CMU Fence continues to platform anti-Zionist messaging

The Fence at Carnegie Mellon University is proving to be a popular spot for anti-Zionist messaging, despite the fact that is it summer and most of the university’s students are away until the fall semester begins.

New messages continued to pop-up surrounding the Independence Day holiday.

A message painted on June 30, the fourth anti-Zionist message since the latest surge began, featured the words “Stop Censoring Antizionist Jewish Voices.” On the other side of The Fence, the message read “Antizionism ≠ Antisemitism.”

Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

On the #cmufence Instagram page — which is not affiliated with or run by the university but features photos of The Fence — those messages were attributed to “Concerned students.” The messaging followed the university’s June 28 removal of a painted message stating, “Death to Zionism.”

“Death to Zionism” was painted in Yiddish. On the #cmufence Instagram account, the message was attributed to “A few Jewish students,” although no proof that Jewish students were involved was offered.

CMU took the unusual step of painting over the words “Death to Zionism.” University President Farnam Jahanian also sent a message to the CMU community, writing that “a call for ‘death’ violated our longstanding policy against such threats of violence, including threats based on an individual or a group’s affiliation or identity. Moving forward, we will continue to quickly remove threatening language wherever it appears on campus, fully investigate these incidents and intervene as necessary.”

CMU police, he noted, were investigating the matter.

An earlier painting of The Fence is also under investigation by university law enforcement. It contained the message “By any means necessary,” an axiom seen by many as justification for a political movement to use any means available — including violence — to achieve its goals.

On July 1, the group “Concerned Students” painted a new message: “Death to sexism.” That message may have been an attempt to protest the school’s removal of the message “Death to Zionism.”

Despite the phrase “Death to sexism” ostensibly championing women’s rights, most of the comments left on the #cmufence Instagram page were satirical and apparently attempting to use the anti-sexist message as a cudgel to belittle the university.

“please contact federal authorities! Being sexist is an integral part of male identity and hence, this is an obvious call to violence,” one comment read.

As for the “Antizionism ≠ Antisemitism” message, Rona Kaufman said the painters were correct — just not in the way they intended.

Kaufman is an associate professor at Duquesne University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law and co-founder of the Center for Jewish Legal Studies.

“Both antisemitism and antizionism are forms of Jew hatred that manifest as discrimination against Jews,” Kaufman wrote in a message to the Chronicle.

Antisemitism, she said, is racial Jewish hatred exemplified by the Nazis and KKK.

“Antizionism,” she explained, is the “most threatening form of Jew hatred today,” and is not a “neutral political view or movement, as is often thought.”

“It is not a response to the war in Gaza or the State of Israel or its policies or anything Jews have done,” she wrote. “Antizionism is a distinct but related version of Jew hatred with Nazi, Soviet and Islamist roots that is more than a century old.”

Both antisemitism and anti-Zionism share core features, Kaufman explained, including a cycle of libel (which includes defamation, exclusion and harassment, violence and threats). Both ideologies spread Jew-hating conspiracies and claim the “path to redemption is by destroying the Jew, today named the ‘Zionist.’”

“I can agree on a micro level that antizionism is not antisemitism,” she wrote, “ … but on a macro level they are the same.”

On July 3, “Concerned Students” painted The Fence with the message: “Multiple choice: Which will they censor? Death to: Fascism, Apartheid, Zionism, Colonialism, Racism.”

One day later, the same group took credit for painting, “21,000 children murdered due to Zionism” and “Who are the ones inciting violence here?”

Although the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health claims that 21,000 Gazan children were killed by Israel during the Hamas/Israel war, that number has been disputed by critics who cite inaccurate date, including duplicate names, no distinctions between combatants and civilians, Hamas’ use of children as human shields, and the terror group’s prevention of Gazans from fleeing locations under attack by Israel.

In Septmeber 2025, Jahanian convened the Fence Working Group, which recently released a report with recommendations on how best to steward The Fence going forward. The Chronicle will publish a story on those
findings later this month.

The latest salvo of messages painted on The Fence by anonymous activists claiming to be part of the CMU community were left intact by the university as of press time. PJC

David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.