that the freedom to receive ideas, and its relation to the freedom of expression, is particularly relevant in the classroom setting…[T]he right to receive ideas is a necessary predicate to the recipient’s meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom.”. Students have a right to receive information and “lawsuits threatening to attach civil liability on the basis of the assignment of [curricular material] would severely restrict a student’s right to receive material that his school board or other educational authority determines to be of legitimate educational value.”

  “..it is far from clear that learning about Israel and Palestine or encountering teaching materials with which one disagrees constitutes an injury”

  Political goals of silencing and censorship

  As a parent, I want my children to be challenged and I am grateful to every teacher who has used their position to protect our children’s right to learn. It is appalling to me to see educators treated and smeared as the enemy. I also stand behind my educators’ unions because our teachers can not do this alone.  My children need the union to have our educators’ backs, so that they can have our children’s backs.

  I will end by quoting Vice President Vance, who echoed President Nixon: “The professors are the enemy”. I will also quote Prof. Jason Stanley, author of “Erasing History”: “The leaders of the movement to attack universities and schools are all Ivy League grads. …These guys are sending their kids to Harvard, Yale and Princeton…. They are attacking the [educational] institutions, the universities, because the universities provide critical inquiry into the kinds of myths that’s required for these kinds of politics. This kind of politics elevates the dominant group…Erasing history paves the way for ethnic, racial and religious nationalism.” 

  Sana Fadel, is a member of Sawa: Newton-Area Alliance for Peace and Justice (“Sawa” means “together”). She is a proud public school parent and began organizing in the Newton Public Schools with like-minded parents in November 2022 to advocate against a local campaign coordinated with the national “anti-woke” FAIR and Parents Defending Education to eliminate diversity and equity initiatives in the Newton Public Schools.  Since October 2023, she has been a member of Sawa, a grassroots organization whose members represent a diversity of ethnicity and faiths from Newton and surrounding cities and towns, to address the local fallout of the Israel-Palestine war. She has a Masters of Public Affairs from Columbia University.