13.05.26
Editorial Note
Recently, the University of Washington (UW) has been at the center of several anti-Israel and antisemitic events. First, the group Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return posted on social media the event to raise money for the “Lebanese resistance” movement. The group, known as SUPER UW, organized the occupation of a University of Washington engineering building in 2025, which led to property damage and the arrests of about three dozen people. Police reportedly arrested multiple pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrating at a Town Hall Seattle event, where Noa Cochva, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, was speaking. SUPER UW also planned to protest Cochva at Red Square on the university’s campus. The Trump administration is currently investigating the UW over concerns about its handling of antisemitism. It will be conducted by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
The University of Washington publicly responded to the U.S. Department of Justice’s compliance review, stating that this was “an off-campus event referenced publicly that appears to have been organized by a group falsely claiming affiliation with the University of Washington. That group’s registration was suspended in June 2024 and permanently revoked in May 2025. The University of Washington strongly and unequivocally opposes antisemitism in all forms. We also notified Meta last year of this group’s unauthorized use of the University’s name on social media.”
In another case, Aria Fani, an associate professor in UW’s Jackson School of International Studies, was terminated as the director of the Middle East Center after he sent messages on the center’s listserv on March 18, where he claimed that the American campaign against the Islamic Republic was a war against its people, cultural heritage, ecology and civilian infrastructure, and said Israel was committing acts of terrorism. He saw Zionism as “cancerous, a potentially fatal outgrowth in our planetary body.” Soon after, Daniel Hoffman, President of the Jackson School, told him he was unfit for leadership because his emails had made some members of the Middle East Center community feel attacked for their views. He remains a professor, though he’s on medical leave this quarter and not teaching. Fani signed a three-year contract in 2025 to serve as the Middle East Center’s director, responsible for programming, community outreach, and fundraising. Fani was born and raised in Iran and moved to the U.S. at 18. He teaches courses on Persian and Iranian studies, and his research focuses on modern Persian literature and translation studies.
Also, a January symposium called “The World as Palestine: On Advocacy, Activism, and Justice” was hosted by the Middle East Center. When UW President Robert Jones was asked about the symposium during a town hall meeting on combating antisemitism, he stated that his office learned about the symposium just one day before. He added that it would be preferable to have more conversation about its occurrence: “All we can do is try to remind people of their responsibilities as members of the university community… Not trying to tell them that they can’t have a discussion about Palestine or about Israel, but let’s be clear that those discussions need to be had in a way that doesn’t perpetuate an environment where people feel unsafe.”
A number of faculty at the University of Washington commented that the environment on campus has grown too “anti-Israel” after October 7, saying that “Jewish students, faculty, and staff found themselves isolated, facing hostility, and witnessing the normalization of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric.”
Realizing that the issue poses a serious instructional challenge, a faculty-led initiative named “Bridges for Change” was created. According to its website, “Rather than expending energy in entrenched ideological battles, we are starting fresh—developing a center dedicated to academic excellence, independent funding, and honest inquiry.”
Accordingly, “We’re not Reforming the Old, We’re Building the New,” which is “A Smarter Way to Fight Antisemitism.” They explain that “This is the first step toward a permanent center for open discourse at the University of Washington. We will host lectures, bring visiting scholars, support research, and empower students, all without ideological litmus tests. This is not oppositional work. It is constructive. We are laying the foundation for a lasting academic home that values ideas over identity, and truth over tribalism.”
Bridges for Change is interdisciplinary, with faculty from six UW schools, including Medicine, Public Health, Law, and Business, having come together to build a new kind of academic space. Led by Prof. Janet Baseman, a highly respected epidemiologist and co-chair of the UW Antisemitism Task Force, the new initiative is guided by “academic integrity and institutional clarity.” It is going to promote “research, inquiry, and discussion free from the constraints of ideological conformity. Host bold, thoughtful voices that challenge groupthink and deepen campus understanding. Provide space at UW for academic voices committed to shaping a positive future for America, the American Jewish community and the US relationship with Israel. Create a serious intellectual home where questions about Israel, the Middle East, and their relationship to U.S. culture, foreign policy, and innovation are explored openly.”
