As a professor with over twenty years of experience in higher education, I’ve watched with growing concern—not only at the rise of anti-Semitism on campus, but also at the shallow, reactive ways many institutions have responded. Nationwide, Jewish students are encountering levels of hostility and marginalization that would have been nearly unimaginable just a few years ago. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. campuses rose by an astounding 321 percent in 2023.
An American Jewish Committee 2024 survey found that over a third of Jewish college students now feel unsafe expressing their identity or opinions and one-fifth report feeling or being excluded from a group or an event on campus because they are Jewish. And almost one-third (32 percent) of American Jewish college students report feeling that faculty on their campuses have promoted anti-Semitism or fueled a learning environment that is hostile to Jews, according to 2025 data from the American Jewish Committee and Hillel International.
What’s equally disturbing is the typical academic response: someone makes an inflammatory claim about Jews or Israel, and the institutional reply is to call it anti-Semitic—end of discussion. No further engagement. No refutation. No intellectual challenge.
This approach is not only insufficient but also irresponsible and may even constitute educational malpractice. It signals moral opposition while ceding intellectual ground. And on a college campus, where facts and reasoning should reign, failing to interrogate false or hostile claims enables them to harden into dogma.
Take one of the most dangerous allegations now mainstreamed in elite academic spaces: that Israel is committing genocide. This claim appears on protest signs, in teach-ins, on syllabi, and in casual discourse. It is rarely rebutted with facts. Too often, it is met only with condemnation.
But serious education demands more. It demands precision.
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Genocide is a term with a clear legal meaning, as defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention: “Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”
This is a high threshold. And even in the most fraught moments of the current Israel-Hamas conflict, international legal authorities have not found that threshold to be met.
Notably, when the International Criminal Court recently announced it would seek arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, it did so on charges other than genocide. Furthermore, according to data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the United Nations, Gaza’s population has more than doubled since 2000. Such demographic growth is inconsistent with the reality of genocide.
That doesn’t mean Israel is immune from criticism. Democracies should be scrutinized. But shouting “genocide” is not critique, it’s just plain false. And claiming such poisons meaningful debate.
More revealing still is the selective application of moral outrage. Students accusing Israel of genocide rarely apply the term to China’s crackdown on Uyghurs, Assad’s mass killings in Syria, or Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. That asymmetry speaks volumes. This is not about universal human rights. It’s about a targeted moral obsession with Jews and the Jewish state.
The accusation that Zionism is colonialism has similarly gained traction in progressive academic circles. Yet it is historically illiterate. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, with continuous cultural, religious, and physical presence for over 3,000 years. Zionism was not a foreign imposition; it was a national revival movement born out of exile, persecution, and repeated ethnic cleansing.
Roughly half of Israeli Jews descend from communities expelled from Arab lands, not from European imperialists. Many others came as Holocaust survivors. To describe their presence as “settler colonialism” isn’t just wrong—it’s an act of historical erasure masquerading as legitimate theory.
Yet these narratives are often echoed unchallenged in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) workshops, course materials, and deliberately one-sided, ideological, virtue-signaling public events. And when objections are raised, the answer is typically not factual—it’s moralistic: “That’s anti-Semitic.” That’s true, perhaps—but not persuasive to those unconvinced.
Even the most common slogans deserve interrogation. Consider the chant: “From the river to the sea.” Many students have little idea what it means. The phrase was popularized by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. It is a call for the elimination of Israel—not coexistence, but the end of Jewish self-determination. This is not a peace slogan. It is a call for erasure.
Similarly, the slogan “Globalize the Intifada” has found new popularity in student rallies and online spaces. Politicians like Zohran Mamdani, whose father is a radical professor at Columbia, have refused to condemn it. But the term intifada refers to uprisings marked by suicide bombings, shootings, and the killing of civilians. Language like this has been clearly identified by institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and StopAntisemitism.org as thinly veiled incitement.
Mamdani’s support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign raises further concerns. BDS is not a call for reform, but a campaign to isolate and delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state. The fact that many of BDS’s intellectual on-campus champions – the activist, progressive, leftist faculty—often refuse to acknowledge Jewish historical claims or Israeli security concerns underscores the movement’s ideological rigidity.
This is the intellectual environment many Jewish students now face: one where they must either deny core elements of their identity or be cast as colonial oppressors. And, in many cases, faculty and administrators are either silent or complicit. Sadly, too, are those who are activists and overtly trying to harm students and others in the Jewish community on campus.
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It is essential to remember that silence is not neutrality. When we allow falsehoods to flourish—especially under the guise of “social justice”—we fail in our basic responsibility as educators.
It is no longer enough to issue symbolic statements or convene yet another task force. Colleges and universities must take responsibility for what they teach, what they tolerate, and what they fail to correct. That begins with requiring historical literacy—on Zionism, Jewish indigeneity, and the modern Middle East—in disciplines where these topics are taught. Students should not graduate without understanding the deep historical, legal, and moral roots of Jewish national identity.
Faculty must be trained to recognize and resist the spread of anti-Semitic ideology in the guise of activism. Administrators must protect Jewish students not only from threats of violence, but from environments where bigotry is dressed up as critical inquiry.
And most importantly, consequences must be real.
Departments that promote falsehoods and propagate one-sided ideological narratives should face institutional review and, if necessary, defunding. Faculty who repeatedly abuse the classroom to advance propaganda rather than scholarship should be held accountable—not protected by appeals to academic freedom that are selectively enforced. University presidents and deans who remain silent in the face of escalating hostility toward Jewish students must be publicly challenged and, if they continue to abdicate their duty, replaced.
Genuine pluralism depends on principled limits. Open inquiry rests on intellectual honesty. And true education demands the courage not only to call something offensive, but to name it for what it is: false, harmful, and beyond the bounds of reasoned debate. If our academic institutions are to preserve their credibility, they must do more than label ideas or actions as anti-Semitic. They must explain why—clearly, courageously, and with intellectual integrity. That means confronting falsehoods head-on and articulating the truths they’ve too often neglected to defend.
Learn more about campus anti-Semitism here.
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