Yale’s recent decision to terminate the Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism is slowly drawing more attention, the news emerging initially in the dark recesses of the New York Post and slowly making its way out to the Jerusalem Post. I had occasion to criticize the center for an overtly right-wing, anti-Muslim conference that it hosted last year in the Yale Daily News and in the Washington Post’s OnFaith feature. While Yale’s official position is that the center was closed because it failed to produce quality scholarship or to sufficiently involve campus faculty, right-wing websites like the New York Post have suggested that the real reasons lie elsewhere. In particular, commentators have hinted that the center was closed because it may have encumbered the solicitation of Arab money, as if that forms a significant part of Yale’s funding, and because criticism of Muslims is, supposedly, too politically incorrect for Yale to handle – despite the dividends that aggressive and abusive language about Muslims often pays in American politics.
Set aside the clearly suspect undertones in those two claims. Whatever actually led to the university’s decision is left, for now, to the exclusive knowledge of insiders and their private motivations. But if it were true that Yale cancelled the program to appeal to donors – rather unlikely as that appears – then its decision would deserve nothing but opprobrium. In truth, the center merited criticism because it pursued an agenda that did a disservice to the study of anti-Semitism by entangling it with crude anti-Muslim and anti-Arab politics. Though the center was ostensibly about one form of racism, it was blind to the point of denial about other kinds that were on open display at its events, particularly against Arabs and Palestinians.
It is truly regrettable that the center delegitimized its own work in this fashion, not least because we are at an important crossroads when it comes to ideas about anti-Semitism. For decades, the idea of anti-Semitism has been in the hands of people who have used it to defend terrible injustices by Israel. My criticism of the center rested on the principle that racism is wrong because of what it does, not because of whom it targets. I was pointing to the tension between nationalist opposition to racism and humanist opposition to racism. So long as the study of and opposition to anti-Semitism is rooted in Zionist nationalism rather than humanism, it is a project doomed to produce irreconcilable conflicts and great harms rather than more possibilities for justice. If, on the other hand, opposition to anti-Semitism is based on a sense of justice, then it is simply inconsistent to perpetuate injustice in Palestine on the basis of opposition to anti-Semitism. The two positions – opposition to anti-Semitism and active support for justice, freedom, and equality for the Palestinians – must, instead, accommodate and reinforce one another.
The Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism failed to do that. Rather, its work was the justification of Israeli violence, militarization, and dispossession, regardless of its human costs. Its chief business was political, to rationalize support for Israel and its policies as a type of anti-racism, as absurd as that may seem. Much can be said about the center’s political agenda, but the core idea that it promoted, namely, that anti-Semitism is an attack on Israeli nationalism rather than an attack on human dignity, must continue to be challenged, even if the center is now closed.
Yaman Salahi is third-year law student at Yale and a a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.
