Marc Dollinger: Navigating Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism & Campus Politics After October 7

What happens when anti-Zionism and antisemitism blur together—and the people most affected are left to navigate the fallout alone?In this episode of The Pluralist Podcast: From Both Sides of the Ocean, Orly Erez-Likhovski (Executive Director of IRAC) and Rabbi Josh Weinberg (URJ Vice President for Israel & Reform Zionism, Director of ARZA) are joined by Marc Dollinger, Professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, for a deeply human conversation about life on campus after October 7.Drawing on more than two decades of teaching—and lived experience on one of the most politically charged campuses in the United States—Professor Dollinger reflects on what it means to defend nuance in environments that increasingly punish it.“At one university, I was labeled a self-hating leftist Jew,” he recalls. “And after a 400-mile drive north, I arrived in San Francisco as a right-wing Zionist colonial conspirator.” The journey between those two labels, he explains, is not just personal—it reveals how easily complex identities are flattened into caricatures.→ Support IRAC’s work for religious freedom, democracy, and equality in Israel:https://apzprxtx.donorsupport.co/page/PluralistPodcast→ Sign up for Orly’s weekly updates from Israel:https://www.irac.org/sign-up→ Get Josh’s newsletter on Israel and Reform Zionism:https://cloud.email.rj.org/blankSubCenter?formid=701UG00000Is8uHYARTogether, they ask:How do we distinguish legitimate political critique from antisemitism—not in theory, but in the lived reality of students and educators?The conversation explores how academic ideas like “constructed narratives” move from theory into real-world clashes, and how groupthink on campus often replaces curiosity with certainty.“If I treated all anti-Zionism as antisemitism,” Professor Dollinger explains, “that’s all I would be doing—and I’d burn out.”They also reflect on the emotional toll this moment has taken on Jewish students, many of whom feel isolated or afraid to speak, and on the limits of institutional responses in spaces driven by polarization rather than care.And yet, the conversation does not end in despair.“My hope is in the humanity of individuals,” Professor Dollinger says. Not in slogans or movements, but in moments when people sit down, take a breath, and allow their souls to be open. In those encounters, he argues, understanding—fragile but real—is still possible.This episode is for anyone trying to hold complexity without hardening, to listen without surrendering values, and to believe that individual openness can still push back against fear, flattening, and false binaries.