Much has been written about how places like Harvard have failed to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. The coverage is both shocking and, sadly, predictable. But what’s really struck me lately is just how willing Harvard can be to take action on anti-Semitism, so long as it means going after Jews.
Harvard researcher of gender identity and “Jewish inclusivity,” Caroline C. Kaufman, rambled in a presentation about anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from Jews themselves:
people can [she laughs] someone can say something that’s anti-Semitic that’s [sic] Jewish, and someone can still have um a harmful effect on other Jews even if they are Jewish. And I still think that it’s worth um, interrogating and discussing those comments and potentially even reporting those comments
So now anti-Semitism is the Jews’ fault, too, Harvard? At least I haven’t seen that same eagerness to “interrogate and report” anyone else on campus. No, this isn’t a Jewish issue; it’s an academic one. And it says a lot about what “Jewish studies” has turned into at places like Harvard.
Harvard’s Jewish Alumni Association (HJAA) has issued a report on their perception of anti-Semitism among faculty and teaching fellows at Kaufman’s university.
[RELATED: The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism in the U.S.]
They found that anti-Zionist and even genocidal slogans are being taught in Harvard classrooms. Meanwhile, the school offers courses like “Video Game Storytelling,” “Leaning In, Hooking Up,” and “Queering the World.” The Fall 2023 term even included a course simply titled “Happiness.”
What Harvard students couldn’t take that semester, however, was a single course on anti-Semitism. Not even one offered by the Center for Jewish Studies. The closest? A class called “Jews and Race”—focused on slavery, BLM, and Islamophobia.
Among the few other courses offered by Harvard’s so-called Center for Jewish Studies were ones on zombies, Polish culture, and early Christianity. A course on anti-Semitism, it seems, would require too much intellectual effort, especially at a university that insists “intellectual growth and academic achievement should not come at the expense of wellbeing.” Small wonder, then, that in the fall, some Harvard students openly celebrated the rape, torture, and murder of Jews—acts committed solely because they were Jewish— on a scale not seen since the Holocaust. Then they went back to their video games and their “Happiness” class.
For the Spring 2024 term, the Center invited a fellow whose PhD dissertation at Columbia University was titled “The Jewish Economics of Sex Work and Mobility, Between 1870 and 1939”—whatever that’s supposed to mean. This vulgar flirtation with anti-Semitic language is not unusual at the Center. Its director, Derek Penslar, made the baseless accusation that the founder of Zionism was a paedophile stalker of a 13-year-old girl, and wrote that Zionism was a means for him to “expose his genitals.” Yale University Press published these garbage ideas as part of its “Jewish Lives” series.
His work does not appear to bother the field of Jewish studies, at least as indicated by the fact that Penslar has served as a two-time president of the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR) before joining its executive committee. In his book Zionism: An Emotional State, 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.” This book became a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
This was a new low for the Prize after the previous year’s winner, Koshersoul, smeared Jews as “annoyingly stubborn,” “argumentative,” and an “exhausting set of people.” Perhaps these smears were seen as acceptable by the Award because the author of Koshersoul, a book about cooking and identity, converted to Judaism and cooks in “the spirit of queerness and impetus of gay liberation”—a completely meaningless statement. After all, if someone presents a meal cooked by a gay man, what does that say about the meal? Absolutely nothing! It says absolutely nothing about the meal. Yet, Koshersoul became the Jewish Book of the Year (“It’s only chicken, motherf[***]er!”).
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This kind of uncensored vulgarity is mainstream within the field. David Hirsh, the founder of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) introduced himself on his Twitter account as: “Russian warship go f[**]k yourself / Founder LCSCA @centre_as / Arsenal, women and men. / ADHD.” And so is the intellectual decay. The Association of Jewish Studies (AJS), the main professional organization for the field, sent a message two days after October 7 to current and former members expressing “deep sorrow for the loss of life and destruction” without stating who lost their lives, where, and why. Tellingly, Mosaic headlined “Jewish Studies Against the Jews” and reported about an AJS conference two months later with
presentations like ‘How Goodly Are Your Tents: Studying the Bible Through Circus Arts.’…Somehow, it seems, a Jewish-studies conference has become an unwelcome space for Israelis to speak openly about Israeli culture, and there is a growing contingent within the discipline that believes the subject can only be discussed in a way that highlights Israel’s sins…professors in Jewish studies are increasingly drawn to seeing their job not as advancing the prospects of Jews but as exposing their faults, real or imagined
As a term, “Jewish studies” has largely become a semantic fraud. It does not represent much research on anything Jewish anymore, and hardly do these “clown shows” constitute as studies. It is most often not academic but hateful activism, and as such anti-Jewish. At least overwhelmingly so in America. Naya Lekht, in Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, calls this brand of education “woke in content, Jewish in form.” Joshua M. Karlip of Yeshiva University refers to it as a “process of de-Judaization of Jewish Studies in America.” And Jarrod Tanny, a historian at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and founder of the Jewish Studies Zionist Network, bluntly describes it as the “failure of Jewish Studies programs.” It’s no wonder Jewish students are often reluctant to enroll in these courses.
