Jews, the Academy, and Antisemitism: How and What Should We Study?

Antisemitism on American campuses, both before and following the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023 is one of nation’s key polarizing issues, acting as a magnet for virtually every political conflict. The current claims and counter-claims about campus antisemitism require far more careful analysis than is afforded by many of the current debates.

I am interested in opening a conversation about these issues that will examine a broader understanding of the social field in which these debates are currently situated. Some of the components of the social field will include the complex history of Jews in American higher education, the transformations in scholarship created by the political movements of the 1970s that have been both critical to creating the field of Jewish studies and contemporary theorizing of Israel and Palestine, and the related political fight to define antisemitism, including the partisans driving this fight outside of academia.

Finally, I will turn to recent survey research on Jewish and non-Jewish students’ attitudes and experiences on American campuses that reveals far more complex findings than anticipated by the sociologists who conducted the research. There is an urgent need for scholars to engage research about campus antisemitism with far greater nuance and assertiveness than currently exists.

Riv-Ellen Prell, an anthropologist, is Emerita Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation and Prayer and Community: the Havurah in American Judaism. Among other works, she has edited Women Remaking American Judaism.

Her scholarly essays, articles and reviews, at the intersection of anthropology and history, engage questions of how American Jewish cultures have been shaped by work, family, gender, antisemitism, and religious and cultural innovation. In 2017 she curated both a physical and digital exhibition “A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota: 1920-1934.” The exhibition was the most widely attended in the University’s history, which resulted in a student protest movement that called for major transformations in memorialization and priorities at the University of Minnesota. She continues work on digital and public history.