This week the United States House Committee on Education & Workforce released a bombshell report, titled “How Campuses Became Hotbeds” of antisemitism. The Committee’s findings were blunt and jarring: university leaders and professors repeatedly “caved to the radical demands of faculty and students [and] are legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism.”

The University of California system, generally considered the most prestigious public university system in the US, was tagged by the Committee as a “hotbed” for antisemitic hostility. According to the report, UC Berkeley Professor Ussama Makdisi “normalized antisemitic violence online, in the classrooms, and with administrators.” Nonetheless, UC Berkeley bestowed upon Makdisi the honor of serving as the inaugural Chair of its anonymously funded, $3.25 million, permanent Palestinian and Arab Studies Program, created in 2024 in apparent response to the anti-Israel “Free Palestine Encampment” leaders’ demands of University leadership.

For organizations like JIMENA, which documents and educates about the nearly one million Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa who fled antisemitic persecution in the 20th century, these findings are deeply familiar. The Committee report’s examples of “anti-Zionism” taught on college campuses today echo the extremist ideologies and state policies that not long ago powered the discrimination, oppression, and ultimate displacement and ethnic cleansing of entire Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

So it is no surprise that Professor Makdisi’s undergraduate course, whose syllabus and readings are included in the Committee’s report, frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a single lens – an extreme Palestinian perspective that deprives students of a nuanced and complete understanding of the region and its people. The complexity that once served as the cornerstone of a UC Berkeley education is now absent.

Makdisi’s course materials are replete with virulent antisemitic figures and passages, notably Haj Amin al-Husseini, whom Makdisi prominently features as a leader of the Palestinian cause while omitting a critical historical fact: al-Husseini was a paid Nazi propagandist who during World War II broadcast from Berlin calls in Arabic to destroy the Jews and recruited Arabs to enlist in the Waffen-SS to help the Nazis murder them. Omitting this face is not incidental – it is historical revisionism.

Makdisi also has his undergrads learn about Jews in Arab and Muslim countries through the politically motivated, conspiratorial work of Avi Shlaim, a single cherry-picked Mizrahi scholar whose work has been widely rejected by respected scholars and Jewish leaders from Arab countries themselves.

Makdisi’s syllabus conveniently excludes the histories of the nearly one million Jewish refugees forced to flee Arab countries where they had lived in for thousands of years, due to Arab state-sanctioned antisemitic violence and economic strangulation, justified through the legal codification of anti-Zionism. This violent state-sponsored anti-Zionism, which Makdisi refuses to address – promoted by the likes of al-Husseini and Arab leaders throughout the region—was used as the legal pretext for Jews’ dispossession, imprisonment, executions, and expulsion across the region.

What is taught—and what is deliberately omitted—shapes student’s moral understanding. By presenting only one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Makdisi’s curriculum cultivates empathy in one direction while erasing the other. That imbalance fuels antisemitism.

It does not stop there, however, according to Lauren Janov, lead of The Education Policy Project and JIMENA Board Education Advisor. Makdisi’s curriculum is now in the K-12 public education sphere too via the federally funded University of California Subject Matter Project (CSMP) created decades ago to bring best practices from University of California professors to K-12 school teachers.

In 2025, CSMP partnered with Makdisi as its “Middle East in Historical Context” expert to help K-12 teachers “address and combat antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bias, bigotry and discrimination at the university.”

But CSMP’s K–12 inquiry set, “Modern Palestinian History,” does not address antisemitism—instead, it reinforces it. By beginning its narrative in the 1890s, it omits the continuous presence of Jews in Israel and across the broader Middle East for thousands of years. In doing so, it reframes Jewish presence in the land as a form of European “Zionist colonization,” echoing the same narrative Makdisi imparts to his college students. A fuller historical account—one that recognizes Jews as indigenous to these lands and documents their continuous presence and eventual dispossession and displacement —complicates this simplistic oppressor-versus-oppressed framing. That complexity is precisely what is excluded.

This Committee report is unlikely to change much at UC Berkeley. On April 2, UC Berkeley will be hosting the talk “Anti-Zionism Is Not a Luxury,” with promotional materials under the UC Berkeley letterhead averring that “anti-Zionism is a vital necessity of existence.”

At this moment when antisemitism is surging in our universities – as the Committee demonstrates so clearly – at the very least, the UC Office of the President, the California Legislature, and federal government should ensure that the $3.4 million earmarked annually for CSMP is frozen until it revises its lessons for factual accuracy and rids them of their bias.

We should demand that our taxpayer-funded educational institutions—from K–12 through the university level—commit to educating the next generation with historical integrity, not political distortion, serving students rather than advancing professors’ political agendas half a world away.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)