Inside the New Group Giving Antisemitism Trainings at Harvard
Project Shema, increasingly a presence on university campuses, uses progressive language while foregrounding the “harm” of anti-Zionism.
contact@ifamericansknew.org August 16, 2025
At a Harvard workshop, attendees reported that Jacobson acknowledged, when challenged by questions about Gaza, that “the impact of Israel is a miracle for Jews and a catastrophe for Palestinians” and that “the war is disproportionately harming Palestinians.” Shema’s offerings make broad use of concepts that have become common in liberal anti-racist trainings, such as the idea that intent is less important than impact when assessing offensive language.
“At this moment, [universities] are facing an energized faculty and student protest movement in solidarity with Palestinians while they’re facing massive authoritarian pressure from the Trump administration and the pro-Israel movement,” said Ben Lorber, an antisemitism researcher and author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, in an interview. “They want to satisfy both camps, and they want to maintain a veneer of positive progressivism.
A training like this can check off all those boxes.” But beneath that veneer, the instruction Project Shema provides still seeks to restrain the protest movement in subtler terms, according to Williams. “I don’t think the goal of Project Shema is about ending antisemitism. It’s about keeping people from saying anything that makes people uncomfortable, and that is the opposite of education,” Williams said. “This is why you can’t say ‘river to the sea’ or ‘Zionism is racism.’ The goal is to have those symbols and that language go away.”
Israeli politics have been central to Project Shema since its founding. When its website first launched in 2020, the organization declared that it was created in response to “the feeling that some in the progressive movement don’t understand or support Jewish national self-determination in Israel,” and that its workshops hoped to strengthen bonds between Jews and the progressive movement while helping “the American Jewish community better engage the American progressive movement on issues of core concern, like Israel and antisemitism.” Its co-founders, Oren Jacobson, Zachary Schaffer, and Brianna Goodlin, have backgrounds working in various Jewish and liberal causes—Jacobson in the reproductive rights movement, Schaffer for the Jewish Federations of North America and the Council of Young Jewish Presidents, and Goodlin in DEI consulting roles.
Their politics appear to include a strong investment in Israel and a distaste for the country’s right wing: The three founders have each taken to Jewish and Israeli media to advance liberal Zionist perspectives, with Jacobson penning an article in 2021 asserting that “when people attack Zionists, we hear ‘Jews’”; Schaffer arguing in 2020 that “Zionism is as much about empowerment as it is about politics”; and Goodlin writing in 2019 that Netanyahu’s policies could “threaten the sustainability of a strong US-Israel relationship.”
The organization’s top brass includes other liberal politicos and corporate DEI professionals, such as Powers, a former chief equity and inclusion officer at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). (Powers attracted attention when she posted from the SCBWI account about antisemitism shortly after Israel’s May 2021 bombing of Gaza and quarreled with commenters who asked for a similar statement about Islamophobia, a controversy that led her to publicly resign.) Much of Project Shema’s programming and materials emphasizes diversity in the Jewish community, a focus reflected in their racially and ethnically diverse leadership.
Between its founding and October 2023, Project Shema had a fairly low profile in a crowded landscape of anti-antisemitism organizations, even as it organized speaking engagements at Jewish federations, community centers, and synagogues. After October 7th, however, as widespread protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza prompted panic in Jewish communities, the organization received an infusion of financial support for programming it was developing to meet the moment.
A new group called Artists Against Antisemitism, formed in November 2023 in response to what it described as a spike in antisemitism in the arts, devoted most of the $120,000 raised in its inaugural auction to supporting Project Shema, funding the creation of Shema on Campus, a series of workshops aiming to “combat anti-Jewish ideas” at universities.
Project Shema also benefited from a number of other post-October 7th Jewish philanthropic initiatives, including grants from the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund, a San Francisco-based funder of Jewish and progressive causes that, Jewish Currents has reported, began preventing grantees from questioning Israel’s “legitimacy” as a “secure, independent, democratic Jewish state” in fall 2023.