However, recently, the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian criticized this and other initiatives aiming at combating antisemitism, in an article titled “US universities are seeing an influx of ‘antisemitism centers’. Some Jewish scholars are worried.” The article was authored by Alice Speri, who spoke with “several faculty with expertise in Jewish history see the Middle East Center and the university’s apparent support for it, as an anti-intellectual effort to sideline their scholarly expertise.”
A spokesperson for UW said the initiative is “one of many self-organized faculty-led groups” and that the university “does not endorse opinions these groups may express.”
One interviewee, Susan Glenn, a professor of history and faculty member in UW’s Jewish studies program, said, “They’re undermining expertise and substituting it with ideology even though they claim to be doing exactly the opposite.”
Speri’s interviews were conducted with mostly left-leaning Jewish Studies critical faculty, as she explained, on the prevalence of antisemitism on US campuses. They “expressed fears that the surge of new initiatives could marginalize the expertise of those who have long studied antisemitism, and some expressed discomfort with the outsize investment in this work at a time of deep austerity in the education sector and as other programs are being targeted for cuts.” And that this was part of a broad ecosystem of initiatives devoted to antisemitism that “lawmakers and the Trump administration have seized on allegations of antisemitism to bend universities to their ideological agenda.”
According to Speri, “contentious” debates have focused on the “distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel,” when several universities have adopted a “contentious definition of antisemitism, known as the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition, which many academics have denounced as antithetical to scholarly pursuits and has already been deployed to censor scholarship and discipline faculty.”
For Speri, “the idea that the study of antisemitism requires new institutions that circumvent existing academic departments raises red flags for some.” She spoke with Lila Corwin Berman, director of the Center for American Jewish History at New York University, who said, “What’s new are these institutional structures, this field-building around the idea of foregrounding antisemitism as a specific thing to be studied outside of a history department or a literature department or a religious studies department.” She told Speri that university administrators are largely responding to pressure, not to the needs of students or academic imperatives: “They’re making a public-facing performance about dealing with antisemitism – and the calculation is not being made through rigorous evaluation of scholarly expertise.”
Speri claims, “Alongside academic efforts, several universities have launched ‘antisemitism taskforces’ to look at Jewish life on campus – many led by faculty or administrators who are Jewish but do not have expertise in Jewish history or antisemitism as a scholarly subject.”
Another interviewee was an anti-Zionist Israeli academic, Hadas Binyamini, who recently completed her PhD in history and Hebrew and Judaic studies and is a “member of Liberatory Jewish Studies, a network of self-described anti-Zionist academics in the field.” She noted that the new centers, “where many jobs are non-tenure and short-term, are exacerbating deepening precariousness in academia.” She told Speri that “scholars seizing on the funding opportunities associated with new antisemitism initiatives at a time of austerity that’s decimating their broader fields as facing a ‘devil’s bargain’.”
Speri also discussed the UW Bridges for Change, claiming, “the center is led by a co-chair of a university antisemitism task force – but she is a public health professor, not a scholar of Jewish studies. Other members come from the university’s law and business schools. The center is not formally affiliated with the University of Washington – but seems to rely on university resources, including to process donations. So far, the center doesn’t seem to have done much more than host two public events, both featuring ardent pro-Israel voices, and launch a newsletter.”
Speri needs to note that critics argue that many Western Middle East Studies programs apply far more sustained moral scrutiny to Israel than to Palestinian political culture, Islamist movements, or broader regional authoritarianism.
