University of Cape Town antisemitic, really? Photo: File
According to David Saks, my university is awash with antisemitism. That’s odd, because I am Jewish and have been at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for more than 30 years and antisemitism hasn’t been my experience, either directed towards me or directed at others.
I should know because, for a number of years, I served as the transformation portfolio holder in the health sciences faculty where we dealt with many “isms” — racism, sexism and hostility to people of diverse sexual orientation. But antisemitism? No, the antisemitism I experienced was outside the university.
It is always possible that instances at the university go unreported but the only evidence Saks produces that there is an upsurge of antisemitism at UCT is the “dossier” of complaints the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) has “compiled”. What do we make of this?
First, Saks would have us believe that, “particularly since October 7”, there have been endless complaints about Jewish students being physically assaulted, crassly insulted and threatened, all of which were brought to the notice of the university. The reference for these claims is an article that appeared in the South African Jewish Report on 10 October 10 2023, three days after the Hamas attack.
Curiously, the article does not describe any physical attacks or threats, only a claim that Jewish students expressing support of Israel faced “a real risk of people getting hurt”. One wonders about the alacrity of the SAJBD willingness to accept this “risk of getting hurt” as evidence of antisemitism when the children of Gaza face a daily reality of actual harm — being blown to pieces by Israeli bombs, burnt alive by incendiaries or left to die slow deaths under rubble or in hospitals with no equipment or drugs to treat them in a genocide the SAJBD continues to deny.
So, we have to rely on the SAJBD records to accept that there are many cases of antisemitism at UCT. How does the SAJBD define antisemitism? Not in the same way that the Jerusalem Statement on antisemitism describes it as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)”. Nor even in the manner defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”. No, in their own words, the SAJBD explained how they define antisemitism in an article in the Mail & Guardian in June 2024 as “… we get to define what antisemitism is and we understand its many manifestations …”.
Put simply, if the SAJBD, which claims to represent the Jewish community, says an incident is antisemitic, then it is so. Readers will understand that puts a question mark over the “upsurge” of antisemitic incidents at UCT.
Given that pro-Zionist students have characterised sentiment against Israel’s actions in Gaza as “an absolute battle on campus”, and students have been openly exhorted “to fight this war on the spiritual front”, it is not surprising that complaints have been lodged with the SAJBD. But are they evidence of antisemitism? We only have the word of the SAJBD and David Saks on that. And they are always right because “we get to define what antisemitism is”.
Of course, the SAJBD is also selective about which Jews get to have a voice. When it claims to have received complaints about prejudice towards Jewish students at UCT, it is referring to claims made only by Zionist Jewish students. The SAJBD does not talk about prejudice against Jews who speak out against Israel.
For example, when a Jewish author and prominent anti-Zionist held a peaceful protest table outside the Jewish Literary Festival, from which she had been excluded, she was the target of abuse and harassment for her views but no defence of her Jewishness came from the SAJBD. It seems, for the SAJBD, there are good Jews, who will support Israel, and who can lodge complaints with the SAJBD, and then there are bad Jews, who can be harassed, doxed, fraudulently reported to the police, smeared when they write critical pieces about Zionism and have the police called on them when holding peaceful demonstrations — with the tacit support of the SAJBD.
To the argument that antisemitism is instrumentalised to suppress criticism of Israel, for which there is extensive evidence, Saks has only one refutation — that criticising a Zionist Jew for alleging antisemitism without basis is itself an act of antisemitism, because how can a Jew be wrong about antisemitism or fabricate an allegation? But, strangely, a Jewish person can be wrong and I know that because I have experienced it myself.
During a fiercely contested community campaign against a large urban development in Cape Town, a coalition of civic and first nation groups were accused of antisemitism after we secured an interim interdict against the developer, who happened to be Jewish. The allegations made against myself and our lawyers were entirely spurious.
Where did the complainant go with the “allegations”? To the SAJBD. Amid his “evidence” was an image of the invitation to a talk about the development I had previously given at the Claremont Main Road mosque in Cape Town, which uses a Palestinian flag in its layout. Another piece of “evidence” was a Daffy Duck cartoon meme used in the campaign’s social media which showed Daffy diving into pots of money. No mention of Jews or Jewishness.
But such evidence was put to the SAJBD to support a fabricated claim implicating me in a purportedly antisemitic incident. If the SAJBD has the discretion to decide what is antisemitism, it is very possible for a Jewish student to feel discomforted, report that to the SAJBD and that instance to be branded as yet another case of antisemitism.
Saks also relies on reports in the United States and United Kingdom to support his claims of rising antisemitism on campuses globally. As has been well-documented, the furore on US university campuses about antisemitism has been instrumentalised by supporters of President Donald Trump to attack US higher education.
Furthermore, the reports of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), on which Saks relies, have been used to justify calls by congressional Republicans to shut down Gaza-solidarity encampments on campuses.
But an analysis by Jewish Currents showed that the ADL’s methodology is significantly flawed. It includes incidents which are clearly not antisemitism, and which lack enough detail to categorise them as such, and their approach to analysis is structured to ignore antisemitism from white supremacist sources in the US, of which there are many. As a result, the ADL audit is “unable to speak meaningfully to the prevalence or impact of antisemitism in the US”.
