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 antisemitism to further discredit the humanities and perhaps administer a death blow to literature and foreign language programs in North America.

The Radical Caucus aims to accomplish this goal by getting MLA’s members’ elected representatives to vote for a carefully crafted sleeper resolution during the business meeting at the organization’s annual convention. That business meeting, the Delegate Assembly, has been the scene of pitched battles over Israel since the 2006-2007 academic year.

Back when the Radical Caucus was devoted to recovering forgotten progressive writers, I was a member. I participated actively in those literary recovery projects and counted the Radical Caucus leaders amongst my friends. But as soon as the group adopted anti-Zionism as its true life’s work it was obvious my presence could not be tolerated. I was cast out of the group.

Every year that  it was permitted to do so, the RC came up with new reasoning to use to get the MLA committed to denouncing the Jewish state and joining the BDS movement to boycott Israeli universities. Many resolutions were voted down, but as the years went by humanities disciplines became increasingly anti-Zionist overall. The odds the RC would succeed increased.

In 2017, however, already ten years into the controversy, the dual arguments that the MLA should not alienate its many pro-Zionist members and did not, in any case, need a foreign policy helped resolution opponents win a temporary victory. By then, a counter organization, MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights, was operating and I was on its executive committee. The rights we were defending included the right students had to enroll in study abroad programs in Israel, the right North American faculty had to collaborate with Israeli faculty and Israeli universities, and the right Israelis had to publish in North American journals and participate in meetings abroad.

In 2025, the MLA’s executive committee, now operating under different rules, blocked the RC’s BDS resolution from coming to the DA for a vote. The executive committee realized the organization’s financial viability would be seriously threatened by a pro-BDS policy. MLA’s membership, by then half what it had been when I joined in 1969, was no longer providing sufficient dues revenue to keep the organization afloat. The MLA was surviving by selling research products and services, arrangements that a pro-BDS stance would jeopardize. The executive committee meanwhile issued a statement assuring its increasingly anti-Zionist membership that the MLA was no friend of Israel.

Barred from embracing BDS, the RC worked through its remaining options the rest of 2025, finally settling on the text of a somewhat more indirect anti-Israel resolution for the January 2026 DA meeting. The resolution has but four sentences, three of them “whereas” clauses, followed by the “resolved” declaration.

It opens with a sentiment most MLA members can be counted on to endorse: “WHEREAS escalating attacks on academic freedom, free speech, faculty governance, and equity are irreparably damaging education in the United States.” That reflects what humanities faculty broadly believe about current political reality.

Only after hopefully wining assent to that clause does RC’s core anti-Zionism come into the picture. Here is the second clause: “WEHEREAS 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.” The resolution was drafted in 2025 while the 2023-2025 Gaza war was ongoing. Now, with an unsteady cease fire under way, the RC is making two wagers—first, that the belief Israel was committing genocide will hold despite the war possibly being concluded; second, that hostility to Trump administration policies will galvanize DA members and carry them past any doubts some will have about the anti-Israel clause.

 In fact, the condition of the humanities these days is seriously degraded. You could convince those English majors who don’t read newspapers or watch the evening news, relying instead on the social media feed from Students for Justice in Palestine, that Israel committed genocide by killing everyone in Gaza. But the RC goes after a still wider accusation. Criticism of the 2024 encampments were really no more that “allegations of antisemitism.” We should address “real problems,” antisemitism not being among them.

Perhaps MLA members have short memories. They’ve forgotten a Jewish woman burned to death in Colorado, two young Israeli embassy members gunned down in Washington DC by a former University of Illinois student. But the fifteen Jews slaughtered on Australia’s Bondi Beach offer less easily dismissed evidence that antisemitism is indeed a “real problem,” a deadly one.

Perhaps the RC recognized the risk, so the text quickly reverts to Trump-based protest: ”WHEREAS untenured and adjunct faculty and international students are especially vulnerable to doxxing, firing, and deportation.” Perhaps MLA members see Israeli students as privileged, white, and not vulnerable to these abuses. And, if they are, they are all IDF veterans and purportedly guilty of genocide anyway. The RC is adept at weaponizing antisemitism to promote antisemitism.

The final short paragraph urges the MLA’s full politicization: “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.” The “opposition” of course includes boycotting Israeli universities and discriminating against Israeli students and faculty. But DA members justly anguished over Trump administration actions may not notice. MLA members for whom the accusation of genocide amounts to an assault on their identity, sense of peoplehood, or religious beliefs do not count. The anti-Israeli goals are encased in Trump policy protest. The RC hopes the resolution will not count as a pro-BDS action, that it merely expresses a wish. Should the resolution pass and the MLA fail the legal tests that will inevitably follow, the MLA can always market keffiyehs instead of the MLA bibliography.

If the RC really cared about those vulnerable international students and contingent faculty it would have left Israel and the RC’s contempt for “allegations of antisemitism” out of the resolution altogether. But without anti-Zionism the RC would no longer have any reason to exist.