AMCHA Initiative

AMCHA Initiative describes its central motivation as protecting Jewish students from direct and indirect assault and fear while attending college.[1] The organization says it is not an Israel advocacy group and takes no position on current or past Israeli government policies; its focus is the safety and educational rights of Jewish students.[7][8] Co-founder and director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin has stated that AMCHA became involved in opposing academic boycotts of Israel specifically because such boycotts could harm Jewish students' academic freedom and educational rights.[8]

AMCHA states that it uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and the U.S. State Department's definition to identify incidents.[7] Under those definitions, the organization holds that some extreme anti-Israel behavior — such as blaming Jews collectively for actions taken by Israel, or targeting Israel as the Jewish collective — may qualify as antisemitic, while criticism of the Israeli government or its policies that does not meet those criteria is not classified as antisemitic.[7] The organization identifies antisemitic expression, targeting of Jewish students and staff, and BDS activity as the primary areas it monitors.[9]

AMCHA's aims extend beyond documentation. The organization says it uses research findings to inform university administrators and the public about incidents and those it identifies as responsible, presses university leaders to take action, and mobilizes community activists.[1] By 2025, AMCHA coordinated a coalition of more than 150 organizations and thousands of grassroots activists, and produced nearly a dozen custom reports for policymakers and federal agencies.[2]

AMCHA Initiative was co-founded by Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin.[1] Beckwith is a UCLA Professor Emeritus who taught and conducted research at UCLA for more than thirty years.[1] Rossman-Benjamin served as a University of California, Santa Cruz Hebrew and Jewish Studies faculty member from 1996 to 2016 and continues as AMCHA's director.[1]

By August 2012, the co-founders were already publicly describing AMCHA as an organization dedicated to informing the California Jewish community about harassment and intimidation of Jewish students on California campuses, and they had been involved for several years in documenting and addressing campus antisemitism before that date.[10] The organization's name — the Hebrew word amcha, meaning "your people" — reflects its aim of bringing people from across North America together to express concern for the safety and well-being of Jewish college and university students.[1]

AMCHA's research arm conducts systematic analysis using a methodology it developed to define, document, and analyze antisemitic activity on campus, as well as institutional structures it considers to legitimize or enable such activity.[1] The organization says it monitors media, social media, submitted accounts, and witnessed incidents for evidence of campus antisemitism.[11] A 2017 AMCHA study focused on confirmed incidents gathered from media reports and eyewitness accounts, rather than student attitude surveys or subjective self-reports.[12]

The organization's publicly accessible Antisemitism Tracker covered more than 700 campuses and recorded over 10,000 incidents as of 2025; a March 2026 statement placed that figure at more than 11,000 incidents across more than 750 campuses.[4][2] AMCHA's 2015 achievements document reported 461 incidents at 129 campuses, alongside 165 Jewish student testimonials from 43 campuses.[11] By 2019, AMCHA's incident database listed nearly 2,600 incidents on U.S. campuses for the four-year period from 2015 to 2019, and a separate disruptions database listed more than 100 incidents involving the disruption or attempted shutdown of Jewish and pro-Israel speakers or activities.[6]

In December 2024, AMCHA released its Anti-Zionist Faculty (AZF) Barometer, a school ranking tool using a 0-to-5 scale based on four measures: faculty endorsements of academic boycotts of Israel, anti-Zionist departmental statements, the presence of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) groups, and FJP-sponsored events and statements.[13] AMCHA described the tool as intended to help campus stakeholders assess faculty activity and help prospective students and families evaluate campus conditions for Jewish or pro-Israel students.[13]

AMCHA-related publications have reported different annual totals, and the cited materials do not show that the underlying criteria were identical.[14][15] UN Watch reported that AMCHA recorded 309 antisemitic incidents on 79 U.S. college campuses in 2015 and 433 incidents on 72 campuses in 2016, an increase of 40 percent.[14] A Ynet report separately said AMCHA documented 648 incidents involving antisemitic speech and actions in 2019, compared with 334 in 2015.[15]

A 2017 AMCHA study examined more than 100 public and private colleges and universities with some of the country's largest Jewish undergraduate populations.[12] That study found at least one antisemitic incident on 99% of campuses with at least one anti-Israel student group, compared with 16% of campuses without such groups, and reported incidents targeting Jewish students for physical harm at 57 campuses that had an anti-Israel student group.[16] For campuses in the study, 70% hosted events the organization classified as antisemitic, and more than 300 antisemitic incidents occurred in 2015 across that population.[16]

