To President Wooten, Provost Stephanie Cosner, Simmons University ODEI Team, Dr. Rachel Deleveaux, Simmons Administration, and the Simmons community:

We are members of the Simmons community. We are students; Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and POC. We strongly oppose the event on antisemitism with Project Shema that Simmons is hosting next Friday. Project Shema has strong ties to the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), an organization with a troubling history of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, immigrants, and queer people, and instead aligning with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence. Project Shema and the ADL regularly offer joint programming—in Houston, Philadelphia, Stamford, Boston, and other locations—and both of these organizations falsely claim that criticism of Israel constitutes antisemitism and is an attack on all Jews.

This equation of anti-zionism with antisemitism is deadly to Palestinians, harmful to Jews, and patently false. The Jewish people and the state of Israel are not one and the same. For as long as the state of Israel has existed, Jews have opposed the ethnonationalist state and its violence against Palestinians.

To frame opposition to Israel’s apartheid regime as antisemitic is not only to follow suit with far-right, anti-Arab leaders in Israel and the United States, it is to distort the reality of what antisemitism actually is, and is not. Many Jews understand that the Israeli occupation of Palestine has always made Jewish people less safe worldwide, and support Palestinian liberation.

Jewish people do face real antisemitic dangers, in particular from right-wing white nationalists, the same forces that seek to harm Palestinians and other marginalized communities. The ADL, on the other hand, and Project Shema as its proxy, has a decades-long record of attacking racial justice movements, supporting racist and militarized policing, and spying on progressive organizers. The ADL misdefines antisemitism, making Jews the face of the US–Israel war machine, and relentlessly lobbies to make criticism of the Israeli regime illegal. Project Shema itself claims that referring to the current genocide in Gaza as a "genocide" is antisemitic- despite the ICJ ruling that confirms this label as accurate. It is crucial to understand that these tactics are not innocent in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians right now, and far from accepted within the Jewish community as well. 

Project Shema may publicly try to distance itself from the ADL (even as they present at ADL conferences and alongside ADL leaders), but their message is the same; they equate advocating for Palestinian human rights with antisemitism.  

By using Project Shema as a resource, Simmons will be endorsing a narrative that the colonization, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation of Palestinian land and people is legitimate. It will bolster harmful narratives that Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are irrational and inherently antisemitic. Simmons will be aligning with those who claim that Israel’s genocide of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza constitutes "self defense." It is important to note that Project Shema’s founder, Oren Jacobson, has stated that criticism of the political ideology of Zionism is antisemitic, and denies the current genocide Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. 

We believe it to be paramount that our school community is educated about actual antisemitism, as well as all forms of discrimination and oppression. Our safety and dignity is connected through collective liberation—not the justification of genocide, apartheid, and occupation—and we must educate ourselves to understand this.

We have two concrete requests at this time: 

1. Drop the event with Project Shema.
2. Offer an alternate antisemitism event. 
   • We recommend this organization, who uses a collective liberation framework. Learn more here about a curriculum that is devoted to understanding and challenging antisemitism grounded in a deep commitment to justice and dignity for all people. 

Thank you for your attention to this petition, its signatories, and the Simmons community at large.

For those who would like more detailed information about why we oppose Project Shema and their framing of antisemitism, please see this FAQ document.