The Faculty Factor, audited

The Anti-Defamation League published The Faculty Factor: Inside the Networks Driving Anti-Israel and Anti-Zionist Activism on Campus in August 2026, through its Center to Combat Antisemitism in Education, as a companion to a separate ADL study of K-12 classrooms. Its thesis, in its own words: ‘Across U.S. university and college campuses, an organized segment of faculty groups, unions, and networks has emerged as a significant force driving belligerent anti-Israel rhetoric and activity. In some cases, this activity has also crossed into antisemitism.’ The report argues these networks give student activists ‘institutional cover’ and ‘normalize extreme hostility towards Israel as legitimate academic discourse.’ We grade the existence and content of the report as FACT; the claims it makes are graded on their own below.

“An organized segment of faculty groups, unions, and networks has emerged as a significant force driving belligerent anti-Israel rhetoric and activity. In some cases, this activity has also crossed into antisemitism. — The Faculty Factor, ADL”

• ADL — The Faculty Factor: Inside the Networks Driving Anti-Israel and Anti-Zionist Activism

The report is not a representative study. It is a narrative mapping of named faculty networks — Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP, described as more than 130 affiliated groups), the American Association of University Professors, the California Faculty Association, and the Coalition for Action in Higher Education — assembled from press coverage, activists’ own statements, social-media posts, and union resolutions. Its central survey number comes from the 2025 ADL/Academic Engagement Network ‘Faculty Under Fire’ study, which reports that nearly three-quarters of respondents observed anti-Jewish activity from other faculty, staff, or administrators. That survey polled 209 Jewish-identifying faculty who chose to respond. A self-selected sample of 209 is a legitimate thing to publish, but it cannot carry a claim about faculty in general, and the report leans on it as if it can.

• ADL / Academic Engagement Network — Faculty Under Fire survey (Sept 2025)
• ADL — The Faculty Factor (networks and methodology)

Read the report’s catalog and the sorting problem is visible in a single list. On one side: a respondent told by a non-Jewish colleague that they ‘had no idea what antisemitism was’; ‘faculty are not talking to me because they know I’m a Zionist’; a college academic senate objecting to labeling ‘From the River to the Sea’ antisemitic; University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty formally opposing adoption of the IHRA definition in March 2026; professors forming a ‘protective wall’ around student encampments. On the other side, in the same report: a chant of ‘there is only one solution; Intifada, revolution’; the display of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine flag, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization; and a social-media cartoon trading on a classic antisemitic trope. The report files both sides under ‘crossed into antisemitism.’ The rest of this page is about that filing decision.

• ADL — The Faculty Factor (incident catalog and cited examples)

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 2016 working definition of antisemitism is the standard the ADL treats as a primary tool, and the report faults faculty for opposing it. The definition itself is a single non-legally-binding sentence, but it comes with 11 illustrative examples — and 7 of the 11 concern the State of Israel, including denying Jewish people self-determination by ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’ and ‘applying double standards’ to Israel. Even the definition’s lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, has publicly warned that it was written to track hate-crime data, not to police campus speech, and that it has been weaponized to do the latter. That an antisemitism standard is 64% about one country is the structural reason critics say it sweeps in political argument.

• IHRA — Working Definition of Antisemitism (definition and 11 examples)
• The Guardian — Kenneth Stern, lead drafter, on the definition being weaponized against campus speech

Two later standards exist precisely because specialists judged the IHRA examples too broad. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, released March 2021 and signed by roughly 200 scholars of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Jewish and Middle East studies — many of them Jewish, including David Feldman, Amos Goldberg, Brian Klug and Alon Confino — states that supporting Palestinian rights, backing boycott, divestment and sanctions, and comparing Israel to settler-colonialism or apartheid are not, on their face, antisemitic. The U.S. Nexus Document draws the same line: criticism of Zionism and Israel ‘should not, as such, be deemed antisemitic.’ Both are careful to say the opposite too — collective-guilt tropes and demanding that Jews disavow Israel are antisemitic. The point is not that anything goes; it is that a serious, Jewish-led body of expertise rejects the equation the report relies on.

