By Elizabeth Redden
Inside Higher Ed

It’s been almost four years since members of the American Studies Association voted by a nearly two-thirds majority to adopt a resolution backing a boycott of Israeli universities, but a lawsuit opposing the resolution filed by four of the association’s current and former members rages on.

In March, a federal judge dismissed the claims of the four members that the ASA operated outside the scope of its bylaws in endorsing a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, but allowed the plaintiffs’ claims of corporate waste, breach of contract and violation of the D.C. Nonprofit Corporation Act to proceed. In a mixed ruling, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that it was reasonably within the scope of the ASA’s charter as an academic organization to support a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, but found that the plaintiffs had presented a “plausible case for breach of contract” in regard to their allegations that the ASA had failed to follow its own rules in conducting a vote on the resolution in December 2013.

Now the plaintiffs are bringing new allegations.

Citing emails and other documents unearthed during discovery, the plaintiffs last month submitted a motion asking the court’s permission to file an amended complaint. The 87-page proposed amended complaint brings new charges that certain of the association’s elected leaders strategically kept their pro-boycott agendas secret when they stood for office, that they withheld “pertinent” information about the boycott resolution from voting members “unless it favored the resolution” and that they took what the court filing describes as the “unprecedented” action of freezing membership rolls prior to the announcement of the vote “with the specific intent to prevent members opposed to the resolution from casting votes.”

The proposed amended complaint says that one of the plaintiffs, Michael L. Barton, a professor emeritus of American studies at Pennsylvania State University and a member of ASA for approximately 44 years, had let his membership lapse in 2012 and was not allowed to vote on the boycott resolution when he attempted to reactivate his membership because of this “scheme to freeze the membership rolls.”
The ASA is seeking to have the motion to amend the complaint denied. In a Nov. 27 court filing, the ASA describes the plaintiffs’ motion as “an improper effort to revisit plaintiffs’ prior losses and to resurrect derivative claims that have been dismissed” and said if accepted it would “cause undue delay” and “result in greatly expanded expenses to the defendants.” In regard to the specific allegations surrounding the freezing of membership rolls, the ASA legal response says, “There is nothing in the bylaws or statutes that” would “specifically prohibit” this.

“The plaintiffs’ proposed second amended complaint is a continuation of their public relations campaign through litigation, whose focus is not truly the well-being of the ASA, but punishment of persons and entities who dare take contrary positions regarding boycotts of Israeli academic institions [sic],” the ASA legal filing states.

A response filed by the plaintiffs last week contests the ASA’s claims that the proposed amended complaint “merely resurrects derivative claims that were previously dismissed” and argues that it instead “presents entirely new claims that arise from facts uncovered in documents produced by defendants” during discovery. Further, it takes issue with what it describes as the ASA brief’s “entirely unfounded and inflammatory claims of harassment and dilatory [delaying] tactics.”

The New Claims

The lawsuit was originally filed in April 2015 against the ASA and six of its individual leaders at the time the boycott resolution was voted on, including Curtis Marez, then the president, and Lisa Duggan, then the president-elect, and several members of its elected National Council, whose members unanimously endorsed the 2013 boycott resolution before making the decision to turn it over to the full membership for a vote.
The proposed amended complaint seeks to add four additional defendants, including John Stephens, the executive director of the association. Four of the named defendants, or proposed defendants, are identified in court documents as members of the leadership of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a group, largely comprised of scholars, that supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

One person the plaintiffs are seeking to add to the complaint is Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University who, according to court documents, served on the ASA’s nominating committee from 2010 until June 2013, six months prior to the boycott vote, and who is also a member of USACBI’s advisory board. The complaint alleges that in her tenure on the nominating committee, Puar had an agenda of “packing the American Studies Association leadership with USACBI leadership, endorsers and other BDS advocates.”

The court filing quotes from several emails in an effort to support this, including one from Sunaina Maira, another defendant in the case: “Jasbir is nominating me and Alex Lubin for the council and she suggests populating it with as many supporters as possible.” It also quotes an email from the aforementioned Lubin: “In my conversations with Jasbir it’s clear that the intent of her nominations was to bring more people who do work in, and are politically committed to … the question of Palestine … we were nominated in order to build momentum for BDS even though the question of BDS in American Studies Association may or may not emerge while we’re on the council.”

