Events
Dimitry Anselme, chief officer of growth & engagement, Facing History and Ourselves , speaking at May 6, 2024 School Symposium
2024-2025 Zoom series: "Navigating Antisemitism on Campus and Beyond" for higher education leaders and administrators
Higher education leaders and administrators — currently working in departments related to student and academic affairs, DEI and legal affairs, communications, development, president, provost, and deans' offices, etc. — are heartily invited to join us for one or more of the webinars below. Presentations will be followed by a Q&A session for participants.
Free of charge.
Required registration closes 2 hours before webinar start time.
When is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?
Student and Faculty Misconduct on Campus and Free Speech
Cutting-Edge Research on Antisemitism
Antisemitic Propaganda as a Form of Information Warfare against Democracies
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
1:00-2:00 PM Eastern Time
What is antisemitism, and how is it different from other kinds of racism? What forms does it assume and what are its primary tropes? When is anti-Zionism antisemitic and when is criticism of Israel antisemitic?
These questions and more will be explored in this presentation, along with an understanding of how this impacts campus discourse among faculty and students.
Presented by Ron Hassner, Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at the University of California Berkeley. He is also the faculty director of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies and is the editor of the Cornell University Press book series “Religion and Conflict.” Prof. Hassner studies the role of ideas, practices, and symbols in international security with particular attention to the relationship between religion and violence.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
12:00-1:00 PM Eastern Time
Chancellor Emeritus Mark Yudof, and First Amendment scholar, will join Rachel Fish in conversation about the challenges university leaders encounter on many campuses today. How do university administrators respond to student and faculty misconduct and address actions and speech that seek to incite hate toward Jewish and Zionist students and faculty? How do institutions of higher education continue to prioritize the value of freedom of speech while ensuring that a hostile environment is not created on campus? When is otherwise protected speech subject to time, place and manner restrictions? Please join us for this discussion and learn from one of the leading experts on how to address these timely and pressing issues.
Mark G. Yudof received his BA and LLB degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. After serving as a law clerk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, he spent two years at the Harvard Center for Law and Education. For 26 years he held various posts at the University of Texas, including professor of law, dean, and provost. He subsequently served as president of the University of Minnesota, chancellor of the University of Texas System, and president of the University of California. He currently serves as chair of the strategic planning and budget committee of the Academic Engagement Network.
Rachel Fish, PhD, serves as special advisor to the Brandeis University Presidential Initiative to Counter Antisemitism in Higher Education and is co-founder and president of Boundless, an independent think-action-tank promoting Israel education and combating Jew-hatred. In addition, she teaches Israeli history and society at The George Washington University as Visiting Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
Previously, she was the executive director of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, senior advisor and resident scholar at the Paul E. Singer Foundation in New York City, and executive director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, where she trained the next generation of academics in the field of Israel Studies.
Fish completed her dissertation titled, “Configurations of Bi-nationalism: The Transformation of Bi-nationalism and Palestine/Israel 1920’s-Present,” on the history of bi- nationalism and alternative visions for constructing the State of Israel. She has served on the faculty at Brandeis University, Harvard University, and The George Washing University, written articles for several publications in the mainstream press and academic journals, and co-edited the book “Essential Israel: Essays for the 21st Century.”
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
12:00-1:00 PM Eastern Time
Professors Len Saxe (Brandeis University), Eitan Hersh (Tufts University), and Rachel Fish (Brandeis University) will share their research findings related to college students in the U.S., Jewish and non-Jewish.
Administrators will gain insights on how this research can impact higher education policy, and identify opportunities for meaningful education and skills building for students, faculty, and administrators.
Len Saxe is the Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Social Policy at Brandeis University, directing the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute. An experimental social psychologist, he focuses on religious and ethnic identity, especially within the Jewish community. His research includes studies of antisemitism, American Jewry demographics, and Jewish education's impact on engagement. He leads a study of Birthright Israel and investigates the American Jewish population's characteristics. Professor Saxe has authored nearly 400 publications, served as a Science Fellow for the U.S. Congress, a Fulbright Professor at Haifa University, and received the APA’s prize for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest and the Marshall Sklare Award. He also teaches at Brandeis University's Heller School and College of Arts and Sciences.
Eitan Hersh is a professor of political science at Tufts University. His research focuses on US elections and civic participation. Hersh is the author of Politics is for Power (Scribner, 2020), Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge UP 2015), as well as scholarly articles. Hersh earned his PhD from Harvard in 2011 and served as assistant professor of political science at Yale University from 2011-2017. His public writings have appeared in venues such as the New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, POLITICO, and the Boston Globe. Hersh regularly testifies in voting rights court cases and has testified to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the role of data analytics in political campaigns.
Rachel Fish serves as special advisor to the Brandeis University President's Initiative on Antisemitism.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
12:00-1:00 PM Eastern Time
Authoritarian states have long deployed antisemitism in their ideological warfare against democracies. During the Cold War, the USSR was the largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda and disinformation globally as it sought to undermine the US and its ally, Israel. By dressing up tropes from antisemitic conspiracy theory as "anti-Zionism," it managed to sell them to a wide variety of audiences across the globe. Today, state actors such as Russia, China, and Iran target young Americans with the same toxic tropes, presenting them as opposition to Israel.
In this lecture we'll survey "anti-Zionist" antisemitism as a form of information warfare targeting democracies; discuss what specifically makes it antisemitic; and talk about why it is critical that democracies learn to resist it.
Presented by Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism. She is a senior advisor with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center; a fellow with ISGAP and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism; and a contributing writer to Tablet. Her writings have appeared in Fathom, Sapir, Quillette, and Newsweek, among others, as well as in several essay collections, including Jewish Priorities: 65 Proposals for the Future of Our People (Wicked Son Press); The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century: From the Academic Boycott Campaign to the Mainstream (Routledge); and Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays (Routledge).