In the spring of 2023, I co-convened and hosted the second annual "Law vs. Antisemitism" conference at Lewis & Clark Law School. It, and the ensuing symposium issue published by the Lewis & Clark Law Review, was one of my proudest professional accomplishments.
As I was organizing the conference and soliciting participants, I had one absolute bedrock rule I swore I would not break: nobody but the organizers, using our best professional judgment, could tell us who would speak at, sponsor, or otherwise participate in the conference.
One reason for that rule was that one of our sponsor's was the ADL (and Steven Freeman of the ADL one of our two keynote speakers, alongside Eric Ward). Even in 2023, there was an active campaign in some circles to "drop the ADL" and to refuse participation in events the ADL co-sponsored. My position on that was that nobody could tell us who our sponsors would be. And the corollary position was that none of our sponsors could tell us who our participants would be. End of story.
For the most part, this firm redline I drew was an entirely moot point. None of our sponsors (including the ADL and the Academic Engagement Network, which I was then a member of) expressed any interest in dictating who could participate. And none of our participants raised any questions about who was sponsoring us. We did get a few emails from outsiders who asked rather motivated questions about whether representatives from this or that hobbyhorse cause would or would not be participating. My answer to those emails was straightforward: any such group was welcome to submit a proposal, and they would be assessed on the same basis as any other potential speaker (though as I recall all of these messages came after the proposal deadline had closed anyway). With a single exception (which I'll discuss in a second), nobody involved in the conference sought or received any alteration of any aspect of the conference's program based on ideological objections to a co-participant. The result was an extraordinarily vibrant and successful conference where speakers from diverse perspectives and ideological backgrounds got to converse and learn from one another. It was a great experience.
I have not attended the subsequent Law vs. Antisemitism conferences. This year I'm on paternity leave, and last year I was frankly burnt out. But I still think it's a great conference and a great asset to the community.
So I was frankly furious to read what can only be described as a hit piece in the Jewish Insider targeting this year's conference, titled "ADL, AEN sponsor UCLA antisemitism conference that featured speakers tied to anti-Zionist groups." The article is clearly written with a scandalized tone -- how could these respectable organizations permit such scoundrels in a room they sponsored! -- and it has already yielded results: both the AEN and ADL have promised to withhold future participation and support for the conference unless they are given veto power to "exclude" speakers they disagree with.
No academic conference with any integrity could accede to such a demand. If the ADL pulls out of the conference going forward, it will have only made a decision to "drop" itself. And on the merits, there simply is no basis to object here. What the ADL and AEN are asking for is fundamentally incompatible with the Law vs. Antisemitism conference project.
To begin: while the nature of the topic means we've always drawn more deeply from the "practitioner" space than many of our peers, the LvA conference is first and foremost an academic conference. It is not a pep rally, it is not a cheerleading initiative, it is not a "safe space", and it is not a therapy session. There are and should be diverse views present; we were not selecting for an ideological line, and we do not promise that anyone's ideological orthodoxies won't be challenged.
This resulted in a range of left-to-right views represented amongst conference participants, which is how it should be. For example, when the Lewis & Clark Law Review was selecting papers to be published in the accompanying symposium issue (we had more submissions than space), I advocated that Ken Marcus' IHRA paper be included -- not because I agreed with it (I didn't), but because it represented a perspective that I knew was important and relevant to a live debate. I don't agree with his take on IHRA, but I'm not going to pretend like it isn't a live perspective that deliberators on the subject of antisemitism need to grapple with. Again, that's how things should be -- and while there that intervention was to the benefit of a conservative voice, like it or not, anti-Zionist views on antisemitism are also important and relevant to a live debate and deserve their space in academic conferences (whether I agree with them or not). They don't get to monopolize the space; but they can't be artificially excluded either. Pretending this debate doesn't exist and wishing it away doesn't do anyone any favors.
