Dr. Barry Trachtenberg: Challenging the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act: Pushing Back Against Jewish Exceptionalist Politics.

Dr. Barry Trachtenberg is the Michael R. and Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History and an associate professor of history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. On Nov. 7, 2017, he testified before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses.”

A scholar of Jewish history and the Nazi Holocaust, Dr. Trachtenberg told the committee: “Legislation such as H.R.6421-Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016 is not a genuine attempt to contend with actual anti-Semitism, but rather is more correctly understood as a means to quell what are in fact protected acts of speech that are vital and necessary both to the scholarly missions of educational institutions and to the functioning of democratic societies.” He cautioned that “many studies are based on a definition of anti-Semitism that de facto defines criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic….Yet as within American Jewry as a whole, Jewish students hold a wide range of views concerning Israel, from unilaterally supportive to sharply critical.”

Dr. Trachtenberg earned his Ph.D. in history at UCLA and a post-graduate diploma in Jewish Studies at Oxford University. Prior to joining Wake Forest in 2016, he was an associate professor and director of programs in Judaic Studies and Hebrew Studies at the State University of New York’s University at Albany and interim director (2010-2012) of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies. He is the author of the 2018 Bloomsbury Publishing book, The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance.