Israel studies departments at U.S. colleges and universities are “on the brink of collapse within the university context” and in danger of “becoming administratively homeless,” according to new research from the Jewish People Policy Institute, an Israeli think tank.
The decline of Israel studies is “the canary in the coal mine of what’s happening in higher education” and is “adjacent to the debates on campus antisemitism” and the “ideological capture of the university,” the University of Haifa historian Sara Hirschhorn, author of the report, told JNS.
The Association of Israel Studies, founded in 1985, lists six U.S. schools with Israel studies centers, two with professorships and chairs of Israel studies, two with Israel studies institutes, and two with institutes that encompass both Israel and Jewish studies. The association lists another seven with centers or programs in Judaic and Jewish studies, and five with joint programs, centers or institutes of Israel and Jewish studies.
Israel studies chairs were first established in 1992, “at an unresolved juncture in the development of Israel studies to respond to the campus climate and donor initiative, more than the readiness of the discipline itself to move into a new stage of maturity,” according to the report.
From 2004 to 2012, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise aimed to “make smaller interventions on a larger number of campuses” by funding visiting professorships and fellowships, instead of costlier endowed positions, the report stated.
“Unfortunately, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the field of Israel studies is on the brink of collapse within the university context,” per the report.
“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 stated, it is “incompatible with a campus climate since Oct. 7 that is increasingly anti-Zionist, pro-BDS and even cheers Hamas.”
Hirschhorn told JNS that “much of the change began before Oct. 7, but certainly after Oct. 7 with encampments on campus, with protesters storming into classes on Israel studies, with a really hostile climate to using the word ‘Israel’ and ‘Zionism’ as if it’s taboo or a dirty word.”
“It’s obvious that Israel studies is confronting a real crisis,” she said.
For the report, Hirschhorn interviewed professors from “comparative, small fields,” such as Greek studies, to “understand the similarities and differences” between them and Israel studies. She also pored over publicly available documents about Israel studies.
She found that Israel studies programs and departments are undergoing a “drift toward post-Zionism and critical scholarship,” which the report attributes in part to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives excluding Jews and Zionists and funding from foreign countries, like Qatar, that sponsor terror.
The report warns that the field’s “identity crisis” stems from a lack of “effort to standardize vocabulary or methodology,” which has meant that “researchers are talking past each other, with much being lost in translation of technical jargon.” The identity crisis makes it hard for Israel studies scholars to “respond with one voice,” according to the report.
Hirschhorn told JNS that there are no teaching plans for Israel studies professors to address a subject about which “people have very passionate feelings, where there’s hostility, where students have really entrenched heritage or religious or other backgrounds.”
Csaba Nikolenyi, a political science professor at Concordia University, where he directs the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies, and vice president of the Association for Israel Studies, told JNS that the field—which includes multiple disciplines, such as Arabic studies, sociology and political science—is “robust” and “remains strong.”
The association’s 2024 conference in Prague had record attendance, Nikolenyi told JNS.
“The more Israel is in the news, the more there is a desire to understand this very, very complex politics,” he said.
‘Constantly developing’
Alexander Kaye directs Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and holds the chair of Israel studies at the school, and is an associate professor in its Near Eastern and Judaic studies department. He previously served as the Israel studies chair at Ohio State University.
“The field of Israel studies is thriving, despite the stiff challenges it admittedly faces,” Kaye told JNS.
“I am clear about what Israel studies is for—to help people understand Israel better, in all of its fascinating and complicated details,” he said. “So it is a great strength of the field that it includes so many kinds of experts, trained in different disciplines.”
Israel studies scholars are penning more books and articles about the Jewish state than ever before and are “reaching wide audiences on campuses and among the public at large, of people who want to have a deeper and more constructive understanding of Israel,” he said.
Kaye also thinks that the field is “constantly developing,” citing the two-year-old Brandeis Institute for Advanced Israel Studies, which he said “is the first of its kind and marks a new phase in the maturation of Israel studies.”
“This Institute convenes scholars from around the world to work together on a specific annual theme and produces cutting-edge research that is conveyed to students and the wider public through conferences, podcasts, and published books and articles,” he said.
Kaye added that Israel studies professors are reaching “large numbers” of students in China, India and elsewhere, well beyond the United States and Europe. The Brandeis Center recently hosted scholars from the United States, the United Arab Emirates, France, India, Bulgaria, Morocco, Germany, China, Cameroon and Brazil. “They have all come to us to learn how to teach better about Israel at their home institutions,” he said.
“Alumni of this program include 415 professors from 290 institutions across 36 countries to teach about Israel within their academic disciplines,” he said. “They have taught over 2,100 courses, reaching nearly 36,000 students worldwide.”
