Recently, Federal Judge Mark C. Scarsi ruled that a leading university (UCLA) acted illegally when it worked with pro-Hamas protesters to deny Jewish students access to portions of campus, including a library. Putting this in perspective, Scarsi wrote that “in the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith … This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of freedom that it bears repeating.”
One must go back to the 1940s to find public organizations in the West imposing what Nazis called Judenfrei (Jew-free zones). It’s sadly true that in some places, Black-free zones continued into the 1960s, but at least educators denounced them. So how did prestigious 21st-century universities devolve into copying Joseph Goebbels?
In Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detail ideologies like postcolonial theory, which lead many people with doctorates to view Israeli children slaughtered on October 7th, not as individuals with decades of family history in the region and historical roots dating back millennia, but instead as “settler colonialists” who deserved what they got.
Less noted is how these questionable ideologies colonized non-rigorous disciplines like Anthropology, whose chief professional organization supports boycotting Israel, but not countries with far worse human rights records. Anthropology’s leaders warned young scholars not to work with the U.S. military in Afghanistan if they ever wanted to work in academe. Afghan women can now enjoy the results of this de facto pro-Taliban stance. Anthropology’s hard left positionality contrasts sharply with more pluralist fields like my own, Political Science.
Alas, Middle East Studies, an interdisciplinary field that has gained considerable influence in recent years, resembles Anthropology more than Political Science. Speaking out of school, I can bear witness to one episode epitomizing that field’s cognitive rigidity.
Two decades ago, I was a tenured professor at a respected university considering hiring a well-published academic who had been denied tenure at another institution, likely because their anti-Israeli research offended that school’s leaders. (I’m not using the individual’s name or gender to respect their privacy and their stated desire to leave this incident behind them.)
I initially favored hiring because the professor seemingly suffered unfair treatment at their prior campus and since I saw—and still see—reasoned arguments for reducing U.S. aid to Israel. I soon had second thoughts. In their writings and job talk, the professor described the Israeli lobby as Washington’s most powerful interest group, supposedly stronger than big pharma, insurance companies, the National Rifle Association, and teacher unions. Yet they seemed unable to define power. Their “research” involved collecting anecdotes without considering alternative evidence.
This led me to ask a question any scholar should have anticipated.
From Arthur Bentley to Theda Skocpol, hundreds of political scientists spent a century studying interest groups. Yet, the professor failed to learn from—or even cite—that massive body of research. Asked why, they answered: “I chose not to.”
“I chose not to” is the response of a religious fundamentalist avoiding the temptation by shouting, “Get behind me, Satan”—not a scholar considering contrary evidence to understand complex phenomena better. My university decided the job candidate lacked the depth to teach our students. Unlike much of higher education, we made the right call.
In a notable book that came out shortly before that ill-fated job talk, Ivory Towers on Sand, Martin Kramer exposed Middle East Studies as a field out of touch with reality. Lacking scientific rigor, Middle East Studies “replaced proficiency with ideology,” consistently erring in its predictions about the region’s politics. As Kramer wrote, the field “had failed to ask the right questions, at the right times, about Islamism” and “produced mostly banalities about American bias and ignorance, and fantasies about Islamists as democratizers and reformers.”
Normatively, its professors never accepted Israel’s legitimacy, opposing President Bill Clinton’s efforts to negotiate a two-state solution that could have assured Israeli and Palestinian safety and sovereignty. Empirically, the field predicted the “Zionist entity” would devolve into a garrison state and U.S. vassal rather than a multicultural democracy with a vibrant economy, which was what Israel became.
In short, for decades, Middle East Studies professors have chosen not to teach their students uncomfortable facts, including that while other governments in the region expelled Jews, 1.8 million Muslims freely practice their faith in Israel, where gays and lesbians are also welcome.
For scholars, humanity is complicated. For fundamentalists pretending to be scholars, everything is simple, with easy to catalog heroes and villains. From the 1940s Germany to UCLA today, we see what comes from willful ignorance.
Image by Bryan of UCLA Campus – Janss Steps on Flickr — Colorized black and white by Jared Gould
I ruefully wonder whether Israel is not indeed becoming a “garrison state and American vassal.”