The proposed amended complaint alleges that Puar and certain other of the defendants or proposed defendants did not disclose their pro-boycott positions in their candidate statements in standing for elected office within the association. And it provides evidence from emails that suggests that at least in some cases nondisclosure may have been a deliberate choice. The proposed amended complaint cites the following emails from Lubin (who is not a party or proposed party to the lawsuit), as well as from Maira, one of the original defendants in the case, about whether to position themselves as BDS supporters in running for National Council. Maira is a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Davis, and a member of USACBI’s leadership.

Lubin: “I would welcome an expanded discussion of whether those of us nominated for the council should mention in our nomination statement our support for BDS … I wonder if it is strategic to be self-identified as a BDS candidate, or whether we should merely mention our support for human rights, academic freedom for everyone and international law.”

Maira: “I’ve been thinking this over and like Alex, I’m a bit unsure — personally, I feel it might be more strategic not to present ourselves as a pro-boycott slate. We need to get on the council and I think our larger goal is support for the resolution, not to test support at this early stage from ‘outside’ the NC.”

Another party to the email exchange offered an alternative view. Nikhil Pal Singh, who was then a member of the National Council, responded, according to the court filing:

“My real question: What do we hope to gain from election of pro-BDS members to the American Studies Association national council if we have not made any of the stakes of their election clear to the membership? … I think that not revealing something this important and intentional and then hoping later to use the American Studies Association national council as a vehicle to advance our cause will not work and may well backfire, because it will lack legitimacy.”

According to the court documents, of the three candidates to the National Council who were party to this exchange, one, Lubin, mentioned support for “a pending resolution on the academic and cultural boycott of Israel” in his candidate statement. He lost. The other two, Maira and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, who both won, did not mention support for a possible ASA boycott resolution against Israel in their candidate statements, though Kauanui’s candidate statement did reference her ties to the broader academic boycott campaign and USACBI in particular (the statement, available here, says she was “involved in a range of activist work for indigenous rights in the Pacific Islands, North America, as well as Occupied Palestine” and that she served “as an advisory board member of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.”) Maira’s candidate biography is more oblique but does mention that she then served as “co-chair of the Academic and Community Activism Caucus within ASA, which organized a resolution on the war in Iraq and discussions of boycott and divestment opposing the U.S.-backed occupation and violations of human rights and academic freedom in Palestine.”

“We do not believe that those brief references come close to meeting the fiduciary duties of disclosure,” said Jennie Gross, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and a staff attorney for the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. “Both Maira and Kauanui included statements discussing what they would do if elected; neither mentioned the boycott resolution, although we believe this was their primary intention in running, and the primary reason they were nominated to run.”

“This case is about the illegal, hostile takeover of a nonprofit, academic association by leaders of an anti-Israel group,” Gross said in a November press release. “Through a series of misrepresentations and breaches of duty, USACBI activists obtained positions of trust in the ASA, and then abused those positions in order to capture and exploit the assets of the ASA to advance the agenda of the BDS movement.” An op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal Dec. 3 and written by two law professors who have advised the plaintiffs’ lawyers similarly argues that anti-Israel activists “subvert[ed]” the ASA.

Others argue that the overwhelming results of the membership vote in favor of boycott of Israeli universities belie charges of takeovers and subversion. The sentiment at an open forum on the boycott resolution held at ASA’s 2013 conference — attended by Inside Higher Ed — was heavily in favor of the boycott.

USACBI described the charge of an “illegal, hostile takeover” as “on its face ludicrous. It seeks to rebrand normal political process, including the work of established caucuses within the ASA, as conspiracy, thus labeling democratic deliberation and advocacy a suspect and sanctionable activity,” the group said in a statement on its website.

“This lawsuit is a desperate attempt to bury the single most important fact: the ASA membership voted by an overwhelming democratic majority — 66 percent — after months of open debate, to support a boycott in support of Palestinian equality,” said Palestine Legal, a legal advocacy group that has in the past provided legal advice to ASA and is advising Puar, who is not at this point named as a defendant in the case.

