Anti-Semitism Among Faculty and the University’s Betrayal

I knew something was fundamentally broken the day a senior colleague grabbed my shoulders and shook me frantically in the faculty dining hall after a contentious meeting of my school’s social science faculty.

The assault was shocking, especially because it happened in what should have been a routine lunch gathering at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC), where I’ve taught for more than fifteen years. My supposed offense? Being visibly Jewish, a Zionist, and refusing to nod along with his anti-Israel rhetoric earlier in the day. I said nothing in that meeting, but I did not signal my agreement and support, which was enough to make me a target.

A few colleagues saw what happened. They witnessed my humiliation but said nothing. I chose not to escalate; I didn’t grab him back or physically defend myself. He was older, and doing so would have looked awkward and risked a full-blown altercation. Still, I was furious at being assaulted and grabbed in my own workplace, and even angrier at myself for letting it happen.

When I later sat down with another professor, he awkwardly admitted he had seen it too. He knew he should have spoken up, but didn’t. With a sheepish smile, he just shrugged and muttered that this was “life” at SLC. A revealing glimpse of the culture of silence that prevails at the school.

I walked away feeling humiliated, hurt, and enraged. But I also knew that filing a complaint would be pointless. The administration would do nothing.

Notably, this incident took place years before October 7, 2023. Even then, the hostility was unmistakable; though back then, the hatred still tried to disguise itself in the language of academic respectability.

The Pattern Emerges

Well before Hamas’s horrific attacks altered world politics, the signs were unmistakable. A colleague who once eagerly collaborated on research projects suddenly stopped replying to emails. Invitations to coffee or lunch quietly disappeared. When I walked into the faculty meetings, conversations would slow, then come to a halt.

At first, I brushed it off as academic busyness or personality quirks. But the pattern became undeniable: my Jewish identity and my refusal to denounce Israel or stay silent when anti-Semitism arose had marked me as suspect.

The hostility manifested in countless ways. Swastikas appeared on my office door—Nazi imagery that administrators told me to “make no real issue of.” I was told I was part of a colonial, genocidal Jewish people. When student groups disrupted my classes in the fall of 2024, calling for a boycott and spreading libelous messages about me over Zoom, the administration’s response was to suggest that I fill out a bias incident form, which is intended for students and reviewed by Student Affairs.

Years before October 7, Jewish students at SLC were already meeting with the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, desperately seeking legal remedies. In March of 2024—many years after those initial meetings—Hillels of Westchester filed a Title VI complaint against the college. By December 2024, the Department of Education opened a formal investigation into SLC’s systematic failure to protect Jewish students.

The message to Jewish and Zionist community members—students and faculty alike—was clear: You are not welcome. You never were.

[RELATED: Berkeley Gives Trump 160 Names Tied to Campus Anti-Semitism, Prompting McCarthyism Comparisons]

October 7: The Mask Comes Off

Then came October 7. Hamas’s attacks didn’t just alter geopolitics; they ripped away the last pretense of civility on American campuses.

At SLC, professor Emmaia Gelman, Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, posted on Instagram the day after the massacre—before Israel had even begun its response—featuring a photo of Hamas breaking through the border fence with the caption: “Solidarity with those who break prison walls.”

Professor Suzanne Gardinier, who regularly calls for Israel’s destruction on social media, used the official faculty email list to organize campus protests. When student groups occupied our main administrative building in November of 2024, barricading doors and trapping students in dormitories, faculty members openly supported and endorsed the violent actions, calling for the physical harm of others.

The shift wasn’t subtle anymore. Faculty who had been cordial for years now literally pivoted mid-stride in hallways rather than acknowledge me. In department meetings, conversations would often go silent when I entered. People I had known for years began avoiding me entirely, as if I carried a contagion.

And this is happening everywhere.

Faculty as Perpetrators

This month, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network released their devastating Faculty Under Fire report, confirming what Jewish professors nationwide have been experiencing: anti-Semitism isn’t just coming from student activists or outside agitators. It’s deeply embedded in the faculty ranks themselves. While the data is based on a small opt-in sample, the findings are nevertheless staggering:

• 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed anti-Semitism from fellow faculty, staff, or administrators
• 53 percent said their university’s response was either very unhelpful or somewhat unhelpful
• 59 percent heard derogatory anti-Israel comments in private conversations with colleagues
• 38 percent felt the need to hide their Jewish identity on campus
• 38.8 percent of those who faced hostility considered leaving academia altogether
• 50 percent believed their campuses had “soft” or “shadow” boycotts against Jewish or Israeli partnerships
• 55 percent noted departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish groups

One faculty member reported: “My chair is pro-Hamas (explicitly so) and has turned our department into an encampment, full of ‘river to the sea’ slogans and propaganda. When I and a few other Jewish faculty objected, the chair organized about 50 people to verbally attack us, including one who told me that we had all the money and power.”

