stand with us vs. mit

The Stand With Us v. MIT decision exemplifies the institutionalized blind spot at the heart of contemporary Jew-hatred recognition. Current legal and analytic frameworks remain constrained by an outdated typology that identifies antisemitism only when it reproduces the explicit semiotics of classical Jew-hatred—Nazi imagery, racial caricature, or theological invective. By contrast, antizionism operates through a distinct matrix of libels—colonizer, apartheid, genocide—that reconfigure the figure of the Jew as “the Zionist” and translocate hatred of Jewish peoplehood into the moralized discourse of anti-imperialism. The court’s insistence that such rhetoric constitutes “political speech” rather than discrimination is an artifact of a conceptual model that cannot perceive antizionism as a contemporary form of antisemitism.

To move beyond this impasse, we must thematize antizionism itself—that is, bring it into analytic focus as a coherent ideology of hate rather than a mere excess of political critique. The recurring “not all criticism of Israel is antisemitism” formula is epistemically circular: it defines antisemitism so narrowly that its contemporary expression becomes invisible. A paradigm shift is required—one that recognizes hostility toward the Jewish collective, articulated through the delegitimization of Israel and so-called “Zionists,” as a specific, structurally anti-Jewish phenomenon. Only by dismantling the permissive logic embedded in our existing definitions can we begin to address the lived consequences of antizionism on campus and in public life.