Five days before I boarded a flight to Israel, my grandmother died. I livestreamed her funeral from Boston Logan Airport. My daughter had been born three months earlier. My wife was afraid of what I might see — or not come back from seeing.

I went because I believed that witnessing the aftermath of October 7 was not only morally necessary, but essential to understanding what the legal categories — proportionality, distinction, incitement — actually mean in practice. I am a law professor. I teach doctrines. I had never stood inside the doctrine.

What I saw

At the Tekuma car graveyard, more than 800 civilian vehicles sit in silence — sedans, hatchbacks, mopeds, an ambulance. An IDF officer recounted how Hamas blasted that ambulance with dozens of AK-47 rounds, threw hand grenades inside, then fired a rocket-propelled grenade. When cleared, they recovered the remains of 18 people, including an 18-year-old girl in a wheelchair. I filmed the wreckage of a burned-out white Audi A5 — the same model I drive. I imagined my wife and daughter in that car.

At Kibbutz Nir Oz, the communal dining tables were still set. Each bore a red hostage poster. Some posters were marked “dead,” crudely taped over “kidnapped.” One table had a child’s highchair with a poster of baby Kfir Bibas. His wide, toothless grin looked just like my daughter’s. I stared at his father Yarden’s photo and thought: had I stayed in Israel after my kibbutz summer twenty years ago, would I be in one of those tunnels now?

The kibbutz’s mailboxes were marked “kidnapped” or “murdered,” as appropriate. Our guide was Sharone Lifshitz, whose father Oded — an octogenarian peace activist who had spent years driving sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals — was kidnapped by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He was later murdered in captivity.

At the Nova Festival site, I met Bar Hinitz, a survivor. He told us he had come to “celebrate life” at a sunrise trance festival. By 6:30 a.m., rockets were overhead and the DJ was on the mic: “Red alert, red alert, it’s not a drill, evacuate as quick as you can.” Bar hid in a bush for forty minutes while automatic weapons fired around him. His best friend Omer — who was not supposed to be there — was murdered. “Talking is healing,” Bar said. “I want to tell people what really happened here.”

At the Nahal Oz command center, I walked through the ruins where 15 of 22 young female soldiers were killed — suffocated by chemical accelerants while in their nightclothes. Keyboards and mice had melted into surreal puddles. The air still smelled faintly of chemical smoke. I had studied arson as a doctrinal matter. This was not theory. This air had poisoned people.

Then I watched the raw footage. Hamas bodycam recordings, CCTV, dashboard cameras, mobile phones of both attackers and victims. One sequence has haunted me since: a terrorist, having just killed a civilian, picked up the victim’s phone and called his parents. In a voice dripping with pride, he boasted of the number of Jews he had killed. Not “Zionists.” Not “Israeli soldiers.” Jews.

The limits of abstraction

I returned to my campus and my classroom with a question that had not troubled me before the trip: is the definitional debate over whether anti-Zionism “is” antisemitism even the right question?

The scholarly debate is real and important. The IHRA definition, the Jerusalem Declaration, the Nexus Document — each has strengths and weaknesses. Kenneth Stern, who coordinated the IHRA drafting, warns against codifying it into law. Cary Nelson defends its clarity. David Feldman urges keeping the concepts analytically distinct. Raeefa Shams cautions against conflating them while acknowledging that much anti-Zionist rhetoric on campus draws from antisemitic tropes.

But after standing in Nir Oz, the definitional debate felt overly cerebral. The central question is not whether a perfect definition exists, but whether institutions are willing to recognize when calls to “resist Zionism” devolve into targeted hostility against Jews. As I wrote in the paper: the stakes are not academic — “unless you are referring to the literal gray matter of innocents that Hamas terrorists splattered onto the dashboards of passenger sedans.”

What I propose instead is a functional analysis: the label is less important than the effect. What does the speech actually do? Does it single out Jews for hostility, exclusion, or violence? Does it invoke antisemitic tropes under the guise of anti-Zionism? If so, institutions may — and must — respond.

Why universities failed

When Jew-hatred erupted across campuses after October 7, many universities responded not with moral clarity but with procedural neutrality. They cited the First Amendment. They deferred to protest guidelines. They “monitored the situation.” They issued statements so equivocal they failed even to name the atrocity. As Miriam Elman observed, many administrators effectively equated Hamas’s terrorism with Israel’s self-defense.

This paralysis masquerades as fairness. University leaders claim they are constrained by definitional ambiguity. They invoke one framework or another. But the problem is deeper than which definition they adopt. It is the institutional habit of using definitions as shields against responsibility. As Stern himself wrote: “This was not written to be a campus hate speech code.” When universities respond to Jew-hatred with yet another reference to definitional frameworks, they are not exercising legal restraint. They are evading moral discernment.

Definitions are useful tools. They assist in training, policy drafting, and pattern recognition. But they cannot substitute for judgment. They do not tell a university president what to say when protesters chant “Death to Zionists” outside a Jewish student center. They do not tell a faculty committee how to respond when a tenured professor celebrates mass murder as political resistance. Nor do they absolve leadership from the obligation to lead.

The liberal-realist framework

I am a classical liberal. I direct a program at NYU’s Classical Liberal Institute. But classical liberalism does not require institutions to remain neutral in the face of illiberal ideologies. On the contrary, it demands integrity — coherent alignment between purpose, structure, and conduct. Too often, university leaders confuse liberalism with passivity.

The framework I propose draws on four traditions: Holmes’s legal realism (law must be grounded in experience, not abstraction), Hayek’s classical liberalism (liberty requires general rules but not institutional paralysis), Aristotle’s virtue ethics (character is formed through habitual practice of judgment, not through rule-following), and Maimonides’s moral formation (the path to understanding begins with repeated, intentional action that shapes the soul).

The synthesis: universities must ask not only “What are we allowed to do?” but “What kind of institution are we becoming?” That is not a rhetorical question. It is the beginning of institutional virtue.

This is not a call for censorship. It is a call for clarity. Universities must distinguish between disagreement and dehumanization. Not through punishment, but through principled speech, moral leadership, and institutional courage. Liberalism, properly understood, is not relativism. It is a structured commitment to individual dignity, civic equality, and the pursuit of truth. When universities fail to defend those values, they are not being liberal. They are being lost.

Read the full article: Beyond the Ivory Tower: Confronting Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Free Speech Through Firsthand Observation and Engagement, AEN Research Paper No. 7 (2025).