By Margaret Litvin

The Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism has set its sights on public schools across our state. Some of their K-12 recommendations, if adopted as written, could cause great harm to teachers and students. So my colleagues and I at Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS) have urged the commission and state lawmakers to slow down and think it through.

When we sent some specific advice, Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller was receptive. “You need to read this letter thoughtfully with no bias, think about it, and not dismiss it,” she told fellow commissioners at the July 9 public hearing. But fellow commissioner David Friedman, a Boston Red Sox executive vice president, resorted to mockery: “This morning we received a letter from some professors who have a problem with our work. These professors don’t seem aware of the 1970s Soviet Union anti-Jew propaganda, things like ‘Zionism Is Racism’ … So bottom line, there is misunderstanding.”

As a Jewish person born in Moscow in 1974 and raised in Massachusetts, and as a scholar whose research examines Cold War Soviet ethnicity politics, I beg to disagree. It’s Mr. Friedman, not the professors, who are shoving identity into typically Soviet boxes.

Soviet antisemitism was systemic racism, and it wasn’t about slogans. For Jewish kids applying to university, like my dad, antisemitism was a failing grade on an oral exam after you had aced the written test. For Jewish job applicants, it was when your qualifications “fit the profile” but your nose didn’t. Most painful, it was the assumption, made by officials and citizens alike, that you supported Israel. “Get out and go to your Izra’il” was a frequent snarl. No one asked your thoughts on Zionism; they just assumed.

My family left the Soviet Union in 1979. At the Vienna airport, met by immigration agents from both countries, we literally chose between Israel and the United States. My parents and 34,000 other Soviet Jews—two-thirds of that year’s emigration – turned Israel down. We opted for America, with its promise of liberty and justice for all. America was and remains our promised land, where no bureaucrat gets to define what our identity means.

To help preserve that freedom for my children and my students, I co-founded CJFS, a group of scholars on 25 New England campuses. We hold quite varied views about the Middle East, but we all clearly understand the distinction between Jewish identity and support for Israel. In particular, we work to educate lawmakers and administrators about the invidious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

The IHRA definition is, as Mayor Fuller noted (1:24), a “lightning rod” that will “immediately turn off” many educators to anything the Commission says. No wonder: it is a circular mess, meaningless without its attached examples. Some examples invite abuse. IHRA calls it hate speech to compare “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” Most people I hear making that comparison are Jewish—including Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Absurd! But if IHRA informs state education guidelines, a history teacher who teaches Olmert’s essay in a class could face a career-ruining bias allegation.

American Jewish leaders are waking up to the danger of being lumped with Israel. In April, hundreds of mainstream congregations, led by the (squarely Zionist) Jewish Council for Public Affairs, wrote: “At this moment, Jews are being targeted and held collectively accountable for the actions of a foreign government.” They are right: the perceived link to Israel, fed by the Trump administration and its Anti-Defamation League allies, is driving real antisemitism. As we have told the Commission, the answer is not to punish Massachusetts students and teachers for speaking about politics, but to teach everyone to distinguish Jewish identity from pro-war views. For everyone’s safety, we need to make that distinction crystal clear.

IHRA does the opposite. It reinforces the pernicious ideas that Jews must support Israel and that all Israel supporters are Jewish (most aren’t). Inviting censorship and surveillance for our sake, the definition ties every Jewish person to everything a foreign government and army do. “Get out and go to your Izra’il” will be a predictable result.

Like Mayor Fuller, Massachusetts lawmakers and administrators should listen to the professors—and do their homework. They should keep the toxic myth that Jews always support Israel out of our workplaces and schools. Political beliefs are not immutable, not a protected category. Antisemitism is best addressed in a framework of protecting everyone’s rights, including everyone’s freedom to define their own identity.

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University and a co-founder of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.