On April 20, 2022, in the aftermath of the Middle East Studies Association’s endorsement of an academic boycott against Israel, 87 organizations (including Legal Insurrection Foundation) sent a joint letter organized by The AMCHA Initiative to the U.S. Secretary of Education asking the federal government not to fund Middle East studies programs boycotting Israel.
The letter provides, in part:
We are 87 education, civil rights and religious organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of members and supporters. We are deeply concerned that in the wake of the recent Middle East Studies Association (MESA) vote endorsing an academic boycott of Israel, some directors and affiliated faculty in federally-funded Middle East Studies National Resource Centers (NRCs), most of which are institutional MESA members, may feel emboldened to implement the boycott in ways that will substantively hurt U.S. students and faculty and directly violate the legislative intent of Title VI of the Higher Education Act. We therefore urge you to establish safeguards to ensure that an academic boycott of Israel, or of any country within the academic purview of a federally funded area studies program, may never be implemented by the program’s affiliated personnel.