Beth Shakman Hurd

Opinion | LTE: We support NU students boycotting the ‘Anti-Bias’ training Opinion Contributors Michael Peshkin and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd show support for students boycotting an 'Anti-Bias' training.

To our students: your resistance matters. You are right to refuse this training, and we stand with you in demanding a university worthy of your commitment to truth and justice.

We won’t give in. It won’t stop here.

A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it | Diana Buttu For years, I pressed Palestinian interests in peace talks. The response to Trump’s plan proves the international community hasn’t learned from catastrophe

“It would be a mistake to view the plan as a historic breakthrough for Palestine. Trump’s vision is yet another American-Israeli concoction cooked up without any input from Palestinians that would retain Israel’s perpetual control over Gaza’s future.”

YouTube video by The Guardian How Chicago is resisting Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown | Anywhere but Washington

Please watch to see what’s happening at the protests against ICE near Chicago, where immigrants are being violently detained and Turning Point supporters are lionizing Kirk.

Calling a ‘code red,’ Newsom says universities must reject Trump’s compact The governor applied more pressure on USC, which received a proposal this week to cooperate with the Trump administration.

“We’re losing this country,” Newsom said. “We’re losing it in real time. This is a chaos presidency. He is a wrecking ball. This is unlike anything we’ve experienced in our lifetime. It is code red. No time for neutrality. It’s time to stand up, pick a side, and be firm and resolute.”

The admin’s efforts to get universities to agree to a list of demands in exchange for preferential access to federal funding isn’t just “troubling” as Ted Mitchell, prez of the @aceducation.bsky.social says in this article; it looks blatantly unconstitutional.🧵
www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

Border wall slicing through Arizona wildlife corridor begins construction: ‘A show of force for nothing’ The 30ft-high wall between the US and Mexico will cut through one of the last unbroken grasslands in the west, leaving residents alarmed over the potential impact on wildlife and water use

“A show of force for nothing.”

Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Noncitizens Over Pro-Palestinian Speech

The opinion on Tuesday left no doubt that Judge Young came away from the trial convinced of the core point made by the academic associations: that the Trump administration had successfully turned an obscure element of immigration law into a cudgel to intimidate opposing voices.

Exactly.

Thank you @ulrich-schmiedel.bsky.social !

Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine protest bias training Around a dozen graduate and undergraduate students gathered in front of Technological Institute on Friday to protest a controversial bias training required for all Northwestern students. The news conf...

“The antisemitism in Northwestern is not where I was told it would be,” (student Holly) Simon said. “The students and faculty organizing for Palestinian freedom and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza have continuously welcomed me as my full Jewish self.”

I stand with these students.

American Support for Israel Is a Political Religion US policies reflect the entangled destinies of the two countries — as if they were merged into one

U.S. support for Israel isn’t just foreign policy, it’s a political religion. Rooted in Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, it blurs borders until America and Israel are imagined as one, argues Elizabeth Shakman Hurd for @newlinesmag.bsky.social

American Support for Israel Is a Political Religion US policies reflect the entangled destinies of the two countries — as if they were merged into one

NEW: What makes the relationship between the U.S. & Israel unique, one that can’t be captured by ordinary frameworks? It’s as if the two were a single entity - “AmericaIsrael” - which functions like a political religion, argues @bethhurd.bsky.social

newlinesmag.com/argument/ame...

Gaza Students Found a Lifeline to U.S. Colleges. Then Trump Shut the Door. Palestinian students who were admitted to American universities are now stuck in Gaza, where Israel has destroyed most schools.

Palestinian students who were admitted to American universities are now trapped in Gaza, where Israel has destroyed most schools.

Opinion | The Border Is Invading America

The border no longer divides only countries. It snakes between white and brown, between families and neighbors, between citizens and the rights they once thought were inviolate.

Rabbis Emerge as Growing Voice of Criticism of Israel’s Tactics in Gaza Among the recent public letters was one from dozens of Orthodox rabbis demanding “moral clarity” to what they called a humanitarian crisis.

As Israel’s tactics in Gaza have increasingly provoked international condemnation, rabbis across the world are speaking out against the Israeli government’s conduct in the war, on moral and religious grounds.

The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it do...