Critics of Middle East Studies programs have also pointed to the influence of Gulf-state funding on some Western academic institutions, arguing that such funding may have contributed to ideological imbalances in hiring and programming. Evidently, pro-Palestinian scholars have been recruiting anti-Israel scholar-activists, sometimes even Jewish or Israelis, to espouse anti-Israel themes. This helps to deflect accusations of antisemitism. The Guardian and others looked the other way.
It is also important to note that the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism is not “contentious.” Although debated in some academic and civil-liberties circles, the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism has been adopted by 46 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. The IHRA Definition can be applied to any antisemite, regardless of nationality, religion, or race.
Bridges for Change is a very welcome initiative, and more initiatives like this are needed to confront the use of Middle East Centers and other social science departments as platforms for highly one-sided anti-Israel activism and, at times, rhetoric widely viewed by Jewish students and faculty as antisemitic.
REFERENCES:
A Smarter Way to Fight Antisemitism
We’re not Reforming the Old, We’re Building the New
Bridges for Change is a faculty-led initiative created in response to the growing recognition that the rise in antisemitism after October 7 reflects a deeper institutional challenge.
Rather than expending energy in entrenched ideological battles, we are starting fresh—developing a center dedicated to academic excellence, independent funding, and honest inquiry.
This is the first step toward a permanent center for open discourse at the University of Washington. We will host lectures, bring visiting scholars, support research, and empower students, all without ideological litmus tests. This is not oppositional work. It is constructive. We are laying the foundation for a lasting academic home that values ideas over identity, and truth over tribalism.
Leadership
Bridges for Change is a truly interdisciplinary effort, where faculty from six UW schools—including Medicine, Public Health, Law, Business, and more—have come together to build a new kind of academic space.
Led by Professor Janet Baseman, a highly respected epidemiologist and Co-Chair of the UW Antisemitism Task Force, the initiative is guided by academic integrity and institutional clarity.
a Positive Vision
Promote research, inquiry, and discussion free from the constraints of ideological conformity.
Host bold, thoughtful voices that challenge groupthink and deepen campus understanding.
Provide space at UW for academic voices committed to shaping a positive future for America, the American Jewish community and the US relationship with Israel.
Create a serious intellectual home where questions about Israel, the Middle East, and their relationship to U.S. culture, foreign policy, and innovation are explored openly.
University of Washington, Seattle Campus
Contact: uwbridgesforchange@uw.edu
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DOJ investigating University of Washington over antisemitism concerns
By:Jake Goldstein-Street-April 21, 202612:39 pmUpdated 1:14 pm
The Trump administration is investigating the University of Washington over concerns about its handling of antisemitism in light of an off-campus event planned by a protest group.
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced the investigation on social media Monday. It will be conducted by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. This follows numerous federal probes into antisemitism on college campuses across the country in the aftermath of protests of Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere.
Dhillon’s social media post cites the Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return’s event scheduled for Tuesday to raise money for the “Lebanese resistance” movement, as Israel has ramped up attacks there.
University spokesperson Victor Balta noted the event hosted by the group known as SUPER UW, and scheduled for Tuesday night, is located off-campus. In a statement, he said the organization is “falsely claiming affiliation with the University of Washington” after its university registration was permanently revoked last May.
“The University of Washington strongly and unequivocally opposes antisemitism in all forms,” Balta wrote.
He said the Justice Department had notified the university that it is conducting a “compliance review.”
“The University will cooperate with the review and provide information and responses,” Balta said.
SUPER UW organized the occupation of a University of Washington engineering building last year that led to property damage and the arrests of nearly three dozen people. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the federal investigation.
The Trump administration had announced a probe of the university after the protest. It’s unclear if anything came of that investigation.
Balta said the university has told Meta, which runs Facebook, that the group was using the university’s name on social media without authorization. Meta, according to the university, has declined to address the concern. The university is appealing the company’s decision.
Police reportedly arrested multiple pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrating at a Town Hall Seattle event over the weekend, where Noa Cochva, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, was speaking.
SUPER UW also planned to protest Cochva on Tuesday at Red Square on the university’s campus, according to a Facebook posting from the group.
