Did a Social Justice-Focused Jewish Non-Profit Give In to a Right-Wing Harassment Campaign by Firing an Anti-Zionist Employee?

By Omar Zahzah – Jul 8, 2022

Avodah claims it was not influenced by a right-wing smear campaign when it fired Anna Rajagopal, but the organization’s actions legitimized the harassment of anti-Zionist activists.

It was supposed to be a dream job.

When Anna Rajagopal spoke to me about Avodah, they understood it to be a “non-profit social justice group that works specifically with recent college graduates and young Jews from the ages of 21 to 26, placing them in a target city with the National Jewish Service Corps to do Tikkun Olam work, or ‘world-healing work,’ specifically around social justice.”

For Rajagopal, who is a young, anti-Zionist activist and Jew of color, Avodah’s mission statement resonated because of its emphasis on anti-racism and inciting social change. Moved by the organization’s proclaimed ethics, Rajagopal applied for a position that combined social media work with racial justice messaging.

“This seemed like the perfect position for me because I got to combine my love for Judaism and my love for social justice and my love for community with my ability to engage large audiences digitally.”

Then, a Right-wing troll site got involved.

A Right-Wing Troll Campaign
In many ways an updated version of Canary Mission, Stopantisemitism.org is a blacklist site dedicated to doxxing outspoken critics of Israel and pressuring employers to fire them.

On June 25th, 2022, Stopantisemitism.org created a new profile about Rajagopal as their so-called “Antisemite of the Week.” Stopantisemitism included screenshots of Rajagopal’s Tweets, which included derogatory statements about Zionists as well as broader analysis of Israeli apartheid, Zionist settler-colonialism, and the need for decolonization:

Examples of Anna Rajagopal’s tweets included in a profile on stopantisemitism.org

The Stopantisemitism profile ends by encouraging its large follower base to engage in targeted harassment by pressuring Avodah to fire Rajagopal.

What happened to Rajagopal is, therefore, unsurprising even if chilling.

What is surprising is the possibility that any organization ostensibly dedicated to anti-racism or social justice work could accept the fringe, right-wing and racist fanatacism of a site like Stopantisemitism.org, which is a blatant attempt to encourage targeted harassment of Palestinians and their allies (often allies of color) for their political beliefs.

This is a matter of compounded harm. When employers and universities unthinkingly penalize employees and students for anti-Zionist views based on Stopantisemitism.org’s anti-Palestinian and antisemitic smear campaigns, they’re not only depriving often already vulnerable individuals of work and education for their political views that the site falsely spins as racist.

In such circumstances, Palestinians and their allies are also collectively harmed because Stopantisemitism.org becomes legitimized as an authority, when in point of fact it needs to be resisted and exposed as merely the latest racist attempt to silence criticism of the Israeli state.

Unsatisfying Explanations
Days after Stopantisemitism’s harassment campaign of Rajagopal began, Rajagopal received a call from Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook, who said that they were letting Rajagopal go.

Rajagopal stated that when they asked for the reason, Cook said only, “Because you incite violence on Twitter,” thereby reinforcing one of the central claims that Stopantisemitism.org was perpetuating in its harassment campaign of Rajagopal.

Email language sent from Cook to an individual (likely reaching out as a result of Stopantisemitism’s campaign) assures the complainant that “After looking more closely into the statements made by Anna, we have decided were not aligned with Avodah’s mission. Anna was hired in a part-time summer role, but we don’t believe their publicly-shared values align with ours, and we are parting ways.”

It appears that a supposedly social-justice aligned organization immediately folded to the whims of a racist right-wing troll site and gave third-party complainants far more responsive communication than its own employee single-handedly facing down a torrent of politicized racist harassment.

After firing Rajagopal, Avodah released a Twitter thread that predictably sought to distance the organization from any complicity in its enabling of Stopantisemitism.org’s harassment campaign.

But the organization’s own actions arguably legitimized and prompted an escalation in this very harassment.

Rajagopal stated that some of the most horrific dimensions of this harassment, which included sexually harassing messages being sent to their family, in fact transpired after harassers were emboldened by Avodah’s firing.

Linked Forever
“We did not and do not make decisions in response to actions or demands of any external group and we did not and do not make personnel decisions based on an individual’s politics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” reads one reflection from Avodah’s Twitter thread.

Avodah has received criticism in the past for refusing to speak out against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people or to support BDS.

Cook’s own Avodah profile states that the current Avodah CEO was involved with organizations such as the liberal Zionist New Israel Fund.

Of course, a past affiliation does not always automatically determine a current organization’s political line.

But if Avodah truly does not “make personnel decisions based on an individual’s politics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” then why would they fire an anti-Zionist employee so soon after a smear campaign launched by a Zionist troll site? And if Avodah wants to invoke a right to set its own standards of conduct as a private organization, why was Rajagopal reportedly told that their online activism would not be an issue?

One possible answer that has been posed by Rajagopal and anti-Zionist Rabbi Brant Rosen in a recent blog post expressing solidarity with Rajagopal is that Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook is currently running for public office.

This is certainly feasible. Yet Cook is not running for Congress, but New York State Office; the presence of pro-BDS Senators such as Julia Salazar suggests that being associated with criticisms of Israeli state policy is not such a political liability at this level.

A more likely possibility may be funding: a cached version of Avodah’s Supporters page reveals a list of Zionist organizations and individuals that includes film director Steven Spielberg, who donated a percentage of the $1 million he received from Israel’s Genesis Prize to Avodah. The Dorot Foundation and UJA Federation New York are also listed among the supporters.

We may never know the precise reason that Avodah fired Rajagopal.

But if the organization did so under the belief that caving to Stopantisemitism.org’s harassment campaign would spare them from further scrutiny, the opposite has proved true: anti-Zionist activists have been criticizing Avodah’s actions on Twitter.

On a broader level, Avodah may have ironically tied itself to Stopantisemitism.org in its very attempt to achieve distance.

For Rajagopal, who has lost the most, “Stopantisemitism and Avodah will be linked forever.”

(Mondoweiss)