The university’s trustees and leaders view it as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal. We are simply choosing not to be a university.

After crushing dissent, U.S. universities deepen ties with Israeli academia Israeli universities regularly collaborate with the military, which has destroyed all academic life in Gaza. That's done nothing to slow U.S.-Israeli partnerships.

While new collaborations between Israeli and U.S. universities lack widespread buy-in from American faculty and students, framing them as redress for supposed discrimination against Jewish or Israeli students, “is a cynical but very effective way to make sure these partnerships are untouchable.”

The Problem With Israel Is So Much Bigger Than Netanyahu Increasingly, mainstream Democrats have sought to carve out a space for “acceptable” Zionism by saying that they support Israel but oppose Bibi Netanyahu. But the horrors of Gaza are a result of proce...

It’s harder and harder for Democratic politicians who want to position themselves as sensible, moderate liberals to defend a country that carries out such grotesque crimes against its stateless and rightless noncitizen subjects.

Northwestern’s Inane — and Controversial — Bias Trainings Indoctrination is not education.

The problem with Antisemitism Here/Now is that its tendentious and simplistic approach to enormously complex histories, including the history of Zionism, is at odds with the mission of the university: to teach, not to indoctrinate.

www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, Pardee School of Global Studies - BOSTON, MA, United States - Boston University Find a career with Boston University

CURA is looking for an assistant director! Here’s your chance to work at the oldest center for the study of religion and world affairs in the U.S. Please share widely! jobs.silkroad.com/BU/External/...

Gourevitch: What is Brown’s deal? Serving the Brown University community since 1891

This is not a temporary measure in an abnormal period. These agreements help create a new normal. If we are being extorted, then just say so. But don’t call a stick-up a voluntary agreement, and don’t sell it as a return to the way things were.

www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Bibles Belong to All of Us: Elizabeth Shkaman Hurd Interviews Hannah Strømmen | Contending Modernities Taking affective investments seriously can be transformative for understanding the staying power of trends and tendencies in biblical reception.

In the second part of their CM conversation, @bethhurd.bsky.social and Hannah Strømmen discuss the role of masculinity in far-right movements today and the importance of focusing on affect when studying them.
contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-m...

Bibles Belong to All of Us: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Interviews Hannah Strømmen | Contending Modernities Taking affective investments seriously can be transformative for understanding the staying power of trends and tendencies in biblical reception.

Part II of my discussion with @hannahmstrommen.bsky.social about her new book Bibles of the Far Right. Fantastic, creative work on some of the most vexing questions of our time. @cmnd.bsky.social

New Firm Seeks to Confront Trump on Executive Power

Important.

Our Genocides: Confronting a New Period in Jewish History Part One of a ten-part series on Israel, Gaza, and American Jewry.

The fact that we now have two genocides marks a terrible historical irony. Our vast and varied response to the first genocide—a response motivated in large part by our determination to prevent such a thing from ever happening to us again—must now be understood as one of the causes of the second.

Bibles Belong to All of Us: Masculinity, Civilization, and the Bibles of the Far Right | Contending Modernities What does a focus on biblical assemblages together with the far-right allow us to see anew?

Sometimes a book is exciting because it makes you think in new ways. Other times it's important to a particular historical moment. Rarely does a book do both. Hannah Strømmen’s new book The Bibles of the Far Right is the exception.

My review for @cmnd.bsky.social

urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

“I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.”

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

Antisemitism training designed by pro-Israel groups is becoming compulsory at US colleges. What’s in it? Training asks students to attribute the statement ‘every time I read Hitler, I fall in love’ to an ‘anti-Israel activist’

“We were shocked by the video…which directly vilifies the movement for rights for Palestinian people and non-Zionist Jews who stand against genocide,” Bez said. “It explicitly requires students to adopt the position that there’s no room for anti-Zionism, and that all anti-Zionism is antisemitic.”

"It really motivated us to want to speak out before such a deal is made and implore our Board of Trustees and our president to not capitulate. Don't give in to this blackmail. We know it's going to be a tough road, but it won't stop here," Nielsen said.

For Immediate Release:

Northwestern Faculty Group Opposes “Dealmaking” with Lawless Trump Administration