Jewish Organizations Warn Lawmakers that MA Antisemitism Commission Failed to Address Antisemitism and Puts Free Speech at Risk
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, December 11, 2025
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Read the Letter from Massachusetts Jewish Organizations
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BOSTON, MA – In an end-of-year visit to the State House, a group of Jewish organizations representing over 20,000 Jewish residents of Massachusetts delivered a warning to state lawmakers: the state’s recently concluded Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism failed “to address antisemitism and put[s] free speech at risk.” This action reflects rising discontent among many of Massachusetts’ Jewish residents out of concern that the state’s antisemitism commission was “pushing Trump’s agenda.”
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In a letter delivered to lawmakers, ten Jewish organizations spanning western Massachusetts to Boston criticized the Commission for approving a final report that “reflects the views of only one segment of the state’s diverse Jewish community and endangers free speech for all its residents.” The letter specifically admonished the Commission for privileging the perspectives of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Far from representing Massachusetts’ progressive values and diverse Jewish community, these organizations used their platform on the Commission to further organizational missions that “include suppressing criticism of Israel.”
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The letter further warns that the Commission’s final report will serve as a “Trojan horse” for pro-Israel advocacy groups like the ADL, the JCRC and the AJC intent on “inject[ing] their agenda into MA public schools, workplaces, K-12 schools, and higher education.” The Jewish organizations also cautioned that this “endangers free speech for all of [Massachusetts’] residents” and that that “[b]y taking its eye off actual antisemitism and devoting itself instead to policing political speech about Israel and Palestine, the Commission has given oxygen to antisemitism and white nationalism in Massachusetts.”
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Members of these Jewish organizations also delivered copies of the Special Commission Shadow Report, which Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff (CJFS) released last month coinciding with the Commission’s final vote. At that time, CJFS lamented the Commission’s failure to deliver what the Commonwealth needs: “a thoughtful, collaborative and inclusive approach to antisemitism.”
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Per the Shadow Report: “The Commission had one critical task: address antisemitism without enabling an authoritarian agenda that imperils us all. With deep regret, our sustained observation and assessment of the Commission and its leadership leads to a single conclusion: the Commission has done more to fuel rising authoritarianism and antisemitism than to create the conditions that promote Jewish safety. The Commission has smeared educators, discounted non-Zionist perspectives, and endorsed the same narratives and policies that the Trump administration wields to divide our communities, target our students, extort our institutions, tar antiwar protesters, and undo hard-won progress toward this country’s highest democratic ideals.”
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Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS) is a membership organization of Jewish faculty and staff from roughly 25 colleges and universities in the greater Boston area and several others throughout New England. CJFS is part of the National Campus Jewish Alliance. We represent a range of backgrounds and hold diverse views about the Middle East and other issues, but we are united in opposing the invocation of Jews and Jewishness—and misguided or cynical claims of antisemitism—to penalize Palestine solidarity activism, to stifle academic freedom, to undermine civil rights or to otherwise erode democratic institutions and norms. We believe that Jewish safety is deeply connected to the safety of all people, and that the fight against antisemitism cannot be separated from the struggle against all forms of oppression.