Since retaking office last year, Trump has targeted elite universities over allegations of harboring antisemitism. Several, including Brown, Columbia and Cornell, have struck deals with the federal government that require them to pay millions of dollars to restore withheld federal research funding.
Critics say the approach is using antisemitism as a pretense to punish universities for promoting a liberal worldview and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that the Trump administration opposes.
In March 2025, the UW and dozens of other colleges across the country received letters from the Trump administration warning of “potential enforcement actions” based on alleged antisemitic harassment on campus. This followed a national wave of university protests last year over Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza, including an encampment on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment watchdog, said in a statement Tuesday that, “Holding UW responsible for the actions of an off-campus group would stretch federal civil rights law far past its lawful bounds.”
“The federal government is not empowered to demand universities serve as roving monitors of private off-campus expression,” the group added, pointing to regulations and Supreme Court precedent. “Unless there are other allegations, this investigation should end.”
Dhillon’s short social media post says nothing about potential sanctions for the University of Washington. Nor did it give any specific examples of antisemitism the Department of Justice is investigating.
The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information.
This article was updated with reaction from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
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UW NEWS
Administrative affairs | UW News blog
April 20, 2026
Statement on Department of Justice compliance review
UW News
The following is a statement from the University of Washington in response to a U.S. Department of Justice compliance review that was announced by a U.S. assistant attorney general on social media:
The University of Washington has been notified by the U.S. Department of Justice that it is conducting a compliance review. The University will cooperate with the review and provide information and responses.
The off-campus event referenced publicly appears to have been organized by a group falsely claiming affiliation with the University of Washington. That group’s registration was suspended in June 2024 and permanently revoked in May 2025. The University of Washington strongly and unequivocally opposes antisemitism in all forms.
We also notified Meta last year of this group’s unauthorized use of the University’s name on social media, and appealed Meta’s refusal to address this issue on March 10. That appeal is pending.
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https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/uw-professor-removed-as-director-of-middle-east-center/
UW professor removed as director of Middle East Center
April 3, 2026 at 6:00 am Updated April 3, 2026 at 6:00 am
By Paige Cornwell
Seattle Times staff reporter
A University of Washington professor said he was terminated as director of the university’s Middle East Center after he sent messages on the center’s listserv that criticized the U.S. and Israel’s military action against Iran and called Zionism “cancerous.”
Aria Fani, an associate professor in UW’s Jackson School of International Studies, said director Daniel Hoffman told him last week he was fired from his leadership role. He remains a professor, though he’s on medical leave this quarter and not teaching.
Hoffman will cover the center’s administrative responsibilities for spring and summer, UW spokesperson Victor Balta said Wednesday afternoon. The university didn’t respond to questions about the reasons for Fani’s firing, citing employee privacy and confidentiality. Fani’s termination was first reported by UW’s The Daily student newspaper.
Fani signed a three-year contract in 2025 to serve as the Middle East Center’s director, responsible for handling programming, outreach to the community and fundraising.
Fani was born and raised in Iran and moved to the U.S. at 18. He teaches courses on Persian and Iranian studies, and his research focuses on modern Persian literature and translation studies. After the Iran war began, Fani wrote a 2,000-plus-word email to the Middle East Center listserv offering his analysis, “which is why I was hired — for my research on Iran,” Fani said. He noted the message contained his views and was not reflective of the diversity of opinions in the center and Jackson School.
On March 18, he sent a second email, with the subject line “More Notes on Iran War.” In that message, he wrote the war isn’t against the Islamic Republic but against the state of Iran and its people, cultural heritage, ecology and civilian infrastructure, and said Israel was committing acts of terrorism. He wrote that he saw Zionism as “cancerous, a potentially fatal outgrowth in our planetary body.”
Soon after, the listserv was placed under moderation, and Fani was no longer able to send emails. He assumed he had violated guidelines, though he said there were no written rules on how the listserv could be used, and thought everything had settled down until he got the phone call last week.
