A Jewish legal group filed a brief with the US Supreme Court last week arguing that anti-Zionism can constitute discrimination against Jews, in a legal argument the authors hope will be used in other courts around the US.

The brief is part of an ongoing legal battle surrounding alleged anti-Jewish discrimination at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Jewish students, backed by the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice, in 2024 filed a lawsuit accusing MIT of allowing a hostile educational environment. The case was dismissed later that year, and the federal First Circuit court of appeals upheld the dismissal.

While dismissing the case, the First Circuit court issued an opinion saying that anti-Zionism was not discrimination and that there was no consensus in the scholarship on the matter.

The circuit court said that the Jewish students were “entitled to their own interpretive lens equating anti-Zionism (as they define it) and antisemitism,” but cannot “insist that others must be bound” by their view.

The decision was a blow to Jewish legal groups that had argued anti-Zionism was discriminatory. Legal opponents of the Jewish groups cited the MIT dismissal in cases around the country.

The Center for Jewish Legal Studies, an advocacy group established this year by law professors Rona Kaufman and Andrea J. Martin, filed the amicus brief last Wednesday as part of an appeal against that dismissal.

Cases filed by Jewish groups in recent years have argued that anti-Zionism was discriminatory based on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, or that anti-Zionism was discriminatory because an attachment to Israel is a core value for most Jews. The strategies have met with mixed success.

The Supreme Court brief took a different approach, arguing that anti-Zionism can be direct discrimination due to historical context, citing anti-Zionism’s ideological history and anti-Zionist violence.

The brief argued that the circuit court had not accounted for scholarship indicating anti-Zionist........

© The Times of Israel