The Sacrifice of Continuity: How Jewish Academia Betrayed the Jewish Future in the Name of Free Speech

On Yom HaShoah—the day Jews mourn the destruction of six million souls—university presidents, many of them Jewish and proud to recount their bar mitzvah parshas in alumni magazines, said nothing. No statements. No vigils. No moral clarity. Only silence.

While Jewish students were harassed, barricaded, and terrorized by mobs chanting for the erasure of the Jewish state, the stewards of higher education watched—and rationalized.

Instead of condemning this academic pogrom, they reached for their favorite absolution: the right to free speech. The Association of American Colleges and Universities issued its usual bromides about “intellectual diversity” and “open inquiry,” but never once mentioned the mobs chanting genocidal slogans. Not one word about the Jewish students cowering in libraries. Not one word about professors excusing terror in the name of theory. Not one word about Jewish identity being systematically erased under the banner of scholarship.

These omissions are not accidental. A theology of impunity governs today’s academy—the belief that condemning anti-Zionism is a betrayal of intellectual freedom. In this warped worldview, antisemitism is regrettable—but not so regrettable as to challenge ideological orthodoxy.

And Jewish Studies? Not only have they failed to resist this trend, but they have lit the path.

Programs established initially to preserve Jewish memory, ethics, and peoplehood have become laboratories for their deconstruction. Free speech, once a shield for inquiry, has become the weapon by which continuity is shattered.

The result is devastating: a new generation of Jews is being taught by their own professors that Jewish sovereignty is a mistake, that Zionism is oppression, and that the miracle of 1948 is a moral stain requiring permanent expiation. This is not a debate. It is the systematic intellectual and theological unraveling of the Jewish people from within.

Nowhere is this betrayal more vivid than at New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies.

Founded with Jewish philanthropy to promote serious, balanced scholarship about the Jewish state, the Taub Center now functions as a boutique think tank for dismantling Israel with academic polish. Its signature events include titles like “Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba,” where Zionism is not explored as a national movement but indicted as a war crime.

The Taub Center: A safe space to blame Israel for being invaded

The curriculum offers no serious engagement with Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, or Rav Kook. No exploration of Israel as a cultural, religious, or political revival. No study of the Mizrahi aliyot, the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry, or the resurrection of Hebrew from liturgical whisper to national voice. Instead, students are offered lectures such as “October 7 and the War in Gaza: Other Voices from Israel” that attack Israel and Zionism as a pastiche of settler colonialism, apartheid, and Jewish whiteness, served with donor-subsidized refreshments and marketed as enlightened critique.

This is not Israel Studies. It is the academic laundering of delegitimization.

And when students protest antisemitism on campus, universities wave the Taub Center and other Jewish Studies programs like a fig leaf: How can we be antisemitic? We host conferences on Jewish power and Zionist crimes every semester! They’ve built the perfect institutional trap—using Jewish funding to undermine Jewish sovereignty and hiding behind those very programs, and behind “free speech,” to avoid accountability.

But the rot goes deeper. Across the country, Jewish academics with tenure and prestige have emerged as the chief validators of anti-Zionism. Consider Shaul Magid and Daniel Boyarin—Jewish intellectuals who openly reject the Jewish state as a moral failure. For them, Jewish homelessness is not a tragedy to overcome, but a redemptive ideal to preserve. Zionism, in their view, represents a betrayal of Jewish ethics. Statehood is heresy; exile is grace.

These ideas have become the new orthodoxy in Jewish academia. They are not fringe—they are foundational. They are preached from endowed chairs, reinforced through required coursework, and rewarded with grants and accolades.

So when students chant “From the river to the sea,” they do so with footnotes. And when Jewish students raise their voices in protest, they are met not with solidarity, but with syllabi.

Even Holocaust Studies has not escaped this inversion. What once served as a moral bulwark against the delegitimization of Jewish life is now used to decouple memory from sovereignty. Scholars like Barry Trachtenberg call Israeli military defense a “genocidal campaign.” Omer Bartov lectures on “complexity” while rockets rain down on civilian homes. Their concern is not that Jews might once again be eradicated, but that invoking the Holocaust in defense of Israel might grant Jews “special moral standing.”

Let’s call this what it is: a slow-motion surrender cloaked in scholarship. It is a betrayal not only of Israel but of the very idea that Jewish peoplehood has value, dignity, and the right to self-determination. And it is being carried out by the same institutions entrusted with defending that idea.

Indeed, as Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), argues in his recent book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles, the AAUP and its disciples have enforced a regime in which Zionism is a thought-crime, and defending Israel is treated as academic malpractice.

The AAUP claims that the standard of “the prevailing disciplinary consensus” should protect faculty views under the banner of free speech. But as Nelson asks: what happens when the “prevailing consensus” in entire disciplines—like Middle Eastern Studies, Women’s Studies, and Ethnic and American Studies—is no longer truth-seeking but ideologically conformist? What happens when that consensus declares Israel an apartheid, colonialist, white supremacist state, and Zionism as racism?

The answer is what we now see: irrational, discriminatory anti-Zionism becoming a shielded orthodoxy. Students and scholars who dissent are shunned. Job candidates who express Zionist views are quietly rejected. Faculty who might dissent stay silent, lest their tenure track derail. This is not academic freedom. It is ideological hegemony.

And the radicals leading this effort know precisely what they’re doing. They have colonized the language of liberation and turned it into a cudgel. They invoke “free speech” not to create open campuses, but to protect professors who call for the elimination of the Jewish state and excuse students who chant for Jewish death. It’s not about freedom—it’s about impunity.

Jewish academics have energized this movement by creating and teaching a theology of Jewish shame and surrender: an elegant, articulate, and devastating approach. It tells Jews they are safest when powerless. That survival is not only suspect, but immoral. That continuity is conditional.

As I wrote last week, October 7 was a modern-day Kristallnacht—a violent and well-organized expression of an ideology nurtured in our universities. As Ruth Wisse recently noted of Harvard: “In 2001, there were no such support groups for Islamists at Harvard.”

But they have since taken root. The Marxists, anticapitalists, anticolonialists, and anti-imperialists of all stripes found a unifying cause in anti-Zionism. This ideology allows every grievance to be directed at a single, politically approved target.

What begins in the classroom echoes in the quad, then spills into the street. Slogans become slurs. Theory becomes assault. The demonization of Jewish sovereignty becomes the justification for Jewish violence. And much of it began with the very Jewish scholars and academic administrators now scrambling to defend the ideological infrastructure they spent decades constructing.

Jewish Studies owes the Jewish people not only an apology but a reckoning. Until these programs are reclaimed or replaced, our institutions will continue to teach that Jewish liberation is a moral disgrace and that exile is the price of being loved.

All in the name of free speech, of course.