According to Fani, Hoffman told him he was unfit for leadership because his emails had made some members of the Middle East Center community feel attacked for their views. Hoffman directed a request for comment to the UW media relations office.
Fani questioned the timing of the decision because one week prior, UW President Robert Jones made comments about a January symposium called “The World as Palestine: On Advocacy, Activism, and Justice” that had been hosted by the Middle East Center. When asked about the symposium during a town hall on combating antisemitism, Jones said he didn’t know about the one-day Middle East Center event until a day or so in advance and would have preferred there had been more conversation about it beforehand.
“All we can do is try to remind people of their responsibilities as members of the university community,” Jones said at the town hall. “Not trying to tell them that they can’t have a discussion about Palestine or about Israel, but let’s be clear that those discussions need to be had in a way that doesn’t perpetuate an environment where people feel unsafe.”
Fani said Hoffman told him the decision was his alone and not made in response to external complaints or media inquiries, though, according to Fani, Hoffman warned him the second email had been leaked and circulated on social media. Balta said Jones was not involved in the decision to remove Fani and had no knowledge of it.
“I feel profoundly hurt and betrayed,” Fani said. “There’s a chilling effect on, not just my academic freedom, but that of my colleagues, anyone who dares to speak out against the war and against aggression.”
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US universities are seeing an influx of ‘antisemitism centers’. Some Jewish scholars are worried
Political pressures are resulting in a range of initiatives that experts say substitute expertise with ideology
Fri 24 Apr 2026 14.00 BST
At the University of Washington, a group of faculty who felt the campus had grown too “anti-Israel” set out to build a new academic center to tackle what they view as antisemitism.
“Jewish students, faculty, and staff found themselves isolated, facing hostility, and witnessing the normalization of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric,” the faculty wrote about the environment for Jews on campus after 7 October 2023. They pledged to offer a place for “open inquiry, intellectual rigor, and fearless debate”.
The center is led by a co-chair of a university antisemitism task force – but she is a public health professor, not a scholar of Jewish studies. Other members come from the university’s law and business schools. The center is not formally affiliated with the University of Washington – but seems to rely on university resources, including to process donations.
So far, the center doesn’t seem to have done much more than host two public events, both featuring ardent pro-Israel voices, and launch a newsletter. But several faculty with expertise in Jewish history see the center, and the university’s apparent support for it, as an anti-intellectual effort to sideline their scholarly expertise.
“They’re undermining expertise and substituting it with ideology even though they claim to be doing exactly the opposite,” said Susan Glenn, a professor of history and faculty member in UW’s Jewish studies program.
A spokesperson for UW said that the initiative is “one of many self-organized faculty-led groups” and that the university “does not endorse opinions these groups may express”. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the group using official university branding and fundraising infrastructure.
The UW center is part of a broad ecosystem of initiatives devoted to antisemitism that have sprung up at US universities against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and as lawmakers and the Trump administration have seized on allegations of antisemitism to bend universities to their ideological agenda.
The initiatives range in scope: some are efforts driven by faculty with varying levels of scholarly expertise on the subject; others are backed by wealthy donors or were announced as universities sought to mitigate the risk of lawsuits and federal investigations. Some of the new programs aim to produce scholarship and degrees; others offer campus events, fellowships and study abroad opportunities. Some centers promise to host robust academic debates; others appear more ideologically oriented. But many of the initiatives are of a piece with a broader rightwing effort to bring more pro-Israel voices on campuses under the guise of “viewpoint diversity”.
Jewish studies experts – including from disciplines like history, religion and literature – who oppose the rightward drift of American universities have watched the proliferation of these efforts with mounting concern. Amid a repressive climate in academia, few of the more than 20 scholars who spoke with the Guardian agreed to do so on the record. But the faculty – who hold a range of views of Israel and the prevalence of antisemitism on US campuses, though most lean left – expressed fears that the surge of new initiatives could marginalize the expertise of those who have long studied antisemitism, and some expressed discomfort with the outsize investment in this work at a time of deep austerity in the education sector and as other programs are being targeted for cuts.