With these resources, the group’s materials and programming grew more ambitious. In addition to piloting Shema on Campus, it created or updated online guides, including a 94-page document on “addressing antisemitism during this time of crisis”; developed tips for building Jewish Employee Resource Groups at workplaces; and advertised coaching services with facilitators and “confidential” counsel to non-Jewish progressives on engaging with Jews and antisemitism.
Perhaps most significantly, the group hired new facilitators, and, according to its annual report, ran 215 trainings at different institutions—including, increasingly, schools and universities—between October 2023 and March 2024. This speaks to a potentially lucrative period for the organization: Project Shema charged Northampton Public Schools $3,500 for three hours of training with Powers, the facilitator, according to the contract obtained by Jewish Currents.
In the spring of 2024, Project Shema landed a contract with the Harvard Business School, around the same time that students created a Gaza solidarity encampment on Harvard Yard and a few months after President Claudine Gay resigned in part due to accusations that she abetted antisemitism on campus. This partnership was secured after alumni recommended the group to the school’s DEI team, the Project Shema spokesperson said.
The group’s work for Harvard was funded in part by the Center for Combating Antisemitism at Combined Jewish Philanthropy, the Boston-area Jewish federation. “After well-received workshops” at the business school, the Shema spokesperson said, the organization was invited to “provide similar programs” across the rest of the Harvard University system, including for university staff. (A spokesperson for Harvard Business School declined to answer questions about the partnership.) According to the task force report, which included training for the proctors and tutors who live with and support undergraduate students in Harvard dorms.
The university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, since renamed the Office of Community and Campus Life (CCL) after right-wing anti-DEI backlash, also invited Project Shema to join the Islamic Network Group (ING), a Muslim-led interfaith organization that frequently collaborates with Jewish groups, to deliver seven sessions across Harvard on antisemitism and Islamophobia called “Honoring Our Shared Humanity.” (Neither Harvard CCL administrators nor ING responded to requests for comment.)
The group hired new facilitators and ran 215 trainings at different institutions—including, increasingly, schools and universities—between October 2023 and March 2024.
Next year, the Harvard T.H. Chan School for Public Health—which, as the host of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights and a magnet for left-leaning students and faculty, was the target of numerous Jewish student complaints referenced in the antisemitism task force report—plans to bring in the organization for three intensive workshops. One is planned for the summer and will be tailored to senior leadership of the school, and two will follow in the fall for students, faculty, and staff, a spokesperson said. The content, they said, has not yet been finalized.
In October 2024, as Harvard was advertising an upcoming Shema/ING session at the school’s Longwood Campus, site of the medical, dental, and public health schools, at least 485 anonymous faculty members signed on to a letter requesting President Alan Garber and the DEI office cancel the session. Among the petition’s contentions was that Project Shema “partners with the controversial Anti-Defamation League . . . whose materials have conflated Judaism with Zionism” and that “these conflations harmfully erase the perspectives of Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, and many other community members.”
The letter came on the heels of previous public campaigns to cancel Project Shema’s appearances at a Northampton high school, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and for the Vancouver School Board’s District Parent Advisory Council, which made similar arguments about Project Shema’s affiliations and content. When the Harvard petition received no response and the event carried on as planned, members of the Palestinian solidarity community on the Longwood Campus decided to attend “to pump the temperature up a bit,” said Eben Philbin, an Israeli American researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health and member of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
Philbin and a Harvard faculty member who attended—the latter of whom asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from the school—reported that, despite Project Shema’s longtime focus on Israel and Zionism, much of its portion of the event avoided the topic entirely. Jacobson, the group’s co-founder and CEO, acted as facilitator, speaking mostly about Jewish history, Jewish diversity, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and historical examples of anti-Jewish violence worldwide. The attendees said Israel initially came up only when Jacobson presented examples of “binary thinking” that could veer into antisemitism.