Another wrote simply: “I am attacked in all directions and no longer feel safe on campus,” and another shared, “Faculty are not talking to me because they know I’m a Zionist.”

[RELATED: Mamdani’s Anti-IHRA Stance Will Put Jewish Students at Risk]

The Student Crisis Mirrors Our Own

This faculty-driven hostility creates a toxic environment for Jewish students. A separate ADL survey found that 83 percent of Jewish students have experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism since October 7. At SLC, the crisis is so severe that Adam Lehman, president of Hillel International, declared the environment for Jewish students there “has been among the worst we’ve seen.”

The Title VI complaint filed in March 2024 details horrifying incidents: Students for Justice in Palestine members threatening a Jewish student and telling him he “should have been killed in Israel,” social media posts attacking “dirty, money-grubbing Juden mongrels,” and the “diversity, equity, and inlcusion” (DEI) director promoting a “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine” event two days after October 7 without mentioning Israeli victims.

The numbers tell a horrifying story. The ADL’s 2024 audit recorded 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents nationwide—averaging 25 per day, or more than one every hour. This represents the highest number ever recorded in the United States. For the first time, 58 percent of these incidents were explicitly tied to anti-Israel sentiment.

Compared to 2022, anti-Semitic incidents rose by 140 percent. On college campuses, the increase was even steeper—84 percent higher in 2024 than in 2023, with 1,694 incidents recorded.

An American Failure

What makes this particularly shameful is that American universities are failing where others are at least making an effort. While anti-Semitic incidents have surged globally—970 percent in Canada, 320 percent in Australia, 300 percent in France—many of these countries have implemented national strategies to combat the hatred. Australia threatens to cut funding to institutions that fail to act. European universities face new requirements for security measures and mandatory training.

Meanwhile, American universities hide behind empty DEI rhetoric. Despite 56 percent of students undergoing diversity training, only 18 percent received any education about anti-Semitism. A Heritage Foundation study found that 96 percent of DEI staff tweets about Israel were critical. In comparison, 62 percent about China were favorable, revealing an obsessive double standard that crosses into anti-Semitism.

[RELATED: From Campus Rhetoric to Assassination]

Historical Echoes We Dare Not Ignore

The parallels to 1930s academia are chilling. Just as German universities once pioneered the intellectual justification for excluding Jews—with faculty leading the charge—today’s professors are normalizing anti-Semitism through academic language about “settler colonialism” and “resistance.”

The faculty survey found that 64 percent of Jewish professors were told by colleagues what is and isn’t anti-Semitism, as if our lived experience of hatred needs their validation. At Harvard, where Jewish students once faced quotas limiting their enrollment, the faculty now denies systemic anti-Semitism exists, despite 67 percent of Jewish students reporting discomfort expressing their opinions.

This isn’t just history repeating; it’s history rhyming with devastating precision.

The Professional Devastation

The personal costs are immeasurable. The Faculty Under Fire report documents faculty who suffered heart attacks from stress, who left not just their universities but the United States entirely, who abandoned research areas they were passionate about. One professor wrote: “I left both academia and the US. I moved to Israel. I had a heart attack in July 2024 that I think was at least partially connected to all of the stress I experienced at my school.”

Beyond individual suffering lies systemic exclusion. At my own institution, awards, leadership roles, and recognition routinely go to others—often younger colleagues with fewer accomplishments. The SLC president platforms select faculty while ignoring others, including myself, despite constant rhetoric about equity and support for all. More broadly, collaborations with Israeli institutions are blocked, speaking invitations rescinded, and grant opportunities vanish. The result is a real brain drain: nearly 40 percent of faculty who have faced anti-Semitism are considering leaving academia altogether.

[RELATED: ‘Can Universities Take Anti-Semitism Seriously?’]

The Institutional Betrayal

The most profound betrayal comes from the institutions themselves. Universities that never miss a chance to issue statements about microaggressions remain silent about macro-aggressions against Jews. They convene committees, promise listening sessions, and then nothing.

The ADL/AEN report found that 54 percent of Jewish faculty said their university’s response was unhelpful. Professional academic associations were even worse—77 percent of respondents found their responses unhelpful. Meanwhile, the ADL’s campus report card gave failing grades to elite institutions, including Columbia, Barnard, and The New School.

