Two weeks ago, members of the Park Slope Food Coop — a roughly 17,000-member cooperative grocery store in Brooklyn better known for kombucha than geopolitics — voted to advance a referendum on whether the co-op should join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The proposed boycott made little distinction between products produced within or outside Israel’s 1967 borders. Nor did it seem particularly concerned with the fact that roughly 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arab or Muslim, or that Israeli companies employ large numbers of Arab workers across sectors. But the vote was never really about groceries. It was about an ideology, one that started in faculty lounges and academic conferences and has now migrated into ordinary American civic life.

That ideology portrays Jews as uniquely powerful oppressors, Israel as uniquely illegitimate among nations, and violence against Israelis as morally justified, or at the very least morally explainable, so long as it is committed in the name of “liberation.”

I know, because I have spent the past two and a half years fighting this ideology at Columbia University, testifying about it before Congress, documenting its spread, and researching it for my upcoming book, American Intellectual Antisemitism.

In the wake of the October 7 massacre, I watched Columbia descend into something I never imagined possible at an elite American university. Protesters openly supported Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — all US-designated terrorist organizations — while calling for the destruction of Israel and the United States. A weeks-long encampment........

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