Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on October 3, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
After the most recent outbreak of campus anti-Semitism in America, the Israel Association of University Heads issued a statement denouncing the mistreatment in question and voicing their support for Jewish and Israeli members of the offending institutions. “We will do our best to assist those of them who wish to join Israeli universities and find a welcoming academic and personal home,” they concluded. The heads of all nine public universities in Israel signed the joint statement.
Other initiatives followed, encouraging students to leave American higher education for Israel. Such a move would, according to the Kohelet Policy Forum, allow students to “enjoy a level of academic study higher than that offered in the United States, where excellency is currently being eroded by progressive insanity, which aside from being marinated in Jew-hatred, is also destroying all academic endeavor.” That policy recommendation has since been adopted by Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and seems to find some resonance among American Jewry.
The Jerusalem Post, for instance, reported about a high-school senior from Washington, D.C., who had applied to four universities in the U.S. but, after October 7, 2023, decided to start her bachelor’s degree at Hebrew University’s Rothberg International School. According to the article, she “is among many recent high-school graduates who have reconsidered their college plans in light of the anti-Israel protests that [have] swept across U.S. campuses.”
In addition to moral decline, America should, in its own best interest, be concerned about the potential brain drain caused by pushing Jews out. History shows that that action has never ended well for any country.
[RELATED: Anti-Semitism Among Faculty and the University’s Betrayal]
But should American Jewish students consider it in their best interest to attend college in Israel?
The question is more complicated than it might appear. Without question, it was intellectually embarrassing when, in 2021, some 200 scholars—mostly American—signed an open letter denouncing Israel’s “ethnonationalist ideologies” and “settler colonial paradigms.” And these were scholars of Jewish and Israel Studies! Even more troubling, the letter used the neo-Nazi term “Jewish supremacy.” But the letter was also signed by Professor Amos Goldberg of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. Hypocrisy aside, the fact that Goldberg signed on to such things while living in Israel—and working in East Jerusalem—is an indicator that students seeking real education in Israel might not always find it there.
I certainly have my doubts that such students would encounter serious scholarship in Hebrew University’s Israel Studies program, judging by the self-description of its academic head, who just returned from a sabbatical in Paris:
Dr. Berda has been highly engaged in social justice activism and politics in Israel … Her master’s thesis … explores the influence of Colonial administrative legacies on the contemporary military civil administration in the occupied territories.
I wonder if this “occupation” includes Berda’s office space at Rothberg International School in East Jerusalem. For that matter, I wonder why she isn’t moving back to New York, where she was born, if she believes that “for Palestinians, all of historic Palestine is their homeland,” while for Jews, that is true only “on a spiritual level, on a religious level.” Tellingly, Israel Academia Monitor headlined its coverage of these claims, “Yael Berda: Anti-Israel Activist Disguised as an Academic.”
The Hebrew University was founded by intellectual giants such as Albert Einstein. Martin Buber was one of its founding professors. Gershom Scholem taught there. And now? A law professor was suspended and arrested last year on “suspicion of incitement after questioning [the reality of] Hamas rapes and other atrocities during the October 7 attacks and saying Israelis are ‘criminals’ and ‘should be afraid’,” reported the Times of Israel. The self-described feminist professor was defended by many of her colleagues. Yuri Pines, professor of Chinese studies, for instance, resigned in protest from his position, including as the director of the Confucius Institute. If Hebrew University were a Zionist institution, he wrote, it would no longer feel like “home” to him. Yet, that’s exactly what made it his home. Pines was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel in 1979. The irony writes itself…
Continue reading the full article here.
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