There are “growing concerns” that some professor and graduate student unions are failing to properly address Jew-hatred and adequately represent their Jewish members, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League and Academic Engagement Network.
Raeefa Shams, communications and programming director at AEN, told JNS that “this is the first time that we are really honing in on the faculty and graduate unions aspect of what you would call antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in the broader academy.”
“We’re collating together a lot of different examples of how, especially in recent years, these faculty and graduate student unions have become increasingly politicized and have developed really one-sided anti-Israel policies that have left many of their Jewish and Zionist members marginalized and alienated,” she said.
Released Wednesday, the report states that “some higher education unions have become flashpoints for conflicts involving antisemitism, Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity,” and the unions have had a “marked increase in anti-Israel activity.”
Among the examples listed in the report is the American Association of University Professors endorsing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the anti-Israel former Detroit public health director, for the Senate seat in Michigan on July 30, the association’s first-ever national political endorsement.
“That’s just one example of a broader pattern of these unions—the AAUP leading amongst them, one could say—of the unions really abandoning their traditional mandate of employee protections and salary negotiations, maintaining and enforcing academic standards to really pursue a very politicized mandate instead,” Shams told JNS.
The report also cites the association’s reversal of its opposition to academic boycotts in 2024 and a webinar it held in 2025 about “scholasticide in Palestine.”
The association’s boycott reversal is “a way of legitimizing the BDS movement, efforts to boycott and isolate Israeli academic institutions and individual academics,” Shams told JNS.
Professor and graduate student unions have engaged in campaigns to boycott Israel and embedded “anti-Israel advocacy into official union communications,” according to the report.
‘Code for acts of terror’
Among the examples it discusses are the California Faculty Association, which operates at the California State University system’s 23 campuses, passed a resolution last year calling for the system to sever all ties with Israeli schools, and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association at the University of California, Santa Cruz, co-authored an academic senate resolution denouncing the “genocide that has occurred in Palestine” in 2024.
Shams thinks that the most egregious instances are those that “explicitly, or at the very least implicitly, endorse violence and resistance.”
“Obviously that’s a code for acts of terror against Israelis, and maybe even Jewish institutions outside that may be perceived as being supportive of Israel,” she told JNS. “Especially considering the current context in which we’re living, certainly a matter of concern.”
The report discusses the Cornell Graduate Students United, a student union, which passed a referendum in November supporting what it said is Palestinians’ “unequivocal human right to resist oppression by any means necessary.”
Professor and graduate student unions have also been partnering with anti-Israel student groups on campus, per the report.
The Student Workers of Columbia graduate student union is part of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, which includes the Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters on campus, the report states.
The university does not recognize the coalition as a campus group, but the union’s participation in the coalition has allowed its protests to be classified as union activity, according to the report.
There are some instances of Zionist union members being subjected to hostile environments in their unions, such as a group chat in the Students Workers of Columbia union deriding the recommendation of Columbia’s Jew-hatred task force that the university hire more Middle East scholars who aren’t anti-Zionist, per the report.
Members of the chat stated that the recommendation was “affirmative action for Zionist academics” and equated Zionism with racism.
A union board member warned those in the chat to exercise caution over their posts, although the board member didn’t decry statements like “death to Israel,” “death to America” and that Zionism is “Jewish supremacy,” the report states.
The report highlights anonymous testimonies from professors, who said that they’ve dealt with antisemitism and anti-Israel advocacy in their respective unions.
One professor said that the union “drafted a letter to the college president objecting to the presence on campus of a former IDF soldier.” Another resigned from a union after the climate became “toxic for Jewish members” to the point that the professor was evicted from a leadership position after being outed as a “Zionist.”
Another professor said that a union has a delegate listserv, where members promote “the toxification of anything having to do with Israel or Jews,” and that a delegate notified the listserv about a “Drop the ADL from Schools” webinar and a film detailing the “nefarious, racist history of the ADL.”
Shams told JNS that the professors quoted in the report are part of AEN and ADL networks and have been “deeply engaged in their respective faculty unions.”
“It goes to show the level of hostility and marginalization that the Jewish and Zionist faculty have been feeling—this sense that they have to disavow their connection to Israel, their connection to Zionism, being attacked for aspects of their Jewish identity that they find to be very central,” she said.
“All of it is shocking, especially when you consider the broader context, that these are supposed to be organizations representing the interests of employees,” Shams told JNS.
The ADL and AEN hope that union leaders and senior members read the report and “understand that there is great reputational damage being done to unions as a result of this extreme politicization,” according to Shams.
To represent employee interests, including supporting workplace and salary negotiations, and uphold academic standards the way the AAUP is supposed to, “they need to cease this extreme politicization, these one-sided resolutions, the partnering with extreme anti-Israel organizations,” she told JNS.
“Most importantly, they should listen to their Jewish and Zionist members,” she said. “They need to take those voices into account when making their policies.”
