By Moshe Phillips, JNS
Parents of students attending Oberlin College have every right to be concerned about what Professor Matthew Berkman will teach as part of a course on “Jews and Power.”
The leaders of a prominent organization of American Jewish academics have leaped to the defense of an Israel-bashing professor.
Six current or former leaders of the Association for Jewish Studies wrote to the administration of Oberlin College in Ohio the other week in defense of Professor Matthew Berkman, a BDS-promoting anti-Zionist who has long been active in the extremist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
Berkman is scheduled to teach a course on “Jews and Power” at Oberlin. A local group, Mothers Against College Antisemitism, has raised legitimate concerns about whether or not he is the right choice as the instructor. And with good reason.
The JVP regularly compares Israel to Nazi Germany, a slur that is considered antisemitic according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition is used by the U.S. government, as well as many other governments and institutions around the world.
A featured speaker at a recent JVP conference was 77-year-old Rasmea Odeh, an unrepentant Palestinian Arab terrorist who was convicted of murdering two Hebrew University students in a Jerusalem supermarket bombing in 1969. She was convicted in Israel and sentenced to life in prison, spending 10 years there before being released in a 1980 prisoner exchange with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Berkman’s extremism goes back to his student days when he was active in “PennBDS,” a BDS-promoting student group at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was one of the organizers of a national BDS conference held at Penn in 2012.
During the 2016-17 academic year, Berkman spoke at events of the JVP’s Philadelphia chapter, appeared in photos on its Facebook page and joined in its picketing of the Anti-Defamation League’s local office. That year, the anti-Zionist website “Generocity” described Berkman as a “Steering Committee member” of JVP-Philadelphia.
In 2018-2019, he wrote anti-Israel letters to local newspapers and was part of a JVP group lobbying against Israel in Washington, which included posing for a photo with anti-Israel Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). As late as 2022, when he had already been teaching at Oberlin College for three years, JVP’s website still listed Berkman as a member.
Yet the AJS leadership, in its overheated letter to Oberlin, heaped praise on him as “a credentialed political scientist” who has “published in several peer-reviewed scholarly journals” and “has presented at conferences in the fields of Jewish studies and political science.”
Berkman is engaged in “legitimate scholarship” in which he “critically explores ideas,” the AJS leaders proclaimed.
Are they kidding? Berkman is obviously an anti-Zionist extremist. Of course, he has every right as an American to oppose Israel’s existence and cheerlead for convicted murderers such as Odeh. But his teachings and writings will naturally reflect his perspective. And parents of Oberlin students have every right to be concerned about what he will teach their children.
Given the sensitive and controversial nature of the AJS leaders’ action, you would think they would have first consulted their 2,000 members. I asked the current president, Professor Laura Leibman, if they did so. The answer: No, because “our members have a wide range of opinions on almost every issue.”
Isn’t that remarkable? The leadership doesn’t want to ask the members their opinions because they do, in fact, have a variety of them.
The letter defending the anti-Zionist Matthew Berkman was “signed only by the Executive Committee and [was] not sent in the name of the entire organization,” Leibman wrote to me. That is what’s known as a distinction without a difference. I very much doubt that the Oberlin College officials who received the letter said to themselves, “Well, it’s only the AJS executive committee, not the general membership.”
In other words, the leaders of the AJS took advantage of the reality that if you send a letter signed by a bunch of current and former AJS leaders, then it’s the power of the AJS’s name that stands out. The recipient understands it as a letter from the AJS.
Leibman insisted that the AJS does not defend only anti-Zionists. She says they have intervened on behalf of victims of anti-Israel bias, too. So I asked her whether the AJS intervened in the three highest-profile cases in recent years involving anti-Jewish bias:
• Shai Davidai, a professor at the Columbia University Business School, was suspended and barred from campus in November 2024 after he criticized the school’s failure to act against illegal pro-Hamas activities on campus. More than 400 professors, students, parents, alumni and staff signed a petition calling the suspension “an egregious act of retaliation and an attempt to silence Professor Davidai.”
• Professor Jeffrey Lax and Professor Michael Goldstein of Kingsborough Community College (CUNY) were targeted with retaliatory investigations by the college administration in 2023 after they complained about antisemitism on campus.
• Professor Andrew Pessin of Connecticut College was subjected to intense harassment by extremist students after he publicly criticized Hamas in 2014. The college administration not only took no disciplinary action against those students, it even gave a “Scholar Activist Award” to Lamiya Khandaker, leader of the campaign against him. Moreover, the administration published numerous statements from academic departments, school officials, student associations and others condemning Pessin on the official Connecticut College website.
Leibman’s reply: No, the AJS has not sent letters in those cases because the victims “did not request them.”
I don’t know why she thinks it even would have occurred to Davidai, Lax, Goldstein or Pessin to turn for help to the Association for Jewish Studies, but I sure hope that they’re reading this and will now ask the AJS to do as much for them as it has done for the Israel-hating Berkman.
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
