Jewish Professors Grapple With Shifting Roles on Campus

On Oct. 10, 2023, Susannah Heschel faced a packed audience in a Dartmouth classroom. Seated alongside Heschel were three other professors from Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies. It was a Tuesday evening, and 80 people were crowded in the seats before her; a dozen were watching the livestream from an adjacent classroom; another 1,600 joined virtually.

The event, which Heschel organized together with her colleague Tarek El-Ariss, chair of Middle Eastern studies, was a forum for the Dartmouth College community titled “A Discussion on the Horrific Events Unfolding in Israel and Gaza.” Beyond trying to give Dartmouth students the opportunity to learn from experts in the field, Heschel and El-Ariss sought to model the type of thoughtful, respectful dialogue demanded of them as members of an academic institution.

And it worked: Less than two weeks later, the Forward ran an article proclaiming that, alone among our nation’s elite universities, “Dartmouth got it right.” By November, other universities began inviting Heschel and El-Ariss—billed as “Dartmouth experts” on fostering understanding and dialogue—to speak about their work, including Syracuse University, Trinity College, and the University of Virginia. And in February, Rep. Kathy Manning, co-chair of the House Antisemitism Task Force, stated that the Department of Education has been using Dartmouth as a model for other schools in the “best practices in handling discussions on antisemitism and the Middle East.” Over the past year, Heschel’s successful work has cemented her as the foremost expert in combating campus antisemitism through education.

Considering this impressive track record, you’d expect Heschel to be confident—or hopeful, at the very least—about her work as a Jewish professor on Dartmouth’s campus.

Yet that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“We were never trained on how to deal with these things,” Heschel told me in a telephone interview. Despite her nationally recognized success in educating and supporting Dartmouth students, I could hear Heschel’s frustration as she spoke. “We need advice.”

Heschel isn’t the only Jewish professor grappling with seemingly new expectations of her as an educator. Over the summer, I spoke with eight Jewish professors from American universities about their professional and personal experiences on campus since Oct. 7.

Across the board, every professor I spoke to was shocked by the explosion of antisemitism on campuses since Oct. 7. Some work in STEM fields and hadn’t encountered any anti-Israel rhetoric in their academic careers until recently; others, like Heschel, who work in Jewish studies or adjacent fields, have been keenly aware of academia’s dark underside for years.

Most professors reported that Oct. 7’s aftermath significantly changed their professional lives. Yet by far, I discovered, the most dramatic shift has been experienced by professors of Jewish studies. At many universities, the job description for Jewish studies is no longer just teaching Jewish history, culture, or thought—it’s solving antisemitism.

Some professors I spoke to said that Oct. 7 affected their work lives significantly as a wake-up call. They were forced to grapple with new personal expectations for their jobs in different ways: in their approaches to teaching, relations with colleagues, or interactions with students. For many, the professional changes they experienced—or initiated—arose out of personal necessity.

“Ineed to sleep at night,” Peggy Mason, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago, told me frankly. For her entire academic career, Mason had firmly believed in excluding politics from her professional work. She entered academia in the 1980s as a proud lesbian and Jew. Identifying as a member of both communities, at a time when it could be difficult enough belonging to just one, Mason strove to cultivate an environment wherein all students—regardless of their identities, backgrounds, or beliefs—could learn. The day she brought politics into her office or classroom, Mason reflected, “would be my last day teaching.”

Soon after Oct. 7, however, Mason began witnessing and experiencing antisemitism that, for the first time, made her reevaluate her approach to teaching and research. “I lost a lot of acquaintances and some friends,” Mason recounted about her colleagues. “I couldn’t be around people who didn’t have my viewpoint.” And she hasn’t yet been able to reconcile her values with her recent experiences. “These people I don’t want to talk to, I have to talk to,” Mason acknowledged readily, when I asked her about the way forward. She looked up at the ceiling, then shook her head. “But I don’t want to teach these people. I don’t want to be colleagues with these people.”

From my conversations, I found that many professors’ work lives, like Mason’s, underwent significant changes because of antisemitism from colleagues and students. Yet for professors in Jewish studies departments, I discovered, Oct. 7 transformed their jobs in an entirely different way. In the past year, universities have started asking these professors to fix much bigger campus problems, in addition to teaching and researching. And, as administrators’ new expectations influenced those of students, parents, and donors, Jewish studies professors’ work lives were turned upside down.

To understand how Jewish studies professors’ jobs have changed, one key factor to recognize is that administrators have essentially tasked them with solving campus antisemitism. Most prominently, this has occurred through the formation of antisemitism task forces. These task forces first began appearing in early November at elite schools, like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, in response to the alarming surge of antisemitic incidents. As Columbia’s then-President Minouche Shafik detailed, their task force aimed to “reinvigorate community-building, develop robust support networks, and tackle head-on the destructive forces that seek to undermine our values and divide us across a range of issues.”

Yet these task forces—and the professors who work on them—have run into several challenges. For one, many have criticized the task forces’ goal as far too lofty. Among these critics is David Wolpe, who cited this difficulty in his letter of resignation from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group in December. Wolpe, a prominent rabbi who taught as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, was one of the eight initial appointees to the advisory group assembled by then-President Claudine Gay in October. The work of the group, Wolpe wrote, which necessitates battling “a combination of ideologies” that is pervasive among Harvard students and faculty, “is the work of more than a committee or a single university.” As a result, Wolpe came to realize that he could not “make the sort of difference I had hoped.”

A second challenge is that Jewish studies professors are just that: professors. They are historians, researchers, and educators—not social workers, consultants, or legal counsel. Rebecca Kobrin, a Columbia professor of American Jewish history, echoed Heschel’s sentiments as she explained the predicament matter-of-factly. Kobrin, who also co-directs Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish studies, is currently a member of Columbia’s antisemitism task force. “What we have been asked to do,” she told me, “we are not trained to do.”

Despite this glaring difficulty, however, administrators expect their Jewish studies professors to fix campus climates. Beyond the confines of antisemitism task forces, this expectation extends to classes, as well.

In isolation, the new job requirements for Jewish studies professors are not readily achievable. And when, on top of that, universities fail to discipline the students who break the rules and spread antisemitism, it’s a perfect storm. “We’re totally unprepared,” Kobrin said with a laugh, looking toward Columbia’s gates. We were seated on a bench near the main campus, though not quite on campus; Kobrin had suggested the meeting spot because Columbia’s campus was still closed to the public in the wake of its encampments. “It’s like there’s a tornado coming, and we’re sitting outside for a football game.”

Part of the problem is that university administrators don’t know how to respond to antisemitism. Yet as I heard from many professors, this is not a new phenomenon. Laurie Zoloth, a professor of religion and ethics at the University of Chicago, told me that she was “disappointed, but not surprised” by the administrative responses she saw this past year, largely because she’s seen similar ones before. Zoloth is my academic adviser; I was seated in her office to discuss my upcoming senior thesis, which she had agreed to supervise. But our conversation drifted as we were distracted by the megaphone-enhanced chants from the quad.

Reflecting on her career, Zoloth recalled an open letter she’d penned about an anti-Israel riot during her time as director of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University, in May 2002. In it, she described SFSU administrators’ inability to protect their Jewish students: “Was I afraid? No, really more sad that I could not protect my students. Not one administrator came to stand with us.” And more than 20 years later, Zoloth reflected as we sat in her office, campus antisemitism remains for administrators as “a puzzle that was not solved.” As a result, she said, “When the blank space just filled up with hatred … no one knew what to do.”

A compounding factor, another professor told me, is administrative bloat. The professor, who teaches at an Ivy League university, explained anonymously that more recent changes in university makeup play a significant role, as well. “By the early ’90s, it became clear that parents and students are customers at colleges, looking for a pretty transcript,” they told me. And colleges responded to the call. As a result, “the structure of universities has changed immensely,” this professor continued, “and the number of administrators has blossomed.” But despite this increase, none of the administrators knew what to do after Oct. 7. “They let us all down.”

Taken altogether, what emerges is that administrators have a track record of being generally ineffective toward the problem of campus antisemitism, and their number has ballooned in the past three decades. As a result, when antisemitism exploded on their campuses last October, administrators left a vacuum that they asked their professors to fill.

Another critical part of the problem is that new university expectations have far-reaching effects. As universities come to expect different, noneducational roles from their professors—like resolving all campus tensions about Israel and Palestine—students, parents, and alumni have adjusted their expectations of Jewish studies accordingly.

According to several Jewish studies professors, these new expectations are causing significant damage to pro-Israel voices in university departments and classrooms. In part, it has to do with the Jewish and pro-Israel community’s skewed understanding of Jewish studies departments and their roles on campus. As Kobrin articulated to me, Jewish studies is meant to bring “all the complexity of the Jewish past to campus so that we can be in conversation with everything going on, on the campus.” The institute’s mission statement similarly notes that it aims to examine and teach students about “the length and breadth of Jewish history and culture, as well as Israel and all of its complexities.”

