JNS
“Israel was the issue that faculty were least involved in, least likely to report to us that they dealt with,” the professor Leonard Saxe told JNS.
A new report from the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., claims that only a minority of professors at colleges and universities in the United States are antisemitic.
It found that 54% of respondents said Israel is an “apartheid” state, and 71% would present a “variety of perspectives” on whether the Jewish state can be classified as “apartheid.” Among non-Jewish professors, 11% said that American Jews are too powerful.
The Anti-Defamation League has said that calling the Jewish state “apartheid” is “inaccurate, offensive, and often used to delegitimize and denigrate Israel as a whole.” The Jewish Federations of North America has said calling Israel “apartheid” is “antisemitic, offensive and false.”
The new Brandeis study finds that 14% of respondents strongly agreed, 18% agreed, and 22% somewhat agreed that Israel is an “apartheid” state. Of the 45% who disagreed, 16% did so strongly and 15% did so somewhat.
Conducted during the spring semester, the report is based on an online survey of 2,335 professors, sampled from 146 universities in the United States, all of which were designated as having “very high research activity” in the 2021 Carnegie Classifications.
‘Dealing with questions’ on Israel
While American professors tend to be liberal, there’s “very little evidence that they’re imposing their particular political positions on students, in particular, in the area of teaching about dealing with questions about Israel,” Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center and its affiliate, the Steinhardt Social Research Institute, told JNS.
Saxe, one of the authors of the new report, is also the Klutznick professor of contemporary Jewish studies and social policy at Brandeis.
The report states that “more than two-thirds of faculty identified as liberal, while one third identified as moderate or conservative.”
Per the report, 72% of faculty self-identified as liberal, including 16% who said “extremely liberal.” Nearly one-fifth (19%) identified as moderate and 10% as conservative. The gulf was greater among humanities professors: 83% of whom identified as liberal (26% very liberal) and 11% as moderate, with just 6% conservative, per the report.
An overwhelming majority of professors reported not engaging in any sort of activism, including posting on social media, about Israel and the Palestinians (78%), Russia and Ukraine (78%), climate change (68%) and racism in America (65%). A smaller percentage (56%) said it eschewed activism or social-media posts about U.S. President Donald Trump and democracy.
“There was overwhelming agreement among faculty that climate change is a crisis requiring immediate action and that President Trump is a threat to democracy,” the report states.
“At the same time, less than half of faculty supported returning all land seized through colonization to indigenous peoples, and a substantial minority expressed conservative positions on issues related to gender identity, immigration and diversity, equity and inclusion,” it states.
Thane Rosenbaum, a distinguished university professor at Touro University in New York, told JNS that the study is “hardly a revelation,” since “bystanders always outnumber perpetrators.”
“Yes, only a minority of faculty members are pathologically Jew- and Israel-hating bullies, but the more classically liberal, open-minded faculty are terrified of them,” Rosenbaum said. “They refuse to challenge them. They watch as students become indoctrinated by them.”
Nothing is worse for professors than “feeling shunned inside the faculty lounge, or on Slack or on tenure review committees,” Rosenbaum said. “Lacking moral courage, they keep their heads down and mouths shut rather than stand up for Jewish students and intellectual freedom on campus.”
‘A pattern of explicitly hostile views’
In the classroom, 76% of respondents did not teach about Israel and the Palestinians; 9% did, and 14% found that it came up, despite not being part of the lesson plan.
“Israel was the issue that faculty were least involved in, least likely to report to us that they dealt with,” Saxe told JNS. He added that there was no evidence that they were imposing their views on students.
The survey asked non-Jewish professors about several issues related to Jews and Israel. Among non-Jewish faculty, 7% at least somewhat agreed that Israel has no right to exist, with 55% strongly disagreeing. Just 1% said that they somewhat agreed that “all Israeli civilians should be considered legitimate targets for Hamas.” (Some 83% strongly disagreed with such an idea.)
Some 8% would not want to work with a colleague who supports Israel existing as a Jewish state, and 13% disagreed “somewhat” with that statement. Some 11% said Jews have too much power in America. Only 5% said “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,” and an equally small 6% said “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda.” That same percentage, 6%, said that “Jews should be held accountable for Israel’s actions.”
“Only around 3% of non-Jewish faculty had a pattern of views about Israel that are generally described as antisemitic by formal definitions put forward by Jewish organizations and that Jewish students tend to see as antisemitic (such as denying Israel’s right to exist),” the report states. “An additional 7% of non-Jewish faculty had a pattern of explicitly hostile views toward Jews as a people.”
Small group ‘can do a lot of damage’
The report states that calling Israel “apartheid” is “a statement Jewish students did not universally see as antisemitic.”
Saxe told JNS that many students see that charge as Jew-hatred, but they don’t consider it as antisemitic as saying that Israel has no right to exist.
The professor told JNS that he thinks that calling Israel “apartheid” denies rights to Jews that many other people have. But in the study’s context, “it’s one thing for somebody to be antisemitic,” he said. “It’s another thing for an antisemitic professor to give bad grades to somebody, because they’re Jewish and support the State of Israel.”
Just “a small group” engages in the latter, Saxe said, though he noted a small group can do “a lot of damage.”
“We have to understand that if we’re going to do something about it,” he told JNS. “Faculty are the ones going to solve this problem, and they have to enforce existing rules and regulations.”
Raeefa Shams, director of communications and programming at the Academic Engagement Network, told JNS that the data in the report “confirm what we continue to hear from the faculty we work with to counter antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campuses—most of the hatred and hostility come from a small minority of loud, extreme voices.”
“It is up to the silent majority to speak up and stand up, so that our campuses can be places of open inquiry and dialogue across difference, where all faculty and students, including those who are Jewish, Zionist and Israeli, are comfortable expressing their identities,” Shams said.
