“At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater,” wrote Gayle Kirshenbaum in the May 8 issue of Forward, a “Jewish, independent, non-profit,” as it is self-described.
“Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to ‘sing’ for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the ‘pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza,’” Kirshenbaum continued.
Kirshenbaum is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Daily News, HuffPost, Newsweek, Tikkun and other outlets.
The backlash to Pederson’s speech was predictably swift. “The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable,” Kirshenbaum reported.
“But to me, Peterson’s speech was a reminder of one of the most important lessons I took away from my time at the University of Michigan: that questioning Zionism is a necessary part of any Jewish life that aims to center justice,” she explained.
Indeed, conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism — as the Israeli regime and its ardent supporters do while falsely claiming to speak and act for all Jews — sets back the struggle to eradicate Jew hatred.
We publish the Forward article, along with the transcript of Peterson’s speech, for the information of our readers.
The headline, subhead, text, and photo of the article that immediately follows are from the original. The transcript of Peterson’s speech at the end of this post, along with its headline and photo, are by World-Outlook.
— World-Outlook editors
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I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
A controversial speech conveyed essential lessons for all Jews
May 8, 2026
At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech [see transcript below this article – W-O] in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater.
Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to “sing” for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
Peterson’s address was a historian’s invitation to every student and parent in the Ann Arbor stadium to recognize that the fight for Palestinian rights shares roots with our greatest movements for justice, including the struggle against antisemitism.
The backlash, predictably, was swift. The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable.
But to me, Peterson’s speech was a reminder of one of the most important lessons I took away from my time at the University of Michigan: that questioning Zionism is a necessary part of any Jewish life that aims to center justice.
I graduated from Michigan in 1989, and spent much of my last year in Ann Arbor ensconced at Hillel, where I edited a magazine for Jewish students. I’d grown up going to Young Judaea summer camps and had spent a college semester in Israel, where I’d witnessed the beginning of the first Intifada. I returned to find a shanty in the middle of campus that had been erected, a student organizer told our magazine, “to bring the uprising to the community. It is to show the conditions of the Palestinians and the brutal oppression of the Israeli army.”
The shanty evoked those then prevalent on campuses everywhere to symbolize the struggle of Black South Africans against settler colonialism and apartheid. The new shanty on our campus asserted that these words also applied to Israel.
While I was strongly against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — where Israel would not remove any settlements until 2005 — I was distressed and confused by the shanty’s silent, ever-present message about Israel’s past and present. Is Israel an apartheid state, I wondered?
So, I put that question on the cover of our magazine.
The Hillel director called me into his office and somberly expressed his concern. But Hillel International had not yet officially clamped down on student activities that question Israel and Zionism.
So, our cover story ran and we dropped our magazine in bundles across campus. At the time, I thought of myself as a liberal Zionist, and I secretly rooted for the student who tried to disprove the devastating charge. But as young journalists, my fellow magazine staffers and I were committed to exploring the views of those who erected the shanty, no matter their hostility to Zionism. We didn’t code the hostility as danger. No one thought we should report our ideological opponents — the kids who fell asleep on their books in the library just like we did — to the dean or to the government for arrest or deportation.
Over my time as an undergraduate, I’d come to recognize in these kaffiyeh-clad Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students the same history-minded, righteous hope that animated me.
Decades later, in the spring of 2024, we all watched as pro-Palestinian student activists — including many Jewish students — set up campus encampments around the country to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. At Michigan, the encampment was set up on the Diag, the university’s public square, where on the day of my own graduation I’d protested the university’s military research.
As the mother of a recent college grad, I was humbled by the determination of these kids, who put up tents, organized teach-ins, and then suffered as police turned off their bodycams and used pepper spray against them. They were lawfully protesting for the university to divest from Israel as it bombed the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza — which is now home to the largest number of child amputees in modern history.
What I understand, and Professor Peterson understands, is that the student activists that he lauded at the commencement are fighting not against Jewish life but for Palestinians’ right to survive daily, as people, and as a people. These activists have asked us to understand, finally, that Zionism is what it does.
“It has been hard work to examine my own mind,” Tzvia Thier, a Jewish Israeli mother, wrote in an essay in the 2021 collection A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. As a child, Thier immigrated to Israel from Romania in the wake of the Holocaust. In 2009, Thier accompanied her daughter to “protect” her while she joined an action to fight the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Thier was 65, and realized that it was the first time in her life that she had had conversations with Palestinians. She understood then that “it was not my daughter who needed to be protected, but the Palestinians.”
“Many questions leave me wondering how I could have not thought about them before,” she wrote. “My solid identity was shaken and then broken. I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty, and hatred by ‘my’ people toward the ‘others.’ And what you finally see, you can no longer unsee.”