While criticizing Israel or advocating for Palestinians should not be considered antisemitic, Jacobson said, he suggested that calling Israel itself and “all Zionists” racist or genocidal would be an example of black-and-white antisemitic thinking. Attendees felt that a more substantial conversation about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians would have been totally avoided if they hadn’t raised it during the Q&A session, when they pushed Jacobson to define Zionism directly. In reply, according to Philbin, Jacobson characterized it as a “2,000-year-old ideology all Jews hold in their heart,” which became a political movement in the late 1800s as a response to “millennia of exclusion” of European Jews.
Attendees of Project Shema programming at other institutions said facilitators presented similar definitions of Zionism as authoritative. In the September 2024 Northampton Public Schools workshop, Powers repeated the claim that Zionism is “a 2,000-year-old yearning to return to our ancient homeland on some portion of that land,” according to the video. “It’s not a rallying call against any other group; it’s just Jewish self-determination on some portion of our ancestral homeland.”
Harvard attendees told Jewish Currents they believe this definition of Zionism sidestepped how Zionism as a political ideology has affected Palestinians and erased non-Zionist Jewish history, merging Zionism with Judaism. “They don’t recognize the impact of Zionism in its most common manifestation,” said the anonymous Harvard faculty member. To Philbin, the training was attempting to make Zionism “appeal to the emotions,” rather than deal with the material impacts of Zionism on Palestinians. (Jacobson did not respond to a request to discuss the content of the workshop and attendees’ criticisms.)
Shema’s materials often caution against using certain language to describe Israel’s actions, including “genocide” and “settler colonialism,” because of how such terms might land for Jews
Project Shema also emphasizes a connection between the vast majority of Jews and Zionism in other materials, including one discussion guide that says that “85% to 95% of Jews on earth support Israel’s right to exist and consider Israel an important part of their Jewish identity.” (The guide does not provide a source for these statistics.) Similarly, Shema’s “guide for allies” says that highlighting anti-Zionist Jewish voices can be a form of “tokenization” that “erases the truth that the vast majority of Jews worldwide” support a Jewish state.
At times, the curricula reinforce the implication that attacks on Israel are, by extension, attacks on Jews. For example, Shema’s materials often caution against using certain language to describe Israel’s actions, including “genocide” and “settler colonialism,” because of how such terms might land for Jews. In a November 21st, 2023, resource guide addressing the claim of genocide—which was becomingincreasingly common at the time in response to dehumanizing rhetoric from top Israeli officials, orders for population transfer of Gazans, and mounting evidence of the Israeli military’s targeting of civilians—Project Shema wrote that most Jews experience genocide accusations against Israel as “harmful.” The accusation, the guide said,
doesn’t land in a vacuum; it is said in a world conditioned to see Jews as evil. Regardless of intent, this language taps into latent antisemitism. Claiming a nation is committing genocide, or a people supports genocide, places them outside the community of the good. This can quickly lead to demonization and ostracization.
In response to emailed questions about whether such analysis is meant to imply that no group of Jews should ever be accused of genocide, a Project Shema spokesperson repeatedly denied that the organization considers accusing Israel of genocide to be antisemitic, despite the guide’s invocation of “latent antisemitism.” “We do, however, explore how holding individual Jews accountable for the actions of the Israeli government or accusing all Jews, Zionists, or Jewish institutions of inherently supporting genocide can undermine Jewish safety, inclusion, and belonging,” the spokesperson wrote.
Shema does not categorically paint protesters and Palestinian grievances as antisemitic: Its guide for university administrators from January 2025 denied that protests are “inherently anti-Jewish” and rejected “all efforts to discredit or erase Palestinians’ lived experiences.” But, the organization argued, the language protesters use, “regardless of one’s intent, can perpetuate anti-Jewish biases that undermine Jewish inclusion and safety.”
The group maintained in the same guide that criticisms of Israel and Zionism and slogans associated with the Palestinian liberation movement, including “globalize the intifada,” “decolonization by any means necessary,” “from the river to the sea,” and “Zionism is racism and colonialism,” are “part of a single connected story undermining Jewish inclusion and safety.”
