Pro-Palestinian students take down their encampment after reaching a deal with Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island on April 30, 2024. Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty Images
If you were to believe President Donald Trump’s administration, you’d think that Brown University, where I am a professor — and soon-to-be director of the program in Judaic studies — is a hotbed of toxic antisemitism. But from my vantage point, the on-campus dynamics around Israel-Palestine have been not just more complex than is reported in the news, but even a cause for genuine hope.
Because as trying as the past year and a half has been, and as wrenching as it is to witness the suffering on all sides of this bloody conflict, this has also been a time of profoundly constructive and characteristically Jewish argumentation.
It’s undeniably been a difficult 18 months in which to be a Jewish academic. Since the brutal Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, I’ve witnessed extremely distressing expressions of support for Hamas’ politics of violence — in the name of underbaked theories of decolonization — from students and faculty alike, at campuses across the country. Some of this activism has even been driven by deep antisemitic sentiment — perhaps even unbeknownst to those enacting it, although it’s unmistakable to me as a scholar of anti-Jewish hatred and racism.
So it’s true that U.S. universities have been struggling, and often failing, to frame a coherent and thoughtful response — and to square theory with reality — which Trump has cited as a reason for threatening to strip federal funding from prominent universities across the country, including $510 million from Brown. But it is equally true that at my university I have many colleagues with whom I strongly disagree about how to characterize Zionism, the historical record of Israel-Palestine, and the destruction of Gaza — and that we have still been talking to, and learning from, one another.
These conversations can be uncomfortable and challenging, for all involved, but they have made me a better scholar and teacher. The urgency of this discourse has even allowed me to forge new friendships, committing to intellectual engagement and scholarly discussion instead of cancel culture.
For example, some of my colleagues and I convened a public conversation about what it means to teach and to be in the classroom in such politically fraught times. We tried simply to model what conversation should be: we listened to each other and responded to each other with questions that, while critical, always maintained our connection to and investment in each other as conversation partners.
Agreement was neither a priority nor a goal. And this seems to me to be a very Jewish virtue.
I say this because, as I see it, my job is to teach my students not only how to think, but how to think Jewishly.
When the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yochanan would present a teaching, his revered study partner, Reish Lakish, would raise 24 challenges. Rather than silence his opposition, Rabbi Yochanan would match it. And when Reish Lakish passed away, Rabbi Yochanan mourned the resulting impoverishment of his study and decline in the quality of his thinking.
Our job as scholars is to embody Rabbi Yochanan’s lessons, and embrace thoughtful criticism. In doing so, we push back against a problem that plagues both our broader culture and higher education. That is, to paraphrase my teacher David Novak, speaking in the name of the late Jesuit theologian, Bernard Lonergan: Few ideas are being critically challenged as they pass from book to book, or social media post to post, without giving evidence of ever having passed through a mind.
My commitment to traditional Jewish learning has helped me navigate conversations across Brown’s campus with student leaders of the pro-Palestinian encampments as well as pro-Israel students. Students of both ideological varieties sat and read the teachings of Zionist leader Theodor Herzl with me the week after Oct. 7; we discussed them, we disagreed, and yet all of us left that classroom with a sense that something positive had happened in the exchange.
This was real learning. I have seen, firsthand, how the Talmudic method of Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish, of insisting on counter-arguments and thinking them through to their logical conclusion in a spirit of growth, has made my students better thinkers.
Because of the arguments we’ve worked through, as the world has brought more urgency to the scholarly questions we take on in class, my students are better able to sit together in discomfort and to hold each other accountable with respect and responsibility, rather than enmity.
This is what makes the planned cancellation of Brown’s federal funding so distressing. The Trump administration claims that this move will help force the university to take steps to protect Jews on campus and combat antisemitism. But during my 11 years at Brown, I have watched Jewish life on campus flourish. And nothing could be worse for Jewish flourishing than defunding a university that has fostered healthy scholarly debate and respectful disagreement in the name of an ill-defined specter of antisemitism.
The Trump administration’s move will not solve the problems of higher education, but exacerbate them. It will impede the cultivation of critical minds necessary to bring America’s university culture back from the brink.
My own studies have focused on the longstanding struggle of Jews to carve out a sense of safety and self-value, and the importance of heeding the warnings of the past. I’m sorry to say that lately, I hear many echoes of that past. By claiming to be fighting antisemitism while really working to stifle apparently undesirable opinions, the administration positions Jews as scapegoats for state policies that pit people against each other in a politics of resentment.
This reduces the very real problem of Jew hatred into a smokescreen for economic and immigration policy, and for alarming encroachments on freedom of thought and freedom of expression. At the same time, it reduces Jewish life to a matter of abstract identity politics. The same kind of reductive identity politics, I might add, that got us into this problem in the first place.
Plus, to teach thoughtfully about Israel-Palestine requires more depth and scholarly breadth than overnight activism can afford. It requires learning.
If I cannot learn from my colleagues who teach Palestinian counter-narratives, then I will be incapable of doing the best job I can to maintain a standard of scholarship that transcends ideological myopia and political reductionism. If I cannot conduct my research, cannot teach with colleagues with whom I don’t see eye to eye, or host events on campus that model the virtues of mature disagreement, I will be unable to help guide my students as they navigate such complex questions with scholarly integrity.
Rather, I’ll be left in an echo-chamber with no one to sharpen my thinking, or that of my students.
If we want our universities to be better, we need to cultivate alternative paths of argument and conversation — as the Talmud teaches us — and we need a bit of the productive discomfort that I have found at Brown. Without these conversations, Jewish students cannot flourish.
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