Linda Sarsour, a prominent anti-Israel activist, will speak at a panel on anti-Semitism at the end of November at an event co-sponsored by The New School in New York, Tablet Magazine reported Monday.
The November 28 event titled “Antisemitism and the Struggle for Justice” is co-sponsored by Jacobin magazine, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Haymarket Books, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and The New School Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program.
“Antisemitism is harmful and real,” the description of the event at Eventbrite reads. “But when antisemitism is redefined as criticism of Israel, critics of Israeli policy become accused and targeted more than the growing far-right.” The invitation then calls on people to join “for a discussion on how to combat antisemitism today.”
The executive director of JVP, Rebecca Vilkomerson, will also be in the panel. Earlier this year, JVP booked Rosmea Odeh—a member of the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine who was convicted for the 1969 bombing in Jerusalem and has since been deported from the United States for lying on her citizenship application—to appear in a panel at JVP’s annual meeting with Sarsour.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has charged that JVP “uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and to provide the movement with a veneer of legitimacy.”
ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt criticized the event on Monday by tweeting, “Having Linda Sarsour & head of JVP leading a panel on #antisemitism is like Oscar Meyer leading a panel on vegetarianism.” Greenblatt added that “ These panelists know the issue, but unfortunately, from perspective of fomenting it rather than fighting it.”
Leo Ferguson from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Lina Morales from JVP will also be on the panel.
The panel, Tablet observed, “features not a single actual scholar of anti-Semitism, nor one voice that doesn’t belong comfortably in the deep left.”
Tablet charged further that by hosting this panel The New School betrayed its heritage twice, “First by inviting some of the leading purveyors of anti-Jewish prejudice to discuss anti-Semitism, and second by failing to invite to the panel anyone who might disrupt the torrent of invective with dispassionate facts and real expertise.”
The New School was founded in 1919 and, in large part, made its name by offering positions to renowned scholars, theorists, and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss who were escaping Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1930s.
One of the university’s most famous students was former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres.
In a critique of Linda Sarsour, Julie Lenarz, a senior fellow at The Israel Project, observed this past June in The Tower, “Linda Sarsour is not a feminist. She supports a culture that is forcing millions of women into religious slavery. She is a false apostle selling her regressive views to a blinded liberal audience.”
[Photo: The New School / YouTube]