News Brief

The American Jewish Committee is calling on a leading publishing house to withdraw a chapter on Zionism in a new encyclopedia.

The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism is published by Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. It is available in print and online versions.

“It is incomprehensible that a reputable publisher would include the national movement of the Jewish people, Zionism, in an encyclopedia on racism,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. “No other form of nationalism is included in the three-volume encyclopedia. Gale has given fodder to academia and beyond to assault the State of Israel.”

In a letter to Frank Menchaca, Gale’s executive vice president and publisher, AJC not only questioned why Zionism was included in the encyclopedia, but also pointed out a number of factual and historical inaccuracies in the chapter.

The author of the Zionism chapter, Noel Ignatiev, has no track record of scholarship in Middle Eastern or Jewish studies, but his previous writings show an inherent bias toward Jews and Israel, according to the AJC. Indeed, the entry misrepresents Zionism as an “ideology of race” and promotes the canard of Zionist-Nazi “collaboration.”

“The chapter is littered with serious errors and deliberate distortions,” Harris said. “Yet it is presented to readers as an impartial and objective overview of Zionism in what purports to be a reference work.”

“What is being marketed as scholarship actually is propaganda, and that’s shameful.”