A 2018 study analyzed incidents from 2015 through the first half of 2018, distinguishing classic antisemitism from Israel-related incidents. Classic incidents outnumbered Israel-related incidents at a ratio of three to one, but AMCHA characterized the Israel-related incidents as more likely to contribute to a hostile environment for Jewish students.[16] The study reported that 94% of anti-Israel incidents showed intent to harm Jewish students, and documented a rise in calls to boycott pro-Israel students or groups — from three such incidents in 2015 to four in 2016, 14 in 2017, and 18 in the first half of 2018.[17] Incidents of genocidal expression were recorded at 46, 113, and 153 in 2015, 2016, and 2017, respectively, with 39 in the first half of 2018.[16]

For the 2021–2022 academic year, AMCHA studied 109 campuses popular with Jewish students and classified a category of incidents as "threats to Jewish identity," defined as redefinition, denigration, or suppression of Jewish identity — including efforts to remove Zionists or Zionism from campus, cancel Israel-related events, intimidate Jewish students, or discourage Jewish identity trips.[18] The study reported 254 such incidents, with nearly 60% of campuses experiencing at least one; Harvard had the highest count at 25, followed by the University of Chicago with 13, Tufts with 12, and Rutgers and UCLA with 10 each.[18] That same report was cited in a 2023 House hearing by Representative Nathaniel Moran.[19]

In September 2024, AMCHA released Academic Extremism: How a Faculty Network Fuels Campus Unrest and Antisemitic Violence, examining 103 U.S. schools with large Jewish student populations. The report found that assaults on Jewish students were 7.3 times more likely and violent threats 3.4 times more likely at campuses with FJP chapters compared to those without, and framed these as associations rather than causal conclusions.[20] A 2026 book chapter by Rossman-Benjamin drawing on six empirical studies spanning more than a decade found that campuses with more faculty who publicly endorsed academic boycotts of Israel had higher levels of reported antisemitic activity, and that faculty support for such boycotts was a stronger predictor of targeting Jewish students for harm than the presence of an anti-Zionist student group.[21]

AMCHA's work has been cited before Congress on multiple occasions. At a 2017 House Judiciary Committee hearing, witness testimony associated AMCHA's April 2017 report, "Antisemitism: At the Epicenter of Campus Intolerance," with examples including Israeli scholars being prevented from speaking, confrontations escalating to shoving, and the phrase "Death to Israel and to all Jews" appearing on a Jewish student organization's Facebook page.[5]

A 2019 House hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism included witness testimony citing AMCHA's incident database of nearly 2,600 incidents from 2015 to 2019, and noted that many of those incidents involved Students for Justice in Palestine.[6] A 2020 House hearing described AMCHA as "a non-profit dedicated to investigating and combating anti-Semitism in American higher education institutions" and quoted its 2016 finding that consideration of anti-Israel divestment resolutions in student government was "strongly linked to a surge in anti-Semitic activity."[22] A 2024 House hearing submission summarized AMCHA and Brandeis University studies as finding a correlation between the presence of Students for Justice in Palestine and increased campus anti-Zionism and antisemitism.[23]

AMCHA's work operates within a broader dispute over how antisemitism should be defined and measured in campus contexts. The Institute for National Security Studies notes that organizations monitoring BDS and Israel-related activity do not use a uniform standard for deciding what counts as antisemitism, and that most U.S. Jewish organizations do not agree that every effort to delegitimize Israel should be classified as antisemitic.[9] The ADL's position, as cited by INSS, is that BDS or anti-Israel activity should be deemed antisemitic only when it uses clearly antisemitic stereotypes or expressions — a threshold narrower than AMCHA's stated application of the IHRA definition to conduct targeting Israel as the Jewish collective.[9][7]

The statistical relationships reported by AMCHA should be read as associations rather than independently established causal conclusions in the cited materials.[24][23] The American Jewish Committee's citation of AMCHA's 2016 report, for instance, noted that 95% of schools with BDS activity had one or more antisemitic incidents, compared with 33% of schools with no BDS activity, without establishing a causal link.[24] Historian Pamela S. Nadell, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in 2017, acknowledged that antisemitism occurred on campuses, but argued that the incidents described did not prove that campus environments were generally "rife with antisemitism" or that antisemitism had created a pervasive climate of fear preventing Jewish students from fully experiencing college life.[5]