No centralized body
Lauren Strauss, a senior professorial lecturer at American University and director of its undergraduate Jewish studies program, told JNS that it is too early to say if Israel studies programs are shrinking, “but it’s well known that humanities programs in general have been facing financial and enrollment challenges across academia.”
“So any ‘shrinkage’ in these programs has to be put in the context of the general climate,” Strauss said.
The new report “somewhat overstates the current situation as a ‘crisis,’” Strauss told JNS, though it “amasses considerable evidence from press reports, personal anecdotes and some published data.”
Her largest criticism of the report is what she says is its suggestion that there should be a central body overseeing what Israel studies centers teach. Professional organizations maintain syllabi “banks,” and scholars share knowledge in journals.
“But the idea that there could be any generally accepted syllabus and course readings in the larger academic community is either laughable, if you know how professors feel about creating their own syllabi, or sinister, if you look at the extent of attempted control over course content in states like Florida,” Strauss said.
The new report states that Israel studies must “completely overhaul” its teaching. “First and foremost, it must define and implement a more centralized curriculum in Israel studies, criterion for what constitutes ‘academic rigor’ and coherent metrics of learning success for implementation on the local university level,” per the report.
Strauss calls that suggestion of a centralized body “somewhat shocking.”
But the American University professor agrees with the report that Israel studies “is increasingly isolated, both its faculty and our courses and its public-facing programs,” and that “internal divisions in the field have been growing for a while.”
“I also strongly believe that universities could and should be doing more to advocate for these programs from a simple perspective of safety—including devoting funding to our physical protection,” Strauss told JNS. “We have seen too many tragic events already this year in the United States to argue that this is unnecessary or that it is solely the responsibility of the Jewish or Israel-focused community to provide and pay for their own professional security.”
Strauss thinks that despite many challenges, Israel studies will “certainly continue to exist in some form in the United States, even if some of the collegiate stand-alone programs and centers are at risk.”
And Israel and Jewish studies, as well as the study of antisemitism, “will remain an area of avid interest in the American Jewish community for the foreseeable future,” she told JNS.
“But there is a bright line between academic inquiry and falsifying information, between open protest and harassment or threats of harm, and those lines need to be maintained,” she said.
Israel studies and Jewish studies are “beset by a wave of politically-motivated, bad faith attacks that challenge the state’s very existence and the right of its citizens, and often of Jews around the world, to live as equals with other societies,” Strauss said. “But the reasons for the possible decline, or at least changes, in Israel studies programs are much more complicated than simple anti-Israelism or antisemitism.”
Donor misalignment
Hirschhorn told JNS that there are “major tensions” between Israel studies donors and schools, because Israel studies programs aren’t necessarily hiring pro-Israel professors.
The report notes that Becky Benaroya, a Jewish philanthropist in Seattle, rescinded a $5 million donation to the University of Washington’s Israel studies program in 2022 because the department’s then-chair signed a petition accusing Israel of settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy, among other things. The report noted that other university monies went to the Israel studies program, and the professor in question was promoted after the scandal.
Nikolenyi, vice president of the Association for Israel Studies, told JNS that the association would have intervened if that incident had been reported to it.
The report also states that Israel studies programs are “on the path to becoming administratively homeless in academia,” as it says that Jewish studies programs are becoming more anti-Zionist and Middle East studies programs are increasingly accepting foreign funding from states that are anti-Israel.
“It has certainly led to the alienation of Israel studies from within Middle East studies or adjacent ethnic studies fields, because they’re kind of very different narratives,” Hirschhorn told JNS. Universities may reach the point that “Israel studies may go out of business while Palestine studies will thrive,” she added.
Hirschhorn told JNS that the report’s recommendations encourage Israel studies as a field to “try to think about how to reform yourself internally to make yourself more equipped to face these external challenges.”
The field “doesn’t know where it’s going and that’s the big problem,” she said. “It doesn’t really know what it is, where it’s going, what its priorities are, what its relationship should be with other administrative units—like other departments—the bureaucracy of the university, it doesn’t know how to fit in itself.”
Even if the report’s recommendations are adopted, “there are such overwhelming challenges on a university campus that are so hostile to the field of Israel studies that there might not be a future for the discipline on an academic college campus going forward,” she added.
Nikolenyi, whose office was “badly vandalized,” told JNS that there have been problems since Oct. 7, including boycotts of Israeli speakers on campus.
“Those are very important challenges in their local specificities, and when our members bring that up within the association, we try to support our members in whatever shape or form we can,” he said.
Hirschhorn told JNS that she doesn’t intend “to write Israel studies’s obituary.”
“I’m trying to write its future,” she said. “People are moving very quickly from the college campus to all of our major institutions of power and knowledge in our society, and the miseducation or undereducation or lack of education that a whole generation of people have been getting on college campuses is going to have dividends down the road in the real world.”
