Papers by Matthew Berkman
The Routledge Companion to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 2022
This chapter draws on a combination of secondary literature and original primary research to offe... more This chapter draws on a combination of secondary literature and original primary research to offer a historical overview of United States campus advocacy around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948, with a focus on institutional development, shifting discursive repertoires, and the role of state repression. It traces the ebb and flow of pro-Palestinian organizing and identifies two “waves” of solidarity activism on United States college campuses: first in the late 1960s, with the rise of the New Left, and again following the emergence of the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2005. Paying close attention to Jewish institution building, the chapter charts the pro-Israel countermobilization and proliferation of organizations dedicated to monitoring and policing real and perceived “anti-Israel” activity among college and university students and faculty. It then concludes with an account of pending legislation and recent government action aimed at curtailing such activity under the rubric of combatting antisemitism on campus.
Political Science Quarterly
American Jewish History, 2021
This article analyzes a conception of and political approach to antisemitism that, while now defu... more This article analyzes a conception of and political approach to antisemitism that, while now defunct, once exercised nearly unrivaled hegemony over American Jewish institutions before imploding in a blaze of communal conflict during the immediate postwar decades. An examination of its final institutional advocate, the American Council for Judaism, highlights this paradigm’s embeddedness in the pre-civil-rights American racial order and traces its obsolescence to the epochal social transformations of the 1960s. Central to the Council’s view of antisemitism, and to earlier iterations of the paradigm in question, was an understanding of Zionism as a racializing force. Established in the waning years of Jim Crow, the Council and its affluent leadership waged a rearguard battle against American Zionism and its ethnonational conception of Jewish identity, in an effort—as they saw it—to safeguard American Jews against antisemitism. The closing section sketches the development of the communal antisemitism paradigm that emerged hegemonic in the wake of the Council’s downfall—the so-called “new antisemitism” paradigm—and highlights the role of reconstituted racial anxieties in its own formulation. Both the “new antisemitism” paradigm and the paradigm advanced by the Council link race, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism in a unique ideological assemblage intended to advance the interests of its adherents. Juxtaposing the two shows the American racial order as a persistent structuring force in intra-Jewish contests over the relationship between (anti-)Zionism and antisemitism.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2017
This article provides an overview and theorization of the “Alternative Peace Movement” (APM), a t... more This article provides an overview and theorization of the “Alternative Peace Movement” (APM), a transnational education and advocacy network based in the West Bank. Emerging in the troubled context of current Israel-diaspora relations and US campus politics, the APM promotes a syncretic Jewish identity narrative and boundary-crossing political programme. Drawing on a content and discourse analysis of the movement’s online documentation, as well as interviews with movement leaders, participants, and allies, the article outlines the APM’s infrastructure and discourse, and provides an historical backdrop and set of theoretical tools for rendering comprehensible the movement’s seeming contradictions and incoherencies. It describes the APM as a case study in “primordialist universalism,” a political orientation that aims to pursue civic and human rights of a universal character by inhabiting a “hard” ethnonational subjectivity and discursive frame. The concept of primordialist universalism offers social scientists a tool for making sense of hybrid social phenomena that confound traditional categories of political analysis.
Jewish Social Studies, 2017
At the beginning of the 1970s, the Jewish Federation of New York underwent a rapid ideological tr... more At the beginning of the 1970s, the Jewish Federation of New York underwent a rapid ideological transition from a politics of assimilation to a politics of ethnic survival. Whereas previous treatments of the survivalist turn have focused on cultural change, this article offers an explanation rooted in the financial dynamics and core institutional imperatives that drove executive decision making by Federation’s board of trustees. Over the first half of the twentieth century, recurrent fiscal strain, Jewish class mobility, and the growth of the welfare state propelled the expansion of Federation’s organizational infrastructure and geographic reach far beyond the limited vision of its founders. For a time, the imperative to generate new revenue and preempt competition helped stabilize the ideological consensus around assimilationism. But those same structural dynamics gradually empowered new actors—students, rabbis, and militants—who mobilized to put concerted pressure on Federation to adopt a survivalist program just as old models of institutional reproduction began to break down. Questions of Federation’s political orientation are thus bound up with the same overarching process of institutional adaptation that engendered its sprawling contemporary architecture and communal preeminence.
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Papers by Matthew Berkman