The Fight Over Antisemitism Studies
How money, fear, and October 7th forged a contentious new area of study.
I spent all of last year covering the federal government’s gutting of science funding. One of the Trump administration’s main justifications was that, in the wake of Hamas’ October 7th, 2023, attacks on Israel and pro-Palestinian student protests, colleges were allegedly hotbeds of anti-Jewish hostility, and deserved to be punished. At the same time that so much research was being terminated and frozen, I noticed that there’d been a rapid increase in centers, positions, and funding streams dedicated to the study of antisemitism. I got curious about this boom cycle.
I ended up writing about antisemitism studies — a young field flush with cash, politically in vogue, and rife with infighting. I profile Gratz College, a small Jewish college near Philadelphia, that last year began offering the world's first Ph.D. in antisemitism studies. It's the brainchild of political scientist Ayal Feinberg, who became convinced, starting in grad school, that the academy didn't prioritize expertise in antisemitism nearly as much it should. So he went on to start the degree that he believed Jews needed. “The field lacks professionals trained to rigorously evaluate and implement interventions that actually reduce antisemitism,” he writes.
Gratz’s antisemitism-studies master’s and Ph.D. programs have about 45 students total. The college says it prepares them to work in education, community groups, governmental agencies, think tanks, museums, and civil-rights organizations.
But Gratz does not explicitly market the Ph.D. as a springboard for tenure-track professors, because, as Feinberg acknowledges, “We can’t generate an antisemitism-studies department that doesn’t exist.” That leaves some observers wondering what the point of the degree is. And that’s not the only question it raises about the concept, practice, and political implications of antisemitism studies. As I write:
But the rise of academic interest is underpinned by a sense of deep unease. Scholars disagree about whether antisemitism studies is a coherent field or a multidisciplinary object of study. They are divided by a fractious debate over the proper definition of antisemitism that shows no sign of abating. And the nascent field risks being co-opted into a blunt political instrument as the Trump administration makes antisemitism allegations central to its quest to forcibly reform campuses.
“Antisemitism studies has become entangled in the dismantling of higher education as we know it,” says Brendan McGeever, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of London. “And I don’t think, as a field, we’ve come to terms with really what that means.”
I came into this subject fresh, and I’m grateful to everyone who spoke to me and helped me craft a story that, I hope, accurately and fairly reflects the state of play. I’d be grateful if you read it (available for free, in exchange for your email).
This is a very interesting piece, Stephanie. Thx for doing it. If I may, I would offer a knit and a few additional angles.
The knit:
You leave it unclear whether once one removes the incidents that are only labeled A-S because of the IHRA, there’s still been a rise in A-S incidents. I believe the answer is that there has been. Certainly there have been more violent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in recent years. Given the tendency among too many (on both the antizionist left and antisemitic right) to accuse Jews of crying wolf, it’s too bad this wasn’t clearer.
The angles:
1) You quote a lot of folks from the disciplines who are critical of this degree because it’s not rooted in a discipline & the rigorous, paradigmatic training the disciplines provide. But those same disciplinary scholars— myself among them- also tend to level similar criticisms at all manner of XX Studies, from Ethnic Studies, Diaspora Studies, American Studies, etc. So this criticism— meritorious or snobby, depending on whom you ask— is generic and is best understood in that wider context.
2) It is a reasonable premise of your piece that academic fields should be about objective, and indeed critical, scholarship rather than advocacy for societal or communal needs. But that’s also a major problem in the aforementioned XX studies fields as well as others. To be clear, American Studies isn’t about advocacy for America or Americans; to the contrary, it’s advocacy on behalf of America’s alleged victims. More generally, “criticism” in all these fields means “punching up,” but rarely if ever criticism of the identities on behalf of whom they are advocating.
3. Jewish Studies is caught between these models. On the one hand, donors want to see their (otherwise marginalized) identity validated by the academy. On the other hand the faculty are inclined punch up— to provide a critical perspective on naive, simplistic traditional/received ideas and narratives from rabbis and community leaders. Which is why, in my opinion, many JS scholars were generally ill-equipped to deal with Jewish campus community members who were having difficulty in the last few years.
None of this takes away from the issues you raised. But I think they explain why there may be demand for this field separate from the Trump administration’s undoubted attempts to co-opt antisemitism concerns for cynical purposes. Also, insofar as the demand for A-S studies is a symptom of a deeper, problematic tendency for significant parts of academia to be focused less on rigorous scholarship and more on advocacy for their favorite identities, it seems unfair to single out one of them.