About two dozen students attended a workshop on combating antisemitism Thursday evening. The event was hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian Jewish student group.
The workshop, “Fighting Antisemitism through a Framework of Liberation,” featured speakers Lesley Williams, an Evanston-based activist, and Nina Mehta, co-director of the Participatory Action Research Center for Education Organizing, an organization dedicated to promoting social justice in educational spaces.
“What really bothers me about … the way that we often talk about antisemitism is that it looks at antisemitism in a vacuum and it looks at it as though fighting antisemitism is in conflict or is in competition with fighting other forms of racism,” Williams, a member of JVP Chicago, told the room.
Thursday’s presentation was a two-hour version of PARCEO’s recently developed “Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation.”
Medill senior Isabelle Butera, a former Daily staffer, serves as a member at large for JVP and helped organize the event.
“We hope today’s training actually helps the Northwestern community understand what antisemitism is, (what it) isn’t and how we fight it,” Butera said as she introduced the speakers.
The PARCEO curriculum evaluates antisemitism within the historical context of the Jewish experience and examines how antisemitism has been misused to further other discriminatory rhetoric, according to its website.
Mehta said the curriculum grew out of conversations with educators and partners in the social justice community.
“There was (a need) expressed for a curriculum that understands challenging antisemitism as interconnected to challenging anti-Black racism, anti-Muslim racism (and) anti-Palestinian racism,” Mehta said.
Communication freshman Elia Silbey, a JVP member who attended the workshop, said they appreciated the curriculum’s distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
As they tried to learn more about the conflict in Gaza and Judaism more generally, Silbey was often frustrated by the prevalence of what they called explicitly Zionist sources.
“This was really important to me because I actually felt like I got to learn about what I’m looking for,” they said.
The JVP-hosted workshop was a response to NU’s new required anti-bias training, “Building a Community of Respect and Breaking Down Bias,” unveiled in a February email from the University.
According to the email, the training is part of the University’s efforts to comply with an executive order entitled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” issued by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office in January.
Butera condemned what she called the University “preemptively complying” with the Trump administration and called the training “propaganda.”
“This training leaves the Northwestern community at best confused about antisemitism and at worst wrongly thinking that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Butera said.
The University’s mandatory training is due for all students April 7. NU’s chapters of JVP and Students for Justice in Palestine have called for a boycott of the training. Consequences for not completing the training have not yet been disclosed.
Butera does not intend to complete the University’s antisemitism training, she said.
“This is a moment in which Northwestern needs to stand up to the Trump administration,” Butera said. “Implementing a training that is clear propaganda out of fear of these investigations and … executive orders is failing to protect the Northwestern community.”
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