Where diversity offices exist to protect every other minority, Jews are told our concerns are “just politics.” Where trigger warnings protect students from difficult content, Jewish students are forced to sit through classes where professors justify October 7. Where safe spaces proliferate for every identity, Jewish students find mezuzahs ripped from their doors.

Why This Matters to Everyone

Some will read this and think it’s a niche problem. They’re dangerously wrong.

When faculty can organize campaigns against colleagues based on ethnicity and face no consequences, academic freedom dies. When departments can maintain shadow boycotts against an entire nation’s scholars, intellectual exchange withers. When professors can be driven out for their identity, excellence is replaced by ideological conformity.

The precedent set today won’t stop with Jews. Once universities accept that it’s acceptable to ostracize based on identity or perceived politics, no one is safe. Today it’s Zionists. Tomorrow, it could be anyone who dissents from the prevailing orthodoxy.

As Harvard’s own faculty ignore the crisis, they fail to see they’re destroying the very foundation of liberal education. When 67 percent of academics self-censor out of fear, the marketplace of ideas becomes a monopoly of ideology.

[RELATED: Harvard Equates Criticizing Hamas Supporters With Racism]

What Faculty Can Do Now

Beyond waiting for institutional change, Jewish faculty must act:

• Build Networks: Organizations like the Academic Engagement Network provide crucial support. Jewish and Zionist faculty are not alone, even when institutions abandon us.
• Document Everything: Every incident, every email, every hallway snub. The paper trail matters for potential legal action under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Brandeis Center offers free legal consultation for those facing discrimination.
• Speak Out: Silence enables. When only one faculty member at Sarah Lawrence reached out to me after students disrupted my classes, and did so privately, it sent a message to the perpetrators that their behavior was acceptable.
• Stay Visible: The 37.8 percent of faculty hiding their Jewish identity are doing exactly what our tormentors want. My visibility has “backstopped scores of students who now feel far more comfortable pushing back on the antisemitic zeitgeist.”

What Universities Must Do

If universities are serious about reversing this crisis, half-measures won’t suffice:

1. Adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism or a similar strong definition and integrate it into conduct codes—not as a suggestion but as policy.
2. Create consequences: Faculty who harass colleagues or students must face real penalties, not just stern emails.
3. End the double standard: If DEI training remains mandatory, anti-Semitism education must be included.
4. Track and publish data: Create annual climate surveys specifically measuring anti-Semitism and make results public.
5. Break the monopoly: Diversity initiatives that exclude Jews while protecting every other minority are discriminatory, full stop.
6. Support Jewish life: We need not just tolerance but active support for Jewish students and faculty to express their identities fully.

[RELATED: Princeton President Melts Down, Rejects Responsibility for Campus Anti-Semitism]

The Moment of Truth

President Trump’s administration has frozen hundreds of millions in funding to universities that fail to address anti-Semitism. The Department of Education has launched investigations into 60 institutions. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating SLC specifically. Change may finally come from external pressure where internal conscience has failed.

But we shouldn’t need federal intervention to do what’s right.

I’ve stayed in academia because I believe in its ideals—that universities can be places where students learn not just facts, but how to live in a pluralistic democracy. We help lift all students and are theoretically supposed to create well-informed citizens. Sadly, my beliefs and intentions alone won’t save these institutions.

As I wrote after students occupied SLC’s administrative building: “This fall, as I held open houses for my courses on polarization and the American presidency, the Divestment Coalition disrupted them by calling for a boycott and spreading libel. Their campaign failed, and my classes were filled with brave, committed students.”

Those brave students give me hope. But they deserve better than universities that force them to be brave just to take a class from a Jewish professor.

The Reckoning

Universities have six months to act before losing a generation of Jewish scholars. The mass exodus has already begun, not just of faculty but of students who see no future in institutions that make their identity a liability. At SLC alone, multiple students have left or are considering leaving because of anti-Semitism.

When colleagues literally avert their eyes rather than greet you, when they organize to destroy your career, when your accomplishments are erased, and your presence is treated as contamination, they aren’t just rejecting one person; they’re rejecting the very idea of a university as a place of free inquiry and human dignity.

The question is no longer whether we’ll confront this crisis. It’s a question of whether universities will confront it themselves or have change forced upon them. Either way, the era of genteel academic anti-Semitism dressed up as political discourse is ending.

History will judge this moment and those who remained silent. Their silence today will echo as loudly as the silence of those who watched their Jewish colleagues disappear from German universities in the 1930s.

The difference is, this time we’re not going quietly.

Image: “Westlands” by SaidieLou on Wikimedia Commons