The Place of Jewish Studies in an Era of Protests
Flora Cassen
Credit: Aitubo Kurt Hoffman
Flora Cassen is Senior Faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Her forthcoming book, Stained Glass: An Expat Jew Reflects on Antisemitism, will be published by the New Jewish Press, an imprint of the University of Toronto Press.
In the spring of 2024, protests against Israel’s war in Gaza erupted on university campuses across the United States and Europe, dividing students, faculty, and the broader Jewish and political worlds. Interestingly, the central controversy was not the war itself but whether the protests were antisemitic. Everyone—from students and parents to United States senators—had an opinion. Yet, one group was notably absent from the public conversation: the field of Jewish Studies. While individual scholars spoke out on both sides of the debate, the academic discipline dedicated to the study of Jewish history, religion, and culture struggled to find a collective voice.
One reason for this silence was that Jewish Studies scholars were as divided on the issue as everyone else. Another was the nature of scholarly work itself—political protests and public discourse demand immediate responses, but rigorous research and careful analysis take time. I want to suggest that deeper historical and structural factors were also at play, rooted in the history of Jewish Studies and its place in American academia. It takes decades for a new field of study to build credibility and institutional respectability, and Jewish Studies practitioners may have feared that engaging too openly in a volatile political debate could jeopardize the field’s standing. This led to an uncomfortable dilemma: speaking out risked the hard-won legitimacy of Jewish Studies in the academy, but staying silent meant that the scholars best equipped to contribute to the conversation were absent and that the public lost out on the nuance and expertise that could have helped them navigate this controversial moment. What can we learn from this shortfall? Should Jewish Studies scholars try to shape the conversations that bear on their expertise, and, if so, should they reconsider the balance between academic caution and public engagement? I want to argue that the answer to both questions is yes, and, more specifically, that it is not only possible but advisable for Jewish Studies scholars to take a more active role in campus conversations about antisemitism.
Scholars in other humanities disciplines were more outspoken about the Israel-Hamas war and about antisemitism than their Jewish Studies counterparts, even when their fields were less directly connected to the debates. Many of them still saw the protests as closely linked with the identity of their fields. One colleague, for example, explained to me that protecting campus protest and protesters was essential, and not merely because he agreed with them politically. He pointed out that his field of study wouldn’t exist if not for the student protests of the 1960s for civil rights, against social injustice, and against the Vietnam War. My colleague’s point was well taken: one of the long-term outcomes of the 1960s protests was the creation of new interdisciplinary academic fields such as African and African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Latinx Studies, and Asian Studies, often grouped under the broad categories of area or ethnic studies.
The scholars who had entered the academy as part of these protest movements knew that the existing faculty and the curriculum remained overwhelmingly white, male, and Eurocentric, and they saw the goal of their work as not only to produce new knowledge and scholarship but also to effect social change. Noting this, Women’s Studies scholars not only wanted to enlarge and expand traditional fields of study to include the situation of women, but they also wanted to give a voice to women in society; they wanted to improve women’s lives and access to resources and help provide them with more freedom, opportunity, and equality. Similarly, Black Studies was not only about studying and teaching about Africans, African Americans, and other African-descended people but also about fighting against racism and effecting liberation for all oppressed groups. Indeed, scholars in these areas have made invaluable contributions to their respective disciplines, and they have also succeeded in bringing a wider variety of peoples and cultures into the study of the humanities.
The notion that education can bring about freedom and equality was not invented in the 1960s. European Enlightenment scholars like Diderot, Voltaire, and Kant believed that knowledge would liberate humanity from the arbitrary powers of absolute monarchies and organized religion. However, for the young scholars of the 1960s, the academy itself had become part of the system preventing freedom and equality for all. They did not see themselves as having to adapt to traditional academia but rather the other way around: their role was to push the academy to change, to become more inclusive, and to work again toward freedom and equality.
Jewish Studies benefited from this movement. The Association of Jewish Studies was established in 1969, with only 49 individual [GU10] members, but it grew tremendously over the following decades. The association’s most recent survey, conducted in 2018, counted 1,700 members teaching 2,109 courses serving 35,000 students across North America. Still, while the spirit of the 1960s provided an opportunity for Jewish Studies to flourish, the intellectual roots of the field go back to nineteenth-century Europe, and we can’t understand its distinctive position in the American university landscape today without tracing these origins.
Modern Jewish studies originated in a 19th-century German movement called the “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” or the science of Judaism. At the time, European Jews were striving to be accepted in society, especially in Western Europe. Emancipation, however—granting equal rights to Jews—tended to come with strings attached. Jews were asked either explicitly or implicitly to prove their “fitness” for equality, often by conforming to European Christian norms.
The group of young Jewish scholars who formed the Wissenschaft movement believed they could play a role in the process of emancipation. If they could present Judaism to their academic colleagues and others as a religion comparable to Christianity, Jews within and outside the academy would be considered worthy of full citizenship. Leopold Zunz, one of the movement’s leaders, expressed this clearly, writing, “Equal rights for Jews in matters of customs and life will proceed from equal rights for Wissenschaft des Judentums.” Or, as Immanuel Wolf, another member, clarified: “Scholarly knowledge of Judaism must decide regarding the Jews’ worthiness or unworthiness, their ability or inability, to have the same respect and rights as other citizens.” They believed that respectability would come for Jews through scholarship, and they modeled their study of Judaism after the study of Christianity.
A point easily missed in this was that the history of the Wissenschaft movement inverted the narrative of freedom through knowledge. They argued that Jews had to find liberation not primarily from monarchic tyranny and a Church that abused its power but from their own Jewish tradition. Thus, as it emerged as a modern academic field in Germany, Jewish Studies did not seek to expand or disrupt existing academic categories, nor did it demand inclusion on its own terms; instead, it shaped itself to the standards of the universities into which it sought to integrate.
The 1969 founders of the Association of Jewish Studies inherited the intellectual legacy of the Wissenschaft school—one that sought liberation through conformity, not rebellion. Unlike their colleagues in area studies, they were not trying to upend and force open the academy but to achieve legitimacy within it. This tension was reflected in the debates and discussions that animated members of the AJS in its early years. As Kristen Loveland recalled in an article written on the 40th anniversary of the association, one of the big questions was whether Jewish Studies scholars should see themselves as serving the Jewish community. Their answer was no. As Marvin Fox explained in 1971:
As a Jew who is devoted to his tradition and people, I allow myself to hope that Jewish students studying with my colleagues and myself will be helped by their Jewish studies to a deeper and more effective personal Jewish life and commitment. As a professor, I can give no consideration to that objective, since my task is to provide students with the tools, methods, and tentative conclusions of learning in my field, but not to save their souls.
A few years later, in response to a question regarding whether the AJS should accept funds from Jewish federations, Nahum Sarna responded that this “would be detrimental to Jewish Studies in the universities” as it might give the appearance “of compromising the independence of Jewish Studies.” After the AJS’s application for membership in the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) was rejected twice, one of the members who was working on the association’s third application in 1984 wrote to another member that the perception that AJS represents only “a circumscribed ‘ethnic’ point of view has to be countered unobtrusively but clearly.” (The AJS was accepted in 1985.)
By 1990, Jewish Studies scholars felt they had finally achieved respectability within the academy. In an edited collection published that year surveying the state of the field, Edward Greenstein and Shaye J. D. Cohen celebrated the field’s full acceptance, declaring that their generation had succeeded where their predecessors had failed. The central theme of their volume was “the normality of Jewish Studies,” and they noted with satisfaction that “the academic study of Judaism is becoming more and more just another humanistic discipline, attracting students from diverse backgrounds and for diverse reasons.”
Despite this sense of normalization, tensions persisted under the surface. As a graduate student at NYU in the early 2000s, I picked up on this in the difference between my Jewish Studies classes and history classes. Jewish Studies classes were text heavy. We would spend two hours painstakingly analyzing and discussing each word in a medieval Hebrew manuscript—a method familiar to me from my undergraduate history courses at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. On the other hand, my history classes were focused on the latest scholarly theories. Having been raised in a more hierarchical system where the right to express ideas had to be earned, I was drawn to the idea-driven discussions and spirit of egalitarianism in these history classes.
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As a student, I enjoyed having a foot in both worlds, which I saw as compatible and complementary. But when I entered the job market, the same strains became more consequential. Considering myself both a historian and a Jewish Studies scholar, I applied widely for history positions. But in history department interviews, I was asked whether I was a historian or a Jewish Studies scholar, as if studying the history of Jews disqualified one as a “real” historian. When I shared these experiences with my doctoral advisor, he told me that this had been the experience of most students in the program. He added that unless a position was marked specifically for Jewish history, it was rare for a Jewish Studies scholar to secure a job in a mainstream history department. With time, and as I learned to understand the job market, I came to see that unlike fields that emerged from internal university commitments—whether driven by student and faculty activism or other factors—the growth of Jewish Studies has largely relied on external philanthropy rather than sustained institutional investment. The presence of private funding can create an illusion of influence, but it also means that Jewish Studies programs and positions are more vulnerable to shifts in donor priorities and external political pressures rather than being deeply embedded in university hiring and curricular structures. In fact, in the three history departments where I have held faculty positions since graduating, I have never seen a hiring discussion that named Jewish history as a priority field.
