Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, told InsideHigherEd that the Trump administration has weaponized antisemitism while discussing the organization’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Antisemitism has been used as a weapon, in many ways, by the Trump administration to bring universities to heel,” Wolfson said in the interview published on Tuesday. “Many times stripping out, or threatening to strip out, hundreds of millions of research dollars that often affect Jewish faculty members.”
Wolfson, who is on leave from his position as an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University until 2027, also stated that the association, of which he was elected president in June 2024, believes “strongly that no weapons should be sent to Israel, at all. Not defensive or offensive, nothing.”
“We need to stand up for academic freedom, for freedom of speech, for freedom of assembly for our students so they can protest the war—the genocide, excuse me—that’s taking place in Gaza,” he said.
The AAUP president referred to the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, which states that boycotts against Israel are not inherently antisemitic, as “a much more apt way of defining antisemitism.”
The Jerusalem Declaration and its supporters argue that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism “blurs the difference between antisemitic speech and legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism,” according to the JDA’s website.
Wolfson told InsideHigherEd that if “Israel is purposefully destroying the educational infrastructure of Palestine and of Gaza,” then AAUP “will take a stand and call for an end to the scholasticide.”
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the AMCHA Initiative, told JNS that, since Wolfson became AAUP president, the association “has abandoned its role in protecting academic freedom and instead embraced the anti-Israel agenda” of boycotting the Jewish state.
“By reversing its own principled stance against academic boycotts last year, the AAUP has normalized extremist ideologies and left Jewish students and faculty more vulnerable to antisemitism on college campuses,” she said.