Indeed, the award-winning 2009 documentary on the ADL Defamation is worth watching to see how incidents which do not rise to any recognised definitional standards are added to the “antisemitism” boat. A 2024 report in The Guardian described internal ADL staff concern that “the organisation’s conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is damaging its efforts to counter hate”.
For the UK, Saks cites a Goldsmith College report as evidence of the deteriorating situation for antisemitism. But the report is simply a set of testimonies, not a representative survey, nor did it seek to document experiences of Jewish students and faculty who did not experience antisemitism. And the report clearly distinguishes between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, affirming freedom of speech and concluding that a working complaints process that listens to victims of antisemitism is urgently needed. It is far from evidence that antisemitism is on the rise.
Notably, Jewish academics at Goldsmith have publicly expressed concern at the failure of the college’s senior management team to engage with Jewish colleagues in the process and pointed out that failings of Goldsmith’s management pertain, not just to addressing antisemitism, but racism more generally.
As for the Harvard investigation into antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, it made no attempt to define antisemitism or verify testimonies but simply accepted what was put to the commission. At its broadest, it confirmed that Jewish students reported backlash, retaliation, bullying and social isolation. But, across all categories, Muslim students experienced worse levels of discomfort and lack of safety than Jewish students. Even among Jewish students, it was also the case that anti-Zionist Jewish students experienced bullying and shunning for their activism.
More bizarrely, the Harvard report cited an instance in which Maria Ressa, Nobel prize-winning journalist, altered her 2024 Commencement Speech to respond to criticisms from right-wing commentators that she was antisemitic, by pushing back against those with “money and power”. She deviated from her planned script, “deleted … conciliatory language from her speech” and emphasised “confronting political opposition”. Why this behaviour should find its way into a university investigation into antisemitism can only be explained by the attacks that followed her speech from right-wing politicians and the chorus of antisemitism accusations.
It seems, not only can you be antisemitic by what you say, but you can also be antisemitic by what you don’t say. All of which means almost anything can be interpreted to be antisemitic when there are no rules.
As I have previously argued, and as other Jewish academics have pointed out, discomfort about anti-Zionist activism on campus does not, in itself, amount to antisemitism unless statements target Jewish people as Jews.
If white people in South Africa were to have called any examination of white privilege as being racism against whites, we would never have been able to start having hard conversations about undoing racism. And if Jewish Zionist students feel uncomfortable about being challenged over Zionist beliefs they have long held, that is not because they are Jewish no matter how much they claim Zionism and Jewishness are inseparable.
For example, the UCT student cited by Saks, who asked a neutral question on a course WhatsApp group and who was mocked by classmates, claims to have been mocked for being Jewish, but not because she had been outspoken about defending Israel’s action in Gaza. Saks and the SAJBD immediately assumed her Jewishness was the reason.
An alternative explanation is anger at what the student said, not at who they are. Bear in mind that, in a context where the Israeli state has been found to be plausibly committing genocide, has been instructed to cease killing civilians and simply continues slaughter on a scale many UN and human rights observers find obscene, it is to be expected that defending such a state will attract criticism, sometimes harsh criticism. But this is not antisemitism, no matter how offended the party might feel. Perhaps Saks needs reminding that the South African Constitutional Court found that criticism of Zionism as a form of apartheid is not antisemitism.
This means that the SAJBD is being selective. It is not claims by Jews about prejudice but claims by Zionist Jews about what they believe to be prejudice. This is not to say there are no cases of clear antisemitic speech. But the SAJBD does not distinguish between the two or talk about prejudice against Jews who speak out against Israel. In fact, the SAJBD has actively perpetrated othering of Jews unwilling to support Israel’s genocide.
Saks also describes Kevin Bloom’s expose of the “concerted effort by the pro-Israel lobby to shut down criticism of the Jewish state” at UCT as a broadside against “mainstream Jewish leadership”, by which one presumes that he refers to the SAJBD for which he is a consultant and former associate director.
But the SAJBD is fast losing credibility, not just in the anti-Zionist Jewish community, but also among those Jews who are Zionist but want to see a peaceful resolution to the current morass and who do not support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal war of extermination. The same is happening in the US, where “every component” of the ”consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down”.
Why is this important? The need to portray Jewish defenders of Israel’s genocide as victims in this global descent into brutality is a strategy desperately required by the Israeli state and Saks is stepping up to the plate to serve the Netanyahu government, not the safety of Jews in South Africa. If the latter were his priority, he might think carefully about what constitutes antisemitism rather than smearing Bloom in innuendo as “dangerously close” to antisemitism.
This is because, in the end, if the SAJBD succeeds in calling anything antisemitic that meets its political objectives, then nothing will be antisemitic because accusations will have lost their meaning. The SAJBD would do more to secure Jews’ safety and security in South Africa if it started condemning the pogroms being enacted on Palestinians in the West Bank by Jewish extremist settlers and to say no form of racial hatred is acceptable, even when that hatred is enacted by people who are Jewish.
But readers need to realise that, at the end of the day, there is a war at UCT and elsewhere, openly articulated by Zionists. That war has spread into the courts and the attempts to undermine Bloom’s article, which starts to lift the lid on this war and who are the aggressors and who are the victims. It is part of suppressing a growing discomfort with Zionist denial of what the Israeli state is doing in the name of Jews. There are many Jews who will have nothing to do with such hypocrisy and David Saks does not speak for us.
Professor Leslie London is in the Division of Public Health Medicine, School of Public Health, University of Cape Town.