Behind a strange controversy over Jewish studies and antisemitism at Indiana University

I thought the German approach to antisemitism could never work in the United States. Maybe I was wrong.

This is not a regular edition of Antisemitism Decoded, which will run next Wednesday as normal, but I wanted to use this platform to give a little background into a recent story I published about the turmoil within Indiana University’s Jewish studies program.

Chet Strange/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Some time ago, a source reached out to tell me that Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism had become a kind of American base for a very German understanding of how to counter antisemitism. The amount of work necessary to make that sentence legible — and explain why it mattered — deterred me from writing about it sooner.

But the short version is that German society’s collective guilt over the Holocaust has metabolized in ways both noble and strange, including the phenomenon of non-Jewish Germans adopting a rigid belief that anti-Zionism — and even more mild critiques of Israel — are vile forms of antisemitism that should be prohibited by the state.

I traveled to Berlin a couple years ago to write about this and had a telling exchange with Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner:

I pointed out that many American Jews hold positions that he believes are antisemitic, like the roughly one-quarter who believe that Israel is an apartheid state, and asked him if it wasn’t a bit strange as a non-Jewish German to be telling Jews that they are being antisemitic?

“It’s a bit odd, of course, absolutely,” he said. “And yet, I call out any form of antisemitism.”

I thought this tendency of German antisemitism experts (who are not Jewish) policing what Jews could say about Israel was so specific to Germany that it could never really be exported to the United States. And so the fact that Günther Jikeli, a German academic, was helping run an antisemitism research institute in Bloomington struck me as little more than a curiosity.

And then, over the summer, Indiana University fired the longtime director of its renowned Jewish studies program without explanation and replaced him with Jikeli, who quickly set about asserting a new vision for the program. He banned a Jewish student from Zoom for displaying a photo that said “Free Palestine,” stripped funding from her anti-Zionist research project and then told the dean — who had raised free speech concerns — that he’d been speaking to people around the country who might file a federal civil rights complaint against the school if Jikeli was forced to allow the student to display this slogan in class. “I will not tolerate this,” he said.

Two of Jikeli’s German colleagues, who like him are not Jewish, wrote to Indiana’s administration defending Jikeli’s actions and explaining that Jewish studies could not properly include anti-Zionism.

Suddenly, the prospect of the German model — in which non-Jewish authority figures use narrow understandings of antisemitism to discipline left-wing Jews — seems like it may find purchase in the United States after all, especially at a time when the White House and Republican state lawmakers are cracking down on a very particular conception of antisemitism.

“It’s just this moment of cultural melding where the U.S. is embracing the IHRA definition, Indiana’s state legislature wants to do a conservative takeover of universities and this random German dude comes in,” said Claire Richters, a leader of the Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association at IU. “It’s just the perfect storm for cross-cultural policing of Jewish studies as an academic field — undermining the functioning of U.S. universities while we’re at it.”

The full article includes many more details and nuance — certainly there are many Jews who also think that left-wing Jewish academics are distorting Jewish studies and support Jikeli’s approach — but I wanted to share a little background on these issues that didn’t make it into the article itself.