University of Denver’s Center for Judaic Studies has long wanted to hire a Holocaust studies professor to support its decades-old Holocaust education programming. Now it’s getting one—a new endowed professorship in Holocaust and antisemitism awareness.
The new role, linking Holocaust and antisemitism studies, was born out of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, which spurred student protests across the country and reports of antisemitic incidents. Adam Rovner, the center’s director, said some protest materials distributed on campus veered into “exterminationist antisemitism,” which he said was a “wake-up call” that students needed better antisemitism education.
Now fundraising for the position is “most of the way there,” and the university has thrown its support behind the role, promoting it as part of its “Denver Difference” campaign. And beyond the new position, the Judaic studies program is growing, “dramatically” expanding classes to meet steady enrollments, Rovner said, with students asking “probing but also civil questions” about current events.
Like University of Denver, a slew of higher ed institutions have announced new Jewish and antisemitism studies initiatives in recent months. University of Texas at Austin is starting a program on “Jewish and Western Civilization” this fall, complete with a study abroad opportunity in Israel and a scholarship program for students interested in the topic. Touro University, founded to serve the Jewish community in New York City, launched an Antisemitism Institute this spring to house its year-old Antisemitism Law Clinic, and a new fellowship program to train faculty to teach antisemitism courses across the country.
But it’s a complicated moment for Jewish studies, and not all programs share the same good fortune of growing academic offerings and funds for new hires. Many programs are shrinking due to lack of resources, Jewish studies scholars say: They face the same forces as other humanities disciplines, as higher ed funding trends toward STEM and professional fields. At the same time, some longstanding Jewish studies programs are seeing a surge of growth—new investments, initiatives, hires, scholarships and student demand—particularly in the wake of Oct. 7, as institutional leaders, donors and students grapple with redressing rises in campus antisemitism. Even as some scholars celebrate the new energy and resources in the field, others question if it’s enough or whether dollars are going in the right direction for the long-term future of the discipline.
Jewish studies, like any academic discipline, is vast and complex, said Jodi Eichler-Levine, professor director of the Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University. And funds for the field should reflect that breadth and support “what Jewish Studies has always done, which is explore lots of complicated questions without a specific goal, but just let’s see what history and what the data shows” in ways that tell “a story that’s really rich and complicated.”
Growth and Challenges
When Rachel S. Harris started as director of Jewish studies at Florida Atlantic University about three years ago, not a single student was majoring or minoring in the field.
Now, the program has 10 majors and minors. It’s rolling out a new Holocaust studies certificate for educators in the state and welcoming new faculty members, including a medievalist, a new Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies and a full-time Hebrew instructor. A Holocaust and Jewish studies building is also under construction to house offices, classrooms, a Holocaust museum and a studio to record oral histories and podcasts.
Although the building was in the works before the Israel-Hamas war, Harris believes state lawmakers and university leaders’ response to Oct. 7 has had some effect on the program’s growth. She noted that Florida governor Ron DeSantis urged state universities to offer flexibility to Jewish students interested in transferring to the institutions because of campus antisemitism, which “set a tone in the state,” Harris said. Florida Atlantic’s president has been eager to partner with Israeli higher ed institutions and has touted the university’s investment in Israel-backed bonds.
Overall, “there’s been a huge capital investment by the community and by donors in showcasing support for Jewish studies as a field,” said Harris, who is also the Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair for Jewish Studies and a film and media studies professor.
Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College, said course enrollments have also been strong at her institution, since even before the war. For example, a medieval Jewish history class is so popular it typically has a waitlist, she said. She attributes the growth to the strength of the program and professors’ willingness to introduce courses students request, such as Yiddish literature. But she also believes her program attracted students after Oct. 7 by taking a collaborative approach with Middle Eastern studies scholars, co-teaching courses together on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Those courses are so popular,” Heschel said. “They know they’re getting two perspectives from professors who respect each other, get along, and that this kind of co-teaching is not something you would find in other institutions.”
Eichler-Levine said her program is experiencing both the successes and challenges facing Jewish studies right now.
On one hand, the program has had “tremendous growth.” When she started as director three years ago, six students were minoring in Jewish studies. That number has since more than tripled, and classes “fill up rapidly” with both Jewish and non-Jewish students.
