“Zionists are the in-group upon which white supremacy depends.”
This is what a Stanford dean told me while giving me her feedback on a curriculum I was developing for Jewish high school students. She suggested that I frame Zionism for them as a white supremacist project.
I had already encountered a pervasive environment of antisemitism from classmates in my program, a collaboration between Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and its Jewish studies program. After these and other comments, it became clear to me that faculty and administrators were also fostering that environment.
The consequence? Whereas before Stanford’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) had one Jewish studies student enrolled in the 2023 PhD cohort, now it will have none. I have decided to drop out. Stanford University and its community members proved uninterested, on countless occasions, in providing me the opportunity as a Jewish student to learn, succeed and engage in a scholarly community.
Another dean told me that I needed to take accountability and “accept blame” for creating situations that encouraged antisemitic behaviors and comments.
My decision arrived as a final act in a long opera of antisemitic incidents and behavior directed toward me from every echelon in the Stanford community, from students to professors to leadership.
There was the time a classmate pronounced to the entire class, while addressing me, that if anyone “thinks the State of Israel should exist, we will never be friends.”
There was the time a different classmate scolded me, “You need to realize the optics of you, as a white woman, saying that six women of color wearing keffiyehs felt violent to you. We are the ones oppressed by this institution.”
Then there was the time one classmate started crying after a presentation I led about the best methods for assessing educational programs in schools with cultures that differed from those of the researcher. She sobbed that my presentation—which had absolutely nothing to do with Israel-Palestine, Gaza or Zionism—“felt like colonial violence” and reminded her of “the genocide.”
Of course, to my classmates, October 7, 2023 was a day to be celebrated as “resistance by any means necessary,” its impact on Jewish lives, bodies and consciousness entirely ignored.
It’s worth pointing out that none of my classmates were Arab, Palestinian or Jewish. They were primarily women of color who deeply dislike Zionism as a concept and understand it as merely a racist, colonial evil rather than the return of an indigenous people to their ancestral homeland.
My classmates directed their animosity toward the Israeli government against me personally while promoting the naive and prejudiced idea that Zionism is an arm of global white supremacy. And that, somehow, I am the incarnation of both social ills.
These were not isolated incidents. They were the core feature of my experience as a Jewish person in this program. When I went to another dean, he told me that antisemitism was “institutional” and there was nothing he could do about it. The next time we met, he relayed that antisemitism was only an issue in the School of Education because I had made it into one. He accused me of overreacting and said, without providing examples, that I needed to take accountability and “accept blame” for creating situations that encouraged antisemitic behaviors and comments. He also reacted negatively to my sharing my experiences with the task force studying antisemitic bias at Stanford University. It’s hard to imagine anyone, let alone a faculty leader, reacting this way toward a person from any other community.
I wish, over the course of my time in the program, that my classmates, colleagues and professors had inquired even once about my political beliefs, instead of making assumptions purely because they know I am a rabbi’s daughter with a Jewish name and education. I wish they had been willing to recognize that, in classroom discussions about Israel-Palestine, I was citing academic books and articles while they quoted TikTok and Twitter. I was the only student present with any scholarly familiarity with the complex history of Israel-Palestine. The faculty, too, introduced classroom dialogues about sensitive topics that they were unqualified and ill-prepared to facilitate. My professors failed to recognize their own limitations, which put undue stress on me nearly every day.
Had my classmates asked, I would have shared my own struggles with Zionism, explaining that I identified as an anti-Zionist for a significant period in my college career. About how it seemed clear to me that no Jew could thrive at my college as a Zionist, so I vilified my own faith community to fit in. About how non-Jews demanded I denounce the legitimacy of (and need for) a Jewish state to prove my solidarity with their radical movements, which in fact reproduce antisemitic ideas about Jews.
My classmates reduced me to the archetypes that fed the discrimination towards my ancestors—a hatred of Jews so deep that an entire society in Europe wanted to exterminate us. To them, even if a Jewish person does not agree with the actions of the Israeli government and openly critiques the mechanisms of violence in Zionist political and military practices, that person is in the end still a Jew.
The irony of this ordeal is that I am a student of critical race theory who wrote my thesis on the history of the ethnic studies discipline and its connection to the Jewish community during the fight over the 2019 California Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum. In doing this research, I learned that the European white supremacy from which colonialism, racism and Nazism arose had solidified its antisemitic core hundreds of years prior. A hatred of Jews was built into dominant European ideas about the world and structures of power well before either 1492 or 1619.
I needed my classmates and professors to appreciate that I am part of a minority. I come from a people the world has hated for so long. I deserve a trauma-informed pedagogy, too, because I can neither learn nor feel safe in a classroom that regards me exclusively as a white oppressor absent any effort to consider Jewish heritage, history, literature or lived experiences.
So I will be leaving a PhD program at Stanford University because daily antisemitism is too rampant, aggressive and isolating. I will be leaving a PhD program at Stanford invigorated to join my American Jewish community in the fight against antisemitism. I will be leaving a PhD program at Stanford University because my classmates and professors do not recognize the fear, pain and trauma of my people, Am Yisrael.
My neshama–my Jewish soul–was never safe with them.
Zahava Feldstein is a southern-raised Jewish American memoirist and currently works as a research consultant for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.