Despite this possible consequence, according to the BDS website, more than 1,000 faculty members on hundreds of campuses around the world have endorsed this boycott. Such action has caused many Israeli scholars to lose funding and research opportunities. Eric Alterman, PhD, currently the CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College who has written extensively about BDS, says it doesn’t make sense to punish the Israeli academic community because they tend to have “the most progressive pro-peace views.”
In the U.S., some BDS supporters have managed to ensure that Jewish student groups are excluded from participation in social justice causes and events — a fact which is particularly concerning to Ken Waltzer, PhD, the former director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University. Waltzer currently leads the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), an organization of U.S. college and university faculty opposed to BDS. “Jewish students want to be part of progressive things [occurring] on campus, and increasingly in these arenas, a test of how progressive you are is whether you are anti-Israel,” he says.
A 2016 incident at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) illustrates this trend. When the Brown-RISD chapter of the Jewish student organization Hillel attempted to co-sponsor a campus event on transgender activism, Brown’s SJP posted a petition on Change.org stating that the event’s speaker — transgender activist Janet Mock — should not come to the university because “Hillel [supports] the Israeli state’s policies of occupation and racial apartheid.” Mock ended up cancelling.