A look at Contemporary Jewry, a journal published by Springer, reinforces the point. One article criticizes the “color-blind racism” of Orthodox Jews for their opposition to the BLM movement—published just a year after the Chicago chapter of BLM celebrated the October 7 attacks. Another explores settler colonialism and states, without qualification: “To be clear, I do not claim that Jews are Indigenous to Israel nor do I think there is any merit to such arguments.” A third article deems it “important” to track the locations of Jews in America, using tools such as distinctive Jewish names, mapping, and community-level data sets, in the name of both academic study and “practical planning.” The author of this historically irresponsible study—a professor at the University of Miami—also serves as the journal’s research editor.
Even if universities start offering the right courses now, who will teach them?
An anthropologist and scholar of Jewish languages at the University of Virginia claimed in the Forward that the term intifada “certainly strikes me as meaning, to Arabs or Arab-sympathetic people, a globalization of a non-violent or minimally violent resistance movement.” Then there’s DAAD Assistant Professor Armin Langer, who received the Baron Award from the Western Jewish Studies Association before joining the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Before moving to the U.S., he lived for many years in an Arab neighborhood in Berlin and seriously claims he has “never encountered any antisemitic comments there,” adding that “’The Jew’ isn’t weak anymore. Muslims are the new Jews.” After suggesting “that the Central Council of Jews [in Germany] be renamed to the Central Council of Racist Jews,” he lost his training position at a college in Potsdam. A Jewish newspaper in Germany called Langer “a useful idiot who kicks Jews in the shins in a media-effective way.”
Or consider someone who studied under David Biale, the vice president of the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR) and three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Biale supported the anti-Semitic BDS movement and defended the disruption of a pro-Israel event at UC Davis, where he was Professor of Jewish History. He criticized the use of Title VI protections for Jewish students, stating, “The purpose of Title VI was originally to protect African Americans on university campuses at a time when they were discriminated against. The Jews are a group with power. I find it to be a very bizarre tactic.”
[RELATED: ‘Globalizing the Intifada’ Targets Western Civilization]
While the AAJR has posted a link asking for donations to Ukraine and issued a statement about a civil lawsuit in Poland—where its current president is from—there is no statement regarding the October 7 attacks. Did those events on American campuses not affect “American Jewish Research”? Instead, the AAJR issued a statement defending its former president against accusations of anti-Semitism. Well, not exactly defending—that would involve argument—more like citing his status. I don’t know what the once-prestigious AAJR stands for today. Perhaps a confusion of responsibility and scholarship with prominence. Indeed, the real “group with power” today seems to be those who act with impunity.
Beyond the performative activism, Jewish studies often lack substance. Criticism of this decline is dismissed without explanation, as if it were about status, not ideas; about intellectual power, not debate. Ironically, it could hardly be less scholarly—or less Jewish.
Another member of AAJR’s executive committee and former president of the Association for Jewish Studies is Pamela Nadell, a professor of gender and Jewish history at American University. Nadell was sitting right next to Claudine Gay and the other Ivy League presidents during their infamous testimony before Congress—the one in which they refused to deem calls for genocide against Jews a violation of their conduct policies. She was “delighted” to be invited to speak as an expert on anti-Semitism in America that day; a topic she was writing a book about, and for which she was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities public scholar award, and for that, she thanked Congress. People talk a lot about the intellectual and moral decline of the Ivy League these days. We were seeing it right there in real time, happening to Jewish studies, too.
“Could I ever have predicted the fallout from that hearing?” Nadell later asked rhetorically in an interview. “Absolutely not. There was no way.”
Learn more about campus anti-Semitism here.
Image: “Anti-Semitism” by Quinn Dombrowski on Wikimedia Commons
