Adira Fogelman is a business administration junior at Cal Poly. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
My name is Adira Fogelman, and I am a business administration junior at Cal Poly. I am also Jewish, having held several leadership positions in various Jewish organizations on campus, including SLO Hillel. A few months ago, I delivered testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C. about campus antisemitism. You can read that testimony here.
I am writing in response to Mr. Kyle Tanaka’s recent Mustang News op-ed defending his research guide titled “Israel Palestine Protests — Cal Poly Student Activism” and criticizing its removal.
Read the original Letter to the Editor here: Cal Poly let the ADL censor and misrepresent my research
Amid a global rise of antisemitism since the attacks on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Jewish students are rightfully alarmed by Mr. Tanaka’s research guide. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism — and on that point, Mr. Tanaka is undoubtedly correct.
However, the concern is not criticism of Israel alone; it is the pattern of framing, omission and representation that, taken together, contributes to an environment where Jewish students feel targeted or excluded.
Concerns about this guide did not originate externally, nor were they prompted solely by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). They came from Cal Poly Jewish students, faculty and community members who recognized serious issues in how their identity and perspectives were represented. The ADL report card itself notes that the guide was removed after complaints from the “community and ADL,” yet the former was not given a proper voice in Mr. Tanaka’s letter.
To reduce those concerns to external pressure from the ADL is to dismiss and undermine the very community most affected by its content.
In Mr. Tanaka’s op-ed, he repeatedly insists that his guide was not about Israel and Palestine, claiming that it did not “focus exclusively” on the topic. This is misleading; Israel and Palestine is one of the most prominent and extensively developed themes in the guide. His own examples reveal that the guide included definitions of Zionism, descriptions of Jewish organizations and discussion of Israel-related protests. Once those topics are included, accuracy and representation of all sides are essential in a serious academic setting.
His defense of the guide’s definition of Zionism is particularly telling. He argues for its validity because it can be found on Wikipedia. But this is precisely the problem: reducing a complex, deeply personal concept to a single, surface-level definition — without engaging with how many Jewish people themselves understand it — results in a portrayal that is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. Considering concerns that Wikipedia pages connected to topics related to Israel and Palestine have reportedly been subjected to coordinated bias, reliance on it as further justification is inappropriate in an academic context.
Moreover, given that Mr. Tanaka’s project proposal claimed that his research would “include representatives from relevant communities,” it is difficult to reconcile the fact that he failed to integrate any perspectives from the Cal Poly Jewish community.
Numerous Mustang News articles identify demonstrations organized by the Jewish community following Hamas’ attack on Israel, yet these events received no description, unlike several other anti-Israel protests which were described in great detail with personal interviews.
Instead, Mr. Tanaka defined Hillel without directly consulting the community itself or seeking to understand its reasons for the claims in his guide, such as why it does not collaborate with certain anti-Israel groups. This omission is particularly notable given that many Jewish communities, including at Cal Poly, have expressed concern about how certain anti-Israel protests and groups have been experienced and interpreted as antisemitic.
For many Jews, Zionism is not simply a “nationalist ideology.” It is tied to identity, history and the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. In fact, the Jewish connection to the land of Israel spans over 3,000 years. Presenting it primarily through a political or critical lens, such as reducing its prominence in the Jewish faith by qualifying that it is not a belief held by “all Jews,” or claiming that it “relies upon religious justification,” in the guide minimizes the perspective of a large portion of the Jewish community and the reality of the history of the Jewish presence in the land of Israel.
A balanced guide would more charitably describe the range of meanings Zionism holds, including its religious, cultural, and historical significance to the Jewish people. While certainly, the Jewish connection to Israel is sanctified in the Torah, it is also reinforced by anthropological and historical evidence, as well as a continued cultural connection and communal presence in the land across centuries.
Mr. Tanaka also claims that his guide did not criticize Hillel. But describing Hillel primarily as a “U.S.-based, pro-Israel national student organization” — within a guide that disregards and minimizes the connection many Jews have to Israel — distorts both Hillel’s relationship to Israel and its role on campus. Hillel is, first and foremost, a cultural and religious home for Jewish students. Reducing it to a political entity is not neutral — it is a framing choice that shapes how readers perceive Jewish student life.
Not only that, but Mr. Tanaka immediately follows his description of Hillel with a link to a documentary which he claims “discusses how pro-Israel propaganda is spread throughout the U.S. education system.” At a time of sharply rising antisemitic conspiracy theories, this pairing is particularly concerning, as it encourages readers to associate a mainstream Jewish student organization with a broader narrative about propaganda. This pairing was not incidental; it was a deliberate framing choice.
One of the most concerning elements of the guide is how it appears to justify violent protests in relation to Zionism. Following his definition of Zionism and a description of the violent protest at the 2024 career fair, the guide states: “Numerous philosophers have argued that it is both morally correct and even a responsibility (or virtue!) to engage in civil disobedience when the political state of affairs is itself unjust.”
On its own, this is a broad philosophical claim. But placed in the context of describing recent campus protests — including those that disrupted events and became violent — this language does not read as neutral background information of an unbiased research guide. It reads as a moral framing that justifies such behavior.
So, now that Mr. Tanaka knows that it is not, in fact, the ADL alone that identified concerns with his research guide, I hope that he will reflect and engage with members of the Jewish community to better understand how to include a more representative range of perspectives in his work. Academic integrity requires engaging seriously with different view points and representing them fairly; otherwise, the result is not serious scholarship, but thinly veiled advocacy.