‘Can Universities Take Anti-Semitism Seriously?’

In response to my recent Martin Center article, “The Emptiness of Antisemitism Studies,” George Leef wrote in National Review and posed the question: “Can American universities take antisemitism seriously?” His framing perfectly captured the larger stakes of the problem. My original piece—later reprinted in Minding the Campus and by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research—showed how little reason there is to expect current universities to treat the subject with much rigor. Instead of confronting Jew-hatred, too many “anti-Semitism studies” programs mask ideology and activism as scholarship, recast Jews as privileged oppressors, or delay condemning October 7, if they condemn it at all. Consequently, the field is largely empty, and the answer to the question “Can they take it seriously?” writes itself.

The Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington, D.C., is a place where anti-Semitism is studied. PERIL’s co-founder and associate director, Brian Hughes, is frequently interviewed by Al Jazeera, which he calls a “media outlet.” Team members include five dogs. When “Sugar,” a chihuahua dressed up with a pearl necklace, is “not helping to prevent polarization and extremism through puppy cuteness, she has a keen interest in dog fashion,” while “Mr. Jones is a loving and energetic pup who listens in on many PERIL Zoom meetings.”

The director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, Adam L. Rovner, currently leads the search committee for the Emil & Eva Hecht Visiting Professor of Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies. His official faculty portrait depicts him in a style that seems either a parody of royalty or hip-hop culture: his face black-and-white set against a red background, wearing a crown and heavy chain necklaces.

David Hirsh, 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.” Hirsh also serves as editorial consultant for the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. Its Spring 2025 issue, published unusually late in August, effectively turned the journal into a student publication: the new managing editor, along with four other editors of the issue, are graduate students. Editorial choices—including an interview titled “‘Fun’ with Antisemitism”—underscore the risks associated with such inexperienced oversight.

Apart from the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism—by its own account “the leading scholarly publication in the field”—there is a competing journal devoted to the topic and plagued by similar problems: Antisemitism Studies, which describes itself as “the leading forum for scholarship on antisemitism.” It calls to mind John Staddon’s warning of “the devolution of social science” through hyper-specialized journals of like-minded individuals and a restriction of what is essential to science—objective criticism.

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But one would surely expect the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London to take the phenomenon seriously. I was therefore surprised to find lectures unrelated to anti-Semitism on its event calendar, such as “Finding Humanity in a World of Technology” or “Ties that bind: kinship, adjacency, and the trans camera.” Was there truly nothing more relevant to Jew-hatred to lecture on at an institute devoted to that specific subject, especially one located in what Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism called “the most anti-Semitic city in the West”?

Of course, scholars are free to be eclectic in their work and even eccentric in personality. But not at the expense of the actual production of knowledge and seriousness where it’s due. So, perhaps the more important question to ask at this point is: How much damage does their unseriousness cause?

The director of the Birkbeck Institute opposes the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and was appointed by Jeremy Corbyn to an internal review group on anti-Semitism in his Labour Party. Two of the institute’s associates described this as a whitewash and accused him in the Jewish Chronicle of coming “dangerously close to a classic antisemitic trope.” But by that time, the Institute had already lost much credibility. At least, I personally see no reason to host a seminar in which a psychologist “offers an account of Jewish barbaric possibilities.”

The same applies to the “king” at the University of Denver, who frames Jews in his latest book, through a single historical figure, as historically implicated in African colonialism, arguing that Jewish assimilation in England was intertwined with imperial power and the conferral of “whiteness.” In doing so, he reinforces harmful associations while claiming to critique them.

Meanwhile, PERIL partners with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which emerged from the communist regime of East Germany. Its human team members are largely psychologists who develop a public-health approach against (right-wing) radicalization and formulate policy recommendations as well as strategies for mental health professionals. However, attempts to uncover the underlying psychological reasons for political beliefs do not seem promising. Claims that right-wingers have a “negativity bias,” for instance, have not replicated in preregistered studies. Moreover, the clinical psychology literature is often biased, manifested as sponsorship bias, publication bias, allegiance bias, unblinded outcome assessors, and small sample sizes. But the problems with the psychology literature do not stop here: 9.5 percent of citations across eight leading psychology journals were found to completely mischaracterize the research, while an additional 9.3 percent failed to include important aspects of the results. As Ian Hussey, a psychologist working at the University of Bern, explained it to me, this data indicates a range of 0-30 percent entirely false citations in individual articles. (One wonders who is reviewing these papers.)

Psychologists could also simply write down their best guesses instead of conducting often expensive and taxpayer-funded studies. An analysis found that 91.5 percent of studies in psychology and psychiatry confirmed the expected effects, about five times higher than in hard sciences.

And then there is another major crisis affecting psychology: Most of its studies simply can’t be replicated. Yet, according to a study conducted by the University of California, San Diego, “Papers that cannot be replicated are cited 153 times more because their findings are interesting.” And even after replication failure is published, nonreplicable papers are cited more than those that replicate. (The common practice of ranking scholars based on their citation index is, for that reason alone, counterproductive to scientific progress.)

Now, all silliness aside about the chihuahua fighting the Nazis, it strikes me as odd that PERIL is advising the U.S. government on policy based on the psychological literature. They simply have no special knowledge to share, and in general, one should be extremely careful not to wrap things in a medical package that are not. We are also seeing this intellectual nonsense in other fields. Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman, for instance, called 9/11 a “geopolitical pandemic,” the 2008 financial crisis a “financial pandemic,” and climate change an “atmospheric pandemic.”

To medicalize radicalism and anti-Semitism also evades personal responsibility. When I made this argument in my book The Therapized Antisemite, even Daniel Burston of the Association of Jewish Psychologists wrote in Kesher that I have “a point … Let’s face it. We cannot have it both ways — habitually describing antisemitism as an ‘illness’ while condemning and punishing people for it, too.”

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PERIL’s entire approach is not only embarrassingly childish and scientifically unsound, but also potentially dangerous. After all, who defines what radicalization and extremism mean in health-care settings? The DSM claimed for over two decades that homosexuality was a mental disorder, which, most obviously, it is not. During the Civil Rights Movement, black men were discredited as “schizophrenic,” while it has been estimated that about one-third of the political prisoners in the Soviet Union were imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals during the 1970s and 1980s. And in 2024, Iran created a “health clinic” to provide women with “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal.” It seems the nine most terrifying of words in the English language aren’t “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” but rather, “The therapeutic state is here to cure your mind.”

This unscientific naiveté about mental health leads to other unserious ways of addressing anti-Semitism on campus. During its outbreak in the spring of 2024, Hillel at Boston University searched for its first-ever “Director of Wellness” to support Jewish students’ “wellness education”:

in the areas of wellness, mental health, and counseling. This professional will partner with BU Hillel leadership to install a wellness strategy at one of the world’s largest Hillels. This will include priorities such as: wellness focused retreats, Jewish learning wellness classes, student-led wellness education events/programming, and more. Each part of what we do will be woven into the ecosystem of wellness.

At the same time, Hillel was searching for a wellness director for USC, wellness support for Queens College, and a mental health professional for Emory—but none for legal advice, Krav Maga, or any other form of self-defense.

Meanwhile, David Hirsh in London reduces anti-Semitism in his work to a single psychological trait, creating what is effectively a caricature of science. By claiming authority and objectivity, he transforms a complex social phenomenon into a laboratory exercise, one that he can measure and scale. When it’s time to panic, I’m sure he will let us know on X.

Until then, these academics need to finish their homework first before playtime.

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