In 1972, the United Negro College Fund asked the New York ad agency Young & Rubicam to help raise donations that could send young black students to college. The Mad Men’s pitch was “A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a fine thing to invest in.”
The ghost of Young & Rubicam survives on the 28th floor of 3 World Trade Center after its agglomeration into VMLY&R. Give them three martinis and ask them for a campaign for funding Jewish Studies programmes in American universities, and they might come back with “Money is a terrible thing to waste, and Jewish Studies a terrible place to invest in.”
“Who Teaches Judaism in America?”, a survey commissioned by the Ronn Torossian Foundation, is the proof. Over the past 60 years, idealistic Jewish donors have poured millions of tax-deductibles into Jewish Studies. Not just to give their tradition the academic study it deserves, but also as a way of inculcating Jewish identity and strengthening American Jewish life.
The Torossian study shows that their money is wasted. These programmes are giving a kosher stamp to anti-Israel propaganda and delegitimisation. The study examines attitudes to Israel among the professors in 1,136 US colleges offering programmes in Jewish Studies and the spin-off fields of Israel Studies, Hebrew and Holocaust Studies between May 2021 and Spring 2026. Four in ten faculties have signed anti-Israel petitions. They include 14 endowed chair holders, the big beasts of the departmental jungle. At Ivy League colleges, 72.3 per cent of Jewish Studies faculty publicly denounced Israel. Columbia University topped the Ivies with 77 faculty boycotters, 27 events and statements for Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine (which was founded after the October 7 attacks), and five departments committed to boycotting their Israeli peers.
In the cheap seats, New York University came top, or bottom, in the nation with 148 faculty boycotters. Marion Kaplan, professor emerita of modern Jewish history, three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award and Guggenheim Fellow, signed every major petition. Just over half (51.9 per cent) of all audited records documented “anti-Israel public signals”.
Statements that the survey does not consider anti-Israel: supporting a two-state solution, criticising the Israeli government, opposing settlement expansion and calling for accountability on civilian casualties.
Statements that the survey does consider anti-Israel: signing anti-Israel petitions, calling for BDS and joining organisations promoting an academic boycott of Israel, and using language such as “settler colonialism”, “genocide” and – a personal favourite – “Jewish supremacy”, which originated with David Duke and the KKK and then horseshoed its way into the faculty lounge. In May 2024, 1,200 Jewish professors signed a petition opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
The March 2025 “Not In Our Name” petition was the largest Jewish faculty petition ever recorded, with 3,400 signatures from Jewish professors, staff and students. How did it happen that the jewel in the keter of American Jewish academic life became a weapon against American Jews and Israel?
It’s the now-familiar lunacy that the French writer Julien Benda called “la trahison des clercs”, the “treason of the intellectuals”, but with a twist of Jewish self-loathing. And it’s the now-familiar identity politics that has eaten into every one of our institutions like a plague of termites. Jewish Studies programmes don’t teach Judaism; in this regard, the survey’s title is misleading. They teach a recent invention called Jewish Studies.
Jewish Studies is one of the “field studies” departments, like African American Studies and Women’s Studies, that came into existence as identity politics took root on the campus in 1968. We shouldn’t confuse Jewish Studies with its precursor, the historic study of the Bible and Hebrew philology and philosophy in American universities. Scholars like Harvard’s Harry Wolfson and his pupil Isadore Twersky, Chicago’s Leo Strauss and Columbia’s Salo Baron were polymathic giants.
Twerksy’s influence on Harvard’s Department of Jewish Studies, where I took a Master’s degree in the 2000s, was so strong a decade after his death that the place was nicknamed “the Yeshiva on the Charles”.
I sought out the senior professors who were heavyweights in that older tradition: Ruth Wisse on Yiddish literature, Shaye Cohen on the Second Temple, Bernard Septimus (a pupil of Twersky’s) on the Jews of Spain, Gershon Hundert on Ashkenazi history. The younger professors and the rising generation of graduate students were mostly a lost cause. Twenty years later, the rising tide of academic radicalism has lifted their boats. They’re now the faculty.
The younger cohort joked bitterly that Jewish Studies was like all the other field studies, only with a generational delay. They wanted it to be as nihilistically radical as the other field studies. They resented how the counterweights of Jewish religion and ethics slowed their field’s corruption.
They got there in the end. The line-up in a 1975 photo from the New York dinner that launched fundraising for Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies includes Twersky and another Harvard professor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who had studied under Salo Baron.
In 2005, when Yerushalmi retired, Columbia established a Yerushalmi chair in Israel Studies. The growth of Israel Studies, a sub-field of a field, reflected how open hatred of Israel was already the norm in Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies, where the Palestinian propagandist Rashid Khalidi had been enthroned in the Edward Said chair in 2003.
Yinon Cohen, the Israeli sociologist who now holds the Yerushalmi chair, signed four separate anti-Israel petitions at Columbia. Only a Jewish intellectual would call for boycotting himself. Only Jewish donors would fund schools that teach young Jews to denigrate Israel and the Jewish people. The spinning sound you can hear is Rav Twersky, revolving in his grave.
It’s time to cut the terrible waste of donations. It’s past time for the wealthiest among the wealthiest diaspora community in our history to find finer things to invest in. It’s not just the Jewish future in America that’s at stake. The corruption of higher ed is poisoning American life.
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