As alluded to above, there was one sop we made to ideological demands at the Lewis & Clark conference -- one of our conservative speakers said he would not be on a panel with a certain progressive speaker. This condition was agreed to by one of my co-organizers without my knowledge or consent; and when I found out I was furious -- partially because on principle I didn't believe our speakers should be able to dictate our panel setups, and partially because I wanted ideologically diverse panels and demands like this interfered with that project. This conservative should have been forced to grapple with the challenges posed by a progressive critic; and vice versa -- that's what makes conferences like this valuable.
That experience makes me take particular note of those persons who walked out or announced future non-participation because there were panels they deemed "one-sided" or otherwise included speakers they said "crossed the red line". The problem here is obvious: one cannot simultaneously have a no-platform rule where one refuses to be in a room with anti-Zionists and then complain about one-sided panels! And if we zoom out on the subject of "one-sidedness", the article identifies a total of three "problematic" speakers. I don't know how many speakers there were at this conference overall, but at mine there were around thirty-five. Three of thirty-five does not suggest a conference that was on the whole one-sided or ideologically stacked (or if it was, it's stacked in a Zionist direction). The article suggests that the anti-Zionists were given special highlighting or feting. They were not. They were part of a larger event and they got to speak their piece on the same terms and in the same environment as everyone else.
What we're seeing here, rather, is certain speakers who refuse to tolerate being in a space that is not univocally Zionist -- and then, upon their departure, complain that the space is ideologically biased. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. One suspects the departure will yield a wider academic boycott of the conference from the political right, which will push the conference's center of gravity further to the left, which the conservatives will then use to claim vindication regarding their decision not to participate. But let's be clear: they were welcome. They were present. Their ideological compatriots were in the overwhelming majority of participants. They left not because they were pushed out, but because they demanded an ideological litmus test and the conference would not indulge them -- any more than we would or will indulge similar no-platform demands seeking to impose an anti-Zionist ideological uniformity.
The point of articles like this are to facilitate ideological censorship and a narrowing of academic exchange. If you have a problem with conferences that maintain an ideological anti-Zionist litmus test; then you can't endorse conferences maintaining an ideological pro-Zionist litmus test. And likewise, the attempt to present the presence of a handful of anti-Zionist speakers as corrupting the entirety of the conference is just as problematic as an attempt to present the presence of a handful of Zionist speakers as corrupting the entirety of a conference. In all cases, the target is the very project of open and free academic exchange.
In any situation like this, where an event features both JVP-type folk and ADL-type folk, it is a fifty/fifty shot whether the former will threaten to boycott unless the latter are excluded, or the latter will threaten to boycott unless the former are excluded. Here, it was the second; sometimes it will go the other way. I'm always stunned that the people who make these ultimatums don't recognize that they always come off a whiny, censorial bullies; but it doesn't seem to stop anyone. Nonetheless -- the ADL and AEN come off as whiny, censorial bullies here, and that's through no fault of anyone but themselves. Again, one doesn't need a campaign to "drop the ADL" if they're just going to end up dropping themselves.
I have no doubt that all the speakers who were selected to present at this conference were picked because they provided an interesting perspective that would deepen the academic conversation on the subject of antisemitism. They were not picked because the organizers "agreed" with everything they have said or would say. It is not a vice but a virtue that these perspectives will not all be agreed to by all; an academic conference that is deliberately trying to create an ideological monoculture is a conference that should be run by someone else.
Coincidentally, I was on a panel at a different conference a few weeks ago with one of the "problem" speakers at the LvA, University of Toronto professor Mohammed Fadel. The subject was campus free speech issues related to Israel/Palestine, and we disagreed on a lot -- sometimes sharply. But it was a productive and pleasant conversation, and that's how these things should be.
Also coincidentally, a few days ago I formally resigned my membership in the AEN. It had been dormant for some time, but in the wake of Trump's all-out assault on academia and academic freedom, I lacked confidence that AEN would stand up for the principles of academic engagement that attracted me to it in the first place. Replying to my message, the AEN's leader expressed her disappointment and reminded me of the AEN's sponsorship of the LvA conference. That just a few days later they announced they would drop that sponsorship because the conference refused to impose a rule of intellectual orthodoxy only confirms my decision was the right one.