Eichler-Levine believes that’s partly because students are drawn to the humanities amid the rise in AI and “want to understand what makes us human.” But they’re also “curious about the world around them. They are obviously seeing Jews in the news … and they want to know more,” she said.
But despite rising student demand, she said she doesn’t have the funding to hire new faculty members when scholars retire, reflecting the general “shrinkage in the humanities” as “universities including Lehigh, invest more in areas like AI or STEM.”
Jewish studies scholars are “feeling the pressure and feeling the irony of the extreme need for our field right now, for people who have been studying Jewish history, Holocaust history, European history, literature … for so long, and ironically, at this exact moment, so much funding for their work is being cut,” including some federal research grants, much like other humanities scholars, Eichler-Levine said.
Targeted Investments
A spate of new initiatives cropping up on campuses—in and outside of Jewish studies—are centered on antisemitism studies and lawfare, with Touro University’s new Antisemitism Institute as a prime example.
The university has had a Jewish studies department since its inception more than 50 years ago, but Oct. 7 got university leaders thinking about ways to expand in response to the moment, said Alan Kadish, Touro’s president.
“We, like everyone else, have been seeing a rise in antisemitism and hate on campuses,” he said. University leaders realized “we actually have a cadre of people already at Touro who are engaged in academic activities related to antisemitism … and, working together, they might be able to collaborate, act in synergy and foster some new ideas.”
The institute brings together a group of professors working on ways to use the law to address antisemitism, conducting research on antisemitism in social media and running a new training program for professors at other institutions, initially focused on how to teach law students about legal structures for combatting antisemitism.
Going forward, “we want to find people who may not necessarily have the training yet to teach about Jewish culture, Jewish life, antisemitism, Israel but who want to teach about these subjects in good faith and teach them how to do so,” said Mark Goldfeder, the professor leading the program. “The best way to take back the campuses, is through the classroom.”
Goldfeder also directs the Antisemitism Law Clinic, founded last year in the aftermath of Oct. 7, to give “systematic training” to the “next generation of Jewish civil rights advocates.” Law students work with the nonprofit National Jewish Advocacy Center, where Goldfeder is CEO and director, to gain experience working on legal cases related to antisemitism.
A wave of antisemitism trainings and education efforts have also started as a result of legal settlements in cases brought by Jewish advocacy groups and the federal government against campuses. For example, Pomona College agreed to conduct trainings on discrimination, including antisemitism, for faculty and students and add programming related to “historical antecedents and modern manifestations of antisemitism and the connections between Judaism, Jewish identity, Israel, and Zionism” as part of a settlement with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a Jewish advocacy organization.
But Jewish scholars and leaders are somewhat divided over whether these new investments are the ones their campuses really need.
“The attention is on lawfare and these dramatic moves,” said Leonard Saxe, Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Social Policy at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University (not affiliated with the Brandeis Center). But he’d like to see more resources and attention directed toward academic research on what kinds of antisemitism coursework and investments in Jewish studies “actually make a difference and address the problem” of campus antisemitism.
“There’s very little discussion of that,” he said. He emphasized that Holocaust and antisemitism education are important areas of study that deserve resources, but he also believes there’s more work to be done by scholars “to figure out what kind of information, what kind of knowledge would be worthwhile?”
Kadish acknowledged “the law is never the absolute ideal way to accomplish things,” but he believes Touro’s focus on it is part of what’s needed in the current climate.
“You’d hope that hate and racism and antisemitism could be combated through education and through just dealing with reasonable people,” he said. “But history has shown that the Civil Rights Act and other legislation have made a huge difference in prejudice in this country. While we’d like to eliminate antisemitism on an intellectual and emotional level, the law has a very important role to play in helping do that.”
What campuses need, Eichler-Levine said, is broad Jewish studies offerings, beyond antisemitism studies, to address students’ rising demand for Jewish studies and curiosity about Jewish faith and culture in all of its “breadth and complexity.”
“I think part of being a college student is learning more about the world around you, because you’re coming of age, and I think learning about culture, religion and ethnicity is a big part of that,” she said. “It’s not that we don’t also need classes on the modern Middle East or the history of antisemitism, and we have those classes, but I think that students are really, really surprised by the things they don’t hear about in the newspaper.”
