The advertisement, paid for by an anonymous organization called BDS Report, was released as the CUNY student government prepared to consider dueling resolutions addressing antisemitism at a meeting last weekend. It was only the most striking of what students on both sides said was a flurry of outside advocacy that poisoned an already deeply divisive debate.
Both of the resolutions, the latest in a spate of similar initiatives at campuses across the country, dealt with the very definition of antisemitism a seemingly esoteric issue that has increasingly become a proxy for larger questions concerning the polarizing politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, identity and free speech. And, after the intervention of national pro-Israel groups, both resolutions failed to pass at a contentious, hours-long Zoom meeting of CUNY’s Student Senate on Sunday.
There are plenty of examples in which the term Zionist has been used as a slur against pro-Israel Jews. In December, the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, posted a meme on Facebook-owned Instagram instructing students to “start Zionist shaming.” The image showed a young man burying his face in his arms, surrounded by terms including, “racist!”, “colonizer!”, and “go back to Brooklyn.”
Similarly, the University of Southern California (USC) student government vice president resigned last August after she was pressured and harassed by fellow students who disagreed with her support for Israel. “But because I openly identify as a Jew who supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state i.e., a Zionist I was accused by a group of students of being unsuitable as a student governor leader,” Rose Ritch wrote in a
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