The Beinart Notebook

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Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts.

Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history.

We spoke about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create, and whether or not they work.

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Recently, Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote an essay criticizing my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University. I thought it would be a good idea to have him on to explore our differences.

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A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s call will be at a special time, WEDNESDAY at 1 PM. Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, and subsequent apology, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts: one South African and one Palestinian. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We’ll talk about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create and whether or not they work.

This week’s live Zoom call will be for paid subscribers, as usual. But we will make the video available for everyone.

Cited in Today’s Video

The Trump administration’s agreement with Northwestern University.

At Harvard, Muslim students are more than twice as likely as Jewish students to feel unsafe.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Lee Mordechai chronicles Israel’s “collective amnesia” about the genocide in Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Ahmed Moor about my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University.

I talked on the Know Your Enemy podcast about the varying Jewish reactions to Zohran Mamdani.

Haaretz profiles Israel’s “Faithful Left.”

Check our Terrell Starr’s excellent Substack newsletter.

The New York Times named Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza one of the 100 notable books of 2025.

I’ll be speaking on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.

Reader Response

I occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal:

“I don’t understand why you felt you made ‘a serious mistake’ by speaking at Tel Aviv University. Virtually all of the humanities lecturers at the university are on the left, as are a good percentage of the students. They are highly critical of the extreme right-wing government policy, and the current Tel Aviv University President Prof. Ariel Porat has defended the right of Arab and left-wing students to protest against the war.

My predecessor as Israeli Co-Editor of Palestine-Israel Journal was Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal. When he was the Co-Director of Tel Aviv University’s Walter Lebach Research Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence, together with Prof. Amal Jamal, a Palestinian-Israel, we arranged for them to host a presentation by Prof. Johan Galtung at the university, who is considered the father of peace research. That earned Bar-Tal the title of “enemy of Israel” from all the right-wing watchdogs. And Galtung himself (who was also on the enemy of Israel lists), who was highly critical of both Israeli and American government policies, had no problem appearing at Tel Aviv U. alongside an appearance we arranged for him at the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Abu-Dis in the West Bank.

You could have found a way to show respect for the BDS movement while at the same explaining that you are critical of any support that any part of the university gives to the IDF. The literature departments definitely don’t supply arms to the IDF, and their curriculum is under attack from the right-wing ministers of education and culture.”

See you on Wednesday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration announced another agreement with an American university—in this case Northwestern University. And it’s really striking if you look at the language that Trump’s Department of Justice uses in describing the terms of this agreement.

So, let me just quote a couple of elements from it. The Justice Department writes that Northwestern University will ‘safeguard its students, employees and faculty from unlawful discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin, including race-based admissions practices and a hostile educational environment directed towards Jewish students.’ And then it goes on that the university will ensure that it ‘does not preference individuals based on race, color, or national origin in admission, scholarships, hiring, or promotion.’ And then it goes on to say that it will ‘implement mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty, and staff.’

So, what do you notice about this language? On the one hand, the Trump administration is boasting that Northwestern is going to treat all students equally, irrespective of race, religion, national origin, etc. And then, literally in the next sentence, it says and it’s also going to do this special thing to protect Jewish students, this special thing to fight against antisemitism. Essentially, what it’s doing is it’s putting the safety and rights of Jewish students in a separate category from the safety and rights of all other students. This is really a disastrous, I think, development actually for Jewish students on campus and for American Jews in general.

The position of American Jewish organization should be that Jewish students on campus should be treated exactly the same as everybody else. And that should be part of a broader strategy and struggle among American Jewish organizations to say that the struggle against antisemitism will be part of a larger struggle against all forms of bigotry.

But that’s not what the Trump administration wants at all, actually, because the Trump administration takes a completely different view about what it calls bigotry towards Jewish students than, let’s say, bigotry towards, let’s say, Muslim students or Black students, right? Because when it comes to Muslim students, the Trump administration doesn’t think bigotry is a problem at all. In fact, the Trump administration is very blatantly practicing bigotry, right? Donald Trump just the other day basically was making fun of Representative Ilhan Omar’s hijab. This is an administration that has said that the only immigrants it wants to come to the United States are white South Africans, that it wants to cut off all third world immigration. It’s an administration that demonizes trans students, right?

