U.S. colleges and universities across the United States are using trainings, programming, and campus rules designed to “combat antisemitism” to directly contribute to a larger Zionist, right-wing trend that normalizes racism, Islamophobia, and the silencing of radical political thought rooted in liberation. The latest example of how this works was seen on June 5, when The Guardian broke the story of the suspension and investigation of Savneet Talwar, a tenured art therapy professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her offense? An assignment that “asked students to develop an ethical treatment plan for a hypothetical queer, Muslim woman living in the US” who “felt deeply affected by the violence against Palestinian civilians and was critical of the home government’s limited response.”
Talwar is merely one of the many U.S.-based college and university faculty and staff to be sanctioned for teaching, writing, and speaking about the ongoing Zionist genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And once the mere mention of Palestine is framed as an “antisemitic” act, then the remedy becomes re-education.
The Guardian reports:
Talwar’s department had already been mired in multiple complaints and investigations about alleged antisemitism involving the same student, and faculty had been required to take anti-bias training as the school sought to address the “climate” in the department.
What are these “anti-bias trainings,” and what is the “climate” this case is referring to?
Talwar’s case is just the latest example of how “anti-bias” trainings, the language of “antisemitism,” and concerns around “campus climate” have been co-opted by Zionist students and complicit administrators to transform U.S. colleges and universities from spaces of learning to sites of indoctrination. Specifically, indoctrination that normalizes anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia and penalizes, if not criminalizes, anti-imperial thought.
The Zionist organization, Hillel International, has been at the forefront of shaping this understanding through three interconnected projects, in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), and other Zionist advocacy and lawfare groups. These projects have included: “antisemitism trainings” for college and university students that are focused on combatting anti-Zionism, the “Campus Climate Initiative” (CCI) programming for administrators on 108 campuses, and the development and proliferation of harsher “time, place, and manner” rules, which have restricted protests, limited programming about Palestine, and silenced dissent on campuses.
Together, Zionist organizations are using this three-pronged strategy to try to end the growing movement for Palestine on campus, but as in all cases of political repression, these efforts are engendering resistance as well.
Antisemitism training
For the past two years, I have held dozens of group discussions and conducted over 40 individual interviews about Zionist repression on college and university campuses with Palestinian and other anti-Zionist students across the United States. Almost everyone interviewed has raised the role of school-mandated antisemitism training as a key ideological tool in undermining work for Palestinian liberation. For the students who have been subjected to these so-called “antisemitism trainings,” the story is primarily the same.
Regardless of whether the training is created by Hillel the Anti-Defamation League, (ADL), or other local Zionist organizations, this programming does two main things. First, it frames Palestinians – the victims of 129 years of Zionist colonization, 78 years of Nakba, and almost three years of an ongoing genocide – as either terrorists and aggressors or as equally responsible for the violence in the region. Not only are these trainings factually incorrect, but they are an assault on Palestinian students forced to watch these videos. Second, these trainings create a chilling effect across campuses, as many students explained to me that, despite what they knew to be true about the Zionist genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, they were “afraid of being labeled antisemitic.” The result of these trainings is that threats and fears of “antisemitism” allow Zionist actors to create and control campus climate, speech, and thought.
Several organizations have produced these trainings, and one at Northwestern University has been well reported, in large part because the university’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace called for a boycott of the training. That training was created by the Zionist Chicago-based Jewish United Fund (JUF), the main sponsor of Northwestern’s Hillel Chapter.
In a joint post on Instagram on February 28th, 2025, SJP NU and JVP NU wrote:
The training was made not with the input of relevant faculty, scholars and organizations in our community, but instead by an extremist Zionist outside organization, who partakes in anti-scholarly work by:
1. Making claims to speak on behalf of “the vast majority” of Jews2. providing no citations, or evidence for claims.
The latter training video, a shorter video that groups together Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian hate, is stated to have been in collaboration with the “Inclusion Expert LLC,” with no indication of meaningfully engaging Muslim, Arab or Palestinian communities.
They go on to show how the trainings serve as Zionist propaganda, and they note the connection to the JUF, which, citing the Fund’s own 2024 report, gave “well over $37 million USD to Israel in 2024.”
