Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on June 13, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Following the shock caused by the anti-Semitic campus riots of spring 2024, Günther Jikeli spoke up. Jikeli, an associate professor from Germany and one of only two faculty members at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University, published a call to action in The Algemeiner:
Giving up on universities is not the right strategy … Donors, both large and small, should support research and programs that oppose antisemitic thinking and behavior. By investing in serious and effective academic research, we equip ourselves with the knowledge and tools needed to effectively combat antisemitism, not only today but for generations to come.
Jikeli ended his call, in all seriousness, with the question, “If this cannot be done in academia, where can it be done?”
Are there no places outside of academia where anti-Semitism can be opposed? No left-leaning institutions like the Anti-Defamation League or the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism? No conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute or the American Enterprise Institute? The UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists are further examples of places outside academia where “it can be done.” There are also scholars without institutional affiliation working on the topic. Hannah Arendt was an independent scholar when she wrote her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Max Dimont worked in advertising when he gave us Jews, God, and History. Eric Hoffer was a dockworker when he wrote the highly acclaimed book The True Believer. Indeed, the right question is whether “it” can be done in current academia, not outside of it. The latter we already know.
According to Gallup, trust in American higher education is generally at an all-time low. Could the concomitant funding problems not rather be a thoughtful re-evaluation by donors who have started to take a closer look at what is going on at universities? A letter decrying campus anti-Semitism at Jikeli’s Indiana University, for instance, received only 56 signatures, including a mere 12 signatures from humanities professors—and only one from philosophy and not even a single one from English! Jikeli himself has been characterized as downplaying Muslim anti-Semitism in Germany in his PhD dissertation, which he wrote at the Center for Research on Antisemitism Studies at TU Berlin. That same Center later hosted a German taxpayer-funded research project on “Jewish pimps.” A newspaper run by the Central Council of Jews in Germany has criticized the Center for discrediting efforts to fight anti-Semitism and having “nothing substantial to contribute” about October 7.
It takes some chutzpah to plead for further donations, given the fact that it took Indiana University’s ISCA almost a week after the October 7 barbarism to issue a tiny statement condemning the most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust. A year before the enormous outbreak of American anti-Semitism that followed the attack, David Wolpe delivered a webinar talk at ISCA that hasn’t aged particularly well:
I don’t want to be a thoroughgoing alarmist. I do believe that things can change, and they can change for the better as they can change for the worse. My general read of the contemporary situation is in America we have to just be constantly aware and speak out. Do I see an impending apocalypse [of anti-Semitism]? No, I don’t. And I think those who do, are doing America and their fellow Americans a real disservice.
One can only assume that the Institute considers this Pollyannaism to be “serious and effective” research. After all, the host of the talk introduced Wolpe as among “the most accomplished scholars of antisemitism of this generation.”
Faced with backlash over the horrific treatment of Jews on campuses, many universities have started creating their own research centers for anti-Semitism—despite lacking the necessary expertise for it. NYU, for instance, announced a new Center for the Study of Antisemitism on the same day that the university was hit with a lawsuit, filed by three Jewish students, “alleging that the university allowed a hostile, discriminatory environment that violated their civil rights protections.” (The parties later agreed to a settlement.) The Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan and the Lab for the Global Study of Antisemitism at the University of Toronto are further examples.
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Research on the anti-Semitism phenomenon is undoubtedly necessary, extremely urgent, and in need of funding. And some talented scholars still exist, even within academia. Yet potential donors to such projects should keep in mind that the label “antisemitism studies” often conceals a lack of genuine scholarship—and at times even pseudoscience. In some cases, such work veers into the unethical (e.g., research that employs a “bogus pipeline”) and, paradoxically, becomes an inversion of what the field stands for: anti-Semitism enshrined as social justice. The replication crisis that affected psychology in the past decade, for instance, was another huge red flag. Anti-Semitism studies ignored it.
Nevertheless, one might argue that it is a good start to create more spaces for anti-Semitism research. After all, it is a step forward, considering that many colleges lack even courses on the subject. Harvard, for instance, did not offer a single course on anti-Semitism when Jew-hatred spread across its campus. Meanwhile, it did offer courses on “Taylor Swift and Her World,” “Video Game Storytelling,” and “Happiness.”
But I wonder where the expertise for these new research centers and other donor-funded projects will come from. Who are the actual experts in academia? Harvard, for example, appointed Derek Penslar to co-chair its task force to combat anti-Semitism, a decision that sparked widespread criticism since Penslar saw reports of anti-Semitism at Harvard as “exaggerated,” according to a report by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Penslar, a two-time president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, has received significant criticism for his work. In his latest book, he wrote that “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians” and that “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization,” to give just two examples. Yet, in 2024, the book became a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. In January 2025, Bar-Ilan University invited him, without any apparent irony, to speak on “Jews, Antisemitism, and Anti-Zionism in American Universities Since 1948.”
Nor do I see how the annual “Law vs. Antisemitism Conference,” which is “inspired by the history of Critical Race Theory” (CRT), can be helpful if papers claim that “white Jews” are “directly implicated in and often beneficiaries of our racist systems” and that they “in some cases helped propagate White privilege.” The conference organizer, a “Critical Race Theory person” (by her own description), speaks in her conspiratorial and ahistorical work about “Jewish benefit from white supremacy and white privilege” and a “Jewish complicity with anti-Black racism.” These conferences are well attended by anti-Semitism scholars. Kenneth L. Marcus, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights under the first Trump administration, has been among them. When Marcus attended, Penslar delivered the opening address.
This points to two general problems. One is what Andrew Koss has described in Mosaic as “Jewish studies against the Jews,” a phenomenon that has largely taken over the academy. The other is a broader problem at academic conferences: They bypass the normal process of peer-review, which, flawed as it often is, at least seeks to vet knowledge. In the case of a conference, however, one simply gets invited by a host and may well present scientifically invalid information, which then gets portrayed as “expert opinion” and reported on in the news. Becoming an “expert” in an academic field should not depend on one’s financial ability to attend a conference, on being picked by organizers, or on a willingness to alight on a particular ideology. Expertise should be earned through accurate predictions and analysis—not activism or networking.
Ultimately, these kinds of conferences don’t expose anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism exposes them. While there is much to despise in the smearing of Jews dressed up as scholarship, perhaps the worst is its outreach. For example, California allowed lawyers to earn Mandatory Continuing Legal Education credit for attending the “Law vs. Antisemitism Conference” at UCLA in March 2025. The question is, after the event, will these lawyers still be able to defend Jews from future harassment or even recognize anti-Semitism as such?
If there are “Jewish studies against the Jews,” then there are certainly anti-Semitism studies against them. A scholar at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, for instance, claims that Jewish studies in China are able to flourish specifically because the field is free of Jewish scholars. After all, Jews would be a “burden.”
I wonder about that “serious and effective academic research” Jikeli rightly calls for, since there is not even a timely and effective journal for the study of anti-Semitism. Articles in existing journals often take years from submission and acceptance to publication. A “literature review” in Antisemitism Studies identified 550 articles on the topic of anti-Semitism and psychology in the U.S. but discussed at length only 15.
There are various other examples that would extend the length of this article. After the outbreak of anti-Semitism on American college campuses, many people encountered them and realized that, often, “the emperor is wearing no clothes.” Understandably, many are reluctant to continue donating.
Jikeli’s call to action strikes me as an unhelpful form of elitism, assuming as it does that current universities are the only places where Jew-hatred can possibly be studied. And this is even though many such institutions have failed to educate their own students, let alone broader society, about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Donors should keep this in mind when they come across the often misleading label of “anti-Semitism studies” in higher education.
Image: “Columbia reinstated Gaza Solidarity Encampment Palestinian flags” by عباد ديرانية on Wikimedia Commons
