University Educator Wants Youth to ‘Unlearn Zionism’

Teaching that anti-Zionism is valid and advocating for it within a university’s Jewish studies program should be out of the question.

By: Lawrence I. Grossman

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, universities have witnessed massive demonstrations against Israel. While there is no single cause for the protests, one factor may be that students are following the lead of professors who exhibit hostility toward Israel.

It is now common among so-called progressives, including academics, to condemn Israel for racism, apartheid, occupation, genocide and settler colonialism. These accusations form a political anti-Zionism ideology that concludes that Israel is illegitimate and ought to be eliminated.

It cannot be denied that Israel has societal problems or significant issues with the Palestinians. But the anti-Zionist critique of Israel is extreme: Even if some criticisms of Israel are true, they do not warrant the extinction of the Jewish state.

In light of overwhelming support for Israel among Jews and their rejection of anti-Zionism as abhorrent, teaching that anti-Zionism is valid and advocating for it within a university’s Jewish studies program should be out of the question.

Yet such anti-Zionism advocacy is what we are witnessing today at the University of San Francisco’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice. There is at least one professor, the program’s assistant director Oren Kroll-Zeldin, who teaches courses on the Israel-Palestine conflict and aims to assist students to “unlearn Zionism.”

Kroll-Zeldin’s approach is outlined his book, Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine. His major point is that young anti-Zionist Jews who engage in “Palestine solidarity” do so as an expression of their Jewish identity. The book more importantly reveals Kroll-Zeldin’s hostility to Israel.

Kroll-Zeldin does not write as a scholar of anti-Zionism, he presents the book as an “autoethnographic account” of his personal journey with “unlearning Zionism” over the last decade and a half.

As he says, “I write this book from the position of an embedded participant in the movement … In many ways, I saw the activists as a reflection of myself…As I researched this community of activists, I became involved with some of the organizations they were part of.”

Kroll-Zeldin characterizes normative American Jewish teaching about Israel as “miseducation” and “indoctrination.” He also writes at length about how his extensive traditional Jewish education was a “process of Zionist indoctrination.”

Kroll-Zeldin writes about these Jewish youths more like stick figures than serious thinkers. “Millennial and Gen [Generation] Z Jews have different generational memories,” he says, than older Americans and know little about the Holocaust and the history of Israel. But, he says, “they are also very familiar with Israel as an occupier and likely were exposed to media images or comments from friends that condemned Israel.”

He never inquires about their ignorance, nor does he even question their views given that ignorance. He just applauds their activism.

In his book, Kroll-Zeldin discusses how as an educator he challenges “the previously held views of my students to enable them to reimagine their connections to Israel, to ‘unlearn Zionism’ and to work in solidarity with Palestinians” in the struggle for justice.

“Unlearning Zionism,” he writes, “recognizes that the implementation of Zionism through a commitment to Jewish supremacy in Israel is at odds with core Jewish values.”

Kroll-Zeldin characterizes, in positive social-justice terms, various anti-Zionist groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the BDS movement, which advocate the dismantling of Israel. To him, for example, BDS is a “nonviolent campaign for Palestinian rights,” with the goals of ending the “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” and promoting the “rights of Palestinian refugees to return” to live in Israel.

What is required, according to Kroll-Zeldin, is “at the very least, an immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territories occupied in 1967 in order to establish a Palestinian state there, thus ensuring Palestinian self-determination. They [the activists] understand this to be a pragmatic goal and a necessary stepping-stone to a just, sustainable, and secure peace in the region.”

The phrase “stepping-stone,” in anti-Zionist terms, points to a subsequent step that would end Israel. This, he says, would be “an antidote to Zionism’s ethnonationalism” and “make Jews safer and to ensure Jewish survival.” He does not, however, describe his vision of how life will be safer for Jews without Israel.

Kroll-Zeldin never finds fault with Palestinians or Arab countries, nor does he ever reflect positively on Israel or mainstream American Jewish communal organizations.

He repeatedly condemns the “American Jewish establishment”—synagogues, Jewish federations, Jewish community centers, Jewish youth groups and political-advocacy organization, such as AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee—as “hypocritical because they emphasize the American and Jewish values of justice, equality and freedom yet do so quite selectively, denying them, for example, to Palestinians.”

It is impossible to know the extent to which Kroll-Zeldin’s beliefs are emblematic of what happens in university classrooms today. But given the massive anti-Israel demonstrations over the past year, Kroll-Zeldin may indeed be representative of a widespread phenomenon.

There is, finally, the irony that Kroll-Zeldin teaches in the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. The program was established in 1977 as the “Swig Judaic Studies Program,” with an endowment from philanthropist Melvin Swig and the goal of bringing a Jewish perspective to a Catholic university. Swig served as the chair of the board of the University of San Francisco and president of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Israel and also served on boards of national American Jewish organizations. Swig was precisely the type of Jewish leader that Kroll-Zeldin condemns in his work.

(JNS.org)

Lawrence Grossman is a semi-retired financial adviser in the San Francisco Bay area