The Nazis famously subverted academia by creating an entire new field of “Jewish research” (Judenforschung) where respected academics from various fields produced a corpus of academic papers to justify the Nazi policy of genocide of Jews. One early example of this perversion of academia is described in Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism inNazi Germany by Alan E. Steinweis:
Early in the [Nazi] regime, when the universities’ embrace of antisemitic Jewish studies still seemed tentative, Nazi supporters decided to fill the gap by creating their own free-standing Jewish studies institute. The main force behind this initiative was the historian Walter Frank. In 1935, with support from high-ranking Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess, Frank founded the Institute for History of the New Germany (Institut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands), the purpose of which was to infuse a National Socialist perspective into German historical scholarship. A short time later, this so-called Reich Institute established its special Research Department for the Jewish Question, based in Munich, and placed it under the direction of the historian Wilhelm Grau. ..Operating under the administrative protection of the Reich Education Ministry, during the second half of the 1930s the Research Department occupied a central position in the emerging field of Nazi Jewish studies. It sponsored research projects at universities, convened conferences that drew participants from a variety of academic disciplines, and published the conference proceedings in a scholarly yearbook, Forschungen zur Judenfrage (Research on the Jewish Question).
What's old is new again.
Modern heirs of Nazi antisemitism have just created their own pseudo-academic institution, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
Don't be fooled by the phrase "critical study." It is just as intellectually dishonest as the Nazi academic studies of Jews were.
It doesn't take a graduate level logic course to understand that "racists embrace the Israeli flag" does not mean "Zionist are racist." That's like saying that KKK use of crosses prove all Christians are racists.In recent years, the Israeli flag has increasingly appeared around the world alongside racial supremacist political messaging– for instance, at the January 6th riot in Washington D.C., Hindutva rallies in India, Nazi rallies in Europe, and, most potently, in anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank. At this point, it could not be clearer that Zionism is a political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession.
But the intent of this new "Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" is not detached academic study of Zionism. It is purely political - and it is antisemitic.
The very first of the group's "Points of Unity" is an antisemitic lie: "Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism."
Zionists don't define themselves this way. Only anti-Zionists do. "Critical studies" of a topic are impossible when you pre-determine the results of the studies. These are no "studies" at all - just compiling evidence, no matter how flimsy, on one side of the scale and ignoring any counter evidence.
Zionism is the self-determination movement of the Jewish people. It seeks the return of Jews to their ancestral lands. It is anti-colonialist. It is not racist. However, denying that Jews are a people with national rights - and labeling those Jews who assert those rights as being inherently racist - is indeed antisemitism.
Their political agenda and disinterest in objective studies is made clear in other "points of unity:" "Academic research is not politically or morally neutral....The Institute’s project is to support research from below, produced by a community led by people who are the targets of Zionist and state repression, with a research agenda determined in collaboration with communities resisting repression."
In other words, if you believe that Jews have rights - rights to a state, rights to self-defense, rights not to be murdered by Palestinian terrorists - you are not welcome in this space.
This is not "critical studies." It is anti-Zionist propaganda. And once you get past their name, they don't even pretend to hide it. To study Zionism, they demand that you reject Zionism and Jewish peoplehood as a prerequisite.
This section of the manifesto is most enlightening:
Studying Zionism through such a comprehensive [sic!] lens means, for instance, looking at the role of Zionist institutions in arenas beyond Palestine as well as the range of Jewish communities, organizations, and institutions where it is not as readily transparent.
These modern Jew-haters are embracing David Miller's paranoid concept of looking for, and magically finding, links between Jewish organizations and whatever they are hating today. It presupposes that Zionist Jews have a single, nefarious agenda, all controlled by a small group of Jews who secretly direct all these projects -and always with immoral aims.
The entire project is putting an academic face on pure hate. Its basic principles are based on bigotry and lies.
Antisemitism is becoming mainstream, and it is people like this who are in the forefront.
(h/t Andrew)