Overall, Jewish studies certainly affects the tone of campus conversations surrounding Israel–but not instantaneously. “We are not an immediate fix,” Kobrin told me. “We are a long-term fix.” The false narratives surrounding Israel that fuel antisemitism on campuses, Kobrin continued, can’t be solved in a single semester. “We’re not going to be able to fix it in two hours by talking to an encampment. That’s about having courses.”

Yet parents and donors often fail to grasp the way that, as an academic discipline, Jewish studies needs to engage with nuance and complexity—especially to effect change on campus. In 2021, for example, a University of Washington professor signed a letter critical of the Israeli government’s actions surrounding the Sheikh Jarrah controversy. The professor, Liora Halperin, held a donor-endowed chair in Israel studies; when the donor caught wind of Halperin’s criticism of Israel, she withdrew her $5 million donation. In response to the withdrawal of funding, Halperin expressed, “UW has dealt an immediate blow to the students who have come to rely on the resources of the program, limited our opportunities to bring innovative academic programming, and sent a broader chilling message about the potential material consequences of engaging in principled political speech.” Referring to this controversy, one professor I interviewed criticized the American Jewish community’s response. “There are plenty of people who are actually antisemitic,” this professor said shortly. “Let’s go after them. This is self-destructive.”

Critically, further, the role of Jewish studies isn’t built to extend far beyond the classroom. “We’re the academic arm of all things Jewish on campus,” Kobrin explained. Like Hillel, she said, Jewish studies is a place that a pro-Israel student will not be challenged and made to feel uncomfortable. The two spaces complement each other but have distinct roles. For example, Hillel can’t invite visiting professors from Israeli universities to Columbia—only the institute can. And according to Columbia’s faculty code of conduct, Kobrin can’t hug her students.

Yet the vacuum left by university administrators last academic year has vastly complicated this landscape. After Columbia’s campus protest on Oct. 12, students began streaming into Kobrin’s office with concerns about other students and the campus environment. And when administrators ignored calls from parents, Kobrin started hearing from them instead. “I received asks from parents to help students write police reports,” she said. “That’s not my job.”

In sum, when donors threaten to pull support from Jewish studies departments, they only make it more difficult to effect change on campus. Yet at the same time, the changes that Jewish studies is capable of making aren’t quick fixes—they’re long-term solutions.

It’s important to note that not all Jewish professors have experienced negative changes in the past year. Rachel Gordan, for example, a professor of American Jewish history at the University of Florida, shared that the past year has brought her field renewed interest from students and support from donors. “We’re seeming more relevant to students because American Jews come up in the news,” Gordan told me. “I mean, I know that seems like it’s not all good,” she added with a short laugh, “but I have noticed in class that both Jews and non-Jews who wouldn’t necessarily have been interested feel like, ‘I need to be educated on what the situation is for American Jews.’”

Regarding the path forward, the professors I spoke to had mixed feelings. Whether they were hopeful or pessimistic, however, they all agreed that Jewish community, presence on campus, and scholarship are now more important than ever. One professor, who identifies as a secular atheistic Jew, put it simply: “The more they hate us, the Jewisher we get.”

Jonathan Sarna, director of Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, offered a similarly hopeful historical perspective. In a lecture at the National Library of Israel in July, Sarna shared: “The good news is that since Oct. 7, we are seeing the beginnings of an exciting revival in American Jewish life, what one study recently described as ‘an explosion in Jewish belonging and communal participation that is nothing short of historic.’” This has especially been true on college campuses, he continued, where Jewish organizations like Chabad and Hillel have reported significant increases in their attendance.

Sarna, a pioneer in the field of American Jewish history, noted that similar revivals have occurred in the past, as far back as the story of Purim in ancient Persia. He elaborated that these moments in history have been characterized by a reinvestment in Jewish community, a turning inward, a banding together. If the past is any indication, Sarna outlined, we’re on the cusp of a new, exciting moment in Jewish history—and Jewish students and professors are at the forefront. As Sarna concluded in his lecture, it is now up to us to take advantage of this revival—and perhaps most importantly on college campuses. “Let us hope that American Jews, working closely with counterparts here in Israel, can make the most of this historic opportunity.”