Questions about the appropriate approach for considering bias against Jewish people are not new, said Lila Corwin Berman, director of the center for American Jewish history at New York University. The field has long been riven with debates, for example, over whether antisemitism should be considered alongside other forms of discrimination, or set apart as a unique form of prejudice. More recently, contentious debates have focused on the distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel. UW, for example, has been embroiled in controversies over faculty and student speech on Israel: last month, it removed as head of the school’s Middle East center a professor who had described Zionism as “cancerous”. Earlier this week, the justice department announced an investigation into UW’s handling of antisemitism after a student group held an off-campus bake sale for the “Lebanese resistance”.
But the idea that the study of antisemitism requires new institutions that circumvent existing academic departments raises red flags for some. “What’s new are these institutional structures, this field-building around the idea of foregrounding antisemitism as a specific thing to be studied outside of a history department or a literature department or a religious studies department,” said Corwin Berman.
She said university administrators are largely responding to pressure, not to the needs of students or academic imperatives: “They’re making a public-facing performance about dealing with antisemitism – and the calculation is not being made through rigorous evaluation of scholarly expertise.”
A growing constellation
In November 2023, weeks after the October 7 attacks, NYU announced the creation of an academic center for the study of antisemitism, an initiative backed by a seven-figure donation, which the university described as a new, cross-disciplinary approach to combat “age-old hatred”. The next month, the University of Michigan launched a new institute to combat “global antisemitism and divisiveness”.
More recently, Baruch College announced a new laboratory to “bolster research, advance pedagogy, and promote community engagement aimed at countering antisemitism”. At Emory University, Deborah Lipstadt, Joe Biden’s former envoy to combat antisemitism, is planning to launch a new policy institute dedicated to countering antisemitism.
Those institutions are only a few examples in a growing constellation. The University of Pennsylvania, Yale and Brandeis have boosted existing initiatives with new antisemitism-focused programs and hires. Gratz College, in Pennsylvania, has launched what it describes as the world’s only PhD program in antisemitism studies. The University of Texas at Austin – where a new program will focus on the “influence of Jewish ideas and Jewish history on the Western world and the American republic” – will also offer coursework on “modern anti-semitism”.
Across the country, tenure-track jobs, postdoctoral positions and fellowshipsdesigned to further the academic study of antisemitism are popping up. Alongside academic efforts, several universities have launched “antisemitism taskforces” to look at Jewish life on campus – many led by facultyor administrators who are Jewish but do not have expertise in Jewish history or antisemitism as a scholarly subject.
Several universities have also adopted a contentious definition of antisemitism, known as the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition, which many academics have denounced as antithetical to scholarly pursuits and has already been deployed to censor scholarshipand discipline faculty.
Lipstadt, a historian, returned to Emory after serving in the Biden administration, and she has publicly promoted the establishment of a new Policy Institute on Countering Antisemitism. But university faculty with scholarly expertise in related fields said they know little about it – and that the university administration did little to assuage concerns they raised in meetings. Some expect that her hardline approach to the issue will define the nature of the center. Lipstadt is a staunch proponent of the IHRA definition and has spoken in favor of elements of the Trump administration’s crackdown against pro-Palestinian students.
Lipstadt did not respond to an interview request. A spokesperson for Emory did not address concerns or offer details about the new institute beyond saying that it will be “donor-supported” and “serve as a hub for rigorous research, education and academic discourse”.
The new antisemitism initiatives are not the only source of tension gripping Jewish scholars: political battles are also being waged for control over what is taught in existing Jewish studies departments.