So, basically what the administration is doing is creating a two-tier system in which it essentially says that Jewish students should have particular protections, which are different, superior protections for their concerns and their safety than other students, right? Now, perhaps if we lived in a world in which Jewish students were uniquely threatened, there might be some justification for that. But that’s really not the case at all. Yes, Jewish students face antisemitism, of course, right? But actually, given the state-sponsored bigotry against Muslims, against Black people, against trans people, they are actually at greater risk than Jewish students.

And the data from college campuses actually, you know, bear this out. When Harvard University created an antisemitism task force and an Islamic phobia task force, they simply asked Muslim and Jewish students at Harvard whether they felt unsafe. And they found that while only 26% of Jewish students said they felt unsafe, fifty-six percent—more than twice as high a percentage—of Muslim students said they felt unsafe. So, there’s no logical empirical basis whatsoever for basically suggesting that there’s a kind of crisis around the treatment of Jewish students and that you’re going to therefore treat them in a fundamentally different way than you treat other groups of students.

What the Trump administration is really doing is creating a two-tier system in which it creates a kind of Jewish supremacy on college campuses because the rights of Jewish students are considere…

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Last Friday FMEP fellow Ahmed Moor had me as a guest on the podcast, Occupied Toughts to talk about my decision to speak at Tel Aviv University, my subsequent apology for doing so, and criticisms of both.

Our conversation gets at many of the questions and concerns people have shared in recent days, from across the ideological spectrum. I asked Ahmed and FMEP if I could share it here, and they graciously consented.

Audio-only version here:

Watch Occupied Thoughts on YouTube

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Anne Irfan is an expert on Palestinian refugee rights, the UN and UNRWA. She is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London (UCL). She has previously taught at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the University of Sussex.

I invited her to talk about her latest book, A Short History of the Gaza Strip.

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Our guest is Chapman University Professor Emeritus Nubar Hovsepian, author of the new book, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual. We talked about Professor Hovsepian’s insights into Said, his close friend, and about what we might learn from Said’s work for this moment in Israel-Palestine and the United States.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove is the rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. He has written for a variety of Jewish publications, including The Jewish Week and The Forward. He is the author of the 2024 book “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today” and the host of the podcast Common Faith.

We have some strong disagreements so I’m grateful that he was willing to come on and discuss them with me.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Chapman University Professor Emeritus Nubar Hovsepian, author of the new book, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual. We’ll talk about Professor Hovsepian’s insights into Said, his close friend, and about what we might learn from Said’s work for this moment in Israel-Palestine and the United States.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM subscribers only, will be this Wednesday, November 12, from 1-2 PM Eastern time.

Cited in Today’s Video

Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz’s message to his congregation that after Mamdani’s victory, life for New York Jews is “beginning to feel like the 1930s.”

Jason Sokol’s, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I argued that Zohran Mamdani’s victory may herald a coalition between anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists that can transform the Democratic Party.

Why the polls may understate Mamdani’s share of the Jewish vote.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 50 years ago, on last week’s Parsha, Parshat Vayeira.

Rabbi Aron Wander on the psychotheology of American Zionism.

I’ll be speaking on November 10 at Cornell University and Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York and on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.

Reader Response

I occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Sophia (last name withheld):

I’ve been reading your coverage of Mamdani and although I think a lot of it is very fair criticism of establishment Judaism, respectfully, I think you are missing one major point. Speaking only for myself, I can tell you that I *hate* Cuomo, and that the idea of voting for him is repellent to me. I too hate the Islamophobia that is showing in our community, and I hate the message that sexual harassment is acceptable in a way that antisemitism is not. These messages are embarrassing and offensive to me.