ASA reported that 1,252 members voted in the election, the largest number of voters in the organization’s history. When asked how she reconciles the level of support for the resolution among the membership with the “hostile takeover” charge, Gross, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, reiterated that there are “claims and allegations relating to efforts to deny the ability to vote to ASA members and scholars who would likely vote against the resolution, while at the same time inflating the votes known to be in favor of the resolution, with new memberships of people who were neither previous members of the ASA nor American studies scholars.”

“I’m not saying the process was perfect, but if I had any concerns about transparency and legitimacy, they were satisfied by the National Council deciding to put the resolution to a membership vote,” said Nikhil Pal Singh, the National Council member who urged his colleagues to be forthright about their BDS ties in the above email exchange and who is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University.
Singh stands by what he said in that email exchange. “I do however understand why individuals would make the decision to represent themselves in the ways in which they chose to represent themselves,” he said. “And the reason is this: there’s a politics of smear around this kind of stuff, so I think the concern probably was, if I say this I’m going to be completely misrepresented.”

Singh said that anyone could have googled Maira and found that she was a member of USACBI’s leadership. “I think for pro-Palestine activists, there’s a countervailing argument that people feel, which is, why are we always having to genuflect to the Israeli exception in a sense? Why are we always needing to bend over backwards to prove ourselves? We are legitimate scholars who have been nominated to the National Council. Our politics are well-known; they’re a matter of public record. People can make the decision they’re going to make. The idea that there was some kind of concealment going on is just a fabrication of these lawsuits.”

More broadly, Singh, who supported the boycott resolution, said he sat on the National Council from 2010 until November 2013, when the council decided to call for a membership vote on the resolution (his term ended then, so he wasn’t privy to the further discussions about implementation of the vote). During his time on the council, he said, he saw increasing support for BDS within the membership.

“I was certainly not aware of any kind of nefarious plot to stack the National Council,” he said. “The way I saw things was that in the years leading up to 2013, there had been a series of efforts to move the ASA toward a pro-boycott position. I had been a member of the ASA since the 1990s, so I’d pretty much been to every annual meeting up to that point and each year there was more and more conversation about this … the membership was getting younger, more progressive, and the concerns of the organization were becoming much more sharply focused around questions of colonialism, racism, state violence.”

The various individuals named as defendants or proposed defendants in the case either declined interview requests or did not respond to messages seeking comment. “The plaintiffs in Bronner v. the ASA are clearly committed to trying this case in the media,” ASA President Kandice Chu said via email. “In contrast, the ASA retains its faith in the courts as the appropriate venue for litigation, and fully expects to prevail in that setting.” She said the association would not be making further comment.

John K. Wilson, co-editor of the American Association of University Professors’ “Academe” blog, strongly opposes academic boycotts but sees the ongoing lawsuit against the ASA as “a meritless lawsuit aimed at suppressing freedom of speech.”

“It is not legally problematic for candidates to make a choice not to reveal everything they believe or even what they plan to do in office,” Wilson said. “It would be morally objectionable if candidates plotted to conceal a major part of their plans for the office. Although there’s not much evidence of that in this case, even if morally objectionable behavior was revealed, that would only justify criticism, not a lawsuit. And this has nothing to do with the main claim of this lawsuit, that the ASA should be legally prohibited from endorsing a boycott of Israel.

“If you don’t like what an academic organization does, you are perfectly free to persuade the members of that group to vote with you and to choose new leaders,” Wilson said. “You are perfectly [free] to denounce the group and boycott it. But you should not be able to ask the government to ban private organizations from taking a political stand.”

Naomi Friedman

PJ Voice

Kenneth Marcus, founder, president and general counsel for the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, has dedicated most of his career to fighting for civil rights. Marcus was recently nominated by President Trump for the position of assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). Since then, Anti-Israel groups have been aggressively working to block Marcus’ confirmation.

