Opinion | What I Learned at Stanford

By | Nov 22, 2024
Antisemitism Project, Latest, Opinion
Stanford Univ. collage

“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, or year, 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. 

30 thoughts on “Opinion | What I Learned at Stanford

  1. Eitan says:

    Great article, you’re bound for greatness!

  2. Monica says:

    I’m so sorry,Please join Shabbos Kestenbaum and the other students and sue them for what they put you through

  3. Naomi says:

    Thank you for taking the brave step of sharing your story. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for you and have no doubt that you will do great things.

  4. Corey Multer says:

    I’m an alum of the business school. I haven’t contributed to the university in years. This is why.

    1. Ed Rivkin says:

      My late father was a proud Stanford business school alum even replacing his MBA ring when it wore out. He was also a generous financial supporter. That all ended decades ago when the school held an event on Yom Kippur and justified their decision to my dad; i.e. they couldn’t work around all religious holidays. My dad was a strong believer in supporting higher education and became VERY engaged in supporting his undergraduate institution as a result.

      As tragic as Ms. Feldstein’s experience was, from our family’s experience, it is not surprising.

  5. Rabbi Dr. Eric Lankin says:

    This is so tragic! Thank you for your tremendous insights. Come do your PhD in Israel where you will be welcomed home and appreciated.

  6. Guy Levy says:

    Did you have any interaction with the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford (https://www.pascl.stanford.edu/)? Your experience seems to be the direct focus of the PASCL mission.

    1. Jose Hofman says:

      soutien total. témoignage poignant.

  7. Arik Harbi says:

    We are with you. Try Yeshiva University for your PhD?

  8. A. Levin says:

    Beautifully written. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. You do not deserve what happened to you.

  9. Kate Gruwell says:

    Zionism, a Protestant – majority movement maintaining a secular Zionist state E European in nature that bloody Stalin created that harbors oligarchs and won’t join sanctions against Russia/ N Korea.
    And of course where most Jews don’t live

    1. Surak says:

      OK, now we know that the Nazi movement didn’t die in 1945.

    2. peter schwartz says:

      Kate Gruwell, your comment is ignorant, dumb, and bigoted. Consider sticking to gentile topics or other things where you can chime in without looking exposing your absence of knowledge.

  10. Tami silvers says:

    I am jewish. Raised in America. Now living in Israel.
    You are wrong on all counts.
    You surely didn’t do a kiddush Hashem.
    Open a chumash. Learn the commentators. ie Ramban, Ohr HaChaim HaKadosh.
    Leave your Judiasm in your heart, and soul, and in your home.
    It’s like going to Stanford and speaking in a foreign language that nobody understands.
    What good did you bring to the school?
    Your there to learn and study their curriculum. You’re there to communicate and share secular ideas.
    You have a stupid & giant chip on your shoulder.
    Be a mensch.
    If you want to talk about Judiasm and Israel, then go to a Jewish place.
    Otherwise you leave it at the door and go and communicate with the other students working together. It is not a competition to prove your more intelligent. The world is here for all mankind to work together.
    Your just ceating self centered , separation between you and everyone else.
    You don’t deserve to be there.

    1. David Sokol says:

      So glad you shared this. I wish you had named the names of the perpetrators instead of covering for them with their titles. Take them to court, or let them sue you. We still have a court system lets use it while it’s there. The court is where people must listen when someone takes their civil rights. Fight back

    2. Surak says:

      No, you don’t deserve to quote the rishonim.

  11. Louis says:

    Zahava, where did you go to college? Did you have no allies at Stanford? Do you think the GSE is especially problematic?

  12. Louis says:

    The UCSF medical center is world class one. They have had a problem, though, with some staff who feel called upon to evangelize on behalf of the Palestinian/Hamas cause, going after Jewish members of that community, especially ones with connections to Israel. Thankfully, the institution’s president has made it explicitly clear that political advocacy cannot be allowed when it conflicts with their professional responsibilities to patients, fellow staff, students, research commitments, etc. One tenured faculty member who refused to go along with the program, was suspended indefinitely.

    It may not be exactly the same set of considerations at Stanford’s graduate schools as at a medical center delivering medical care, in particular the education school, but close enough to make the point that they do not exist as places to stage or wage partisan political campaigns. That should be understood by all, and those who can’t accommodate themselves to it, including deans, other administrators, faculty, students, etc. should go elsewhere. Whatever their political sympathies, they should not infringe on the rights of those who don’t share their thinking about the I-P conflict or other political issues. They might not be open to changing their own thinking, but perhaps they might gain from hearing the views of others articulated.

