Given the rampant antisemitism we have seen at many of the top American universities, Jewish students are being invited to go to Israel for their degrees. That sounds like a reasonable idea, but in today’s Martin Center article, Christopher Schilling says “not so fast.”
The problem, he observes, is that some Israeli universities seem to be just as infected with leftist nonsense as ours are, and you even find professors who side with Hamas.
Schilling writes:
The question is more complicated than it might appear. Without question, it was intellectually embarrassing when, in 2021, some 200 scholars — mostly American — signed an open letter denouncing Israel’s “ethnonationalist ideologies” and “settler colonial paradigms.” And these were scholars of Jewish and Israel Studies! Even more troubling, the letter used the neo-Nazi term “Jewish supremacy.” But the letter was also signed by Professor Amos Goldberg of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. Hypocrisy aside, the fact that Goldberg signed on to such things while living in Israel — and working in East Jerusalem—is an indicator that students seeking real education in Israel might not always find it there.
Of course, students can get a solid, non-politicized education in Israel if they want, but that is also true in the U.S.
Schilling further observes, “It almost seems like Israeli academia is often not about the production of knowledge at all but about buzzwords, ideology, and careers. To find those things, no one needs to leave America.”
So, both the U.S. and Israel have higher education institutions that waste student time on ideological junk. Caveat emptor.