Reclaiming the Academy: How Anti-Zionist Jews Captured the University and Betrayed Jewish Thought

Free speech became a weapon. Jewish Studies became sabotage. It’s time to build something worthy of the Jewish nation's Covenant of Destiny.

In the annals of modern liberalism’s moral confusion, few phenomena are more perversely illustrative than the intellectual indulgence afforded to anti-Zionist hate. Karen Cyphers, in her Substack essay “A Hall Pass for Hate?”, captures this inversion of moral logic with clinical precision: antisemitism is the only prejudice for which the academy issues indulgences,

provided it's shrouded in the language of liberation and progressive virtue.

This is not your garden-variety hypocrisy. This is ideological gymnastics worthy of Olympic gold. In the academy, where speech codes abound and microaggressions are monitored like radioactive isotopes, the ancient hatred of the Jewish people is granted sanctuary—so long as it masquerades as solidarity with Palestine.

Herbert Marcuse, patron saint of the academic left, called it “repressive tolerance”—a tortured euphemism for the selective application of liberal ideals. In this view, free speech is sacred, unless wielded by the wrong people. Which, by astonishing coincidence, always seems to include Jews.

Some free speech is freer for others… Courtesy of Karen Cypher

Nowhere is this more vividly illustrated than in Cyphers’ data. In a recent experiment, respondents were asked whether a student who intimidated peers should be suspended or expelled. When the aggressor was a European student targeting Black, LGBTQ, or Jewish students, 76% to 83% said yes. But when the aggressor was Palestinian and the targets were Jewish? Support for punishment dropped to 60%.

There it is. Not just anecdote. Not just hypothesis. Proof. We are witnessing the institutionalization of a moral hierarchy in which Jewish suffering is a rounding error—unfortunate, perhaps, but not actionable.

Even more chilling is how this inversion of justice plays out on campus. Since October 7th, we have seen not the reemergence of legitimate critique, but the wholesale collapse of civilized discourse. Free speech has become the alibi for a blood libel renaissance. Celebrations of Hamas atrocities, rationalizations of rape, torture, and mass murder—all justified in the name of “resistance.”

Let’s be clear: this is not dissent. It is incitement.

It is not dialogue. It is degradation.

And it is not accidental. It is strategy—bolstered by faculty, sanitized by departments, and bankrolled by institutions too timid or too complicit to intervene.

Jewish anti-Zionist academics have weaponized the very principles once designed to protect open inquiry—free speech and academic freedom—to advance their activism, embedding their ideology in teaching, publishing, and campus organizing. These same principles have shielded their campaigns to intimidate peers, pressure administrators, and reshape universities without opposition. They’ve wielded their influence to veto faculty hires, override curricula, and establish entire departments as anti-Zionist strongholds. They’ve led efforts to form groups like Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), not to enhance dialogue, but to strong-arm policy changes, stifle dissent, and demand loyalty oaths to anti-Israel orthodoxy.

It didn’t stop at the departmental level. These activists extended their reach into disciplinary bodies and accrediting boards, ensuring that ideological conformity was enforced at every level. After the George Floyd riots in 2020, they seized the cultural moment to align university administrations with neo-Marxist and Islamist frameworks, cementing their dominance under the guise of academic liberty. The result? A campus culture in which antisemitic and anti-white faculty are hired without challenge—because the very safeguards designed to protect diversity of thought were weaponized to exclude it.

Now enter the tragic irony: some of the fiercest anti-Zionists are Jews. Jewish faculty, Jewish deans, Jewish Studies departments. They speak with the cadence of prophets but act with the instincts of demolition crews. Their project is not criticism but delegitimization. Not debate but erasure.

We call them "Un-Jews." Not because they lack identity, but because their Judaism is defined by inversion—undoing the things that have sustained Jewish continuity. They host Shabbat dinners, cite Torah, and sing niggunim—only to baptize their politics in the sacred and call Zionism a sin. To them, Jewish peoplehood is a category error. Israel is a cosmic mistake. They believe Judaism can be fulfilled only by dissolving the very instruments of Jewish power and purpose.