  13. Preeva Tramiel says:

    This is heartbreaking. I’m very sorry to hear this attitude in what used to be center for Jewish learning when Arnie Eisen and Steve Zipperstein taught there, with a Yiddish class on campus (1990s)

  14. Elliot Fladen says:

    Alum of Stanford law school here. Not surprised by the racism you described.

  15. Tina Shulman says:

    While you have clearly had an appalling experience at Stanford, “trauma-based pedagogy” is certainly NOT the answer, and reflects the distorted oppressor/oppressed binary and ideological idiocy that are part and parcel of the critical race theory that you seem to have absorbed UNcritically. You would do far better to inculcate yourself with a well-deserved sense of pride in your 4000-year culture and history — including that of the modern state of Israel. Shame and self-identification as a victim has never been a part of that history, no matter the external circumstance.

  16. Yacov Greenberg says:

    Name names

  17. Roy Warner says:

    Dear Ms. Feldstein: Thank you for taking the bold action that you did. I’m a 76 y/o retired NY & FL trial lawyer now living out West in AZ, born in Brooklyn in ’48 and raised in Fresh Meadows, Flushing, Queens. I was Bar Mitzvahed at the Fresh Meadows Jewish Center (Conservative), and remain one of those secular Jews who follows those rituals and ethical principles that are prescribed in the Torah and interpreted in the Talmud. But it wasn’t until I was in the Marine Corps (’69-’71) that I learned that I was a “Jew”; i.e., the “Other,” and not just Jewish as stamped on my “tags.” First, it made me stronger because my “Otherness” is welcomed in Eretz Israel. Second, as opposed to what Stanford is doing, the Commandant of the Marine Corps issued an Order that all Marines who were Jewish could attend Yom Kippur services on or off base. The fact is that the US, with all of its discrimination and Jew-hatred at the time, was still a sanctuary for Russian and Eastern European Jews who were being slaughtered in the streets during the Pogroms. Indeed, my grandparents those of my wife were Russian Jews who came to NY from the Pale (what is now Belarus and “the” Ukraine) to escape the 1905 pogroms and its aftermath; my Hebrew name is Yeshiyahu (Isaiah), which is from my great-grandfather who was beaten deaf in a pogrom. Always remember that the 16 million or so Jews in the world, from Orthodox to secular/Conservative as I am, will always be the “Other,” except in Eretz Israel. Lastly, wherever you gain your Phd will not determine what you accomplish in your professional career because Harvard, Stanford, etc. merely open doors; nobody asks a Harvard grad if he or she was first or last in the graduating class.

  18. Stan V Smith says:

    My heart hurts for you and I admire your courage!

  19. Nir Vogel says:

    As an Israeli living all my life in Israel, serving at a military combat unit for 3 years, and many years on – in military reserve service, I find it appalling that Stanford Dean thinks that Zionists are the in-group upon which white supremacy depends.
    HOWEVER, since it seems that Zahava Feldstein is a religious Jew, I have to ask her: do you believe that the Jews are the chosen people, as is clearly written in the bible? Do you believe in Jewish supremacy? Do you believe that “Am Israel’ is ” Or la-Goim? ” light to the gentiles?
    Also, since Zahava Feldstein is suffering so much from anti-Semitism in Stanford – why does she live in the U.S? Why no in Israel? How about you do Alia with all your family? serve in the IDF? Go to the bomb shelter whenever the sirens blow? Maybe life in the U.S is not that bad?

  20. Rob says:

    The situation is similar in Swedish universities

  21. Amos says:

    I feel sympathetic but then towards the end you espouse the same neo-Marxist-CRT ideology that animates your former colleagues. It sounds as if you’d be content if only Jews would be allowed into the race-victimhood hierarchy, and then all POCs, LGBTs, and re-admitted Jews could snarl together against whites. No?

  22. Elon says:

    I am an Israeli at a sabbatical at Stanford school of education. I am hosted here by GSE, proudly show my yellow ribbon for the hostages, and present myself as an Isreali. I never encountered any antisemittic or even anti Israeli remarks. On October 7th 2024, one faculty member asked me how I feel one this day, mentioning the resemblence to Sep. 11th. My experience is totally different.

  23. Professor Philip Carl Salzman says:

    Antisemitism and anti-Zionism is just one of the official racisms that are prominent in American and Canadian universities. Bigotry and discrimination toward white, males, and Christians, as well as Jews, are a result of the woke ideology that universities have adopted to replace the Enlightenment search for truth. Almost all of our educational institutions should be defunded, delegitimized, and thoroughly reformed. Many personnel must be fired. Civil rights laws should be applied rigorously, and violators among administrators and professors indicted and prosecuted.

  24. Dave street says:

    Have you contacted the new Stanford President? He’s Jewish and reasonable.

    Have you spoken with a law firm?

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