In the end, at least 300 students were barred from registering for the Fall 2025 semester at NU after boycotting the training video.
The Northwestern University antisemitism training shares many features with the official Hillel International antisemitism training videos, which were created in partnership with the ADL. The three-part video series is currently available online and is being used in hundreds of schools across the U.S., where the training “indoctrinates participants into the political project of Zionism,” according to education scholar and organizer Eli Meyerhoff.
These trainings, whether run by Hillel, the ADL, or partner organizations like the JUF, are propaganda projects designed not to make Jewish students safer, but instead to make Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students less safe.
Campus Climate Initiative
Indoctrinating students only works if administrators are on board. As made clear by numerous congressional hearings and campus policy changes over the past three years, this has been a very successful campaign, in large part because of Hillel’s “Campus Climate Initiative” (CCI), a program targeting college and university administrators.
When the program began in 2020, seven campuses signed on for the first cohort, with new campuses joining each year. In August 2023, Hillel received a $500,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to expand and support the CCI through campus recruitment and programming, conducted over two years. As of the 2026-2027 academic year, 108 campuses in the United States will be part of Hillel’s CCI.
The CCI, “collaborates with higher education administrators to ensure a positive campus climate in which Jewish students feel comfortable expressing their identity and values.” These values, according to Hillel’s own vision, involve centering the Zionist State and its support for the occupation of Palestine and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians: “Israel is at the heart of Hillel’s work. Our goal is to inspire every Jewish college student to develop a meaningful and enduring relationship to Israel and to Israelis.”
According to a report in ejewishphilanthropy.com,
By collecting data, convening university administrators for learning and training opportunities and providing recommendations, CCI…hopes to bridge gaps in understanding about antisemitism that Hillel believes has prevented universities from adequately protecting Jewish students.
Hillel’s CCI ensures that college and university administrators first rely on Hillel-generated data and then use Hillel-generated learning and training programs to center Jewish students’ experiences and feelings on campus. For example, when the CCI was developed in 2020, Mark Rotenberg, vice president of University Initiatives & Legal Affairs at Hillel International explained: “We will work with selected colleges and universities to provide training that helps administrators and staff to recognize the threats of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and to take affirmative steps to address them.”
These trainings include their hallmark workshop, “Jewish Identities, Antisemitism, and Inclusion on Campus and Beyond”:
This signature workshop provides an introduction to Jewish individual and community identity, the history and contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, and the needs of Jewish students on college campuses today. The ideal foundational learning for groups with limited knowledge of Jews, Judaism, and antisemitism.
As well as, “Zionism, Zionisms, and Anti-Zionism”:
We explore the origins, definitions, and culturally situated perspectives of Zionism. What do self-proclaimed Zionists mean by that identification today? How does Zionism reflect Jewish philosophies, traditions, and identities? How has the term been politicized, adapted, and/or coded by its opponents? We will delve into these questions and more, deepening participants’ understanding of Zionism and its modern manifestations
Additionally, there are workshops on “Contemporary Jewish Racialization and Campus Antisemitism,” “Academic Freedom and the Needs of Jewish Students,” and “Understanding Antisemitism in the Context of Social Justice Activism.”
The CCI is Zionist indoctrination. By looking carefully at its programming, Hillel’s true agenda here is clear.
While Hillel is careful not to explicitly define “antisemitism” in any of their publicly available materials, their partner, the ADL, does not take such a precaution. In their 2024 toolkit for colleges, the ADL:
[R]ecommends that colleges and universities integrate a definition of antisemitism into their Codes of Conduct and/or other related policies. The definition should include a reference to Israel, Zionism or anti-Zionism. Definitions should either be thoroughly explained in the policy or clearly hyperlinked on the policy page. Such action is important to explicitly signal to the campus community that antisemitic harassment will not be tolerated on campus.
Policies that fall short of meeting the recommendation may include references to antisemitism that do not explicitly reference anti-Zionism, Zionism, or Israel, thereby failing to acknowledge that anti- Zionism is a form of antisemitism.
They go on in the report to emphasize that:
The ADL recommends that colleges and universities participate in Hillel’s Campus Climate Initiative and/or develop a task force against antisemitism or focused on Jewish student life that is composed of relevant stakeholders (such as Jewish organizational representatives, Jewish staff members, or Jewish students).
