Overview
The AEN partners with more ubiquitous organizations that use the “antisemitism scare” to conduct right-wing attacks on universities, scholarship, and campus communities. Common tactics include letter writing campaigns and data collection that can be circulated and re-used by fellow zionist organizations. AEN partners in these escalating attacks have included Hillel International, Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC), Jewish National Fund USA, Louis D. Brandeis Center, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, as well as the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group behind Project 2025 and Project Esther. AEN and FAAM advisory board members are also closely connected with AMCHA Initiative, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), all of which similarly advance racist and repressive attacks in the guise of scholarship on antisemitism.
AEN & Hillel International
The AEN partners with Hillel International on their Campus Climate Initiative (CCI) with participation from over 100 colleges and universities in the US and Canada. The partnership was announced in 2020. with the stated mission of making zionism a central component of university and college DEI initiatives. AEN and Hillel co-published an updated “Best Practices and Principles” in May 2025 for “upholding free speech and academic freedom” while swiftly rooting out anti-Israel sentiment, as a direct response to the anti-genocide campus encampments the previous semester.
AEN & Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
The AEN announced an official partnership with the ADL in [date]. In September 2025, the two organizations co-published deliberately misleading report titled. Faculty Under Fire: Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias in Higher Education. The findings were based on a completely biased and selective survey of 209 pro-Israel AEN members (characterized simply as “Jewish Professors”) and announced a crisis of widespread antisemitism towards Jewish faculty. The so-called surge was blamed on Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP)—despite Jewish faculty and staff forming a substantial base of FSJP’s membership. AEN and ADL’s fraudulent report was subsequently disseminated by zionist media outlets including the Algemeiner, Jerusalem Post, and the doxxing platform Campus Reform.
AEN & Jewish National Fund-USA
The AEN partners with the Jewish National Fund (JNF)—which has long taken a prominent role in the theft and erasure of Palestinian land—to offer Faculty Fellowships, including sponsored trips to Israel for academics and administrators. AEN is the recipient of an ongoing JNF grant focused on integrating alumni of JNF’s Faculty Fellowship program into AEN’s network of faculty members. Over twenty AEN faculty members represented the Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement (FAAM) at the JNF Global Conference for Israel in November 2025. members from AEN Director of Communications and Programming, Raeefa Shams, is also a board member at JNF-USA.
AEN & Heritage Foundation
AEN members Mattie Harris and Albert Cheng (University of Arkensas) partnered with the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene to publish a report in AEN’s Research Paper Series measuring the impacts of 10-day study abroad programs in Israel on “Perceptions of Antisemitism and Attitudes About Israel.” They concluded, unsurprisingly, that university students and educators who participated in these propoganda trips viewed Israel and Zionists more favorably.
AEN & Boundless Israel
AEN sponsored Boundless Israel’s 2020 report “BDS as a Threat to Academic Freedom and Campus Free Speech in the United States.” Boundless co-founder and former Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs speechwriter Aviva Klompas also spoke at Israel on Campus Coalition’s 2023 national leadership summit.
Joint Pressure Campaigns
The AEN also partners with Zionist organizations to issue joint statements and press releases targeting institutions whose members advance an academic boycott of Israel. These campaigns have been directed at universities with Middle East Studies Programs, specific academic departments, and especially academic associations. The latter that have been targeted include the American Anthropological Association (AAA), American Association of Geographers (AAG), American Association of University Professors (AAUP), American Bar Association (ABA), American Historical Association (AHA), American Psychological Association (APA), Modern Language Association (MLA), National Women Studies Association (NWSA), and Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP). Prolonged campaigns have focused on the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Anti-AAUP Campaign
The American Association of University Professors’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure reversed its increasingly unpopular 20-year-old position in August 2024 at the height of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, recognizing boycotts as “legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” AEN Executive Director Miriam Elman complained to Inside Higher Ed that the AAUP had been “hijacked” by pro-Palestinian sympathies and could “no longer be able to call itself the arbiter of academic guild rules.” Cary Nelson, the staunchly pro-Israel former AAUP president and Elman’s close ally, also penned an op-ed against the AAUP’s reversal and started a corresponding petition. (The AEN has co-published several of Nelson’s works, including a racist research paper disparaging Palestinian higher education and his 2019 book Israel Denial).
In March 2025, the AEN once again challenged the AAUP over a webinar on Scholasticide in Palestine. The panel of experts discussed Israel’s confirmed systemic destruction of Gaza’s educational infrastructure since October 2023—including 95% of schools, all 12 universities, libraries, archives, museums, and heritage sites—and its deliberate murder of thousands of students, teachers, and academics. AEN’s pressure letter claimed the event promoted “a one-sided narrative demonizing Israel” and was co-signed by the heads of the ADL, AJC, Hillel International, and JFNA.
The ADL and AEN also partnered on an email-writing campaign challenging AAUP’s collaboration with pro-Palestinian academic groups for its 2025 National Day for Action in Higher Education, and recently denounced AAUP President Todd Wolfson for referring to Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign Gaza as a genocide.
Anti-MESA Campaign
For many years, the AEN has shown animosity towards MESA, the leading academic organization in the U.S. devoted to study of the Middle East. AEN first issued statements in December 2021 and March 2022 rebuking the decision by MESA member to advance a BDS resolution against the Israeli State. Soonafter, the AEN initiated a pressure campaign targetting 12 universities that receive federal grants for Middle East Studies Programs to withdraw their membership from MESA. The campaign invovled partnering with other virulently anti-Palestinian pseudo-academic lobbying groups (many of which share board and leading members with the AEN), including the AMCHA Initiative, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (LDB), and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME).