Israel Studies Under Attack at US Universities, New Report Finds

Israel Studies as an interdisciplinary field is in danger of being crowded out of American higher education by infectious ideologies which are having success in confecting a consensus that it normalizes the existence of a country which undermines progressive values, according to a new report published by The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).

The report — written by University of Haifa professor Sara Yael Hirschhorn and titled, “Israel Studies at American Studies at American Universities: Is There a Path Forward?” — argues Israel Studies in the American academy is in decline, a downward trend that is being accelerated by a cultural milieu fostered by a consortium of interest groups that are hostile to the existence of Israel as a Jewish nation-state and wish to see their antipathy reflected in college curricula.

“Despite the fact that the field is well-funded, has attracted the interest of both the scholarly and lay community, and could be a constructive intervention in campus debates at this moment of crisis, it is currently epistemologically and pedagogically incompatible with a campus climate since 10/7 [Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel] that is increasingly anti-Zionist, pro-BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel] and even cheers Hamas,” Hirschhorn writes.

“The prevalence of Ethnic Studies and its associated paradigms, the impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI])frameworks that all but exclude Jews and Zionists, the influence of lavish Middle Eastern funding on university programs and politics, and the deterioration of campus culture in the age of ‘cancel culture’ have profoundly constrained the ability of Israel Studies to flourish in the Western academy,” she adds.

Hirschhorn goes on to argue that in addition to being surrounded by enemies, Israel Studies is working through a crisis of identity caused by competing visions of its scope and mission. As an interdisciplinary field serving as a “big tent” for other disciplines relevant to the study of Israel, she says it winds up being open to “almost everyone who wants to affiliate” even as they undertake courses of study that are “haphazardly cobbled together into what has been called a discipline, with its attendant academic conferences, publications, employment, grants, and community that often lack coherence.” Israel studies scholars, she adds, betrayed the field’s nebulous characters themselves during a 2024 conference held at Charles University in Prague where virtually no one delivered a presentation which came remotely near to addressing the conference theme, which was Israel Studies from a “European and international perspective.”

The conference did not present a coherent vision, “nor did there seem to be any hierarchy of priorities between, say national security of Israel or queer histories of mandate Palestine,” she continues. “The awarding of prizes and grants at the conference were decided by closed-door committees based only on a vague set of published qualifications, leaving much of the process opaque. The balance of Israeli scholars compared to other nationalities was all quite evident and may signal a decline in the field in the West. Furthermore, attendance seemed self-selecting — many notable figures who hold chairs in the field of Israel Studies were absent.”

In its weakened state, Israel Studies is vulnerable to attacks by DEI, Hirschhorn later said, connecting the seams of her thesis.

“On its face, one might think that DEI would be beneficial for Jews as a small religious and ethnic minority in the United States, but in practice it has excluded their concerns from its remit and has even been rebuked for both ignoring and fomenting antisemitism on university campuses,” she explains. “The pro-Palestinian agenda was implicitly adopted as a correct manifestation of DEI priorities, which extended support to tent encampments and other student protests. In some cases, DEI administrators themselves were revealed to have engaged in anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity on social media … and in training materials.”

All signs, she concluds, portend Israel Studies’ becoming “administratively homeless” as BDS advocates amass power in campus bureaucracies and the field itself “takes no concrete steps toward self-definition or embraces an opportunity to ring-fence it activities with the support of increased donor funding.” In a worst-case scenario, “it might simply be absorbed into the growing field of Palestine Studies or completely abolished by university administrators.”

JPPI president Yedidia Stern implored the Jewish academic community to take Hirschhorn’s report seriously.

“This is more than a crisis of curriculum — it’s a crisis of intellectual freedom,” he said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “Israel is being silenced in spaces that once welcomed open academic exploration. We cannot allow this erasure to continue unchecked.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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