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- At the University of Washington, a group of faculty who felt the campus had grown too “anti-Israel” set out to build a new academic center to tackle what they view as antisemitism.
“Jewish students, faculty, and staff found themselves isolated, facing hostility, and witnessing the normalization of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric,” the faculty wrote about the environment for Jews on campus after 7 October 2023. They pledged to offer a place for “open inquiry, intellectual rigor, and fearless debate”.
The center is led by a co-chair of a university antisemitism task force – but she is a public health professor, not a scholar of Jewish studies. Other members come from the university’s law and business schools. The center is not formally affiliated with the University of Washington – but seems to rely on university resources, including to process donations.
So far, the center doesn’t seem to have done much more than host two public events, both featuring ardent pro-Israel voices, and launch a newsletter. But several faculty with expertise in Jewish history see the center, and the university’s apparent support for it, as an anti-intellectual effort to sideline their scholarly expertise.
“They’re undermining expertise and substituting it with ideology even though they claim to be doing exactly the opposite,” said Susan Glenn, a professor of history and faculty member in UW’s Jewish studies program.
A spokesperson for UW said that the initiative is “one of many self-organized faculty-led groups” and that the university “does not endorse opinions these groups may express”. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the group using official university branding and fundraising infrastructure.
The UW center is part of a broad ecosystem of initiatives devoted to antisemitism that have sprung up at US universities against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and as lawmakers and the Trump administration have seized on allegations of antisemitism to bend universities to their ideological agenda.
University of Washington faculty pledged to offer a place for ‘open inquiry, intellectual rigor, and fearless debate’. Photograph: gregobagel/Getty Images
The initiatives range in scope: some are efforts driven by faculty with varying levels of scholarly expertise on the subject; others are backed by wealthy donors or were announced as universities sought to mitigate the risk of lawsuits and federal investigations. Some of the new programs aim to produce scholarship and degrees; others offer campus events, fellowships and study abroad opportunities. Some centers promise to host robust academic debates; others appear more ideologically oriented. But many of the initiatives are of a piece with a broader rightwing effort to bring more pro-Israel voices on campuses under the guise of “viewpoint diversity”.
Jewish studies experts – including from disciplines like history, religion and literature – who oppose the rightward drift of American universities have watched the proliferation of these efforts with mounting concern. Amid a repressive climate in academia, few of the more than 20 scholars who spoke with the Guardian agreed to do so on the record. But the faculty – who hold a range of views of Israel and the prevalence of antisemitism on US campuses, though most lean left – expressed fears that the surge of new initiatives could marginalize the expertise of those who have long studied antisemitism, and some expressed discomfort with the outsize investment in this work at a time of deep austerity in the education sector and as other programs are being targeted for cuts.
Questions about the appropriate approach for considering bias against Jewish people are not new, said Lila Corwin Berman, director of the center for American Jewish history at New York University. The field has long been riven with debates, for example, over whether antisemitism should be considered alongside other forms of discrimination, or set apart as a unique form of prejudice. More recently, contentious debates have focused on the distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel. UW, for example, has been embroiled in controversies over faculty and student speech on Israel: last month, it removed as head of the school’s Middle East center a professor who had described Zionism as “cancerous”. Earlier this week, the justice department announced an investigation into UW’s handling of antisemitism after a student group held an off-campus bake sale for the “Lebanese resistance”.
But the idea that the study of antisemitism requires new institutions that circumvent existing academic departments raises red flags for some. “What’s new are these institutional structures, this field-building around the idea of foregrounding antisemitism as a specific thing to be studied outside of a history department or a literature department or a religious studies department,” said Corwin Berman.
She said university administrators are largely responding to pressure, not to the needs of students or academic imperatives: “They’re making a public-facing performance about dealing with antisemitism – and the calculation is not being made through rigorous evaluation of scholarly expertise.”
A growing constellation
In November 2023, weeks after the October 7 attacks, NYU announced the creation of an academic center for the study of antisemitism, an initiative backed by a seven-figure donation, which the university described as a new, cross-disciplinary approach to combat “age-old hatred”. The next month, the University of Michigan launched a new institute to combat “global antisemitism and divisiveness”.
More recently, Baruch College announced a new laboratory to “bolster research, advance pedagogy, and promote community engagement aimed at countering antisemitism”. At Emory University, Deborah Lipstadt, Joe Biden’s former envoy to combat antisemitism, is planning to launch a new policy institute dedicated to countering antisemitism.
Deborah Lipstadt in New York City on 28 February 2024. Photograph: Victor J Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Those institutions are only a few examples in a growing constellation. The University of Pennsylvania, Yale and Brandeis have boosted existing initiatives with new antisemitism-focused programs and hires. Gratz College, in Pennsylvania, has launched what it describes as the world’s only PhD program in antisemitism studies. The University of Texas at Austin – where a new program will focus on the “influence of Jewish ideas and Jewish history on the Western world and the American republic” – will also offer coursework on “modern anti-semitism”.
Across the country, tenure-track jobs, postdoctoral positions and fellowships designed to further the academic study of antisemitism are popping up. Alongside academic efforts, several universities have launched “antisemitism taskforces” to look at Jewish life on campus – many led by faculty or administrators who are Jewish but do not have expertise in Jewish history or antisemitism as a scholarly subject.
