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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.

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?

New School Student Senate Sanctions Hillel Over Program With Israeli Military

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........

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