For the second year in a row, the Anti-Defamation League’s 2026 annual survey of campus antisemitism awarded Oberlin College a grade of “B.” On paper, that suggests a relatively healthy environment for Jewish students. Yet the rating also reveals the limitations of how campus antisemitism is often measured. The ADL relies heavily on the reported “vibrancy” of Jewish life—rated “excellent” at Oberlin—as evidence of a positive campus climate.
But visibility alone doesn’t necessarily indicate intellectual openness or ideological pluralism. At Oberlin, the deeper problem is not the absence of Jewish life, but the narrowing of acceptable discourse surrounding Israel and Zionism.
The existence of Jewish organizations on campus can obscure this reality. Oberlin’s Zionist student organization, Obies for Israel, formed after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has remained small and relatively marginal. This contrasts sharply with broader campus activism. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, 165 Jewish students signed a public letter in the student newspaper denouncing Israel as a genocidal apartheid state.
The issue at Oberlin is therefore less about whether Jewish students are permitted to practice Judaism than whether openly Zionist perspectives can comfortably exist within the campus public sphere. Time and again, Israel appears either excluded from representations of Jewish identity or framed primarily through a critical lens.
I recall a 2019 college video on Jewish student life in which five Jewish students discussed identity without any reference to Israel. That omission reflected a broader campus pattern. Jewishness is often treated as acceptable when detached from Zionism, while Zionist identity becomes increasingly privatized, confined largely to communal spaces such as Hillel and Chabad on Campus.
This dynamic intensified after Oct. 7. Even Jewish communal spaces reflected the broader atmosphere.
At a 2024 Yom Hashoah event organized by Oberlin’s Chabad rabbi, neither Israel nor the attacks were mentioned. In a later Chabad publication, the rabbi’s wife, who is Israeli, described a campus climate in which many Zionist students feared social or academic repercussions for expressing their views openly. The result was a bifurcated reality in which Jewish religious and cultural life remained visible, while openly Zionist identity increasingly retreated from the campus public sphere.
Administrative policy also contributed to this environment. Since 2018, under university president Carmen Twillie Ambar, the college has reportedly discouraged the reporting or public disclosure of antisemitic incidents out of concern that doing so could “amplify” them. After Oct. 7, repeated incidents of anti-Israel graffiti—and its routine removal by college security, which I personally witnessed—further obscured the extent of the issue.
In the spring of 2024, Ambar defended students’ right to erect the “People’s College for the Liberation of Palestine” encampment on free-speech grounds while acknowledging that protesters “had not always been perfect in adhering to our community values.”
Concerns about anti-Israel bias have extended beyond student activism into the classroom itself. I was part of a group of Jewish alumni and Iranian human-rights activists, alongside journalist Benny Weinthal, who helped draw attention to the controversial record of Oberlin professor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati.
A former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mahallati faced criticism for allegedly deflecting international scrutiny during the Islamic Republic’s 1988 prison massacres—charges he denied. Critics also objected to course materials reportedly describing Hamas as “freedom fighters” and questioning Israel’s legitimacy.
In 2023, after pressure from Jewish alumni, including Melissa Landa, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into antisemitism allegations at Oberlin. Yet the college initially accepted Mahallati’s explanations regarding both his anti-Zionism and his role during the prison massacres. He was eventually dismissed not over those controversies, but because of a resurfaced sex-for-grades scandal dating to the 1990s.
Anti-Israel bias is also visible in campus programming. Long before Oct. 7, anti-Israel speakers such as Rutgers University professor Noura Erekat, cartoonist Eli Valley, and political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein appeared at Oberlin without controversy. By contrast, efforts to bring figures such as Elisha Wiesel, the son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, or Israeli writer, speaker and social-media influencer Hen Mazzig to campus received no institutional support.
Academic programming has reflected the same asymmetry. At a recent teach-in on the Iran conflict organized by a student branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, faculty from the Middle East and Jewish Studies Programs framed Israel primarily through the language of “American imperialism” and “Netanyahu policies,” while devoting comparatively little attention to Iran’s internal repression, regional terror networks or Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities.
Taken together, these patterns reveal a campus climate in which criticism of Israel is normalized while openly Zionist perspectives become socially and intellectually constrained. Jewish students may still find vibrant communal or cultural life at Oberlin, but that should not be confused with genuine ideological pluralism.
This distinction matters because universities increasingly rely on metrics that fail to capture how antisemitism often operates in contemporary academic culture. Administrators point to the presence of Hillel, Chabad or Jewish cultural programming as evidence of a healthy campus climate, even while Israel is persistently delegitimized in classrooms and public discourse and Zionist students fear social ostracism for expressing their views openly.
Courses on antisemitism and the Holocaust that marginalize or omit Israel risk presenting an incomplete picture of modern Jewish identity. Nor can departments such as Jewish Studies serve as a corrective when courses there either frame Israel primarily through a critical lens or avoid the subject altogether.
Oberlin’s administration had opportunities to address these tensions more constructively before Oct. 7. In 2022, my husband, an Oberlin sociology professor, attempted to bring the Academic Engagement Network to campus through a climate initiative supported by the organization. The proposal included confidential surveys on campus discourse and expanded programming aimed at fostering greater intellectual diversity on Israel and antisemitism. The effort received no institutional support.
As Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has argued, contemporary antisemitism often takes forms that obscure their underlying dynamics. At Oberlin, anti-Zionism at times functions as precisely such a socially acceptable guise.
