BY DANIEL A. SEGAL
Academe Blog published the author’s post, “The AAUP Errs in Endorsing Cait Conley for Congress,” along with a response by Giulia Zanni, Robert Newton, Ezra Susser, Sarah Borden, Susan Witte, and Page Fortna, “Why We Stand by the AAUP’s Endorsement of Cait Conley.” Below is Segal’s reply to that response.
I value and appreciate the thoughtful engagement of Giulia Zanni and her coauthors with my statement of opposition to the AAUP’s endorsement of Cait Conley.
In responding to my claim that Conley’s comments about antisemitism give succor to those who smear pro-Palestinian Democrats as antisemitic, Zanni et al. write that “Conley did not name any person, movement, or form of speech” and that Conley has “declined Lawler’s repeated invitation to denounce Mamdani.” This is misleading. Conley has in fact—albeit in response to Lawler’s badgering—denounced as antisemitic Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Statement on the Third Anniversary of October 7.” This is not in line with what Zanni et al. tell us, and it smears Mamdani for supposed “antisemitism.”
Conley’s comments on Mamdani’s October 7 statement are calumny precisely because they adopt the view—at once anti-Palestinian and anti-intellectual—that it is “antisemitic” to discuss the historical causes of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, or the genocidal response to it by the Israeli state.
Mainstream politicians regularly try to have it both ways. This is the case with Conley’s record of making admirable comments about, for example, the “deportations of student visa holders” (as Zanni et al. note) while also signaling that she stands with those who hear pro-Palestinian speech as “antisemitic”—including, say, the pro-Palestinian speech of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student who is, today, threatened with deportation precisely on the grounds that his pro-Palestinian speech is “antisemitic.” The double-speak of mainstream politicians makes it naïve to trust that out of all the things Conley says, she really means the things we in the AAUP like to hear but not the rest.
Zanni et al. and I—and the AAUP too—agree that Conley is better than Mike Lawler. But I stand by this central point in my initial comment and thus also by my opposition to the AAUP’s endorsement of Conley: In our historical moment, one cannot make the mistaken claims about antisemitism that Conley has made and not be complicit in the pro-Israel and broadly right-wing attack on academic freedom and campus speech rights that is prevalent now.
Daniel A. Segal is the Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges. His scholarship ranges from Jane Austen (with Richard Handler) to racial discourses in the Americas to theorizing states and non-states in world history. He is a past fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, a past president of the AAUP chapter of the Claremont Colleges, and a current member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace.
