The annual “Law vs. Antisemitism Conference” comes to New York this year at Yeshiva University, March 8–9, and so do the controversies.

Past editions were held at Indiana University, Lewis & Clark College, Florida International University, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). With papers claiming that “white Jews” are “directly implicated in and often beneficiaries of our racist systems,” and that they sometimes help “propagate White privilege,” the event became an inversion of what it stands for. A development that was hardly surprising given the fact that the conference’s co-founder, by her own account, is a “Critical Race Theory person,” has written conspiratorial smears about a “Jewish benefit from white supremacy” and “Jewish complicity with anti-Black racism.”

The inaugural address at the first conference was delivered by a Harvard professor who absurdly argued that Zionism was a means for its founder to “expose his genitals.” His later work contained blatantly anti-Semitic claims: “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians”; “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.” Despite this, the annual events are well attended; Kenneth L. Marcus, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights under the first Trump administration, has been among the participants.

Jewish Insider reported that the ADL-sponsored event at UCLA last year included a representative of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. Yet, Rona Kaufman, a professor at Duquesne University, claims she was unaware that anti-Zionist speakers could end up presenting at the conference—a striking oversight, given past presentations and the fact that the event was openly “inspired by the history of Critical Race Theory.” The conference’s intellectual pedigree should have offered further concern. Robert Katz, the conference’s other co-founder, published the ADL-funded book Antisemitism and the Law, which obsessively parses racial classification of Jews and avoids substantive legal questions.

As chair of this year’s event, Kaufman is attempting to rebrand the conference as the “Law and Antisemitism Conference,” which, ironically, seems like a more fitting title given its history of speakers. In the Times of Israel, she made “The Case for the Law and Antisemitism Conference” and spoke of a commitment “to replace false narratives with intellectual honesty, rhetoric with rigor, and polarization with principled analysis.” Her effort, however, cannot disguise the fundamental problem: she also appears unaware of what rigorous legal scholarship on anti-Semitism requires.

A conference devoted to anti-Semitism and the law is urgent and necessary, but urgency cannot replace expertise. Too often, such academic gatherings manufacture authority where none exists: scholars pay the fee, present a paper, and emerge labeled “experts,” while weak arguments creep their way into law schools and public institutions. When credentialing replaces rigor, ideology masquerades as scholarship, with real consequences for law and policy. California, for instance, permits attorneys to earn Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) credit for attending the UCLA conference.

This year’s program illustrates the problem of manufacturing “leading scholars” well. A Chinese professor of languages will lecture on “Comparative Approaches to Law and Antisemitism,” while a striking number of psychologists—from a field still grappling with replication failures affecting most of its studies—are positioned to offer seemingly authoritative guidance on legal issues they are ill-equipped to judge.

Also in attendance is Charles Small, Executive Director of ISGAP, a New York–based nonprofit research institute. Among the fellows at ISGAP is a scholar who claims that Jewish studies in China are able to flourish specifically because the field is free of Jewish scholars. After all, Jews would be a “burden.”

Small is, by the conference’s account, “committed to creating scholarly programming and research on contemporary antisemitism at top-tier universities internationally.” Yet he invited Deborah Lipstadt to teach at its Oxbridge summer program. Given the stark rise in Jew-hatred, her tenure as Biden’s Antisemitism Envoy proved a grave disappointment. Just three months into the new administration, she then had the chutzpah to hit the media, claiming the administration’s crackdown on campus anti-Semitism had “gone way too far” and was an “overreaction.”

Mathew Bolton, another conference attendee, is a fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. He previously worked at the controversial Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin, which ran a German taxpayer-funded project on “Jewish pimps”—grotesquely echoing a Nazi trope smearing Jews as drivers of prostitution. After multiple scandals, the Central Council of Jews in Germany rebuked the Center for undermining the fight against anti-Semitism, and the American Jewish Committee condemned it for “downplaying Jew-hatred.” Meanwhile, the publicly funded institution shrugged off critiques from the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz as “tirades of hatred,” claiming—right out of the anti-Semitic playbook—that the critics were motivated by money.

Without any principles in scholarship, gatherings meant to combat Jew-hatred—even those including serious scholars—risk spreading confusion, muddying the law, and undermining civic trust. But, sure, anyone can call himself an “anti-Semitism expert.” It’s not against the law.