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Jan 19, 2026, 8:51 PM

A Taxonomy of Antizionism

The South Africa-born Israeli cultural analyst and journalist Samuel J. Hyde recently called for “a collective intellectual mobilization” to make antizionism a field of study. The formal study of antizionism would become a recognized field producing a much larger...

Jan 12, 2026, 10:53 PM

Day of the undead

The Modern Language Association’s Executive Director Paula Krebs stepped forward not one but three times to stumble through confused explanations of a constitutional amendment strengthening the organization’s odd distinction between a motion and a resolution. The amendment was up...

Dec 21, 2025, 8:23 AM

Weaponizing anti-Semitism at the MLA

Cary Nelson WEAPONZING ANTISEMITISM AT THE MLA The latest attempt to weaponize antisemitism at the Modern Language Association, North America’s most influential disciplinary organization, is in motion for potential fulfillment in January. Once again, the organization’s Radical Caucus hopes to weaponize...

Nov 14, 2025, 7:29 PM

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Cary Nelson My first acquaintance with The Jewish Quarterly came by way of a miniature treasure—small in dimensions but towering in scope—that arrived in my mailbox after I ordered it from Yivo: The Rudashevski Diary. Just 204 pages of a...

Jun 2, 2025, 9:16 PM

Lara Sheehi and the Jewish Museum Murders

Sporting her inverted red triangle earrings and weighing in at length (over an hour) on the Jewish Museum murders, Lara Sheehi in a May 23 interview did her best to remind us it is really a story about the...

May 30, 2025, 5:51 PM

The Fire This Time

As Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, lay on a Washington DC sidewalk outside the Jewish Museum, shot in the back, grievously and perhaps mortally wounded, she began instinctively to crawl away from her assailant. He was Elias Rodriguez, 31, an...

Feb 23, 2025, 12:37 AM

Not one sentence of exoneration for Sheehi

Despite recent claims by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) that the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education “unequivocally clears and exonerates Dr. Lara Sheehi from any and all claims made by the spurious Title...

May 23, 2024, 9:26 PM

Letter on campus antisemitism

OPEN LETTER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS BOARD OF TRUSTEES We are writing as the executive committee of a new faculty organization, Faculty for Academic Freedom & Against Antisemitism (FAFAA). We are a growing voluntary association of 65 current and...

Apr 21, 2023, 10:57 PM

GWU Law Firm delivers what it was paid for

On March 27, 2023, the president of George Washington University issued a ten bullet point summary of a report received from a corporate law firm that GWU had hired to review the case of Lara Sheehi and a complaint...

Oct 5, 2018, 6:43 AM

Jasbir Puar Launches Women’s Studies on a Death Spiral

In the 1970s and 1980s the emerging field of Women’s Studies embodied the hopes and goals for transforming humanities disciplines. It led a long overdue effort to hire more women faculty. It promoted the drive to show how rigorous,...

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About Me

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an ISGAP faculty member. Three of his authored books—Israel Denial (2019), Hate Speech and Academic Freedom (2024) and College Zionists Confront the Abyss (2026)—form a trilogy on antizionism. He holds an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

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