When that shanty went up on Michigan’s campus in the late ’80s, I began to question all that I’d learned about Israel’s founding. I began to question the very idea of an ethnostate — in the name of any people, anywhere — that enshrines the supremacy of one group of people over another.
By the time I became a mother, I’d become anti-Zionist. I understood — with a grief that does not abate — that, as Jews, our history of oppression has become an alibi for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
We must reject the bad faith accusations of antisemitism that have emptied the word of meaning and enabled authoritarian repression. When students on campuses today charge Israel with apartheid and genocide, they are echoing reports from B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization. I ask the parents of my generation to read these reports and do as Thier did — to allow themselves to see what we have not wanted to see.
I stand with the more than 2,000 University of Michigan faculty, staff, students and alumni who have condemned the university’s response to the commencement address heard round the world.
For the sake of all of our children, I ask that we each do all we can to open our community’s heart to Palestinian history and humanity. That we each join the urgent struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people.
This is the way that our Jewish college kids will find the deep and true safety of community: by leaving hatred, fear, and isolation behind; by honoring Jewish history by standing in solidarity with all who are oppressed; and by roaring in a stadium for freedom and justice, along with their entire generation.
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The Freedoms We All Enjoy Were Hard Won
The following is the transcript of the speech by University of Michigan history professor Derek Peterson at the school’s May 2, 2026, commencement ceremony at the U of M campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. World-Outlook transcribed the speech from the original YouTube video.
By Derek Peterson
All right, so my name’s Derek Peterson. I’m the professor of history and of African studies and chair of the faculty senate and I’m very impressed with our student musicians. I am very glad to be in front of you all today. I’m delighted to have a chance to talk with all of you.
In 1865, a young woman named Sarah Burger applied for admission to the University of Michigan. In those days, there were 450 students on campus and all of them were men. There were also 20 members of the faculty and all of them were men, too.
Michigan’s president at the time was a man named Henry Tappan, and he was opposed to the admission of women. When we attempt… Wait, wait, go ahead. Go. Yeah. [laughter]
When we attempt to disturb God’s order, he wrote, we produce monstrosities. That was President Tappan’s view. So, it must have taken a lot of courage for young Mrs. Burger to make her application to U of M.
She was no wilting flower. She was a suffragette who was familiar, that is, with the program with its rights. She had attended a conference on women’s rights in Cleveland at the tender age of 14.
Her application to Michigan was received skeptically by the Board of Regents who wrote to the presidents of East Coast universities to ask for advice. And the president of Rutgers, among others, wrote back to say that allowing women into the University of Michigan would, quote, obliterate their refined and retiring delicacy. [boos]
So, in 1858, the Board of Regents unanimously voted against Sarah Burger’s admission to the university. She, however, was not deterred. In 1859, she applied again and got 1,429 other women of the state also to apply for Michigan. [cheering]
They were the whole campaign.
The Board of Regents again refused to consider Sarah Burger’s application. In the end, Michigan waited until 1870, after the US Civil War, to finally get around to opening its doors to women. Today, the landscape is very different. 53% of the graduating class of 2026 is made up of women. [cheering] [applause] [cheering]
So, it’s easy to look upon these things and say, “Woohoo, congratulations to all of us.”
The point that I want to make, though, is that the freedoms that we all enjoy were hard won. They [snorts] weren’t handed to us by a generous and far-seeing administration. This is the greatest public university in the world because people like Miss Sarah Burger refused to accept the enclosures and orthodoxies of their time. [cheering]
And they saw in the University of Michigan a promise that this great university would actively place itself in the service of all the people of this great state. So, the next time you sing Hail to the Victors or The Yellow and Blue, sing for Sarah Burger. [cheering]
And sing for the thousands of other students who have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of social justice over the course of centuries.
Sing for Moritz Levi, the first Jewish professor at the University of Michigan. [cheering]
Appointed professor of French in 1896, he was to open the doors of this great university to generations of Jewish students who found in Ann Arbor a safe haven from the anti-Semitism of the East Coast universities.
Sing for the students of the Black Action Movement whose members demanded a curriculum that would reflect the experience and identity of Black people in this country. [cheering]
Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists [loudest cheering] who have, over these past two years, opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza. [ovation]
The greatness of this institution does not only rest on the shoulders and on the accomplishments of our student athletes who deserve all the congratulations we can offer them. But the greatness of this university rests also on the courage and the conviction of student activists who have pushed this university down the path toward justice. It is to them that we can rightly sing, “Hail to the victors valiant, hail to the conquering heroes, hail to Michigan, the leaders and the best.”
Congratulations to all of you who are graduating today. Go Blue.
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Categories: US Politics