Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, Right-wingers frequently mocked the rhetoric and concepts popularised by the “woke Left”. They argued that ideas such as microaggressions, safe spaces, and pervasive claims of victimhood were being used to suppress free speech in academia and justify DEI programmes under the guise of anti-racism and “equity”. Yet now, in an ironic turn, many on the Right appear to be adopting similar tactics to silence pro-Palestine campus protesters — whom they view as their bêtes noires — under the pretext of combatting antisemitism.

Earlier this week, Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the Executive Vice President of American Friends of Lubavitch who is known as the “Rabbi of Capitol Hill”, was invited by Republicans to address a US Senate committee on antisemitism. During the hearing, he echoed a sentiment similar to Ibram X. Kendi’s argument that “we’re either all being racist or anti-racist,” stating that it is not enough to simply be “not antisemitic” but that one must be “anti-antisemitic”. The implication, much like Kendi’s stance on racism, is that mere neutrality is a form of complicity — being “non-racist” is seen as passive indifference, whereas actively opposing racism, or in this case antisemitism, is the necessary stance.

Rabbi Shemtov called on the federal government to pass the “crucial measure” that is the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” and legally enshrine the IHRA definition of antisemitism, something that even its author, Kenneth Stern, has said was never intended to be used as a legal instrument.

Opposition to antisemitism, especially when it manifests as violent harassment, is something with which no sensible person would disagree. But the devil is always in the details. Federal law already prohibits antisemitic harassment and violence: there is no need for extra legislation. So the core problem with the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act is that it brings in a very broad notion of antisemitism which focuses on speech and ideas rather than conduct and actions. It can therefore be exploited in tendentious ways to repress political speech. In the context of ICE’s arrests, imprisonments and pending deportations of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, this is not a frivolous hypothetical but a striking reality.

Later in his remarks, Rabbi Shemtov said universities should go further and help promote a “robust Jewish identity” to “empower” Jewish students. This almost echoes demands for universities to promote specific black counter-spaces to bolster their sense of “belonging” and “wellbeing” in a “white” institution. But Jewish identity, like every religious and cultural identity, comes in multiple and contradictory forms. What form of “robust Jewish identity” is to be promoted? Hasidic religious Zionism? What about the Jewish identities that don’t rest on support of Israel?

These measures will do little to protect Jewish students, and will instead seek to impose thought taboos on what can and cannot be said about Israel and Palestine. For instance, merely mentioning “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” in the same sentence as “Israel” could be deemed unacceptable. Through increasingly broad interpretations of antisemitism — where criticism of Zionism or Israeli actions in Gaza is conflated with bigotry — speech may be curtailed. This mirrors how social justice progressives, through their own expansive definitions of racism, have justified censorship and the silencing of ideas they found objectionable in universities.

What the anti-antisemitism of the Right and the anti-racism of the progressive Left have in common is the fervent belief that they are protecting “vulnerable” minorities through their authoritarian recommendations. But, in practice, the effect of their efforts will be to limit free speech. It protects no one, and only disempowers everyone.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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