Response to MSCCA Draft Recommendations on Higher Education

 

November 17, 2025

 

The Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism has released a draft final report of their findings and recommendations, including new recommendations for higher education. As a group of over 200 Jewish faculty and staff from 25 Boston-area colleges and universities, we are deeply committed to combating antisemitism. University faculty and staff have an important role to play in this effort, by providing expertise and context, and by facilitating respectful conversations about challenging topics. However, by including measures that have little to do with antisemitism and instead appear designed to suppress criticism of Israel, the Commission risks playing into ongoing attacks on international students, Arab and Muslim students, and higher education in general. These measures include:

 

• Continued reliance on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism: While acknowledging other definitions of antisemitism, the draft report dictates that “Educators and other actors charged with implementing these recommendations should be informed of and by IHRA’s definition and its examples.” These examples consist largely of criticisms of Israel that are designated to be hate speech. The definition’s lead author has emphatically rejected its use in any disciplinary or legal context. Three-fourths of public testimony at the Commission’s Sept 25 meeting called on the Commission to reject use of the IHRA definition. Despite this overwhelming opposition, the Commission continues to promote reliance on the IHRA definition, which dangerously confuses criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

 

• Prohibition of academic boycotts: The draft report mischaracterizes boycotts against institutions based on the policies of nations they support as counter to federal and state anti-discrimination laws (Finding #15), and directs universities to prohibit such boycotts (Recommendation #15). These passages appear aimed at prohibiting participation in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to pressure Israel to respect Palestinians human rights and end occupation of Palestinian territories. This movement is itself modeled on the successful international boycott of South Africa, which successfully contributed to the dismantling of the South African apartheid regime. Boycotts of countries and institutions, based on their policies and actions, are neither illegal nor discriminatory. As the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism states: “Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.” The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) asserted that students and faculty should be free to participate or not in academic boycotts without formal reprisal. As a legal matter, the US Supreme Court has affirmed the right to boycott institutions or countries as protected political speech.
   

• Restrictions on student protests: The draft report appears to call for schools to impose new or strengthened restrictions on student protests (Recommendation #10). Although this recommendation makes no mention of Jews or antisemitism, it appears premised on the idea that recent protests of Israel’s military action in Gaza are presumptively antisemitic. In truth, many Jewish students participated in these protests, as they have done in many other student protest movements from marches for civil rights, to anti-Vietnam War activism, to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. To suggest that student protests must be curtailed in the name of fighting antisemitism wrongly and dangerously positions Jewish safety in opposition to movements for social justice.
   

• Designation of “Zionist” as an antisemitic slur: The draft report asserts that the word “Zionist” is a “replacement slur” used to harass Jewish people (Finding #3h). But Zionist is a descriptive term for a collection of political beliefs regarding Israel.  Many Jews self-identify as Zionist, as do many Christians. The term can be used in an antisemitic way, for example if indiscriminately applied to all Jewish people without regard to their beliefs. However, it is neither antisemitic nor harassment to use “Zionist” as a political label, even in the context of harsh criticism. 

 

Additionally, there are provisions in the report that, while positive on their face, raise concern because of the dangerous and discriminatory ways they have been implemented at various universities over the past two years:

 

• Anti-bias trainings: The draft report calls for mandatory anti-bias training, including antisemitism training for faculty, administrators, and students (Recommendation #6). We affirm the value of anti-bias training that addresses antisemitism along with anti-Black racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, and other hateful ideologies. However, some recently-developed antisemitism trainings exacerbate bias rather than combating it. A training developed for Northwestern University by the Jewish United Fund contains incorrect maps, erases Palestinian history, flattens Jewish identity, and compares critics of Israel to Ku Klux Klan members. Project Shema trainings, currently being used at Harvard, Tufts, and other schools, argue that opposition to Zionism is necessarily antisemitic. Anti-bias trainings must be based on accurate information, reflect the internal diversity within groups, and be vetted by content-area experts.
   

• Reporting mechanisms: The draft report calls for clear mechanisms for reporting bias, harassment, or discrimination. While such reporting mechanisms are necessary, they are also easily weaponized to advance a discriminatory political agenda. Since 2023, outside pressure groups like Campus Reform and Canary Mission have driven a surge in federal investigations, lawsuits, and deportation proceedings against international students, focusing almost entirely on criticisms of Israel. Safeguards must be in place to prevent reporting mechanisms from being exploited by outside groups to advance political agendas that undermine the mission of higher education. 

 

As the Commission acknowledges in the preamble of their draft report, accusations of antisemitism have been exploited in recent years as a pretext to attack education and violate the civil rights of immigrants and other vulnerable groups.  Yet the above measures threaten to exacerbate this trend and distract from the fight against antisemitism by conflating it with criticism of Israel. As we state in our guiding principles on combating antisemitism, we call on Massachusetts leaders, in higher education and beyond, to fight antisemitism in a way that safeguards bedrock democratic principles of equality, free speech, academic freedom, and due process.