BY DANIEL A. SEGAL

Academe Blog is publishing a response to this post 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,” and Segal’s reply to that response. 

As part of its new program of political endorsements, the AAUP has endorsed Cait Conley for the US House of Representatives seat in New York’s Seventeenth District (NY-17). Conley is unquestionably a better choice for higher education than her opponent, the incumbent Mike Lawler. She has, however, contributed to the repression of speech that is arguably the primary target of the current assault on campus speech rights and academic freedom protections: pro-Palestinian speech. The AAUP has thus erred in endorsing Conley—even if she is the better of the two candidates.

When discussing Israel and Palestine while campaigning, Conley has repeatedly said she is “absolutely disgusted by the rising antisemitism happening within both political parties” and on “both sides of the political spectrum”—that is, on both the Right and the Left. Antisemitism is, of course, deeply and widely embedded in US society, especially and specifically as a core element of white Christian nationalism. It would thus be a fantasy to think that any part of US society, and any province of our politics, is free of antisemitism. No one, in short, should respond to Conley by claiming that antisemitism is only a feature of the Right and absent or not a serious issue on the Left.

All the available evidence tells us, however, that the symmetry and equivalence in Conley’s phrasing is false. Indeed, even those who would seem to be looking for rampant and rising antisemitism on the Left in the United States have had trouble finding it. An April 2026 report, Antisemitism and Prejudice on Campus, from Brandeis University’s Center for Modern Jewish Studies, for example, found that hostility to Israel is not correlated with “hostility to Jews.” Consistent with this, the report also tells us that students who are “extremely liberal” (the report’s category for the furthest left end of the political spectrum) are the least likely of any ideologically defined grouping to be hostile to Jews. Convergent data are also embedded in a recent study from—of all the unexpected places—the right-wing Manhattan Institute. (Please email me if you have questions about, or would like to discuss, the crosstabs in that study that support the conclusion that antisemitism is at this time primarily a feature of right-wing politics.)

It follows from the above (and other) evidence that Conley’s representation of antisemitism as comparably and symmetrically a scourge on the Left and on the Right is not evidence-based. And it is deeply unfortunate, albeit entirely predictable, that not a single journalist has, to my knowledge, asked candidate Conley to support her claim about “rising antisemitism” on the Left.

In 2026—in the context of widespread and, yes, rising support for Palestinian rights—talk about antisemitism on the Left is coded talk for smearing pro-Palestinian speech as antisemitic and thus as hate speech. The Left in question is not a generic or abstract Left but left anti-Zionism and left opposition to the US-backed, Israeli genocide against Palestinians.

Additionally, Conley’s specific reference to the Democratic Party as harboring “rising antisemitism” is coded language that gives succor to those who accuse pro-Palestinian Democratic politicians of being antisemites. Think here of Zohran Mamdani and (AAUP-endorsed Senate candidates) Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon—all of whom have faced scurrilous charges of antisemitism.

Conley’s coded smearing of pro-Palestinian speech chills and represses such speech and, more concretely, lends support to its institutional repression on our campuses—something that the AAUP has itself done so much good work fighting. 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.

There is an important and genuinely difficult point of theory in my argument. Classic or liberal defenses of campus speech rights and academic freedom embrace abstract or content-neutral principles, such as the idea that time, place, and manner restrictions on speech must be even-handed and the minimum needed to ensure the ongoing functioning of the university. Such principles have real value and are important tools in our struggle to reclaim higher education, but they are also insufficient.

They are insufficient precisely because while nearly all speech should be protected on our campuses, the nearly is important. There are, in fact, instances of heinous speech that should be institutionally checked and disciplined: A prominent recent example is “free pussy [upstairs]” in a Cornell University fraternity group chat; another is “Jews will not replace us,” as infamously chanted by Unite the Right participants rallying at the University of Virginia in 2017. Delineating the category of speech that warrants institutional sanction is not easily done—I certainly struggle with this—but what does seem clear is that in protecting speech and academic freedom, we cannot escape making judgments about content, about what speech should be sanctioned and what speech merits the staunchest protection.

The problem with Conley’s ungrounded claim about antisemitism is not that it represses speech but that it represses the wrong speech: not antisemitic speech (as her claim purports) but pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech. Similarly, Conley’s own speech—her unmoored claims about antisemitism—does not offer a reasoned argument against pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech but instead participates in and fosters repression of such speech. The distinction between reasoned arguments against a view and speech acts that repress it is, again, not always an easy one to make, but it is real and important.

Note also that my argument is not that Conley’s own speech should be restrained or repressed. Rather, it is that her speech should keep us from identifying her as a champion of speech rights and academic freedom.

There are times when it makes sense to vote for a less or the least bad candidate. And I imagine that, were I a voter in NY-17, I would cast my ballot for Cait Conley. But because her ungrounded and ill-founded comments on antisemitism lend support to institutional repression of fully legitimate, even urgent, pro-Palestinian speech, the AAUP endorsement of Conley is unmerited and should be withdrawn.

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.