What is the work of the IJAN academic network? Why are we organizing as anti-Zionist Jewish academics?

The Jewish anti-Zionist Academic Network (JAZAN) formed within the context of the International Jewish anti-Zionist Network in order to bolster academic participation in the Palestine Solidarity Movement broadly and within institutions of higher education in particular. As such, the academic network’s purposes and goals are multi-pronged.

Teachers, researchers and writers who work on university and college campuses engage with political justice both ideologically in our own work and materially in collective struggle—as such the academy is a site within which there is potential for Zionist discourse to be de-legitimized and Zionist militarism to be strategically opposed.

As Jewish anti-Zionist academics and as part of broader communities, we are committed to:

• Broadening and deepening anti-Zionist discourse and putting forward alternative visions
• Opposing the misuse of charges of anti-Semitism that frequently occur in an academic context
• Supporting Palestinian, Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim anti-imperialist faculty, staff and students
• Working with students on campuses who are organizing in SJP chapters and engaging in BDS campaigns
• Supporting students and faculty who are doing critical scholarship opposing US imperialism, racism and Zionism
• Engaging in mutual teaching and learning through intellectual collaboration
• Challenging academic hierarchies and forms of competition and refusing to police one another within the neo-liberal academy
• Exposing how the policies and investments of the University are linked to Zionism and other violences
• Articulating linkages to other ongoing critical forms of struggle, including solidarity with indigenous, black and anti-racist struggles, and struggles to abolish the military-prison-industrial-complex

Join us in the following projects planned for the next year:

§ Developing a communications network of anti-Zionist Jewish people in the academy who can discuss our work and the broader politics of Jewish anti-Zionism in the PSM, while we connect and support one another

§ Working on a collection of papers coming out of the US Assembly of Jews Confronting Israeli Apartheid and Racism

§ Meeting and presenting at academic conferences, in such fields as Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Sociology, Modern Languages, Feminist/Queer Studies, Middle East/North Africa Studies, and more

§ Participation in writing articles, statements, analyses, background documents to support IJAN campaigns and work:

· A campaign to challenge the Zionist exceptionalizing and exploitation of the Nazi genocide of Jews

· A report to expose the Jewish National Fund and a series of papers on Jewish opposition to the Zionist construction of Jewish nationalism that the JNF is founded upon

· Discussion of the principles and processes toward decolonizing Palestine that may allow for the emergence of a just society