And while Project Shema has likewise stated that anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic, the first edition of its new online publication, Translations, will concern “the conditions and contexts under which anti-Zionism can become harmful to Jews,” according to an email obtained by Jewish Currents. At Harvard, some workshop attendees ultimately concluded that while Shema made room for criticism of Israel and some expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, the organization deemed most opposition to Zionism or calls for decolonization unacceptable. “The problem is we can’t talk about what the ICJ has said is plausibly genocide,” said the anonymous Harvard faculty member. “Asking people undergoing and watching genocide to tone police—you’re kind of missing the larger point.”
Lorber said this fixation on empathy can “blunt some necessary political critique of realities on the ground, turning it into a giant listening circle while Gaza continues to burn.”
Project Shema’s dialogue guides on terms like “genocide”—meant to help Jews uncomfortable with such language speak to their progressive friends—encourage the audience to “start with empathy” by expressing “shared concerns for Palestinian lived experiences and trauma” before raising concerns that language like “genocide” can be harmful. According to anti-racist educator Williams, while empathy plays an important role in political education, Project Shema pays only “lip service [to] valuing the Palestinian perspective,” while ultimately making an exclusive demand for empathy toward Jews.
Attendees are advised to avoid an indictment of genocide because of how that is experienced by Jews, she pointed out, but not consider how Palestinians experience, say, the Star of David, a symbol that has been graffitied on Palestinian homes, bulldozed into Palestinian land by the invading military, and branded on a Palestinian prisoner’s cheeks.
Indeed, antisemitism researcher Lorber said this fixation on empathy can “blunt some necessary political critique of realities on the ground, turning it into a giant listening circle while Gaza continues to burn.” The Jewish professor who requested anonymity for their university expressed frustration that their training did not include specifics about the Nakba—when Zionist forces expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in the process of the Israeli state’s founding—and that it included “no discussion” of the current disastrous conditions in Gaza, even as it discussed the acceptability of language around them.
They were also concerned that Project Shema’s approach elides the power dynamics of such discourses in the United States, in light of the Trump administration’s move to detain and deport international pro-Palestine students and faculty: “It’s all very well and good to say this rhetoric hurts people’s feelings, but when we have an administration saying that this rhetoric should mean you’re abducted, it’s egregious to leave that out,” they said.
Project Shema declined to answer more specific questions about its work at Harvard or attendees’ critiques of its training materials. But it’s clear that the Shema trainings, and other Harvard administration efforts, have not convinced students to give up their activism—including those from corners of the school the administration has especially sought to quiet. On Tuesday, May 27th, for example, several affiliates of the public health and medical schools joined in organizing a 24-hour livestreamed vigil in Harvard Square, where they read “the names of Palestinian children killed in the genocide.”
Harvard’s efforts have also failed to convince Trump to end his campaign to crush the school in the name of fighting antisemitism. In May, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s move to revoke the immigration status of all international students at Harvard and prohibit it from admitting any more; now, the president has issued an executive order attempting to find another route to blocking Harvard’s admission of international students, a major source of revenue for the school. On June 30th, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had found Harvard in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for “deliberate indifference towards harassment of Jewish and Israeli students.”
The administration’s bulletin noted specifically that the various antisemitism trainings Harvard has pledged to provide on campus during the 2025–2026 school year “are unlikely to remedy the deep structural issues [the Office of Civil Rights] has identified.” All in all, even as Harvard has enlisted Project Shema’s help in responding to demands by pro-Israel stakeholders, outside right-wing interests, and the US government—all while maintaining its liberal bona fides—it’s unclear whether such a group can appeal to any of them. “Ultimately, the authoritarian regime won’t be satisfied with mere antisemitism training,” Lorber said. “They’re going to increasingly demand the liquidation of student groups, the dismantling of entire departments, and the firing of professors. That’s where we’re headed.
Emily Wilder is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles.
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