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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\nThis hatred now pervades the academic culture around me. One colleague, who takes Duquesne undergraduates on educational trips to Auschwitz, has remained enthusiastically involved in a professional psychoanalytic society that was, until recently, led by a \u201cdecolonizing psychologist\u201d notorious for teaching that Zionism is a mental illness. Another colleague collaborates with someone who posted publicly that \u201cthe so-called \u2018final solution\u2019 was not nearly final enough,\u201d published a manifesto for the \u201cIslamic Marxist Revolutionary Alliance,\u201d and is currently on trial in the United Kingdom for supporting terrorism. A graduate student in my department publicly celebrated Hamas terrorists and Oct. 7 atrocities. <\/p>\n
As a result of calling these things out, I have been isolated and harassed.<\/p>\n
In response, Duquesne\u2019s Psychology Department mandated a \u201cCountering Antisemitism\u201d training session, provided by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. The training devoted nearly all of its attention to forms of anti-Jewish hatred that most educated Americans already recognize as bad: medieval religious anti-Judaism (\u201cChrist killer!\u201d) and 20th-century racial antisemitism (\u201cParasite!\u201d). But it never named the form of Jew-hatred that prompted the training in the first place \u2014 antizionism \u2014 with its own familiar accusations of \u201cColonizer!\u201d \u201cApartheid!\u201d and \u201cGenocide!\u201d<\/p>\n
If my department were plagued by Spanish inquisitors or neo-Nazi skinheads, the training might have been useful. It is not. I am countering a form of Jew-hatred expressed by ordinary academics using what now passes for acceptable academic language.<\/p>\n
Near the end of the session, the colleague who educates undergraduates at Auschwitz but tolerates the celebration of Hamas atrocities by his own graduate student asked how one can criticize state policy without being branded antisemitic.<\/p>\n
I expected a thoughtful and straightforward answer from the Holocaust Center\u2019s educator. The educator could have said that criticism of the Israeli government is not anti-Jewish. Indeed, nobody criticizes Israeli governments more passionately than Israelis do. But the educator also should have said that singling out the world\u2019s only Jewish state for standards applied to no other country, denying Jews the right to national self-determination, treating \u201cZionist\u201d as a category of contamination and psychopathology, or obsessively degrading Israelis as \u201cethno-supremacist baby killers\u201d are not legitimate policy critiques but modern forms of anti-Jewish bigotry and abuse.<\/p>\n
The educator should have said that contemporary antizionism is not political criticism at all, but discrimination directed at Jews through the language of Israel.<\/p>\n
Instead, what followed truly shocked me. After some hand-waving innuendo about geopolitical dynamics and colonialism, the Holocaust Center\u2019s facilitator explained that just because a Jew says that something is antisemitic doesn\u2019t mean it is. The oppressed group doesn\u2019t get to decide what\u2019s antisemitic. <\/p>\n
Imagine workplace racism training that concluded by telling Black people they are not reliable authorities on the racism directed at them. Imagine telling gay people they cannot meaningfully identify homophobia.<\/p>\n
Either would rightly be regarded as absurd. Yet when the subject was Jew-hatred, the proposition was presented as entirely reasonable.<\/p>\n
That was the session\u2019s final explicit message: Jews, as a group, do not get to decide what is anti-Jewish.<\/p>\n
The unstated message was even more revealing: The facilitator\u2019s apparent priority was to absolve those worried about being accused of antisemitism, not to help them counter the antizionist hatred they were helping to spread.<\/p>\n
I later learned that, according to public materials, this Holocaust Center educator was trained by IfNotNow in 2016 and went on to co-found IfNotNow Pittsburgh. IfNotNow\u2019s mission includes ending U.S. support for \u201cthe ongoing Nakba\u201d and \u201cIsrael\u2019s system of apartheid.\u201d Indeed, IfNotNow\u2019s statement after Oct. 7, 2023, placed blame on the Israeli and U.S. governments, not Hamas, for the massacre. <\/p>\n
The Holocaust Center\u2019s educator also is credited as one of the \u201ccollaborators and mentors\u201d who peer-reviewed a 2025 guide that recasts Israel as an \u201cethnonationalist\u201d state aligned with Christian imperialism and American white supremacy. <\/p>\n
Why is this dangerous? <\/p>\n
Antizionist hate \u2014 projecting the most hated evils of our age back onto Jews, now recoded as \u201cZionists\u201d \u2014 is not just a problem in Duquesne\u2019s Psychology Department. It is perhaps the most denied bigotry in the world today. If we want that denial to end, then choosing anti-Jewish bias educators who are trained by antizionists and who are tolerant of antizionism is counterproductive at best, and harmful at worst. That choice reflects institutional judgment, not merely a single educator\u2019s personal opinion.<\/p>\n
The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh\u2019s stated mission is to \u201cconnect the horrors of the Holocaust and antisemitism with injustices of today\u201d and to \u201cempower individuals to build a more civil and humane society.\u201d That mission carries a profound responsibility: not merely to teach how Jew-hatred once appeared, but how it evolves and manifests in the present. <\/p>\n
A training approach that refuses to name antizionism \u2014 and tells Jews they don\u2019t get a say in what counts as anti-Jewish hate \u2014 does not prepare participants to recognize the dominant form of hatred confronting many Jewish students and faculty today. <\/p>\n
That is not a minor omission. It is a direct betrayal of the Center\u2019s founding purpose \u2014 and of the community it exists to serve.<\/p>\n
Jew-hatred has never remained static. Like a virus, it mutates to survive, changing its language while preserving its target. Across centuries, it has adapted to new religious, scientific and political contexts, but its core remains the same: casting Jews as the source of whatever is wrong with society and portraying hostility toward them as not merely acceptable, but as good. <\/p>\n
In medieval Europe, Jews were condemned as Christ killers who block eternal salvation. In the 20th century, they were condemned as race-polluters who block national unity. Today, they are increasingly condemned collectively through the world\u2019s only Jewish state as racist colonizers who block global peace and harmony. Holocaust education that cannot explain that evolution \u2014 and how each mutation gains popular legitimacy by presenting itself in terms of the accepted theology, biological-science, or social-science scholarship of its age \u2014 is not merely incomplete. It leaves students, educators and institutions unable to recognize the prejudice unfolding directly in front of them.<\/p>\n
An institution that cannot recognize hatred as it evolves cannot protect the community it was built to defend. Pittsburgh\u2019s Jewish community deserves a Holocaust Center that can name the disease in its current form \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. PJC<\/p>\n
Alex Kranjec is an associate professor of psychology at Duquesne University. <\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note: You can read The Tree of Life\u2019s response to this opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antizionism has become the dominant public expression of anti-Jewish hatred at many elite institutions. I have wondered how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-260399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}