In 2002, flyers showing a soup can with the words “Palestinian Children Meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license” peppered the campus of San Francisco State University (SFSU). A month later, during a Middle-East peace rally held by Hillel students, anti-Israel groups yelled, “Hitler should have finished the job,” and “Go back to Germany, where they knew how to deal with you.” In response, SFSU President Robert Corrigan stated, “It is not animus towards Jews, but there are strong anti-Zionist feelings on this campus.”

And in 2002, a university president could both make this claim and fail to resolve the problem — for two important reasons.

First, while the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education protected students against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, age, disability and even membership in youth organizations, the OCR did not extend those protections to Jews. In 2004, that changed. Marcus, who was serving as interim assistant secretary of education for civil rights — the very position for which he is currently being considered — directed the OCR to extend protection to Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and others.

Second, in 2002, there was no clear statement for defining and identifying modern-day anti-Semitism. Is a flyer accusing Jews of killing and eating Palestinian children simply an expression of anti-Israel sentiment, or is it also a modern form of blood libel, a reemergence of the anti-Semitic claim that Jews are consuming the blood of Christian babies?

In 2010, the U.S. State Department established a definition of anti-Semitism that includes demonizing Israel or Jews as a collectivity, denying Jewish people a right to self-determination and applying a double standard to Israel.

The SFSU flyers clearly meet the criteria of anti-Semitic speech according to this definition. However, educators and university leaders, as well as the general public, remained largely unaware of this definition.

Marcus worked to increase awareness. In 2011, he established the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, whose mission “is to advance the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and promote justice for all” through research on anti-Semitism, education and legal advocacy. The center has pursued landmark litigation and established chapters at 18 law schools throughout the country. In 2015, Marcus published The Definition of Anti-Semitism with Oxford University Press as part of an effort to foster discussion on this issue and promote awareness of the State Department definition.

If Marcus’ nomination for assistant secretary of education for civil rights is confirmed by the Senate, he will once again assume leadership of the OCR. After Marcus was nominated, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, an umbrella group that disperses educational material accusing Israel of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, immediately issued a call to its members, including the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), asking them to tell their senators to oppose the nomination. They falsely accused Marcus of being “a sworn opponent of Palestinian rights.”

In fact, Marcus has never opposed anybody’s rights. Quite the contrary. Under his direction, the OCR during the George W. Bush administration “started taking a stronger approach to enforcing civil-rights laws.” Marcus pressed for the rights of women as well as racial, ethnic and language minorities, and led a national initiative for equal access rights for disabled college students.

Furthermore, in his capacity as president of the Brandeis Center, Marcus has also spoken out against and testified about the harassment of Muslims, Sikhs and other religious minorities.

So why do groups like the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and the JVP really oppose Marcus’ nomination? Because they don’t want civil rights law extended to Jews and because they don’t want their false accusations, such as the most recent blood libel about Israel harvesting the organs of Palestinian children, labeled as anti-Semitic. While it is clearly possible to advocate for Palestinian rights without engaging in anti-Semitism, any rhetoric that paints one group as bad and another as good is a powerful tool, and these groups want to make use of this tool with impunity.

Meanwhile, the situation at SFSU has deteriorated: Anti-Israel students regularly disrupt and shut down Hillel events, most notably the Jerusalem mayor’s 2016 speech. In addition, SFSU purposely excluded Hillel from a civil rights event on campus, and Jewish students are harassed to the point of receiving death threats. Not a single SFSU student has faced disciplinary action. So, in 2017, current and former students filed a lawsuit against SFSU claiming that it has fostered institutional anti-Semitism.

Sadly, SFSU is not alone. Anti-Semitism coming from both the far right and the far left is rising sharply on campus. It is vital that OCR — and that states and the federal government in general — adopt a coherent, effective framework to address all forms of anti-Semitism, which is what Ken Marcus, the Brandeis Center and all individuals and organizations engaged in this important cause hope to do.

By Aviva Vogelstein

Algemeiner

Last week, the Bal Harbour Village Council took a tremendous step forward in the fight against antisemitism: under the leadership of Mayor Gabriel Groisman, the Council voted 5-0 in favor of the “Anti-Semitism Definition Act.”

