Is It Time to Write the Obituary for Israel Studies?

I am the author of a new report published by the Jewish People Policy Institute, “Israel Studies at American Universities: Is There a Path Forward?,” a call to action to save the discipline before it’s too late.

I trained as a historian in the field of Israel Studies and have had a bird’s eye view to the trials and tribulations of the field in my career teaching at Brandeis, Oxford, Northwestern and now the University of Haifa over the past 15 years. The report was written out of professional and personal commitment to a field in crisis in the troubled campus space today, especially after Oct. 7. With pro-Palestine encampments proliferating across quadrangles, students unwilling to be socially shunned for taking a class with “Israel” or “Zionism” in the title — if not vulnerable to outright antisemitic attack — faculty subjected to ideological litmus tests, and even protesters storming into Israel Studies classrooms, the situation has become untenable.  

But once upon a time, from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, Israel Studies was a new, promising and thriving academic initiative dedicated to the research, teaching, and study of modern Israel, Zionism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict through an interdisciplinary lens. The core tenets of the field were to embrace the complexity of Israel and emphasize the dual narratives of Israelis and Palestinians as a means of educating toward conflict resolution. That open-tent philosophy led to an identity crisis — today, it doesn’t know what defines it, who belongs within in, how to teach it, what its relationship with other departments and disciplines should be (especially in a hostile campus climate and with a new field of Palestine Studies growing up alongside it) and what its priorities must be for the future. Moreover, an increasingly prominent anti-Zionist wing of the field has come into conflict not only with other scholars, but with donors and communities that has alienated many former champions.

While Israel Studies confronts a kind of schizophrenia from within, it is also beset by broader challenges in university culture. Today, Israel Studies is a canary in the coal mine of academic dysfunction, from ideological capture of much of the humanities and social sciences heavily funded by despots from the Middle East, to campus antisemitism and cancel culture. The widespread embrace of BDS and both the intellectual and bureaucratic institutionalizing of ideas about Israel as a settler-colonialist/apartheid/genocidal regime and Jewish Zionists as “white supremacist oppressors” makes it difficult for any complexity about Israel to be introduced into the curriculum, and perhaps even more importantly — to hire, publish, or promote anyone who deviate from these narratives. Whether Israel Studies can survive in a climate where Israel and Zionism are the third rail of campus politics is a test case for health of institutions of higher education as a whole.

Yet, “what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus”: Israel Studies demonstrates the dangers of the pipeline from dorm room to boardroom, as an entire generation of students were miseducated (or undereducated or uneducated) about Israel, Zionism and the Arab-Israeli conflict but are now inhabiting institutions of power and knowledge, from the media, to politics, and foreign policy. The dividends of the Israel Studies dilemma may yet be seen down the road.

Can Israel Studies survive given this set of both internal and external circumstances?

My recommendations are for the field to reform itself and be in a stronger position to confront the situation on campus environment beyond it — but without the “buy in” from faculty, university administrators and donors (who don’t necessarily play nicely together), it may spell the disappearance of Israel Studies, at least at the most antagonistic elite universities where it once thrived.

In sum, it may be time to move Israel Studies to a hospitable home off-campus — including thinktanks and Jewish institutions like JPPI — to offer a new generation a rigorous and nuanced curriculum that may be lacking at college today.

Rather than an obituary, I hope it will be a rebirth of the field for the post-Oct. 7 reality. 

Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn is a celebrated scholar, author, educator, media personality and public intellectual who currently serves as Senior Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a Historian of Diaspora-Israel relations at the University of Haifa.