#icsz

[eretzyisrael]

By TAMMI ROSSMAN-BENJAMIN

In March 1941, Nazi theorist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg launched the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. Its inaugural conference, “Research in the Struggle against World Jewry,” featured talks by many scholars, including the Institute’s director, historian Wilhelm Grau, who concluded that the only viable solution to the Jewish question was for the Jews to disappear.

Rosenberg’s Institute was one of several established to support the Third Reich’s efforts to provide an empirical basis for their anti-Jewish policies. To that end, the scholars affiliated with these institutes endeavored to put in place a new interdisciplinary field of study that would draw on various academic disciplines to promulgate antisemitic scholarship about the Jews.

According to Alan Steinweis’ book, “Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,” this new brand of scholarship, which he dubs “Nazi Jewish Studies,” demonstrates its practitioners’ “cynical manipulation of scientific knowledge, historical events, religious texts, and statistical data” in the service of “justifying the disenfranchisement, expropriation, and removal of Jews from German society.”

Fast forward to August 2023. 

Two academic leaders of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) – San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi and University of Massachusetts Boston Professor Heike Schotten - co-authored an article explaining why they recently established the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ).

Describing ICSZ as “explicitly anti-Zionist” and “strictly committed to abiding by the BDS picket line,” Abdulhadi and Schotten link their new Institute to “the long history of struggle” against efforts “to conflate Zionist politics and ideology with Jews or Jewishness.”  

In October, the Institute will be holding an inaugural conference entitled “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism” to provide academics and activists with tools for delegitimizing the most widely accepted definition of antisemitism, which rightly identifies anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, but is being portrayed by conference organizers as “a tool of and a shield for repressive state power.”

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Some of the leading academics pushing for mandatory ethnics studies courses are ardent anti-Zionists.

Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz, co-chairs the UC Academic Senate working group developing the admissions proposal. She recently co-founded the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which declares on its website that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.”

“The information provided above makes it crystal clear that the UC faculty driving the ethnic studies admission requirement proposal view opposition to Zionism and activism to harm the Jewish state and its supporters as core components of their ethnic studies discipline,” this week’s letter to the UC board states. “They promote antisemitic stereotypes of Jews and the Jewish state and encouragement to antisemitic activism as ‘part and parcel’ of ethnic studies courses at the University of California and beyond.”

Last month, Hong argued during a podcast interview that ethnic studies should teach “the extraordinary violence of Zionism, the settler colonial violence, [and] the militarism that is inflicted on Palestine and Palestinian people.” She added that “a critique of Zionism is part and parcel of the field of [ethnic studies].”

In the same interview, ICSZ’s co-founder Emmaia Gelman said academics should “tie [Zionism] to this much larger Western supremacy and white supremacy” and “de-link the study of Zionism from Jewish studies.”

Hong is also organizing ICSZ’s first conference next month — part of which will take place at UC Santa Cruz — titled “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition’: Theory and Practice.”

The conference will focus on combating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and well over 1,000 global entities, from countries to companies. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.

Critics argue that applying double standards to Israel and opposing Israel’s continuation as the nation-state of the Jewish people may not necessarily be antisemitic, creating tighter standards around when anti-Israel speech and activity is antisemitic.

In this week’s letter, the nearly 100 organizations said the ethnic studies admissions requirement’s ideological roots make it “an outrage” and “both wrong and highly dangerous.”

[sethshead]

The first thing that an examination of ICSZ’s website makes clear is that, contrary to their claims, ICSZ’s founders are not, in fact, anti-Zionists. ICSZ describes Zionism as “a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it.” It views it as a “political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession” and intends to demonstrate “how the critical study of Zionism is deeply and essentially connected to the study of global forces including contests over power, race, colonialism, capital, militarism, and violence.”

This deeply contrived view of Zionism bears no relationship to how the founders of Zionism framed their beliefs, nor how Jews have historically perceived and experienced Zionism. Jews who argued against Zionism as the answer to the “Jewish question” in the run-up to World War II (an entirely legitimate debate until the war proved Zionism right in the most terrible way possible) would not have recognized in this description the Zionism that they opposed.

Zionism is the movement to being about and preserve Jewish self-determination within the land of Jewish origins. Full stop. Within those parameters there are and have been a great many differences of opinion, tactics, and agendas, but Zionism as a whole is no greater or lesser than the definition I here provided.

Efforts to hang all these poetic meanings and associations, aligning Zionism with all that is wrong with the world, instead of engaging with Zionism per se, as itself, in a Jewish context, recalls many traditional forms of hate leveled at our people.

We are always used as surrogates for whatever forces the bigot wishes to condemn. We are never just the people we are, we are the collective identity of capitalism or Bolshevism; of backwards ignorance or heedless, culture-consuming modernity; of the unassimilatable alien or the perfectly camouflaged subversive - frequently all these things at once! But never are we engaged as people, just as Zionism is expressed by anti-Zionists in terms of these imposed constructs, as cosmic evils, rather than as a people tired of running for their lives and finally empowered with agency, autonomy, and the capacity for self-defense.

[inspirecitizens]

A PYP Empathy to Impact Model

If you could walk through the doors of the Primary School at the Inter-Community School Zurich (ICSZ), you would find yourself in an atmosphere of creativity, inquiry and innovation. This is a place where leaders and educators care deeply about students and cultivating a sense of wonder of the world. 

[lauranaturalhome]

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[poliskull]

The thinking man without a face on a river of thoughts, observes it as the passage of time, inexorable without return 🇮🇹l'uomo pensante senza volto su un fiume di pensieri , lo osserva come il trascorrere del tempo , inesorabile senza ritorno Avaiable on ETSY 17x14x14 #skull #skullart #skulldesign #skullpture #macabreart #horrorart #gothart #gothichomedecor #gothlife #skullpassion #poliskull #skullstyle #skulllover #etsyartist #etsyhunter #skullstudio #skulltattoo @poliskull (presso Manerba del Garda) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0vXcm-iCSZ/?igshid=ttktdjfclkv