I had the honor of testifying in support of this important ordinance, which seeks to provide Bal Harbour’s law enforcement officials with a uniform definition of antisemitism. Such a definition would help them evaluate possible antisemitic intent behind criminal offenses, ensuring appropriate treatment of such incidents. If the ordinance passes its second reading in December, Bal Harbour will be the first government body in the country to adopt such legislation.

“This fight is important not only for the Jewish community but for the entire American community at large — as hate breeds hate, and we cannot stand still and allow intolerance to threaten our society,” said Mayor Groisman.

Bal Harbour is also a leader in anti-BDS legislation. Nearly two years ago, Bal Harbour became the country’s first municipality to pass an anti-BDS ordinance. At the time, only two states had passed anti-BDS measures. Now, an estimated three dozen cities and 24 states have passed similar bills.

Antisemitism is unfortunately on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 1,299 antisemitic incidents in the first three quarters of 2017, a glaring 67% increase from the 779 in the same period last year. In Florida, the ADL recorded 137 antisemitic incidents in 2016, with South Florida — where Bal Harbour is located — having the highest percentage.

In October, a Naples Chabad was burglarized, trashed and defaced with antisemitic graffiti. Reportedly, someone had drawn a swastika and written on a window in red lipstick “! YOU JEWS NEVER! LEARN!! HEIL HITLER!” In January, “BDS” was spray-painted in front of Jewish-owned businesses in Miami.

Including the US State Department’s definition in Bal Harbour’s Code would be an important tool for law enforcement. Law enforcement concerns were crucial to developing the European Union Monitoring Committee’s International Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, upon which the State Department and International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definitions are based.

The UK College of Policing adopted the definition in its “Hate Crime Operational Guidance.” A 2017 European Parliament Resolution called for adopting the definition in supporting law enforcement efforts to identify and prosecute antisemitic attacks more efficiently and effectively. The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights included the full IHRA definition in its 2017 guide, “Understanding Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes and Addressing the Security Needs of Jewish Communities.”

Valid monitoring, informed analysis and effective policymaking start with uniform definitions. Uniform definitions are especially important for antisemitism, because much confusion clouds the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel. Bal Harbour’s initiative — and other similar federal and state bills that have been introduced — seek to apply the State Department’s widely-established definition of antisemitism domestically. Under the State Department definition, anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism if one seeks to demonize Israel, delegitimize Israel’s right to exist, or hold Israel to a double-standard by demanding behavior not expected of any other democratic nation.

The definition importantly notes, “Criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” Former State Department Special Envoy to Monitor & Combat Anti-Semitism, Ira Forman, explained, “It is especially important to define anti-Semitism clearly to more effectively combat it.”

Federal bipartisan legislation incorporating the State Department’s definition of antisemitism unanimously passed the Senate in December 2016. Although the House did not have time to vote before the winter recess, the House Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on the bill, and it is expected to be re-introduced. In the states, South Carolina is expected to be the first state to pass similar legislation soon. The Louis D. Brandeis Center has been working to educate lawmakers about the importance of defining antisemitism and has testified in support of several state bills.

None of these bills burden free speech. Rather, they provide a uniform tool for ascertaining intent, similar to the use of confessions in criminal proceedings. The point is not to penalize or restrict antisemitic speech, which is typically protected by the First Amendment and should not be curbed. However, antisemitic activities may violate the law, such as when they involve vandalism or physical assault. This conduct should be addressed in a manner consistent with law enforcement policies.

Mayor Groisman and the Bal Harbour Village Council deserve tremendous praise for their support of this vital ordinance.

Aviva Vogelstein is the Director of Legal Initiatives at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

The Jewish Press

Photo Credit: Alex Chis via Flickr

Leaders of the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement conducted a covert campaign to take over academic associations, without disclosing their political agenda, and then to use their influence to impose boycotts on the State of Israel, according to newly discovered documents, according to a press release sent out on Friday by The Louis D. Brandeis Center.

