While pervasive antisemitism on America’s college campuses is nothing new, the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th unleashed a storm of Jew-hatred not seen since Germany in the 1920s and 30s. The aggressive and violent encounters by Jewish students and faculty members on campuses across the country, most of which have been met with apathy, willful blindness, and callous indignation on the part of administrators who hide behind claims that free speech protects hate speech when directed at Jews (while ignoring that every other “marginalized” group of students must be protected in safe spaces and the like), have led to Jewish members of these campus communities feeling frightened, ostracized, and alone. The pathetic and embarrassing Congressional testimony of the presidents of MIT, UPenn, and Harvard only represent the tip of the iceberg but is there hope that perhaps the breaking of the dam will lead to significant and long overdue changes? Will pushback against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracies – now endemic across America’s universities (and K-12 programs) – continue, and will the national attention to what it has wrought for Jews on campus lead to a safer and more welcoming environment for them? Or will it require legal action from both individual civil lawsuits and federal investigations to finally effectuate the necessary changes that will lead to Jews being treated with the same respect, dignity, and security that is afforded every other student group? Please join us for an enlightening and informative conversation with Ken Marcus and Asaf Romirowsky to learn more about what’s happening to address antisemitism in the academy.
About the Speakers:
Asaf Romirowsky Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Romirowsky is also a senior nonresident research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) and a Professor [Affiliate] at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian he holds a Ph.D. in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King’s College London, UK, and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history.
Romirowsky is co-author of Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief and a contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. Recently, he co-edited Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, a special issue of the journal Israel Studies.
Romirowsky’s publicly engaged scholarship has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, The American Interest, The New Republic, The Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Ynet, and Tablet among other online and print media outlets.
Kenneth L. Marcus is founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; Professional Lecturer in Law at The George Washington University Law School; Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Center for Liberty & Law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School; and author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press).
During his public service career, Marcus served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights; Staff Director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; and General Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
In academia, he formerly held the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at the City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College School of Public Affairs and served as Visiting Research Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and previously served as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Marcus was a litigation partner in two major law firms, where he conducted complex commercial and constitutional litigation. He also currently chairs the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Civil Rights Practice Group.
He has published widely in academic journals as well as in more popular venues such as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, and Politico. Mr. Marcus is a graduate of Williams College, magna cum laude, and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
