BDS Was Never About Groceries
Two weeks ago, members of the Park Slope Food Coop — a roughly 17,000-member cooperative grocery store in Brooklyn better known for kombucha than geopolitics — voted to advance a referendum on whether the co-op should join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The proposed boycott made little distinction between products produced within or outside Israel’s 1967 borders. Nor did it seem particularly concerned with the fact that roughly 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arab or Muslim, or that Israeli companies employ large numbers of Arab workers across sectors. But the vote was never really about groceries. It was about an ideology, one that started in faculty lounges and academic conferences and has now migrated into ordinary American civic life.
That ideology portrays Jews as uniquely powerful oppressors, Israel as uniquely illegitimate among nations, and violence against Israelis as morally justified, or at the very least morally explainable, so long as it is committed in the name of “liberation.”
I know, because I have spent the past two and a half years fighting this ideology at Columbia University, testifying about it before Congress, documenting its spread, and researching it for my upcoming book, American Intellectual Antisemitism.
In the wake of the October 7 massacre, I watched Columbia descend into something I never imagined possible at an elite American university. Protesters openly supported Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — all US-designated terrorist organizations — while calling for the destruction of Israel and the United States. A weeks-long encampment excluded every Jew who refused to denounce Zionism, the belief that the Jewish people deserve self-determination in their ancestral homeland. University buildings were violently occupied. Calls for “global intifada” became commonplace.
And the students were not alone. One professor at Columbia told Jewish students that “[their] people survived in order to commit mass genocide.” Another publicly expressed “jubilation and awe” less than a day after Hamas’s massacre. An Arabic language course recycled classic antisemitic tropes about Jewish political control. The problem was not merely that these ideas existed at Columbia. It was that their presence barely raised an eyebrow.
What united the students in the encampments and the professors in the classroom was adherence to the same worldview. That framework had spent decades incubating inside parts of American academia, particularly within fields heavily influenced by postcolonial theory and activist scholarship. I call this ideology American Intellectual Antisemitism.
Unlike traditional antisemitism, which openly demonizes Jews, American Intellectual Antisemitism cloaks itself in the language of social justice, decolonization, and human rights. Jews are recast not as a vulnerable minority but as White settler-colonial oppressors, while the world’s only Jewish state is framed as uniquely illegitimate. By framing Israel as uniquely evil, the ideology allows highly educated people to openly express animus toward Jewish collective existence as a moral virtue.
American Intellectual Antisemitism doesn’t criticize Israel’s policies. It treats the existence of a Jewish state itself as a moral crime.
The BDS movement perfectly embodies this ideology. Although its supporters present BDS as a human-rights initiative, its founder, Omar Barghouti, has repeatedly made clear that the movement opposes “a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” By singling out the world’s only Jewish state for boycott while showing little interest in sanctioning China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, the movement treats Israel, in effect, as “the Jew among the nations.” That is precisely why college professors spearheaded the fight to boycott Israel long before BDS became mainstream. Beginning in 2013, academic associations across North America voted to boycott Israeli universities and scholars. Not China. Not Russia. Only Israel.
Of course, criticizing Israeli policies is not inherently antisemitic. Israelis themselves criticize their government constantly, as do many non-Israelis who are clearly not antisemitic. A person can oppose settlement expansion, criticize military actions, support Palestinian statehood, and express deep concern for Palestinian civilians without denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination or supporting the terrorist regimes that seek to annihilate it. It is when criticism of Israel’s policies shifts into opposition to Israel’s existence that antisemitism enters the conversation.
That is what distinguishes American Intellectual Antisemitism from legitimate political criticism. Replacing complexity with ideological absolutism, it sets as its goal the marginalization and eventual destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
That is why what happened at the Park Slope Food Coop matters. The vote was not an isolated controversy. It was just another step in the normalization of an ideology that views anti-Jewish hostility as virtuous. It was a real-life demonstration of how ideas once confined to seminar rooms now openly shape American civic life.
We can continue playing whack-a-mole, fighting one BDS resolution after another as they emerge in co-ops, unions, schools, nonprofits, and professional organizations. We can continue reacting each time anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American hatred erupts in a different city, campus, or institution. Or we can finally confront the departments, academic associations, and intellectual frameworks that legitimized this ideology long before it reached neighborhood institutions like the Park Slope Food Coop.
If we want to confront the ideology, we must go to the source. And that source lies behind the closed doors of presidents’, provosts’, and deans’ offices at our elite universities.
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American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities (Wicked Son/Post Hill Press) is now available for pre-order.
