Friends of Israel and enemies of Israel both commit the same mistake when they assume that, in American colleges and universities, the faculty hired to teach Jewish subjects are, in their own way, supportive of the Jewish state. The assumption is a reasonable one, and each side’s error mirrors the other. The friends of Israel naturally suppose that academic scholars of Jewish history, Jewish thought, the history of Israel, and the arts and letters of Hebrew are there to offer context and support and are both capable of and inclined to explain Israel’s case on campus. That doesn’t mean that they would be expected to support any particular Israeli policy or Israeli politician or each and every maneuver of the Israeli military, but that they support Zionism in some fundamental sense. And Israel’s enemies think that same thing, but of course from the opposite point of view, seeing in the entire enterprise of Jewish studies and all of its related fields and disciplines a vehicle for propaganda. It turns out that both are wrong. There’s a good chance that an average member of a faculty of Jewish studies, Israel studies, Hebrew studies, or Holocaust studies holds a documented public position against Israel. Nearly four in ten of the professors specifically teaching Jewish civilization on American campuses are on the record as being hostile to Israel.
Those data come from newly released findings of the largest audit yet undertaken of the views of professors of Jewish civilization in America, published recently by the Ronn Torossian Foundation and a publication called The Olam. The audit’s own headline number is higher still—better than half, and past 70 percent at the Ivies—but that figure blends named professors together with institutional listings and petition tallies. The number above is the most important: faculty individually identified as teaching these subjects, and what they’ve put on the public record.
To think through what this means, Jonathan Silver, the editor of Mosaic and host of the Tikvah podcast, is joined by Rachel Fish. Fish is a scholar of modern Israel, Zionist thought, and contemporary anti-Semitism, and the incoming CEO of the Israel Institute. They discuss not just these numbers, but how a discipline built to study Jewish civilization on serious scholarly terms ends up, in a meaningful share of cases, working against that civilization’s national survival. We talk about what it means for the pipeline that produces the next generation of professors: graduate admissions, dissertation topics, and the hiring committees that decide who gets to teach. And I ask her about what a Jewish family sending a child to campus in the coming weeks needs to understand before that student walks into the classroom.