Gelman, a Jewish adjunct professor and union organizer, said he considered dropping one text from his syllabus this semester due to concerns about disciplinary action but kept it, confident he could defend it under academic freedom if challenged. He called the new guidelines “obviously tendentious,” “absurd” and “offensive,” and said that he was not alone in his concerns.

A professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, who requested to remain anonymous due to concerns of being doxxed or penalized by NYU’s administration, said they had planned to discuss police brutality in Palestine as part of their course curriculum this semester. The professor said they were “very uncomfortable” and “nearly self-censored” out of fear that students would misinterpret films watched in class and file a report to the university.

“There’s something intangible about the kind of inherent trust that one has in the classroom of the people that are sitting there,” the professor said in an interview with WSN. “But if you can’t trust that they’re going to interpret the film in a way that is appropriate, if they’re going to interpret the film as anti-Zionist or something, it would be very tempting to just skip this stuff because it’s controversial and I don’t want to rock the boat.”

A previous WSN investigation found that NYU had filed more than 180 conduct cases against students and faculty related to protests over the war in Gaza — many of which originated from reports to the university’s Bias Response Line. One faculty member called the disciplinary proceedings “depressing and demoralizing.”

A professor in the journalism department, who also requested anonymity, said they regularly host guests in their class to discuss topics related to world news, including U.S. foreign policy in Israel and the war in Gaza. The professor told WSN they felt “not safe” continuing to do so and elected to omit speakers from their syllabus in the wake of NYU’s new guidelines.

“That’s a shame because that was a really popular and successful event that brought people together,” they said. “I’m inviting students into something where they may be violating the policy simply by having the critical discussion necessary to understand those things better.”

When asked about faculty concerns, NYU spokesperson John Beckman reiterated his August sentiment that the updated guidelines did not alter university policy. Beckman said that the university’s guidelines are based on suggestions from the Office of Civil Rights, and that other institutions had received “numerous” concerns regarding “the reference to Zionist as a potential codeword.”

Over the last year, students and faculty have participated in several pro-Palestinian demonstrations where protesters have repeatedly criticized Zionism amid Israel’s ongoing siege in the Gaza Strip, including with signage reading “WE DO NOT ENGAGE W/ ZIONISTS” and “ZIONISTS NOT WELCOME.”

“There is nothing incompatible about upholding academic freedom and upholding civil rights laws and NYU’s policies against discrimination and harassment,” Beckman said in a statement to WSN. “Let’s remember what this is all about: clarifying for members of the NYU community that the use of codewords or dog-whistles to engage in harassment and discrimination will not insulate you from the enforcement of our policies.”

Beckman clarified that NYU “does not presume” all uses of the word violate its NDAH policy and referenced a section of the guidelines that states it does not ban “scholarly discussion, academic research or pursuits or the study and/or critique” of issues relating to Zionism or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gabriel Levine-Drizin, a representative of NYU’s graduate student union, said the new policy was especially concerning because it came at a time when many staff already felt at risk of university sanctions. 

“The university says that the policy hasn’t changed, but what has changed is the triggers or means by which they enforce that policy,” Levine-Drizin said. “What we’ve been arguing this whole time is that that is clearly a change to the terms of our conditions of employment.”

In an Instagram post this weekend, the union shared a testimony from an anonymous TA who said that “despite largely steering clear of conversations about Zionism for my safety, I have had students ask if I support terrorism, question my qualifications, harass me in course reviews and report me to both HR and the Office of Student Conduct despite my clear lack of violations.”

Levine-Drizin said that the new guidelines only serve to worsen this environment, citing a series of modules on Brightspace mandating that students comply with the updated conduct policies.

“Our members very quickly realized that signing and going through a module in which you have to click that you agree that Zionism is a code word for Jewish and being anti-Zionist is being antisemitic, and very explicitly said that you could be subject to punishment and discipline, was not only a step way too far to take during a genocide but also just a horrible mockery of academic freedom,” Levine-Drizin said.

While U.S. college campuses have been taking additional policy measures against incidents of antisemitism, often under pressure from lawmakers and lawsuits, NYU is the first major university to list words like “Zionists” as an example of a potential NDAH violation. The guidelines state that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity.”

Multiple Jewish academics told WSN that while this is true, developing policy based on such a framework can be “somewhat problematic.” Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College, said that, while he is a Zionist and does view that as important to his own Jewish identity, some Jewish people do not share similar views.

