A Letter to the Letter Signers
When Allyship Overlooks a Community
Dear letter signers,
I write this letter with great trepidation, but it has been on my mind for months. Some of you I greatly admire, some of you I don’t know at all, some of you I know a little, and some of you are close friends. All of you are part of a group of social and personality psychologists who signed an open letter in support of student pro-Palestine protests.
Regardless of whether we do or do not have a personal relationship, please know that I respect your right to form your own opinion; I also believe that you are well-intentioned. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to write to you now because my feelings about your actions have become overwhelming.
I wanted to share with you some of the pain I have experienced since October 7th.
That day changed me. After that day, it became much clearer to me who are my friends and who are not. On that day, and the many days after, I learned that a core part of my identity was not only not respected but actively maligned and villainized. Something awoke in me that day, and that pain brought me clarity about my place and my people’s place in this world.
So, let me claim and celebrate that identity. I am a proud Jew. Israel is the birthplace of my mother. My grandparents and my mother’s eldest sisters (then toddlers) were born in Yemen. They eventually fled due to the persecution they faced as Jews, needing to be smuggled out in the dead of night from their place of birth, literally crossing desert to escape. Yemen once had a thriving Jewish population. I recently learned that it even had a Jewish kingdom known as the Himyarites when its ruling class adopted Judaism as far back as 300 AD, predating the Arab conquest by many hundreds of years. But it had become unliveable for Jews. Today there are zero Jews left.
My grandparents and aunts settled in what was then British Mandate Palestine, where they rebuilt their lives, forming community with other Yemenite Jews. There is a name for us. We are Mizrachi Jews. Jews who never left the Middle East. Jews whose culture closely resembles the countries of their origin—Yemen, Iraq, Iran. My ancestors were not white colonizers. We are indigenous to the Middle East and have been there for thousands of years.
My entire life I have been asked where I am from because my skin tone is not white. So, I am proud to clarify: I am a Mizrachi Jew, a Jew of colour.
I am saying all this as context for my feelings of abandonment. I have hesitated to write this for so many months because I was afraid of how I might be perceived. Better to stay quiet and to only speak freely in spaces where other Jews are around, I told myself. But being Jewish is a core part of who I am, and given Israel’s centrality to my culture—observant Jews call out to it and physically orient toward it thrice daily—Israel is a core part of who I am too.
As such, I have come to see you signing that letter as a desertion of your Jewish friends and colleagues.
First, I want to make it clear that I fully support the rights of students to protest and even to be disruptive so that they are heard. Like you, I was deeply upset by scenes of police violently shutting down encampments. I also agree wholeheartedly with the call to protect our Arab and Muslim students from any form of harassment or prejudice. This is an essential part of ensuring that our campuses are safe and welcoming for everyone.
However, I felt deeply saddened by the one-sided nature of the letter you all signed, particularly in how it downplays the antisemitism that became a real concern during many of these protests. Empathy for one group needn’t come at the expense of empathy for a second group. While I respect the diversity of views within our community, the letter’s suggestion that accusations of antisemitism are merely a tool to silence protesters is dismissive of the very real fears and experiences of Jewish students and faculty—including those like me who see the situation as more complex than simply good versus evil.
I am also offended by the repeated use of token Jews who participated in these events as proof that these demonstrations could not be antisemitic. While you acknowledged individual instances of antisemitism, your blanket denial that these protests were antisemitic is insulting and denies what many Jews around the world feel. These protests were largely not advocating for peace; they were not arguing for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, many of the protests took maximalist positions on Israel/Palestine, sometimes chanting slogans that denied the right of the state of Israel to exist (e.g., “We don’t want no two state; we want all of ‘48”) or slogans that wanted to erase Jews from the area.
There is also a deeper context you omitted. These protests are happening at the same time as there has been a sharp rise in Jew hatred around the world. In Canada where I live, police reported 900 incidents of Jew hate across the country in 2023. For a comparison there were 784 incidents of Black hate and 211 incidents of Muslim-hate, with both populations each five times as large as the Canadian Jewish population. This amounts to 1 Jew-hate incident for every 373 Jewish Canadians; 1 Black-hate incident for every 1,913 Black Canadians; and 1 Muslim-hate incident for every 8,416 Muslim Canadians. Things don’t look any better in 2024 or in other western countries.
If the same movement that animates student protests is animating these many acts of Jew hatred that have occurred in Canada, then, yeah, these protests are antisemitic. Just a few examples that have affected just me and my family: My childhood synagogue, the place where I prayed multiple times a week until I was 17, was firebombed; my father was called a dirty Jew in my old suburban Montreal neighbourhood; my once-friendly Toronto neighbour is all of a sudden not so friendly; my 13-year old daughter had to deal with boys Sieg Heiling Jewish kids in her school.
To be clear, I would have no problem with you all signing a letter defending our students’ right to protest. I would also have no problem with a letter that highlighted the brutalities committed by the Israeli government because I too am heartbroken by the murder of so many innocent Palestinians. But I do have a problem with a letter that is one-sided, that barely mentions the tragic events of October 7th, that does not wrestle with the atrocities committed by Hamas (or even name Hamas), that does not give weight to how most Jews on campus feel about these protests. Some of you letter-signers even revealed your true feelings by supporting the abominable claim that the mass rape of Israeli women did not happen.
If the letter had been more balanced, far more than about 200 people would have signed. If the letter had been more balanced, more than a small handful of Jews would have signed. Some of you are college administrators, some of you are chairs of departments, some of you are on the boards of important institutions. When you sign a letter, you do not speak with your voice alone, but with the voice of your various constituencies. When you sign your name to such a letter, you might be acting as a good ally to your Muslim and Arab students and faculty, but you are abandoning your Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. This is something that weighs heavily on me, knowing the impact your stance can have on my community.
Your letter did not need to be this way. It could have acknowledged the real pain being felt by multiple groups in our community. It could have been written in a way that did not invalidate the Jewish community’s experience or erase our complicated feelings about what is happening. Empathy is not zero-sum. The letter could have held space for two competing narratives. It could have brought our community together to heal. Instead, it polarized us. I wonder if any of you regret signing this letter now.
I will no longer be silent about the wellbeing of my community. I no longer think Jew hatred is something that my mother or uncle might unearth from their memories or dust off from old history books. Jew hatred is alive and well. I see it in too many places now.
Collegially yours,
Michael Inzlicht