BDS activists were forced to reveal this secret agenda, as well as the unsavory means used to advance it, in the course of the cutting-edge anti-boycott litigation brought against the American Studies Association by Professors Simon Bronner, Michael Rockland, Michael Barton, and Charles Kupfer in 2016 (Bronner et al v. Duggan et al—1:16-cv-00740, District of Columbia District Court). The professors’ success in partially defeating the ASA’s motion to dismiss in April 2017 set the stage for the dramatic new revelations.

“The evidence shows that members of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), a movement which promotes BDS in the United States, have sought to take over the ASA and similar associations,” stated Jerome Marcus, of Marcus & Auerbach LLC, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. Five of the proposed amended complaint’s defendants are USACBI leaders: Sunaina Maira, Neferti Tadiar, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Jasbir Puar, and Steven Salaita.

“This case is about the illegal, hostile takeover of a non-profit, academic association by leaders of an anti-Israel group,” added Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law’s Jennifer Gross, another attorney for the plaintiffs. “Through a series of misrepresentations and breaches of duty, USACBI activists obtained positions of trust in the ASA, and then abused those positions in order to capture and exploit the assets of the ASA to advance the agenda of the BDS movement.”

As detailed in the lawsuit, USACBI is an anti-Israel political activist group that seeks to delegitimize the State of Israel in the world community. It proscribes any academic involvement with Israeli universities, including intellectual discourse, collaboration on research, and even study abroad programs. Newly revealed emails show how USACBI activists took over the ASA in order to use the academic association as a tool for advancing their anti-Israel political agenda.

The lawsuit reveals that they plotted to take-over the ASA by stealth, because most scholars opposed any form of academic boycott, and many considered the USACBI’s anti-Israel boycott to be anti-Semitic. The lawsuit shows that the plot was concocted in part by controversial BDS activist Jasbir Puar, who has suggested that Israel had mined for organs of Palestinians for scientific research.

Explicit emails between and amongst various defendants show how Puar promoted the USACBI agenda by packing the ASA leadership with BDS advocates. BDS activist Sunaina Maira wrote in an email: “Jasbir is nominating me … for the Council and she suggests populating it with as many [USACBI] supporters as possible.” Another BDS supporter explains: “In my conversations with Jasbir it’s clear that the intent of her nominations was to bring more people who do work in, and are politically committed to . . . the question of Palestine . . . we were nominated in order to build momentum for BDS even though the question of BDS in American Studies Association may or may not emerge while we’re on the council.”

Emails amongst candidates for ASA leadership positions explicitly agree that they would not disclose their plan to advance BDS to ASA members. The one candidate who disagreed, saying the issue was material and disclosed his support for BDS, lost. Those who kept it secret were elected.

These same BDS activists, once elected, manipulated ASA procedures to suppress voting for the Boycott Resolution by ASA members who disagreed with them. In an email, ASA Executive Director John Stephens explained that those academics who would pay their dues after the announcement of the vote would likely vote against the BDS resolution. By artificially freezing the cut-off date for dues payment, the BDS activists succeeded in preventing some long-time dues-paying ASA members from voting. The complaint further alleges, in spite of these manipulations, BDS activists never actually obtained the number of votes necessary to impose a boycott but manipulated the association to impose one anyhow.

“The email paper trails reveal nothing less than a focused campaign to capture a society of academics with no relationship to Israel, its Arab neighbors, or the Arab/Israeli conflict,” added Aviva Vogelstein, the Brandeis Center’s Director of Legal Initiatives. “The ASA’s boycott campaign was conducted by activists who are focused on only one thing: using organizations of scholars – including but not limited to the ASA – and their resources, including good will, to attack Israel.”

Original Article

Shiri Moshe
The Algemeiner

Anti-Israel activists implemented a “covert campaign” to gain leadership positions at the American Studies Association (ASA), which they subsequently manipulated into endorsing an academic boycott of Israel, a Jewish human rights group said on Thursday.

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which is representing four plaintiffs suing the ASA over its 2013 adoption of the boycott — revealed that newly-uncovered emails showed how activists with the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) “took over” and used the ASA to advance their political agenda.

