Jewish academics are being “targeted and silenced’’, sacked or boycotted, Emeritus Professor Greg Craven found in his government-initiated investigation of 32 universities. His damning report, released on May 14, 2026, exposes ongoing intimidation and harassment of Jewish staff and students on campus – including academics “glorifying the leader of a proscribed terrorist organisation’’ to students.
The Australian’s Natasha Bita reports: “Antisemitism is being directly used to repress the academic freedom of its victims.” Professor Craven – a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University – lashed the university sector for failing to adopt clear and enforceable definitions of antisemitism – five months after 15 people were shot dead at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach last December.
Criticising “arcane and almost unusable complaints and disciplinary processes’’ across higher education, Professor Craven found that university campuses had hosted aggressive protests and sit-ins featuring antisemitic slogans, offensive symbols, antisemitic guest speakers and “loud harassment of Jewish students and others seen as supporting the state of Israel or ‘Zionists’.”
“It is implausible for universities to deny any significant level of blame here,’’ he said. “Antisemitism is a continuing and very serious problem within Australian universities. Not only is any degree of antisemitism in our universities racist, bigoted, unethical and immoral, it undermines their international viability as institutions of research and learning. “As institutions of free debate and intellect they cannot allow themselves – or others connected with them – to be perceived as discriminating against a vulnerable and fearful minority.”
Professor Craven, who has built a career developing and interpreting complex regulations, scorned some university definitions as “profoundly obscure, impenetrable and truly baffling”.
OPINION
Andrew L. Urban
Antisemitism is antidemocratic … primarily because it rejects core democratic principles: individual equality under the law, protection of minorities, universal rights, empirical reasoning over collective scapegoating, and the legitimacy of open institutions. Liberal democracy treats individuals as rights-bearing equals regardless of ethnicity, religion, or ancestry. Antisemitism singles out Jews as a collective category for suspicion, exclusion, or harm—whether through quotas, boycotts, expulsions, or violence. This is incompatible with “one person, one vote” and equal protection. Historical codifications (e.g., Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of citizenship) directly dismantled democratic equality.
Not every critic of Israeli policy is antisemitic (policy disputes are normal in democracies), and not every antisemite overthrows a democracy—prejudice can exist in flawed democracies. However, the essentialist form (Jews as inherent threat by nature of being Jewish) consistently erodes the universalism democracy requires. “Antizionism” becomes antidemocratic when it denies Jews (alone) national self-determination while endorsing it for others, or when it imports collective guilt into domestic politics. Left- and right-wing variants both weaponize it: one via “oppressor” intersectionality that exempts Jews from minority protections, the other via ethnic purity or conspiracy.
In short, antisemitism treats a group as outside the democratic “we,” substitutes myth for mechanism, and justifies exceptions to liberal norms. Stable democracies contain it through assimilation, law, and cultural norms; its rise signals fragility in those guardrails. Data from Pew and historical records consistently show it clusters with lower interpersonal trust and institutional scepticism, not neutral pluralism.
Democratic deliberation recognises that problems (economy, wars, inequality) have complex, debatable causes solvable through evidence, debate, and reform, unlike classic antisemitic tropes.