Letter to the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism

In July 2024, the Massachusetts legislature passed budget provisions requiring the creation of a commission “on combatting antisemitism in the commonwealth.” The provision came on the heels of the Biden administration’s U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, which reiterates the federal government’s “embrace” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s widely criticized definition of antisemitism. The state’s Special Commission had its first public hearing last October. The following letter was drafted after its eleventh hearing earlier this month.

To the Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism and its Co-Chairs, Senator John C. Velis and Representative Simon Cataldo:

I write as a longtime member of the Jewish community in our state, the parent of a child in the Cambridge Public Schools, and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School with doctoral training in Middle East history, including the modern history of Israel and Palestine. I am descended from Rabbi Akiva’s student, Yochanan Ha-Sandlar, and my family has played a role in the Jewish community for centuries. For example, when my great-great grandfather expressed skepticism about Zionism in a sermon at the Great Synagogue of Pinsk, a young man named Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president, threatened him with violence.

I mention all this to emphasize my deep personal and professional investment in the subjects of the Commission’s work.

After observing your latest hearing in person at the State House on September 8, however, I have come to the conclusion that the Special Commission should either dramatically revise its approach or be disbanded. Its rhetoric is toxic; it has empowered commissioners whose use of evidence and testimony is careless and even unethical; it lacks basic knowledge about the context of its inquiry; and its co-chairs seem intent on exploiting the prejudices and fears of a particular faction of the Jewish community to aid their political careers. During the hearing, I heard commissioners assert charges of “assault” as fact when they have been contradicted by video evidence and rejected in court, misrepresent public data to muddy the testimony of an expert witness, and attempt to turn political disagreements into a “crisis” that justifies emergency rule in Massachusetts schools. With our nation’s democratic order in danger, this Special Commission cannot be trusted to meet the moment.

The campaign by one faction of the Jewish community over the past twenty-three months to systematically label political outrage as “antisemitism” is causing destruction at every level of civil society.

The testimony of a student at Harvard Law School, whom the commissioners selected to represent the perspective of Jewish students at Harvard, was illuminating. The student was apparently chosen due to her disagreement with other Jewish students at the school. “The residue of that year in the aftermath of October 2023 seeped into my law school experience,” she testified. “Some people refuse to engage in a conversation about Israel unless you acknowledge the genocide in Palestine.” But why was her viewpoint regarded by the Commission as uniquely relevant to an understanding of the atmosphere for Jews at Harvard?

To drill down on the problem, allow me to inspect one of the student’s polemical claims and the Commission’s response. The student asserted that anyone who uses the phrase “from the river to the sea” at a demonstration is “ignorant” of a hidden genocidal meaning known to pro-Israel Jews. But this is a matter of historical record, and the student who testified to the Commission is on the wrong side of it.

“From the river to the sea” has never been a commentary about human rights or military strategy. Rather, it is a statement about territorial sovereignty. Those who founded the Irgun terrorist group in the 1930s called for Jewish rule on “both banks of the Jordan,” as is evident from the Irgun’s logo from that era. (See the top of the second page of this file in the archives of the Jabotinsky Institute.) After the independent state of Jordan was recognized in 1946, the geographical frame of such pronouncements moved westward. When the West Bank and Gaza Strip were conquered by Israel in 1967, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan announced in the Israeli Knesset that “the land of Israel between the Sea and the Jordan cannot be divided” and that Israel’s military would occupy it permanently. 

A decade later, Irgun commander Menachem Begin took power as prime minister of Israel, and his Likud Party stated formally that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” Somehow this stance is not taken to have an occult genocidal meaning, though there are many in the Israeli settler movement who make that association explicit, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly echoes their language.

Meanwhile, the Arabic phrase “from the water to the water” (min al maya lil maya) appeared in Palestinian folk tales to describe the area that the storytellers inhabited. After the British declared the region “Mandatory Palestine” under their sovereign authority and announced an intention to create a “national home” for Jewish people there, the slogan “Palestine is Arab from the water to the water” was remembered, pointing out among other things that 90 percent of the local population were not Jews. The phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” appears in popular discourse only after the 1980s and would appear to be a translation of and response to what was by then a common Israeli statement of territorial absolutism.

The commissioners should also know—as reported in the New York Times, for example—that many Palestinians and Israelis today use the phrase “from the river to the sea” to call for a state of all of its people in which there is no gerrymander for a particular ethnicity. Its use in this sense can be seen widely on protest posters in Tel Aviv as well as in front of the Massachusetts State House, where a group called “Pro Peace Boston,” consisting of Palestinians, Muslims, Israelis, and American Jews, has used the phrase almost every Sunday since October 2023.

My intention is not to criticize the Harvard Law student who testified before you for the holes in her historical and cultural knowledge. She is studying to be a lawyer, and it is not her fault that she has been asked to give her opinions on matters where she has no expertise. My point is that the Special Commission has shown itself to be unfamiliar with the background of current political controversies in our state, unable to assess whether the information it is getting is accurate, and oblivious to the complex dynamics within the Massachusetts Jewish community. The Commission’s co-chairs seem insistent on becoming the patrons of one particular faction of Massachusetts Jews—not only providing a platform for them to dominate a different faction but also empowering them to use their access as “court Jews” to destroy the right to free expression in our state. According to the student, the hidden genocidal meaning of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is so unambiguous that the state legislature should intervene to prevent its use. Clearly she has not yet arrived in her legal studies at Article 16 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, or, in the public school context, M.G.L. C.71§ 82. Yet the commissioners subjected her testimony to no critical inspection, treated her most polemical assertions as an empirical reality, and praised her proposed resolutions.

In a call after Monday’s hearing, partisan Jewish organizations—and Senator Velis himself—complained of “gaslighting” by four Jewish scholars affiliated with Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff (CJFS) whom the commissioners crammed into a fifteen-minute panel: Hilary Lustick, Jeremy Menchik, Frances Tanzer, and Jonathan Feingold. I did indeed witness gaslighting in Room A-2 of the State House, but it went in a different direction.

Throughout the long hearing, other than Professor Lustick’s redirection of a question by Senator Velis, there was no mention of the actual reason for the intense political conflict in our state over the last twenty-three months: the fact that Israel has almost completely destroyed the Gaza Strip, displaced its two million inhabitants, killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians with explosive weapons, and established a state of siege in which thousands of others have died without access to food and urgent medical care, all as an act of revenge for the October 7 attacks. No reference at all was made to the glaring fact that every significant human rights organization in the world, including in Israel, has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza or that on August 31, the leading international scholarly association of genocide scholars made a similar assessment. The failure to mention the actual context in which the Commission’s inquiry is taking place is rightly described as “gaslighting.” In particular, it is the context for the objections to the Commission’s recommendations made by CJFS members, whose scholarship the co-chairs dismissed with such unearned and, frankly, undignified disrespect, casting the legislature of this Commonwealth into disrepute. For almost two years now, the actions of Israel’s government have been supported by one faction of the Jewish community, which has now come to the legislature for protection against those who find those acts outrageous. This faction has strategically conflated the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 with nonviolent expressions of solidarity with Gaza and outrage at the unchecked killing of Palestinians. And it has coordinated with organizations such as the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which were working closely with the Israeli government well before October 7, to impose its views on U.S. higher education. (On July 25, 2023, top officials of the Brandeis Center, Hillel, the Zionist Federation in the United States, and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations spoke to this effect in a hearing before the Knesset.) Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has made substantial funding available to these and other groups to influence the regulation of political expression on American campuses; the current minister, Amichai Chikli, is a political operative who has openly allied the government with white supremacist European parties. To illustrate the devastating effects on the broader Jewish community in Massachusetts of this faction’s participation in influence campaigns by the Israeli government and other right-wing institutions, allow me to offer a personal example. In December 2023, my son was in his elementary school classroom when an airplane passed overhead pulling a banner reading “Harvard Hates Jews.” The stunt was part of a campaign targeting Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay and aiming to control political expression on campus on the grounds that nonviolent protest was making students sympathetic to Israel feel “unsafe.” During the bus ride home, my son, who is bilingual in Hebrew and English, argued with an Israeli classmate, previously his friend, who insisted that Harvard affiliates opposing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza were Hamas supporters. His classmate told my son that he was also a Hamas supporter, and they got into an altercation. When I picked him up at the bus stop, he was inconsolable. What I want to emphasize to members of the Special Commission—and also to the officers of the legislature who should be overseeing it more closely—is that the campaign by a faction of the Jewish community over the past twenty-three months to systematically label political outrage as “antisemitism” is causing destruction at every level of civil society in our state. The Commission’s wholesale and uninformed advocacy of this faction’s point of view in its recommendations threatens to institutionalize such destructive conflict permanently in our schools—first among K–12 students like my son, and soon in our institutions of higher education. Moreover, the Commission has refused to solicit testimony from the Jewish community as a whole. So far as I can tell, Senator Velis and Representative Cataldo agreed to hear briefly from Jewish academics affiliated with CJFS only so that the Commission could subject them to ritual denunciation on social media. This failure to consider the Jewish community in Massachusetts in its totality is important, because it means that the Special Commission’s K–12 recommendations would actively discriminate against a broad segment of the Jewish community, including my son, in the practice of our religious and cultural identity. As Professor Menchik pointed out, current statistics put non-Zionist Jews in Massachusetts as high as 40 percent of the state’s Jewish population. Indeed, based on my anecdotal observations among Jewish Harvard students over the last twenty-three months, as well as national polling, Israel’s actions in Gaza and the intolerance of its supporters have likely increased that proportion. This should not surprise us since, as political scientist Mira Sucharov has indicated, American Jews’ identification with Zionism seems to be heavily dependent on the way it is defined. When the definition accurately describes the current reality, i.e. “Zionism means the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” Sucharov found that 69 percent of Jewish respondents opposed it and only 10 percent supported.

