David Letwin

Who Is David Letwin?

David Letwin is a lecturer in Arts Online at Rutgers University who has spent over a decade turning his campus platform into a full-time anti-Zionist activism gig. He co-founded Jews for Palestinian Right of Return (a group that often aligns with Jewish Voice for Peace) runs with Rutgers Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine along with Sahar Aziz and Noura Erakat, and signs petitions the way other people breathe. The man has found his one note to play.

What Has David Letwin Said About Israel and Palestine?

Letwin’s public statements are a greatest-hits album nobody asked for: genocide accusations, “colonizer and colonized” binaries, and a 2024 rally quote demanding the end of a “zionist regime.” The pattern is simple — Israeli victims get a footnote, Palestinian suffering gets the headline, and anyone who suggests otherwise gets called one-sided.

• March 2025 – In an interview with The Irenaut, Letwin said “we are conducting this interview during the current U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine and the seventy-eighth year of the Nakba,” and stated he founded the organization Jews for Palestinian Right of Return because “We felt there needed to be an anti-Zionist Jewish voice.”
• January 2025 – Letwin cosigned Sahar Assaf’s claim that a state “for seventy-six years, has oppressed, murdered, and annexed land from an Indigenous Brown population with total impunity” by saying he hoped for it “from the river to the sea.”

• October 2024 – At New Jersey’s Palestinian protest marking the October 7th anniversary, Letwin announced that “the only way there’s going to be justice for all throughout historic Palestine is the end of a Zionist regime.”

• October 2023 – Letwin signed a letter scolding Rutgers’ president for making “one-sided statements that only mentioned Israeli victims in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.”
• April 2022 – Letwin spoke at a BDS event in Princeton and summed up the conflict as “we’re really dealing with colonizer and colonized” and supported Hamas by saying, “terrorism is a word that was…simply invented to dismiss resistance of people in the face of power.”
• May 2021 – Letwin signed the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights faculty letter condemning Israel’s “military assault on Palestinians across all regions” and rejecting “narratives that demand an ‘equal sides’ approach.”

What Organizations Is David Letwin Part Of?

Three overlapping outfits carry Letwin’s activism: Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, which he co-founded back in 2013; Rutgers Faculty for Justice in Palestine; and his seat as a New Brunswick representative in the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union. That last one is the real prize — it’s not a soapbox, it’s a lever, and Letwin has used it to drag Rutgers’ academic labor institutions behind divestment resolutions like anti-Zionism is just settled union policy now.

• February 2025 – Letwin signed the open letter “From Jewish Rutgers union members: Zionist hegemony must end” which came out against “all ethnosupremacist states–including the apartheid Israeli state.”
• January 2022 – Letwin signed the Open Letter Against Rutgers MOU With Tel Aviv University, joining the push to kill the school’s partnership with an Israeli institution.
• January 2016 – Letwin popped up in an interview with Elements of Oppression magazine, saying “I feel that as Jews we have a particularly useful role to play in undermining Zionism.”
• September 2013 – Letwin signed “Jews say no to AIPAC and say no to bombing Syria,” introducing his brand-new group to the broader anti-interventionist left.
• January 2010 – Letwin signed the “Cairo Declaration” to end Israeli apartheid, opening a file that now runs dozens of pages deep.

How Has David Letwin Promoted BDS?

If BDS were a religion, Letwin would be a cleric. He’s signed the statements, defended the movement in print, and spoken at the events with the energy of a man who thinks the acronym stands for “Bring David Speaking.” His 2020 essay “BDS is anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic” is a masterclass in insisting the thing everyone can see isn’t actually there.

• November 2022 – Letwin signed the TWAIL scholars and allies statement, which “unequivocally support[s] the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, including the academic boycott.”
• February 2020 – Letwin published an essay claiming “linking BDS to antisemitism is a hoax perpetrated by those seeking to stifle growing Palestinian solidarity.”

• January 2020 – Letwin’s essay “BDS is anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic” landed, adding another entry to a bibliography that could be titled Things I Believe Very Strongly.
• February 2019 – Letwin joined a BDS discussion titled “Your right to boycott and the campaign to silence BDS”.

• February 2018 – Letwin drafted a statement backing BDS and gave an interview to Electronic Intifada, a publication that’s hosted him more than once.
• February 2016 – Letwin signed “Respect the BDS picket line,” presumably after checking there was a picket line to respect.
• June 2014 – Letwin argued in print that “BDS lays the basis for a true peace process.”

Conclusion: What Does David Letwin Mean for Rutgers’ Campus?

David Letwin is what happens when anti-Zionist activism gets a union card and a course code. His faculty status and adjunct union seat lend a whiff of legitimacy to positions that treat Jewish self-determination as a moral catastrophe, and Rutgers administrators seem perfectly happy to let him keep doing it. Whether any of this crosses a legal line is a question for lawyers. Whether it crosses the basic professional line — the one where an instructor doesn’t turn every microphone into a BDS rally — is a question nobody at Rutgers appears interested in asking.