Jessica Winegar
Overview
Jessica Winegar is an activist in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Winegar is a member of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and was part of a group that unsuccessfully attempted to get the AAA to boycott Israeli academic institutions in 2016. She is also a member of the eight-person organizing collective of Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (Anthro Boycott), the primary body advocating for the boycott within the AAA. Winegar has claimed that it is a "mythology" that anthropology “can and should be ‘objective’ and apolitical.”
Winegar is a professor at Northwestern University (NU), where she is the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies. She teaches in the Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) Program at Northwestern NU. Winegar received her Ph.D. from New York University (NYU) in 2003.
In November of 2015, Winegar co-authored a book with Professor Lara Deeb titled "Anthropology’s Politics — Disciplining the Middle East." In the book, she discussed how academia and the field of Middle Eastern anthropology “is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state.”
Winegar uses her personal Twitter account to promote BDS and spread anti-Israel propaganda. She has called for Americans to "seek alternative news sources" on the conflict that would be less sympathetic to Israel.
Claims of a Zionist Conspiracy to Stifle Research
On November 22, 2016, Winegar wrote an article outlining the main points of her book "Anthropology’s Politics." She claimed that there is “massive collusion between education, the media, and US and Israeli state policy” regarding research on the Arab-Israeli conflict that has created a “regime of self-censorship” since the 1970’s.
In that article, Winegar also decried efforts to publicize professors’ views and branded students who aided in these efforts as "student moles" who were helping “produce faculty black lists and smear campaigns.”
Winegar lamented the "Israel-as-threatened narrative" in American academia, which she said comes from Western academia’s reliance of assessing history based “on political leaders, parties, negotiations, treaties, and war tactics.” She further criticized “mainstream media in the United States” for portraying Israel as being in “a perpetually weak position” and as a “state continually threatened by neighboring countries…”
Winegar claimed that "coteries" of pro-Israel students will “walk out of class when they are exposed to material they disagree with, interrupt classes in a hostile manner to denigrate different perspectives, disrespect professors (especially women and those of Middle Eastern background), complain to administrators who then have to launch investigations, and even threaten professors’ safety.”
In that same article, however, Winegar offered praise to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), whose members have engaged in many of the above actions, as documented by Canary Mission.
On January 6, 2016, Winegar and Deeb — in an article promoting their book — published an excerpt from the book where they effectively admitted that their conclusions were based widely on the emotions of their subjects and only loosely on documentation. They wrote: "Despite the fact that the vast majority of our interlocutors have not personally experienced such menacing opposition to their tenure or retention, they still expressed apprehension, a sense that working on the region was a ‘minefield,’ and fears that they could easily be targeted by right-wing and/or Zionist organizations because of their teaching, public lectures, or research, and that their institutions would not necessarily protect them."
They also claimed in the book that "anthropology is not immune to compulsory Zionism in the academy."
Defending Hate Speech
Winegar and Deeb’s book further claimed that Steven Salaita, the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB), who was fired from his position after posting a series of anti-Semitic tweets, was targeted for "taking anti-Zionist political positions…"
In 2014, The University of Illinois withdrew an offer of employment to Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, read: "You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” In 2017, Salaita posted to Facebook: “People ask if I would go back in time and change anything. I would not…I will die unapologetic.” In February 2019, Salaita stated that he had become a school bus driver in the Washington, D.C., area.
On March 18, 2015, Winegar retweeted a tweet from Salaita that included an article he wrote on the anti-Israel Mondoweiss site. Winegar is also a member of the Facebook group Salaita academic freedom resources.
Supporting Terrorists
On August 11, 2016, Winegar retweeted a tweet from the Electronic Intifada (EI) site supporting Palestinian militants. Among them was Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militant Bilal Kayed. The PFLP is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union, Canada and Israel. Kayed was incarcerated for 14 years for terrorist operations committed during the second Intifada, in 2002.
The tweet Winegar retweeted included an EI article and the article’s lead photo. The photo showed support for PFLP Secretary General Ahmad Sa’adat and Marwan Barghouti, a terrorist who headed the the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist Tanzim force and founded the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Barghouti’s organizations carried out a large number of deadly attacks, killing scores of Israelis and wounding hundreds.
On October 24, 2014, Winegar signed a petition defending terrorist Rasmea Odeh titled "Feminist scholars to Obama: End prosecution of Palestinian survivor of sexual torture."
Odeh was a key military operative [00:02:08]with the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1969, Odeh masterminded a PFLP bombing that killed two college students in a Jerusalem supermarket. Odeh also attempted to bomb the British consulate.
Odeh confessed, in a highly detailed account, the day following her arrest. In a 2004 documentary, one of Odeh’s co-conspirators directly implicated [00:10:53] Odeh as the mastermind.
In 1970, an Israeli court tried and convicted Odeh for her involvement in both bombings and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, Odeh was released 10 years later, in a prisoner swap and emigrated to the United States.
On November 10, 2014, a Michigan federal jury convicted Odeh for immigration fraud because she failed to disclose her prior conviction and life sentence on her immigration application. On March 12, 2015, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In 2017, after an appeal and a lengthy court battle, Odeh admitted to immigration fraud, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship, deported to Jordan and banned from re-entering the U.S.
The petition Winegar signed called on the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Odeh and recognized her as "a leader in the international struggle to empower women and end violence against women."
Demonizing Israel and Pushing BDS
Winegar is an author for the website savageminds.org, where she promotes essays from the Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (ABIAI) Anthro Boycott website.
On January 4, 2017, Winegar co-authored a blog post with Deeb on savageminds.org where she expressed frustration that the Israeli government and pro-Israel groups fought the AAA boycott campaign, adding that "Israel-Palestine is this generation’s apartheid South Africa."
Winegar and Deeb claimed that AAA members opposed to the boycott were part of an "older anthropology that often rests implicitly on subtle forms of racism and paternalism" and bemoaned the fact that the AAA has so many “[o]lder, whiter, male, Zionist, liberal scholars” as members.
On April 22, 2016, Winegar— during the AAA period of voting on the BDS resolution — republished an essay by Lisa Rofel, who claimed that Jews who support Israel practice "ethnic chauvinism."
On April 20, 2016 Winegar republished a pro-BDS essay on savageminds.org where she introduced it with claim of Israel committing "settler colonial violence." The essay said that Israel has committed “war crimes and even genocide.”
On January 6, 2016, Winegar claimed in an interview that Israel’s security barrier is an "apartheid wall."
On November 3, 2015, Winegar republished an ABIAI Anthro Boycott blog on savageminds.org that claimed that "Over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations have called for boycott and themselves assessed the costs and benefits of this action."
By 2012, anti-Israel Professor Norman Finkelstein had already called into question the composition of the so-called Palestinian civil society organizations. In August of 2016, BDS leader Ilan Pappé ultimately admitted that BDS was not initiated by a "call" from Palestinian civil society.
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.
One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”
In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.
Social Media and Weblinks
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/1082221717/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/winegarjessica [Deleted]

- Status:
- Professor
- University:
- New-York,
- more...
- Northwestern
- Organizations:
- BDS
- Related Profiles:
- Kareem Youssef,
- Neveen Ammar,
- Tamar Ghabin,
- Last Modified:
- 04/29/2025