“Boycott, divestment, and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic. — Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism”

• Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism — full text and signatories
• The Nexus Document — Israel, antisemitism, and the line between them

The three standards fight over criticism of Israel, but they converge on one thing: holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli state is antisemitic. IHRA lists ‘holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ as an example. The Jerusalem Declaration’s Section B says the same, and adds that ‘requiring people, because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism’ is antisemitic. Nexus agrees. This matters for the audit, because it means the conflation of Jews with Israel is condemned by the very definitions the debate is fought over — and, as the next sections show, that conflation is the thing the report itself repeatedly performs.

• IHRA — example: holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel
• Jerusalem Declaration — Section B on collective responsibility and forced disavowal

Match the report’s examples against the Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus line and a large share of its case falls on the protected-speech side. Faculty formally opposing the IHRA definition is a position the definition’s own drafter shares. A boycott, divestment and sanctions resolution is the kind of non-violent political protest the JDA names explicitly as not antisemitic. ‘Faculty are not talking to me because they know I’m a Zionist’ describes social friction over a political identity, not a hate incident. Calling Israel a settler-colonial state is a contested academic argument, not a slur against Jews. Presenting these as components of a networked antisemitic threat is the conflation critics have documented for decades, and we grade it PROBABLY TRUE as an attributed critique: the pattern is well-sourced, and the naming of who makes the charge is what keeps it out of pure opinion.

• Jerusalem Declaration — BDS and settler-colonial comparison are not, as such, antisemitic
• The Nexus Document — criticism of Zionism and Israel is not, as such, antisemitic

The conflation in this report is not new; it is the house method. Since the 1970s — Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein’s 1974 book The New Anti-Semitism — the ADL has promoted a framework that treats opposition to Zionism as a form of antisemitism. Reporting by Jonathan Guyer and others has documented internal ADL dissent under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, including from staff, that the organization’s Israel advocacy has diverted it from its historical anti-hate mission, and critics have long argued its annual incident audits absorb anti-Israel and anti-Zionist protest into the antisemitism count. We attribute this to the reporting and to named critics — Peter Beinart, the JDA scholars, Jewish Currents — rather than asserting a precise share of the count ourselves, which would require the ADL’s internal coding rules we do not have. Graded PROBABLY TRUE as a documented, attributed critique of method.

• Wikipedia — Weaponization of antisemitism (ADL ‘new antisemitism’ framework; Forster & Epstein, 1974; sourced overview)
• Grift Grinders — “Limit the First Amendment”: the campaign to narrow speech about Israel

Inside the same report sit items that do not belong in the protected-speech pile. The display of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine flag — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — alongside signs celebrating ‘the resistance.’ A social-media cartoon in which a Star-of-David character shrugs off Gaza casualties ‘once they realise there are no consequences,’ which trades on the antisemitic trope of Jewish indifference to non-Jewish life. A public claim that a pro-Israel lobby has ‘bought and paid for almost every single member of Congress,’ the ‘Jewish money controls politics’ trope in all but name. These are the report’s strongest material, and we grade them FACT as plausibly antisemitic by mainstream standards. Conceding them is not a weakness in the audit; it is the point. The complaint is that the report launders its weak examples in with these, not that the strong ones do not exist.

• IHRA — examples including classic anti-Jewish tropes and collective-guilt framing
• U.S. Department of State — Foreign Terrorist Organizations list (PFLP designation)

The backdrop is not in dispute and we will not soften it. FBI hate-crime data shows Jews have been the most frequently targeted group in religiously motivated hate crimes every year since 1991; in 2023, antisemitic incidents made up 68% of all religion-based hate crimes, up 63% from the year before, and the American Jewish Committee notes even that is likely underreported. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented a rise in antisemitic incidents after the October 7, 2023 attacks, including vandalism of synagogues, assaults, and hate-group flyering. A definitional critique of one ADL report changes none of this. It is because real antisemitism is real that miscounting it matters — a count that folds in political speech is easier to dismiss wholesale, which serves no one who is actually targeted.

• FBI — Hate Crime Statistics (Jews the most-targeted religious group; 2023 share of religion-based hate crimes)
• SPLC — post-October 7 rise in antisemitic incidents