Prominent Jewish academic leaves ‘toxic, bullying, antisemitic’ union

A leading academic in the study of antisemitism has resigned from the University and College Union (UCU) describing it as “by far the most toxic, bullying, antisemitic space I have ever been in.”

Professor David Hirsh, who teaches sociology at Goldsmiths College, said he had been a founder member of the union, having also been a member of one of its predecessors, the Association of University Teachers (AUT).

“For many years now I have been afraid to speak at meetings because I knew what kind of responses would come my way”, Hirsh said in his statement.

“I have obeyed every strike call during that time, and every other call for solidarity with my colleagues, even when I thought they were counterproductive. But UCU has not offered any solidarity at all with Jews, who have been working in an increasingly institutionally antisemitic environment on campus.

“Well, of course it didn’t, because UCU was a pioneer and a legitimizer of that antisemitism, so it would make no sense to imagine it could help in addressing it.”

Hirsh, who published the book Contemporary Left Antisemitism in 2017, is also the academic director and CEO of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

“When the campaign to exclude Israeli colleagues from our campuses, journals and conferences was treated as legitimate in the union, it brought with it waves of antisemitic rhetoric, anger and exclusions”, he said.

“When I spoke out against some of that, I was excluded permanently from the union online discussion.

“When I was denounced by the President of our Student Union as a ‘far right white supremacist’, and after she referred my work as a ‘Zionist Goldsmiths academic’s explicit racist history’, my UCU branch turned up on Twitter to offer 100% solidarity to her, but zero solidarity was offered to me. They were content that a union member and an expert in antisemitism was being denounced as a Nazi and they were siding with the person who had done that.”

Hirsh’s decision to leave came in response to a statement today from Jo Grady, general secretary of the UCU, which described the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation as an “escalation of its crackdown on the Palestine solidarity movement” and a “deeply sinister development”.

Palestine Action, which has carried out a campaign of direct action since its founding in July 2020, was proscribed after two of its activists infiltrated an RAF base and targeted two military aircraft. Other recent targets include UK branches of Israeli defence companies, several Jewish charities with links to Israel and a Jewish owned business in the heart of Stamford Hill, which was broken into and daubed with paint. Palestine Action claimed the business had leased a property to an Israeli defence firm.

Hirsh described how “the union nationally, is running a campaign in support of Palestine Action, which is an antisemitic network that specializes in spreading red blood libel symbolising paint around buildings where Jews work. It falsely teaches people to believe that Israel has been running a state organised campaign of systematically and deliberately murdering civilians on a huge scale, like the Nazis did. And it fights to deprive Israelis of the capacity for self-defence, even when it has seen what kind of threats exist to the lives of Israelis.”

He said he felt “angry that I finally feel I have no choice but to resign from the union.

“Most Jews I know resigned from the union years ago. I stuck with it because I did not want to be driven out of a union I felt I had a right to be in. There are a negligible number of Jews left in the union who are willing or able to bear witness to the antisemitic culture, or to organise against it. There are still antizionist Jews, who parade their Jewish identities in the hope of protecting the union from criticism of its antisemitism. And there must be plenty of Jews who, for one reason or another, want to be a member of a union, but are afraid to speak up.

“I hate the idea that when there is a strike in the future, I will have to go to work, and people will ask me why. And I will say it’s because I couldn’t bear contributing to an antisemitic organisation any longer, I couldn’t bear being a member of one anymore… But actually, it is the union that has excluded Jews, it is not Jews who have withdrawn solidarity with their colleagues.”