A proposed second amended complaint filed by the plaintiffs — all current and former American Studies professors — named five of the 10 individual defendants as USACBI leaders: Sunaina Maira, Neferti Tadiar, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Jasbir Puar, and Steven Salaita.

The defendants “misappropriated the American Studies Association’s funding, name, prestige, membership lists, and respected institutional voice” on behalf of USACBI, thereby subverting ASA’s “apolitical mission and scholarly purpose,” the plaintiffs said.

According to the complaint, the “defendants obtained control of the nominations process by which the American Studies Association chose its leaders,” then restricted nominations to individuals affiliated with USACBI and who would support the ASA’s proposed boycott of Israel.

“This constituted a violation of the American Studies Association bylaws, which require that nominations for the American Studies Association National Council and President reflect the diversity of the membership,” the plaintiffs argued.

The scheme was allegedly spearheaded by Puar, an assistant professor of women’s studies at Rutgers University who has come under fire for supporting terrorism against Israelis and repeating accusations that Israel harvests Palestinian organs.

Puar, also a USACBI leader, acted “to ensure that only signed supporters of USACBI were nominated for American Studies Association President” — a requirement she did not disclose to ASA members, according to the complaint.

In one alleged email exchange between nominees to the ASA’s National Council — who were debating whether to reveal their support for BDS in their nomination statement — USACBI leader Maira claimed, “I feel it might be more strategic not to present ourselves as a pro-boycott slate. We need to get on the Council and I think our larger goal is support for the resolution, not to test support at this early stage from ‘outside’ the NC.”

Another USACBI leader, David Lloyd, replied, “I would definitely suggest not specifying BDS, but emphasizing support for academic freedom, etc.”

Nikhil Singh, who was already a National Council member, cautioned against this approach.

“[W]e all know that ‘academic freedom’ is not good enough,” he wrote. “My real question: what do we hope to gain from election of pro-BDS members to the American Studies Association national council if we have not made any of the stakes of their election clear to the membership?”

“I think that not revealing something this important and intentional and then hoping later to use the American Studies Association national council as a vehicle to advance our cause will not work and may well backfire, because it will lack legitimacy,” Singh added.

Of the three nominees involved in the discussion, only one — Alex Lubin — mentioned support for “the academic and cultural boycott of Israel” in his statement.

“He lost the election” while the other two candidates won, demonstrating that “a nominee’s commitment to the boycott of Israel and its academic and cultural institutions” was a material fact to ASA members, the plaintiffs argued.

By the end of her three years on the Nominating Committee, Puar and two other USACBI endorsers “had turned the American Studies Association National Council from a body primarily comprised of American Studies professors and scholars, and otherwise diverse members … to one overwhelmingly comprised of individuals with a singular focus on adopting the USACBI Boycott,” the complaint continued.

Ultimately, seven of the twelve ASA members nominated for the 2013 National Council had also endorsed USACBI. This did not reflect the diversity of the ASA’s approximately 4,000 members at the time, which only contained some 800 USACBI endorsers, according to the plaintiffs. This was a breach of the ASA’s constitution, which mandates that nominees “shall be representative of the diversity of the association’s membership.”

The complaint included what it said were several other incriminating emails from the defendants, including one from Maira, who wrote, “Jasbir is nominating me and Alex Lubin for the Council and she suggests populating it with as many supporters as possible.”

In another email, Puar claimed, “I think we should prepare for the longer-term struggle by populating elected positions with as [many] supporters as possible.”

A third email, this time from Lubin, read, “In my conversations with Jasbir it’s clear that the intent of her nominations was to bring more people who do work in, and are politically committed to . . . the question of Palestine . . . we were nominated in order to build momentum for BDS even though the question of BDS in American Studies Association may or may not emerge while we’re on the council.”

The plaintiffs listed multiple other complaints against the defendants, including that they “refused to post or circulate letters and other information opposing the boycott” before the ASA vote.

The ASA’s 2013 vote to implement a boycott of Israeli universities and academic institutions marked its first-ever — and thus far only — boycott of a nation.

Several universities terminated their ASA membership over the vote, which was condemned by over 200 senior university administrators and multiple academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, American Association of Universities and American Council on Education.

Original Article