“There is an inside-the-tent Jewish battle over whether having a particular view on Zionism or Israel is required to be inside the tent,” Stern said. “When people say all anti-Zionism is antisemitism, I obviously disagree with that. Some is and some isn’t, but when they’re trying to push for that, they want the state to ratify one side of this internal Jewish debate.”

In the early 2000s, while working as director of the American Jewish Committee’s division on antisemitism and extremism, Stern was the lead author of a working definition of antisemitism used to track hate crimes. The definition, which includes “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” was later adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016. In 2019, President-elect Donald Trump signed an executive order under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that encouraged universities to adopt the IHRA definition.

NYU adopted the IHRA definition in 2020 in response to a lawsuit arguing that the university permitted discrimination against Jewish students on campus. The lawsuit, which a student filed following a string of incidents targeting Jewish students on campus, led to an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education regarding the university’s procedure for addressing antisemitism on campus. 

In a July settlement of a lawsuit accusing NYU of being indifferent to instances of antisemitism on campus, the university reaffirmed its commitment to the IHRA definition of the term. As part of the settlement, NYU also said it would hire a Title VI coordinator and allocate more resources toward its Center for the Study of Antisemitism, which opened in May. 

Stern told WSN that he disagrees with U.S. colleges’ implementation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and has repeatedly criticized universities’ policies. He said that by using the definition to regulate student speech or behavior, higher education institutions could oversimplify antisemitism to the detriment of academic freedom.

“They’re against academic freedom and, most significantly, they put a blinder to how you should deal with these problems with education,” Stern said. “Using the rules of the campus in this way to prescribe speech is incredibly counterproductive — it undermines the purposes of critical thinking.”

That said, Stern and multiple other academics told WSN that terms like “Zionism” and “Zionist” are at times used as a form of coded language for antisemitism. Zachary Lockman, a professor in the Middle Eastern and Islamic studies department, said that because Zionism is a political ideology in its own right, the notion that it could be a “code word” for a larger demographic does not accurately reflect its meaning.

“One can agree with it or not, like it or not — all fine, but to specify a particular political ideology as raising these questions is dangerous, because then we get the Office of Equal Opportunity making decisions that have real consequences for people,” Lockman said. “Because somebody can file a complaint and say ‘They used the term Zionist, I understood that as a code word for something else,’ and we now have a policy which opens up that possibility.”

Jonathan Feingold — a professor at the Boston University School of Law who studies anti-racism legislation — told WSN that policies denoting anti-Zionism as antisemitic are fairly new and incite concerns regarding potential biases on college campuses. 

“Legal organizations that are advocating either for Jewish students that have been involved in protests for Palestinian human rights — or just advocating on behalf of Palestinian students or others — might make the argument that policies that seem to favor a particular ideological position with respect to Israel constitute evidence of disparate treatment,” Feingold said.

Last December, the Student Government Assembly passed a resolution in support of pro-Palestinian speech on campus. While the resolution was brought to the University Senate Executive Committee, on which President Linda Mills is a member, as of the end of last semester it still had not gone to a vote after multiple delays.

Avinoam Patt, the inaugural director of NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, said he appreciated the university’s specific prohibition of “excluding Zionists from an open event” or “calling for the death of Zionists.”

“A university should be a setting where we celebrate our ability to have a free and open exchange of ideas,” Patt said in an interview with WSN. “If we’re committed to that ideal, then we reject the idea that anyone should be boycotted or excluded on the basis of who they are or where they come from or how they voted.”

However, Stern said he thinks students and faculty should be encouraged to talk about Zionism more, not less. He said that, in his experience, the most effective way for universities to combat instances of discrimination or harassment on campus while still protecting academic freedom is to have “difficult discussions” in classes between students of differing perspectives and to facilitate courses where students can learn more about the subjects at hand. 

Stern told WSN about one example of a course that examined the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also said that addressing antisemitism and promoting academic freedom should not be mutually exclusive.

“If you do things that promote academic freedom, it’s more likely to improve the environment, it’s more likely to get students and faculty to be supportive,” Stern said. “If it harms academic freedom systemically, it’s going to backfire on a campus, because faculty in particular are going to see their ability to teach impacted.”

Contact Hope Pisoni at [email protected].