Your patronage looks very much like state-sponsored philosemitism—not just the conceptual flip side of antisemitism, but a form of it that is often a prelude to pervasive bigotry against Jews.

There is no representative of non-Zionist Massachusetts Jewish residents on the Special Commission, and under the supervision of its co-chairs, its work product is likely to harm them directly. I can easily imagine that, had an anonymous “antisemitism” tip line such as the one recommended by the Commission been available in late 2023, my son’s Israeli classmate, or his parents, might have denounced him, leading to a mandatory disciplinary process. There is a term for this kind of state-sponsored discrimination against Jewish people, and it is in the name of the Commission itself. At several junctures in Monday’s hearing, the co-chairs and their witnesses posed a rhetorical question: “Why the special focus on Israel?” Apparently they believe, or pretend to believe, that because Gaza is not the only example of state violence on a large scale in the world, views and expressions which make supporters of Israel uncomfortable or feel ostracized are ipso facto antisemitic. As a historian with expertise in the modern Middle East, I do not find this view compelling. The names of Israel’s cities and those it occupied in 1967, including Gaza itself, are at the beating heart of Western culture. The country’s capital was for centuries in the exact center of many European world maps. Israel is also the demonstration project of the post–World War II international system, and the Holocaust of Jews under the Nazis is the reason that the Genocide Convention was created. The destruction and loss of life caused by the Jewish state in Gaza has been deemed by the world’s leading body of genocide scholars to violate the very international treaty that was designed to make sure the Jewish experience was never repeated, and the government of Israel is working actively to destroy the United Nations and other institutions that were created after World War II because of their opposition to its actions. Finally, and perhaps most important, Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world and the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the Middle East. For all of these reasons, Israel is exceptional, and the current public attention it attracts is very unsurprising to any objective observer. Due to the Special Commission’s partiality to a partisan faction of Massachusetts Jews, such nuances of the situation have remained obscure to its members. Your recommendations amount to patronage of that group. As Professor Tanzer rightly pointed out on Monday, such patronage looks very much like state-sponsored philosemitism—not just the conceptual flip side of antisemitism, but a form of it that causes resentment and is often a prelude to pervasive bigotry against Jews. All Jews stand to be harmed by this—including me, the other members of Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff, my Israeli-born wife, and my school-aged son. Through the Special Commission’s efforts to create a crisis atmosphere which might be seen to justify emergency rule in our school system, its recommendations would arguably become one of the most significant drivers of antisemitism in Massachusetts. I’d like to close with a few words from my grandmother’s grandfather, Reb Velvele Margolis, who was briefly the chief rabbi of Boston before he was lured away to New York. Prior to his arrival in America, he was one of the leading rabbis in Eastern Europe and the main legal authority at the Beit Din in Grodno (present-day Belarus). In 1898, Reb Velvele attended the Second Zionist Congress, where Theodor Herzl proclaimed that a central goal of the movement should be the “conquest of the [Jewish] communities”—specifically, by taking over the Talmud Torah elementary school system at the local level and replacing it with a Zionist curriculum. After the Congress, Reb Velvele became a fierce opponent of Zionism, a stance he held until his death in 1935. In a Hebrew article written shortly before his immigration to the United States, he characterized Jewish nationalism by quoting Scripture: “The violent predators among your people (b’nei paritzei amcha) will lift themselves up to establish the vision; but they will fail” (Daniel 11:14). Zionism, he went on, was like a “monstrously great machine . . . Herzl’s machine.” (The analogy was used by Herzl himself both in his diaries and in The Jewish State.) He defined the central mitzva of “Herzl’s Torah” as the “conquest of the communities” (kibush ha-kehilot). The Hebrew word he used here—kibush—is the same one applied today to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Certainly many Jewish people disagreed with Velvele at the time, and in twenty-first-century Massachusetts the Jewish community continues to be deeply split. But by aligning itself openly with a particular faction, the Special Commission has not only created recommendations that would impose viewpoint discrimination on all Massachusetts residents, harming our democratic values and creating an opening for authoritarian intervention by the Trump administration in our schools and universities. It has also interposed itself in the self-determination of Jews throughout the Commonwealth. The fact that the legislature’s Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism is proposing to officially anathematize views that were once held by one of Boston’s leading rabbinical figures—the person who, according to his biographer, inspired the fundraising campaign that built Beth Israel Hospital—is not just an irony: it completely invalidates its approach. I therefore repeat my request that the Special Commission either withdraw its present recommendations and dramatically revise its method of operations, or cease to exist. Sincerely, Aaron Shakow

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