Published by JNS on 2/2/2026 Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman and CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and a former assistant U.S. secretary of education for civil rights, is cited four times in Wikipedia’s entry on “weaponization of antisemitism” and five times in notes at the bottom of the page. “While warning in 2010 against denying or minimizing antisemitism, attorney and academic Kenneth L. Marcus also cautioned against overuse of the ‘antisemitism card,’ paralleling concerns raised by Richard Thompson Ford with the broader misuse of ‘the race card,’” states the page on one of the internet’s most visited websites. Marcus told JNS that Wikipedia reveals its bias by having a page on “weaponizing” Jew-hatred at all, and that the references to his thinking are taken out of context. “The so-called ‘weaponization’ is really more of a smear against Jewish advocates and should be recognized in that way,” he said. “They may think that by citing my work, they are providing some degree of balance, but the opposite is the case,” Marcus told JNS. “I have previously cautioned against either minimizing or exaggerating antisemitism, just as I have made the same caution about other forms of bias.” The Wikipedia entry cites his work “somewhat out of context, as if it were support for the inappropriate charge of weaponization,” Marcus said. The former education official has tried to refute the notion of weaponized charges of Jew-hatred. “Advocates for the Jewish community, such as myself, are very aware of the dangers of exaggeration and have been clear about the need for objective assessments,” he said. “This should be seen as an indication that weaponization charges are, at best, exaggerated or distorted and, at worst, fabricated.” The Wikipedia article states that some have compared charging Israel’s critics with Jew-hatred to “Soviet censorship, McCarthyism and rhetorical strategies against the South African anti-apartheid movement.” One of the citations appended to that sentence is a 2024 article by the Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz. The Brandeis Center filed a lawsuit against Harvard in May 2024, alleging that the school found Ganz responsible for a hostile environment against three Israeli students but didn’t address the situation. “Ganz is hardly an appropriate authority on the subject matter in light of his own positions and in light of the fact that he has been found to have discriminated against Israeli students,” Marcus told JNS. “This is just another example of Wikipedians, who profess to provide an objective assessment, in fact relying to an excessive extent on questionable figures.” ‘Taken over’ Activists are pushing particular narratives on Wikipedia, where there is an indication that some foreign countries are paying for slanted edits to pages, according to Marcus. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is probing whether there are “systematic efforts” to promote Jew-hatred and anti-Israel material on the site. “Wars develop within Wikipedia communities that are every bit as intense as the wars going on in the Middle East, so reasonable people are often scared away,” Marcus told JNS. “The result is that pages are taken over by extremist, anti-Zionist advocates.” The encyclopedia’s entry on the movement to boycott Israel, which Marcus sees as an “antisemitic hate movement,” states that BDS is “a nonviolent, Palestinian-led movement” pushing for the Jewish state to obey international law. If it were more thorough, Wikipedia would focus more on the ways that the movement to boycott Israel emerged from the Arab League’s boycott of the Jewish state, which “relates to the prior Nazi boycott, as well as earlier anti-Jewish boycotts in prior years,” Marcus told JNS. The entry depicts “the BDS movement, inaccurately, as a human rights campaign, as opposed to a rebranded antisemitic boycott,” he said. “It’s not so much that they don’t mention the Arab League boycott and other boycotts of Israel, but they certainly downplay those in favor of a different narrative that the Wikipedians advance.” The entry “takes at face value the self-serving descriptions of members of that movement rather than viewing the BDS movement in a more objective light,” he said. The page cites a “relatively small number of mainstream, reasonable commentators,” who are “overshadowed” by a “very substantial number” of “highly biased, anti-Zionist figures and platforms,” according to Marcus. “A very large number of major figures, including public officials, have pointed out the antisemitic character of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement,” he told JNS. “At a minimum, this entry should have a discussion of the major figures who have explained why BDS is antisemitic.” PR for anti-Zionists The opening lines of Wikipedia’s entry for Students for Justice in Palestine “couldn’t have been written much more favorably if it had been developed by a public relations firm working on SJP’s behalf,” according to Marcus. The group is a “pro-Palestinian college student activism organization” that has “organized events about Israel’s human-rights violations,” per the entry, which quotes The New York Times calling it “the leading pro-Palestinian voice on campus.” The page mentions charges, including by the Brandeis Center, that the student group is antisemitic, but “those accusations are relatively minimal as compared to the apparently favorable discussion of this highly controversial organization,” Marcus said. JNS also asked Marcus about Wikipedia’s entries for anti-Israel protests at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Columbia University in 2024. The Brandeis Center has active lawsuits related to both. Although the center’s suit against activists, who allegedly set up the encampment at UCLA, has generated media coverage, Marcus said, “facts disclosed in that lawsuit are largely unreported in this article,” in the UCLA entry on the site. “At best it’s lazy, but the fact that the omission is one-sided raises a significant question,” he told JNS. The entry on Columbia portrays the private school as “the subject of a peaceful student protest activity as opposed to a series of hateful, violent activities that were the product of outside organizations, outside agitators, and yes, some students as well,” Marcus told JNS. “The impression is given that this was largely a peaceful protest that provoked a forceful response from the Trump administration, but without giving a real understanding of the antisemitism that required a response,” he said. “What’s scary about these articles is not just that people, including students, rely so much on Wikipedia,” but that artificial intelligence models “rely so heavily on it,” according to Marcus. The site can “launder accusations” from anti-Israel sources and “turn them into encyclopedia entries,” which “become the basis for AI-generated materials that become the basis for all sorts of education indoctrination and decision-making,” which “should be frightening to people,” he said.