This is where the ghosts of Jewish intellectualism past make their entrance. Hannah Arendt—brilliant, aloof, and often wrong—famously blamed Jews for their own persecution. In Zionism Reconsidered, she warned that a Jewish state would corrupt the universalist soul of Judaism. Today’s academic heirs have taken that warning and turned it into a playbook. The new orthodoxy? Zionism is original sin. Israel is the heresy. Atonement is eternal.

Ruth Wisse, who saw all this coming, tried to issue the warning before the levees broke. Jewish Studies, she said, had abandoned its mission. Once a beacon of cultural pride, it now genuflects before the altar of anti-nationalist dogma. Figures like Judith Butler and Daniel Boyarin didn’t just infiltrate the conversation. They rewrote the script.

We have reached a point of absurdity so grotesque that Jewish continuity is now treated as a form of oppression. And anti-Zionism has become the price of admission to academic respectability.

What’s needed now is not better messaging. It is reconstruction.

While we’ve funded hummus tastings, campus havdalahs, and Birthright selfies, our intellectual infrastructure has crumbled. The Christians, God bless them, have rebuilt. The Society of Christian Philosophers is thriving. They reclaimed theology without apology. And what have we done? We outsourced Jewish philosophy to tenured radicals who think Herzl was a colonialist and Kook a nationalist menace.

It’s time to fight back. Not with slogans. With institutions.

Build a Society of Jewish Philosophers. Real ones. With backbone.

Establish academic centers devoted to Zionist thought and Jewish civilization.

Audit and, if necessary, abandon Jewish Studies departments that have become unrecognizable.

Develop the next generation of Jewish intellectuals who do not apologize for Jewish sovereignty.

And above all, give Jewish students a reason to be Jewish.

Not culturally Jewish. Not ethnically Jewish. Meaningfully Jewish.

To be a Jew is to be history’s most stubborn dealer in hope. Every mitzvah is an act of rebellion against despair. Every Jewish ritual is a protest against resignation. Zionism is that protest, made flesh. It is the transformation of Jewish longing into Jewish agency.

Zionism is not just a political project. It is the very culmination of Jewish mission in the world. The Haggadah teaches that we are meant to build a sanctuary—not only in our hearts, but in history. Rav Kook taught that even the secular Jew who labors for the rebirth of Israel fulfills prophecy:

"We should recognize that we are part of a nation, which, in turn, is part of all humanity… thus advancing the redemption of the nation and the universe."

Kook saw in the building of Israel the tangible expression of holiness. "Independent Israelite creation in thought, in vitality, in industry is impossible for Israel except in the Land of Israel," he wrote. The exile was not only dangerous—it was spiritually sterile.

And so we must teach Zionism not as a reaction to antisemitism but as its antidote. Not as an ethnic movement, but as the modern flowering of a 3,000-year-old covenant. Not as an awkward necessity, but as a moral triumph.

Leo Strauss once said Jews are chosen to bear witness to the absence of redemption. Perhaps. But I believe we are chosen to sustain its presence—and to build its future. Zionism is not the negation of Judaism. It is its most daring and redemptive expression.

After the destruction of Jewish independence, we lived under the Covenant of Fate. But with the rebirth of Israel, we reclaimed the Covenant of Destiny. Whether religious or secular, left or right, born in Israel or drawn to it—we reestablish that covenant through the act of nation-building.

This is why confronting the “Wicked Son”—the one who rejects Jewish peoplehood—is not an act of exclusion. It is an act of fidelity. As Rav Kook put it:

"The entire culture that takes pride in resonating falsehood must be eradicated from the world... The world's building, which is now collapsing... demands the building of the Israelite nation."

The Haggadah takes us on this journey. Rabbi Akiva envisioned it. Rav Kook saw it begin. Our task is to carry it forward.

We may not be required to complete the work.

But we are forbidden—utterly forbidden—to abandon it.