Two things can be true at the same time, though. I have no issue with people being so-called critical of Israel, and of that criticism having grown in intensity in the last two years (it certainly has for me). However, I find Mamdani to be monomaniacally obsessed with Israel and its crimes in a way that I find concerning and even antisemitic. When people say what about North Korea, China, Sudan, etc., I don’t find that to be an excuse for Israel’s behavior. But when he identifies Israel in one way or another as the source of most evils here in the US, I think that is suspicious. Israel is not the cause of racist policing in the U.S., that predates Israel! I am not assuaged by him promising to protect synagogues; that would be his job as mayor, not a favor he hands out to Jews. If he is so concerned (correctly) about affordability in the city, stop campaigning on your commitment to defund the Technion; it is basically a dog-whistle at this point for the anti-Israel and even antisemitic Left (which are two descriptors that I distinguish between, as I don’t believe being anti-Israel is necessarily antisemitic)

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s a rabbi on the Upper East Side of New York named Chaim Steinmetz. He is the rabbi of a synagogue called Kehilath Jeshurun. It’s probably the most prominent Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side of New York. It’s one of the most prominent Orthodox synagogues in all of New York, in fact, in all of America.

And after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s election for mayor of New York, he wrote in a letter to his congregants, ‘it’s beginning to feel like the 1930s.’ It’s beginning to feel like the 1930s. He’s not the only person who feels this way. A prominent rabbi in the Hamptons on Long Island announced that he’s going to build an entire Jewish Day School, because he’s expecting so many Jews to flee New York City in fear, and come out to Long Island, and he’s going to build a day school for their children.

Now, for many, many people, many non-Jews, but also many Jews, many progressive Jews, this is baffling. It’s just really, really hard to understand how people could look at Zohran Mamdani, a guy who won at least a third of the Jewish vote, a guy who’s got tons and tons of Jews in his campaign, a guy who speaks again and again and again about Jewish safety and about his opposition to antisemitism, a guy who smiles constantly, that they would feel this level of terror just because Mamdani believes that Israel should be a state in which Palestinians and Jews are treated equally.

But it’s important to try to understand the reason for this terror, which I think in many, many people’s cases is actually genuine. And it’s also really important to understand that this is not… this kind of terror is not a particularly Jewish story. It’s not a particularly Jewish phenomenon. I think it’s important to emphasize that because the exceptionalization of Israel and Jews, I think, can lead to antisemitism.

I think the best way to understand this terror is by recognizing that people who become very invested in political systems of group supremacy, in which one group, a religious, ethnic, racial group has supremacy over another, that when you become deeply invested in that, you associate your safety, your identity with that system. The prospect of equality comes to seem extraordinarily frightening. Indeed, equality becomes, in a way, tantamount to death. The prospect of equality is associated with death, or at least subjugation.

And this is not particular to Jews who identify very, very strongly with the political system of the state of Israel. It’s, I think, common to groups of people who have become accustomed to a system of religious or racial or ethnic or group supremacy. So, a couple of quotes actually from my book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza:

· In 1998, when the Good Friday Accords were signed, which gave Catholics equality in Northern Ireland, the Protestant leader, Ian Paisley, called the Good Friday Accords a prelude to genocide.

· In 1979, there was a poll of White South Africans, which found that 84% of White South Africans believed that if there were a Black government in South Africa, ‘the physical safety of Whites would be threatened.’

· There’s a wonderful book about White Southerners during the Civil Rights Movement by the historian Jason Sokol. It’s called There Goes My Everything, White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945 to 1975. And Sokol writes, ‘they thought in terms of White supremacy or Black supremacy. If Blacks gained rights, Whites would correspondingly wear the yoke.’

This, I think, is what we see in the reaction to Zohran Mamdani. We see it among Jewish Israelis, but we also see it among Jews in New York and other places who are very, very strongly identified with Israel’s political system, the idea that equality actually means the subjugation or even death of Jews.

Now, of course, this is increased by the history of Jews that we have, of a deep history of oppression, persecution, indeed genocide. But you notice that even groups like, let’s say, Protestants in Northern Ireland, or White South Africans, or White Southerners, who don’t have as dark a history of persecution as Jews do, still tend to see things the same way. That they look at someone like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or the Catholics in Northern Ireland, and they don’t see people striving for equality. They see people striving for their subjugation, and they’re particularly reinforced in that by the fact that these people who, you know, represent subordinate groups often have a great deal of anger towards these systems of supremacy, and in many cases, even are involved in acts of violence.

And I…

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Our guests are Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative, and gubernatorial candidate, Ruwa Romman, who was denied the chance to speak at last year’s Democratic convention, and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, co-host of the podcast, Pod Save the World.