Several universities have also adopted a contentious definition of antisemitism, known as the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition, which that many academics have denounced as antithetical to scholarly pursuits and which has already been deployed to censor scholarship and discipline faculty.
Lipstadt, a historian, returned to Emory after serving in the Biden administration, and she has publicly promoted the establishment of a new Policy Institute on Countering Antisemitism. But university faculty with scholarly expertise in related fields said they know little about it – and that the university administration did little to assuage concerns they raised in meetings. Some expect that her hardline approach to the issue will define the nature of the center. Lipstadt is a staunch proponent of the IHRA definition and has spoken in favor of elements of the Trump administration’s crackdown against pro-Palestinian students. Lipstadt did not respond to an interview request. A spokesperson for Emory did not address concerns or offer details about the new institute beyond saying that it will be “donor-supported” and “serve as a hub for rigorous research, education and academic discourse”.
The new antisemitism initiatives are not the only source of tension gripping Jewish scholars: political battles are also being waged for control over what is taught in existing Jewish studies departments.
At Indiana University, home to one of the country’s most prestigious Jewish studies programs, the university removed the head of the program reportedly following pressure from donors. The chair – a historian widely described as a moderate – was replaced with a vocally pro-Israel scholar who quickly became embroiled in a series of controversies.
The Helene G Simon Hillel center at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, on 13 February 2024. Photograph: Michael Conroy/AP
Professors at two other universities, who asked that neither they nor their employers be named, described administrations attempting to bypass established hiring processes in order to appoint more pro-Israel faculty.
The pressures aren’t always coming from the right – at the University of California, Irvine, a campus rabbi who had been teaching a class on major Jewish texts recently did not get his contract renewed. He attributed the decision to Jewish studies moving “much more towards an anti-Israel activist lens, as opposed to a nuanced academic perspective”.
A ‘political weapon’
The faculty who spoke with the Guardian do not oppose the study of antisemitism. Most have devoted their careers to it.
“We’ve been studying this for a very long time,” said Sander Gilman, a retired professor at Emory University who authored several books on antisemitism, including a forthcoming one exploring the history of its exploitation as a “cudgel for many other purposes”. Gilman argues that antisemitism is not a static fact of history but tied to historical and political circumstances.
“What we’re seeing now is the resurgence of antisemitism as a political weapon,” he added. “Real academics’ job is to question, not to advocate.”
Still, some scholars welcome the growing focus on antisemitism studies. Maurice Samuels founded Yale’s Program for the Study of Antisemitism in 2011 at a time when only one other antisemitism program existed at a US university. “Antisemitism has not been recognized really as its own distinct field until recently,” he said. “I think that the change is a good one.”
He also acknowledged the ways antisemitism has been politicized.
“Yes, antisemitism is being used to attack universities,” he said. “And yes, it’s a valid object of study and we should keep studying it. In this climate, it’s all the more important to have good scholarship on these issues so that we can distinguish what really does constitute antisemitism and what is mere political smokescreen.”
“Studying antisemitism is legitimate. We do want to understand people who are violent towards Jews and their history,” said Hadas Binyamini, who recently completed her PhD in history and Hebrew and Judaic studies. “That should be supported – but that’s not necessarily what we see with this trend of antisemitism centers.”
Binyamini, who is a member of Liberatory Jewish Studies, a network of self-described anti-Zionist academics in the field, also noted that the new centers, where many jobs are non-tenure and short-term, are exacerbating deepening precariousness in academia.
She described scholars seizing on the funding opportunities associated with new antisemitism initiatives at a time of austerity that’s decimating their broader fields as facing a “devil’s bargain”.
Several scholars drew a parallel between the current moment and the late 1990s establishment of Israel studies, a field driven in part by donors who feared that academia was growing overly critical of Israel. But Israel studies has contributed significant scholarship – including some that is deeply critical of Israel.
That’s what several faculty hope will happen in response to the current drive. Even as it emerges in a charged political context, they hope the new initiatives will find a way to advance meaningful debate of an important subject.
In order for that to happen, “university leaders need to ensure that the scholarship and the academics remain at the forefront”, said Jeff Veidlinger, director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan.
The institute, named after a Swedish humanitarian and university alumnus who is credited with saving some 20,000 Jews during the Holocaust, launched in the aftermath of October 7, although it had been in the works.
The center studies hatred against all religious and ethnic communities. “Antisemitism is part of a broader phenomenon, and it flourishes alongside other forms of hatred, and Islamophobia, and so we’re looking to study all of them together”, Veidlinger said.
That approach initially angered some donors and alumni who wanted the center to take a more pro-Israel stance, he acknowledged, while pro-Palestinian students and faculty were suspicious of what they believed was an effort to push pro-Israel advocacy on campus. Still, the center is tackling difficult questions at a heated time, including by hosting a panel on genocide, with three scholars debating how the concept applied to the destruction of Gaza.
“Both sides would have preferred less nuance,” Veidlinger said. “There were some who wanted the people we brought in to call it genocide and there were others who say that any attempt to call it genocide is antisemitic. And the truth is, there’s a discussion that you can have.”
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