Similarly, the right-wing lawfare organization, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (also known as “The Brandeis Center’), in partnership with Hillel International and the ADL, has called on college and university administrators to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism into campus protocols. The Brandeis Center is the leading force behind the ongoing effort to misuse Title VI to suppress speech critical of Israel on college campuses. As Hillel works tirelessly to avoid committing to an overtly Zionist definition while hiding behind the mantle of the “Center for Jewish Life on Campus,” their explicitly Zionist partners, like the ADL, the Brandeis Center, and the JUF, do their dirty work for them.
Time, Place, and Manner rules
“Antisemitism trainings” and the Campus Climate Initiative are two ways Hillel, acting as the campus arm of the Israel lobby, has captured college and university campuses. The third strategy Zionist organizations have used are revised and expanded “time, place, and manner” rules as a way to institutionalize censorship on campus.
Throughout my interviews with students and faculty, I was told that the bureaucratic hurdles introduced by these policies created campus environments in which Palestine-related programming became almost impossible to organize. Faculty hosting Palestinian speakers, students organizing Palestine-related events (like film screenings, book clubs, and poetry readings), and university community members engaging in anti-genocide protests now find so many bureaucratic obstacles and threats of censorship that these events either don’t happen, or they are moved off campus to avoid administrative threats and sanctions.
The Academic Engagement Network (AEN), sponsored by the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) and funded, in part, by Hillel International, recruits faculty to lobby their college and university administrators to challenge the academic boycott of Israel and to implement pro-Israel policies on U.S. campuses. This means targeting BDS campaigns, protests, and programming. In May 2024, the AEN, partnered with Hillel on a statement of Best Practices and Principles that asserted:
University leaders must ensure that policies and procedures regulating the time, place, and manner of protests, demonstrations, postings, and other speech activity are both clearly conveyed to the campus community and rigorously and neutrally enforced.
Such a statement uses the language and policies of “civility” to create the conditions in which students can be suspended for using bullhorns at protests or expelled or de-enrolled for any unauthorized protests.
The Middle East Studies Association has tracked 122 instances in which an event was targeted by college and university administrators – of these postponed, canceled, or otherwise interfered with events, two were unrelated to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the Zionist genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank and Southern Lebanon. Four were related to Israel advocacy, one was related to Lebanon education, and the remaining 115 targeted events involved Palestine advocacy. Only 13 of these 122 events continued as scheduled. Out of the remaining 109 events, 67 were cancelled, 23 were censored, and 19 were moved off campus.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
As I have written elsewhere, Hillel’s “antisemitism” trainings and Campus Climate Initiative programming were first part of a right-wing attack to dismantle DEI initiatives and then further developed after Tufan al-Aqsa to ensure Palestine-related speech, protest, and even thought is rendered institutionally impossible on US college and university campuses. The case of Savneet Talwar is a case in point — asking students to merely consider the psychic impact of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians becomes a legitimized offense under the guise of “antisemitism.”
With this in mind, campus-based programming to “combat antisemitism” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While proliferating under the guise of “making Jewish students more safe,” these are programs explicitly designed to disappear the words “Palestine” and “Palestinians” from U.S. college and university campuses. This makes Palestinian students unsafe while also silencing all opposition to an ongoing genocide. One example of resistance to these programs emerges amongst students at The New School, who recently sanctioned its Hillel chapter for its ties to Israeli war crimes and violations of international law. These Zionist organizations have no business promoting programming and protocol on college and university campuses.
Hillel International is part of the Israel lobby, masquerading as a student organization. In partnership with the ADL, the AEN, the Brandeis Center, and other Zionist organizations, Hillel’s capture of U.S. college and university campuses provides a roadmap for fascist attacks on every corner of academic life. These organizations use “antisemitism” not just to erode academic freedom, but also to foreclose freedom of assembly, speech, and the right to dissent. Until these programs are dismantled and organizations like Hillel are barred from campus, U.S. college and university campuses – once potential sites of learning, inquiry, curiosity, and research – are now nothing more than Zionist re-education camps.
Maura Finkelstein
Maura Finkelstein is a writer and anthropologist. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her recent essays have appeared in The Markaz Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera, and the New Arab.
