The Academic Intifada Defeats the Association for Jewish Studies

Israeli academics anticipate another nightmarish year. Many are in that honorable but exhausting revolving door known as “miluim,” reserve duty. Many have already buried too many beloved friends, relatives, and students. And many are watching their academic dreams crumple as collaborators shun them in a silent boycott. It’s not just the anti-Zionist haters. Even non-ideological colleagues are freezing Israelis out – they simply don’t want to be harassed by the Academic Intifadists for daring to work together with anyone associated with the Jewish State.

Boycotting fellow academics is like draining oxygen from your own airplane cabin. Scholars soar when they are free to bounce ideas off one another, to encourage unlikely alliances, allowing serendipity to unlock the world’s mysteries. Spurning colleagues because of their homelands, suffocates academia, imposing political blinders on a system that craves openness.

In this hostile, unscholarly, illiberal environment, it’s reasonable to expect the Association for Jewish Studies, AJS, to lead the charge against formal boycotts and this informal, demoralizing and immoral shunning of Israelis simply for being Israeli. After all, as the “world’s largest professional society for Jewish Studies,” AJS collects dues from many Israeli members.  Moreover, AJS members should be courageous mentors spearheading the battle to defend Jewish students. Such heroism would affirm what AJS calls its “core values”: emphasizing “critical inquiry, academic integrity, intellectual honesty, a commitment to on-going learning, and respectful debate” as well as “academic and intellectual freedom….”

Indeed, on September 12, the AJS Executive Committee issued a letter to “oppose institutional academic boycotts that exclude people on the basis of national origin or entail political or religious litmus tests,” given “AJS’s long-standing commitment to the free exchange of ideas.”

So far, so good. Had it ended there, the statement would have been punchy and powerful.

But then, the Executive Committee went weaselly. Its letter “recognizes the right of individual faculty members to exercise their freedom by choosing not to partner or cooperate with other individual faculty members or academic institutions with whom or with which they disagree and to do so absent the threat of institutional reprisal or sanction.”

That addition, amid mounting anti-Israel boycotts both formal and informal, dilutes the denunciation of boycott. Translating this high falutin’ doublespeak, the AJS proclaimed that while departments and universities should not boycott Israeli universities formally, it’s ok if individual professors informally boycott Israeli, Zionist, or even Jewish professors.

That’s the shutdown currently posing the great threat – individuals snubbing Israeli colleagues, either because they “disagree” with Israel, or just don’t want to avoid anything reeking of Israel, which illiberal liberals now smell around anyone who rubs elbows with Israelis.

Obviously, scholars are free to choose with whom to collaborate, with many factors shaping such an important decision. Why couldn’t the AJS make it clear that it was focusing on personal chemistry and autonomy by saying, for example, “that when such noncooperation takes the form of a systematic academic boycott, it threatens the principles of free expression and communication on which we collectively depend.”

That is precisely what the AJS Board of Directors declared unanimously on December 17, 2013.

It’s sobering.  Presented with a clear moral and existential challenge, at this historic juncture, the AJS Executive Committee turned yellow-bellied. Betraying the blue-and-white, it greenlighted informal boycotts – which is blacklisting. Apparently, hobnobbing with Jew-hating colleagues is more important than protecting your Israeli brothers and sisters.

This masquerade, denouncing the very tactic you’re approving, is uncomfortably familiar after October 7th – evoking those feminists who spent years denouncing gendered violence – but rationalize Hamas’ mass rape of Israelis as “resistance.”

The statement then virtue signals, reassuring the world that Jewish Studies professors are also enlightened people of conscience, sickened by that primitive Jewish democracy that dares defend itself against rampages and rockets.

Admittedly, the statement doesn’t mention Gaza or Israel. But when academics write: “We understand that cruelty, injustice, and suffering may inspire moral indignation,” we all know today’s one common target of academic moral indignation: the Jewish State.

Then, meandering illogically and paradoxically in ways my first-year writing students would never dare do, they return to their opening, saying: “However, we resist the argument that institutions should respond to such circumstances by limiting their fundamental commitment to the free exchange and expression of ideas or by ostracizing members of the scholarly community.”

Huh?

It takes a Ph.D. to become this kind of unethical contortionist. Having implicitly approved academics ostracizing colleagues personally, they denounce institutional ostracism, even though the most valuable academic collaborations are colleague-to-colleague.

I get these profiles in faintheartedness. The Academic Intifada is relentless. Propagandizing professors using classrooms as re-education camps and abusing their platforms to bully Jewish students, won’t hesitate to cancel Jew-positive or Israel-positive colleagues. And our enemies know far too well what too many Jewish Studies, ahem, experts, seek to deny: Judaism and Zionism are intertwined.

Our activist students more clearly recognize the powerful, ever-escalating, mutual reinforcement of their Jewish and Zionist identities – and cheer it. Meanwhile, most students see through the Jewish Studies professors’ craven calculus – their wobbling doesn’t convince the haters and it certainly doesn’t reassure besieged pro-Israel students, Jewish and non-Jewish.

I wonder if any of the co-signers of this two-faced statement donned a safety vest and offered to walk one harassed Jewish student to class last year. Did any of them visit a harassed student in a dorm room that became a target for Jew-haters rather than a welcoming, comfortable home-away-from-home. Clearly, the Association of Jewish Studies they lead cowered collectively last year as Jewish students endured the worst eruption of anti-Semitism in our lifetimes. The AJS Website offers no public statements denouncing the encampments or the worst year of campus Jew-hatred.

As the year begins, with this letter, they’re still sniveling, granting Jewish Studies’ legitimacy to the illegitimate assault on Israeli academia.

It’s confusing. The AJS says its “mission is to advance research and teaching in Jewish Studies at colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning.” The organization claims to be “committed to the development and strengthening of an institutional and public culture that encourages diverse views, and supports its members’ right to articulate beliefs and positions without fear of retribution.” And, most farcical, “The AJS works to create a sense of community among its membership and to build bridges among Jewish Studies scholars” – even while tolerating personal bridge-busting!

What is boycott, individual or institutional, if not political “retribution”? How does boycott respect “diverse views” and “advance” the cause of Jewish Studies? I can see how such dodges might “advance” individual professor’s careers in PCU – Politically Correct U – but it undermines the cause, betrays academic values, and double-crosses our students who deserve better role-modeling and more examples of courageous defiance from all academics, not just Jewish Studies professors.

Any Jewish Studies professors who are not hackademics, professorial hacks parroting the oppressor versus oppressed line of the day, might want to study the power of Jew-hatred that just cowed the AJS. Jew-hatred is a most totalizing bigotry. It not only makes the haters self-destructive, sacrificing their defining ideals to attack the Jew, but it is overwhelming, railroading bystanders into violating their core values too.

Historians will not look kindly on these un-Jewish cowards, kippah-washing and monograph-washing today’s mania against Israel, Zionism, and Jews. But it’s not too late. The AJS Executive Committee has spoken – and fled for the hills. Where are the donors, many of whom come from the mainstream Jewish community? They should redirect their funds to give Israeli scholars special research funds, and help establish scholarly journals dedicated to the pursuit of truth – not the pursuit of Jews.

And, most pressing, where are the members? By speaking up, by standing for academic freedom and openness, by quoting the AJS’s “core values” to the AJS leadership, they have an opportunity to save Jewish Studies from the Association for Jewish Studies itself.

Professor Gil Troy, a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute, the Global ThinkTank of the Jewish People, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream was just published.