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 for adoption at the group’s January 2026 annual meeting, this year in Toronto.  A motion commits the Modern Language Association to take some action. A resolution is merely an express of collective sentiment—a conviction, a wish, a hope, an expression of belief. An aggressively antisemitic resolution (supposedly) doesn’t bind the MLA to antisemitism. It just embraces and channels antisemitism on behalf of all the MLA’s members.

Her awkwardness may well have been performative, expressing her reservations about the distinction she was trying and failing to articulate. Only a day earlier, at an open hearing, she had suggested the lawyers might say the claim an MLA resolution does not certify a commitment is nonsense. Certainly the MLA’s Radical Caucus, which had proposed 2026’s only resolution, gave every evidence the MLA was now committed to an antisemitic declaration: Israel is guilty of genocide. Here is the text of the RC’s resolution:

WHEREAS escalating attacks on academic freedom, free speech, faculty governance, and equity are irreparably damaging education in the United States;

WHEREAS these attacks weaponize allegations of antisemitism and racism to undermine struggles against those real problems, justify massive cutbacks, and silence protest against the U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza;

WHEREAS untenured and adjunct faculty and international students are especially vulnerable to doxxing, firing, and deportation;

BE IT RESOLVED that the MLA condemns these attacks and their specious justifications, and urges all United States educational institutions to join in this opposition.

A group of us, most wearing t-shirts reading ANTIZIONISM = ANTISEMITISM, walked the floors of the convention distributing  a flier explaining carefully that the resolution’s second WHEREAS clause, accusing Israel of genocide, would divide the MLA, casting its Jewish members out of the human community. According to MLA rules, it was too late to delete the clause, but the lesson was clear: without the clause, the resolution would have unified MLA’s members behind academic freedom and the defense of the humanities. With the clause included, the effect was malicious , divisive, and destructive. At Saturday’s Delegate Assembly we leafleted the hall again and urged that the resolution be voted down.

Our small group of six lined up to testify to the two hundred members in attendance, joined by others we had not met. Each of us spoke out of our hearts and minds, offering our voices mixing reason and passion. We knew the odds were against us in the wake of the Gaza War, but we also believed we spoke the truth.

A couple of the Radical Caucus members, grinning widely, seemed capable of feral violence, but that fear came to nothing. But when they laughed and snickered at a Jewish member who testified to the anguish she felt at her professional home aiming to exile her this way we learned, as we had repeatedly in 2024, that today’s antizionism is often less about demonizing Israel than about demonizing the Zionists in our midst. The sight and sound of fellow Jews among the Radical Caucus’s allies celebrating the alienation of their brothers and sisters was chilling reminder of an earlier generation’s betrayals.

Krebs’ studied and repeated struggle to make sense out of the enabling amendment was borne out in the wooden, unexpressive demeanor of the MLA committee members charged with presenting the text of the day’s action items. They stepped up to the microphone not merely without enthusiasm but without affect.

The constitutional amendment was, if I may mix metaphors, a hail Mary pass aimed at enabling MLA to have its cake and eat it too. On the verge of an organizational commitment to a new mission of antizionism, the amendment would prove we were just in love with antizionism, not committed to carrying out its eliminationist mandates.

Within hours of approving the resolution, the RC’s catcalls still resounding, we saw there was a statement on the MLA’s website announcing the organization was not endorsing BDS. But genocide was the BDS movement’s new rallying cry. The MLA hoped it could maintain a sliver of daylight between itself and BDS’s new activist strategy. Through that sliver of daylight would pass MLA’s commercial relationships with public companies in states prohibiting BDS commitments from companies doing business with the state.

Good luck with that. MLA’s Zionist members are already drafting the necessary letters of notification. They will include letters to all universities contributing to the MLA’s annual convention. Not that the RC will give pause at that news. They are not merely willing but eager to sacrifice the organization on the altar of their hatred.

Between our leaflets and our testimony, we had an impact. Instead of a resounding  defeat, we lost narrowly by a vote of 61 to 52. Nine votes from thousands of members. Yet it proved that the MLA was divided just as we warned. Not that the RC was concerned. It was worth destroying the Association in the service of radical antizionism. The MLA is exacerbating its divisions and cementing them in place.

On that very Saturday, hundreds of miles away in Chicago the American Historical Association was holding its annual meeting and voting on the same RC resolution. After a decade of uncoordinated antizionist organizing in academic disciplines, MLA and AHA were on the same page. It must be accounted a stunning and immensely troublesome development, one offering bleak prospects for humanities pedagogy and campus governance. This kind of collaboration was only possible after the simultaneous worldwide university encampments of spring 2024.

Academic departments are traditionally separated in their administrative silos. They are separated as well by disciplinary pride. Each discipline imagines itself the best in terms particular to the field. English professors see themselves as priestly guardians of the best that has been created in writing. Historians see themselves as uniquely able to adjudicate the factual record of the species. They can consult, but their disciplinary associations rarely work together. If antizionists have learned to bridge that gap, the rest of us better do so as well.

The Radical Caucus’s strategy apparently appealed to the historians, now more than willing to shed inconvenient facts about genocide if that helped demonize Israel and its friends. So they constructed a text that embedded the genocide accusation in a broad complaint about assaults on universities. At the open haring on Friday, however, the RC members had a conniption when we said it would have been better to eliminate the second Whereas clause. That clause, they insisted, was the heart of the matter. The rest was just a vehicle delivering the vital anti-Jewish core.

Academic freedom was just a distraction, a ruse, like the “scholasticide” fraud the previous year and again in 2026.

Our historian allies at the AHA did not have much impact. The antizionist resolutions were kept off the agenda, but the antizionist faction had hundreds in attendance and were able to suspend the rules and put two resolutions up for a vote. The RC resolution and the zombie scholasticide resolution each passed in lopsided nearly four to one votes. Two days later, on Monday January 12, the AHA executive council vetoed the votes.