Antisemitism experts and Jewish officials from a range of political and organizational backgrounds are set to testify at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s hearing on campus antisemitism on Thursday, the committee announced.

The witness panel is set to include Carly Gammill, director of legal policy at StandWithUs; Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad); Charles Asher Small, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP); Rabbi David Saperstein, the director emeritus of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; and Kenneth Stern, the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.

The hearing is a long time coming, with former chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) repeatedly refusing requests to hold a dedicated hearing on campus antisemitism following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.

Gammill is a constitutional lawyer who has worked to fight antisemitism in a variety of venues, including on campus, through the legal system.

Shemtov has long been a fixture of bipartisan administrations and on Capitol Hill, and is the founder and leader of TheSHUL of the Nation’s Capitol at the Chabad-Lubavitch Center in Washington.

ISGAP has highlighted antisemitism issues on campuses and in university curricula, particularly drawing connections between donations from Qatar and other nations and universities.

Saperstein served from 2015 to 2017 as the Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and was the longtime director of the Reform movement’s lobbying arm. 

The Union for Reform Judaism has endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism as “an important part of combatting the growth of antisemitism” and “a powerful tool.” But it has also argued that some of the examples linked to the definition can be problematic in some instances, including covering some protected speech. 

The group argued that the definition “should not be codified into policy that would trigger potentially problematic punitive action to circumscribe speech, efforts which have been particularly aimed at college students and human rights activists.”

Stern is a former American Jewish Committee official who helped draft the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. But he has been outspoken against its use on college campuses, arguing that the Trump administration’s 2019 executive order on antisemitism “weaponized” the definition in Title VI cases, which puts him at odds with most mainstream Jewish groups.

Stern has defended the “right” of campus protesters to use violent slogans, including calling for “intifada,” and said that efforts to implement the IHRA definition on campuses are meant to chill anti-Israel speech.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee called him as a witness at a widely criticized hate crimes hearing last year.