In the wake of October 7, the academic landscape has shifted again. Area studies has continued to expand, and an ethos blending scholarship with political activism now permeates universities. While Jewish Studies scholars benefited in some ways from the ethnic studies turn of the 1960s, they have struggled to find a place among disciplines that do not consider the subject of Jewish Studies—i.e., the study of Jews—to fall into the “minority” category. In scholarly contexts, “minority” often refers not only to a group’s numerical representation but also to its social position and access to power. Jews, who make up just two percent of the U.S. population, fit the first part of this definition, but they do not fit the second. In the postwar era, as American Jews overcame many of the structural barriers and social discriminations that had previously limited their opportunities, they were increasingly seen by others, and often saw themselves, as less vulnerable to systemic discrimination and oppression than their minority counterparts.
In addition, the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has now become a defining political issue on campuses, and Jewish students and faculty are often caught in the middle of these heated debates. Criticism of Israel, while legitimate, can sometimes veer into antisemitic rhetoric, further isolating not only Jewish students and faculty but also the field of Jewish Studies itself in an academy within which it thought it had achieved normalization.
These tensions came to a head when the AJS decided to issue a statement about October 7. Whereas its public condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2019 and its support for the anti-racist protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020 had been largely uncontroversial, the field was divided in its response to the October 7, 2023 attack, which resulted in the Association issuing a tepid public statement that frustrated all sides. It is not surprising to see the same diversity of opinion among Jewish Studies scholars as in the broader Jewish community. Still, there was something else going on, too. One critic astutely pointed out that the AJS’s October 7 statement omitted the word “Jew.” The ensuing debate brought attention to the degree to which the field of Jewish Studies, while dedicated to studying Jews and their histories and cultures, continues to have an uneasy relationship with Jewishness as an identity and cause.
As Jewish students have reported increasing hostility since October 7, with investigations at institutions like Columbia and Harvard confirming a rise in antisemitism, Jewish Studies scholars have often hesitated to respond in concrete ways, becoming mired instead in theoretical debates about the definition of antisemitism. This reluctance is understandable, given the charged atmosphere around Israel-Palestine. But if the experts in Jewish Studies produce definitions of antisemitism that are failing to help anyone make sense of the lived experiences of Jews on and off campus—what role can the field aim to play within, let alone beyond, the ivory tower?
The current moment, therefore, presents new and complex challenges. Adhering strictly to neutrality risks making the field irrelevant, particularly when Jewish communities globally face an unprecedented crisis. Conversely, centering Jewish identity could fracture the field and potentially jeopardize the acceptance of Jewish Studies by the rest of the academy. Still, this raises a difficult question: Are Jewish students and Jewish faculty paying the price for the field’s acceptance? Have Jewish Studies scholars, in their pursuit of academic status, failed to stand up for the very community whose history, culture, and resilience they study and teach? Over the past year-and-a-half, I’ve often heard students or their families express dismay about the relative silence of Jewish Studies faculty, and I understand why this silence feels unsettling.
Most scholars want to protect the neutrality of their work and their fields, and they worry that direct advocacy could undercut their academic credibility. This is a legitimate concern; the first responsibility of scholars is to produce new knowledge—and the pursuit of scholarly truth is often a slow and meticulous process that does not align easily with the rapid responses expecte of activists and opinion makers, especially in the age of social media. Still, I want to argue here that it is possible to stand against antisemitism in a way that remains consistent with scholarly standards and is also ethically responsive to the needs of the moment.
The first step is to show up for these difficult conversations and always insist on nuance. Slogans do not help; careful research and reasoned discussions do. The field of Jewish Studies investigates and researches a wide range of Jewish perspectives and experiences, from varied interpretations of Zionism to the complex threads of Jewish history. Including these perspectives in campus debates is an essential antidote to oversimplifications that paint all Zionists, all Israelis, or all Jews with the same brush.
The second step is to reject attempts to label nuanced discussion as support for apartheid, racism, or genocide. Acknowledging complexity is not the same as endorsing injustice; on the contrary, it is the essence of what universities do. Obviously, not every criticism of Israel is antisemitism. When Jewish students wrongly judge legitimate critique of Israel’s actions and policies as antisemitism, we should explain why they are wrong without dismissing their pain. If Jewish Studies faculty speak out, they can remain committed scholars while also preventing harmful stereotypes from taking root. Above all, it is essential to point out that the rationale for doing so is not about defending Jews; it is about ensuring the humanity of all in our campus communities and upholding the university’s core values of open inquiry and debate. By insisting on our right to be understood in all our complexity, we offer a model for students and colleagues of how to engage in the difficult but necessary work of creating a more informed and welcoming academic environment. In doing so, Jewish Studies scholars may finally follow the path of the area studies scholars of the 1960s. Rather than conforming to existing academic norms, they would push the academy to expand so Jewish Studies can be recognized and included on its own terms.