At Indiana University, home to one of the country’s most prestigious Jewish studies programs, the university removed the head of the program reportedly following pressure from donors. The chair – a historian widely described as a moderate – was replaced with a vocally pro-Israel scholar who quickly became embroiled in a series of controversies.
Professors at two other universities, who asked that neither they nor their employers be named, described administrations attempting to bypass established hiring processes in order to appoint more pro-Israel faculty.
The pressures aren’t always coming from the right – at the University of California, Irvine, a campus rabbi who had been teaching a class on major Jewish texts recently did not get his contract renewed. He attributed the decisionto Jewish studies moving “much more towards an anti-Israel activist lens, as opposed to a nuanced academic perspective”.
A ‘political weapon’
The faculty who spoke with the Guardian do not oppose the study of antisemitism. Most have devoted their careers to it.
“We’ve been studying this for a very long time,” said Sander Gilman, a retired professor at Emory University who authored several books on antisemitism, including a forthcoming one exploring the history of its exploitation as a “cudgel for many other purposes”. Gilman argues that antisemitism is not a static fact of history but tied to historical and political circumstances.
“What we’re seeing now is the resurgence of antisemitism as a political weapon,” he added. “Real academics’ job is to question, not to advocate.”
Still, some scholars welcome the growing focus on antisemitism studies. Maurice Samuels founded Yale’s Program for the Study of Antisemitism in 2011 at a time when only one other antisemitism program existed at a US university. “Antisemitism has not been recognized really as its own distinct field until recently,” he said. “I think that the change is a good one.”
He also acknowledged the ways antisemitism has been politicized.
“Yes, antisemitism is being used to attack universities,” he said. “And yes, it’s a valid object of study and we should keep studying it. In this climate, it’s all the more important to have good scholarship on these issues so that we can distinguish what really does constitute antisemitism and what is mere political smokescreen.”
“Studying antisemitism is legitimate. We do want to understand people who are violent towards Jews and their history,” said Hadas Binyamini, who recently completed her PhD in history and Hebrew and Judaic studies. “That should be supported – but that’s not necessarily what we see with this trend of antisemitism centers.”
Binyamini, who is a member of Liberatory Jewish Studies, a network of self-described anti-Zionist academics in the field, also noted that the new centers, where many jobs are non-tenure and short-term, are exacerbating deepening precariousness in academia.
She described scholars seizing on the funding opportunities associated with new antisemitism initiatives at a time of austerity that’s decimating their broader fields as facing a “devil’s bargain”.
Several scholars drew a parallel between the current moment and the late 1990s establishment of Israel studies, a field driven in part by donors who feared that academia was growing overly critical of Israel. But Israel studies has contributed significant scholarship – including some that is deeply critical of Israel.
That’s what several faculty hope will happen in response to the current drive. Even as it emerges in a charged political context, they hope the new initiatives will find a way to advance meaningful debate of an important subject.
In order for that to happen, “university leaders need to ensure that the scholarship and the academics remain at the forefront”, said Jeff Veidlinger, director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan.
The institute, named after a Swedish humanitarian and university alumnus who is credited with saving some 20,000 Jews during the Holocaust, launched in the aftermath of October 7, although it had been in the works.
The center studies hatred against all religious and ethnic communities. “Antisemitism is part of a broader phenomenon, and it flourishes alongside other forms of hatred, and Islamophobia, and so we’re looking to study all of them together”, Veidlinger said.
That approach initially angered some donors and alumni who wanted the center to take a more pro-Israel stance, he acknowledged, while pro-Palestinian students and faculty were suspicious of what they believed was an effort to push pro-Israel advocacy on campus. Still, the center is tackling difficult questionsat a heated time, including by hosting a panel on genocide, with three scholars debating how the concept applied to the destruction of Gaza.
“Both sides would have preferred less nuance,” Veidlinger said. “There were some who wanted the people we brought in to call it genocide and there were others who say that any attempt to call it genocide is antisemitic. And the truth is, there’s a discussion that you can have.”
israel-academia-monitor.com 