The Fight Over Antisemitism Studies
How money, fear, and October 7th forged a contentious new area of study.
By Stephanie M. Lee
May 12, 2026
Liz Berger didn’t know how to make sense of the carnage. On October 7, 2023, Hamas murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel, the biggest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. To Berger, a Jew living in southeastern Pennsylvania, it “felt like a rupture.” So when she came across an ad for a new online master’s degree in antisemitism studies from Gratz College, she took it as a sign to enroll. And she decided she was in it for the long haul when, in 2025, Gratz, a small Jewish college outside Philadelphia, expanded it into a Ph.D. — the world’s first doctoral degree in antisemitism studies.
A new kind of Ph.D. would seem to herald a new field. And it’s not the only indication that antisemitism studies has arrived. New centers, positions, and funding streams have cropped up at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, Harvard University, Baruch College, the University of Denver, and the University of Southern California, to name a few. Donations are pouring in. Researchers are convening at conferences in growing numbers. An official scholarly association and a new journal are on the way.
But the rise of academic interest is underpinned by a sense of deep unease. Scholars disagree about whether antisemitism studies is a coherent field or a multidisciplinary object of study. They are divided by a fractious debate over the proper definition of antisemitism that shows no sign of abating. And the nascent field risks being co-opted into a blunt political instrument as the Trump administration makes antisemitism allegations central to its quest to forcibly reform campuses. “Antisemitism studies has become entangled in the dismantling of higher education as we know it,” said Brendan McGeever, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of London. “And I don’t think, as a field, we’ve come to terms with really what that means.”
In the summer of 2014, as more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in a clash between Israel and Hamas, pro-Palestinian protests thousands of miles away in France boiled over into attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops. Ayal Feinberg, who was just starting a Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Texas, wondered about the connection between the two events. His dissertation, based on hate-crime data, found that Israel’s military actions were associated with increased attacks on Jews in the diaspora. At the same time, he came away with the impression that there was “a huge gap in very basic research surrounding antisemitism,” he recalled. And most of his mentors, he said, urged him to include other kinds of prejudice, like Islamophobia and anti-LGBTQ discrimination, in his research, rationalizing that a wider remit would improve his odds at a tenure-track job.
His takeaway: Antisemitism expertise wasn’t prioritized in the academy. “It’s a really hard decision to be told, Don’t study what you feel you need to study to better protect your family, because it’s going to limit your ability to get a job,” said Feinberg, who is Jewish.
"Antisemitism studies has become entangled in the dismantling of higher education as we know it. And I don’t think, as a field, we’ve come to terms with really what that means."
Feinberg did land at a Texas A&M University branch campus, as an assistant professor of political science, in 2019. He also started consulting for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish civil-rights organization, where he helped lead major surveys of antisemitic attitudes. He became convinced of the need for a degree about this vexing phenomenon. “The field lacks professionals trained to rigorously evaluate and implement interventions that actually reduce antisemitism,” he would later write, blaming “academic gatekeeping,” “organizational insularity,” “antisemitism itself,” and the widely held belief that the United States has been a uniquely safe harbor for Jews.
By June 2023, when Feinberg joined Gratz as an associate professor and the director of its Center for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights, he believed that Jews had left themselves vulnerable. In the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, fighting antisemitism required interdisciplinary training, as he would later write — “in psychology to understand prejudicial attitudes, sociology and political science to grasp systemic discrimination, communications and rhetoric to unpack dangerous narratives, and history to contextualize it all.” In a kick-off ceremony for the degree last April, Gratz leaders planted on campus grounds a sapling grown from the chestnut tree outside Anne Frank’s secret annex.
Image: Ayal Feinberg (third from right) at the tree-planting ceremony to commemorate the new Gratz College degree in antisemitism studies.Gratz College
Founded in 1895, Gratz is the oldest independent college for Jewish studies in North America. While it is headquartered in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, all of its master’s, doctoral, and certificate programs are online. It has a total of 520 graduate students, about 45 of whom are split between the master’s and Ph.D. programs in antisemitism studies, according to Feinberg. The latter comprises a mix of educators, Jewish-nonprofit employees, lawyers, rabbis, data scientists, and social-media influencers.
The Ph.D. courses cover antisemitism in relation to literature, law, the media, sports, conspiracy theories, American and Russian history, Christianity, and the Muslim world. Titles include “Advocacy: Strategies and Implementations,” “The ‘Science’ of Countering Antisemitism: Scholarly Approaches to Contemporary Prejudice,” and “Quantitative Approaches to Antisemitism.” Some are taught by outside faculty members like Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor of communication and international studies. Homework for his course, on analyzing and combating Jewish stereotypes in the media, might involve drafting a social-media post for a Holocaust museum in a public-relations crisis. Antisemitism’s toll on mental health is the theme of a class led by Miri Bar-Halpern, a clinical psychologist who also lectures at Harvard Medical School.
Berger made her way to the Ph.D. after growing up Catholic and converting to Judaism in marriage. Formerly a social worker who worked in outpatient settings and hospitals, she found herself, after October 7, wanting to better understand what it meant to belong to a marginalized faith and to raise her children accordingly. Her dissertation will likely explore how neurodivergent Jewish students experience antisemitism. After that, she sees herself pursuing a combination of advocacy, teaching, and research. “I personally would not want to be part of an antisemitism-studies program that was not rooted in the ethics of an applied version of it,” she said. “I don’t want to just read about this.”
Gratz says it prepares students to work in education, community groups, governmental agencies, think tanks, museums, and civil-rights organizations. While it says that it teaches the skills to do “academic-quality research,” it doesn’t explicitly market the Ph.D. as a springboard for tenure-track professors. “We can’t,” Feinberg acknowledged, “generate an antisemitism-studies department that doesn’t exist.”
The study of antisemitism is complicated by a basic question: What is it? One definition has been adopted by dozens of countries and endorsed by most major American Jewish groups. President Trump cited it in a 2019 executive order that expanded federal antidiscrimination protections to include antisemitism, and the Biden administration said the U.S. “embraced” it. Last year, when the government froze $400 million of Columbia’s funding for allegedly tolerating antisemitic attitudes during pro-Palestinian protests, the university agreed to incorporate the definition. Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley have committed to using it to settle lawsuits alleging anti-Jewish discrimination.
The “non-legally binding working definition” was put forth in 2016 by an intergovernmental organization called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Antisemitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” it states. “Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” Many incidents tend to fit under this umbrella without controversy: swastikas, Holocaust denial, believing that Jews control Wall Street and the media, attacks against Jews because they are Jewish, synagogue vandalism. But seven of the IHRA’s 11 potential examples of antisemitism relate to criticism of Israel.
Opponents of the definition worry that it is so broad as to cover legitimate criticism of Israel or of Zionism — an ideology with its own contested definitions, but that is commonly interpreted as the belief that a Jewish national home should exist in Palestine. Israel’s government has arguably muddied the waters. According to the IHRA, antisemitism can include “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” But in 2018, Israel passed a law defining itself as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” That phrasing widened the pathway for equating criticism of Israel — including its military actions in Gaza — with criticism of Jews.
Feinberg said he thinks the debate is largely a distraction. (Definitions aren’t talked about much at Gratz. “It doesn’t really matter what you say it is,” said Maya Glasser, a rabbi pursuing the Ph.D., “it matters what you’re doing about it.”) Especially after October 7, “it feels so insensitive to the needs of the Jewish community right now to continue to prioritize the definition,” Feinberg said.
Even when the definition isn’t being directly discussed, though, its instability has a way of seeping into discussions of all kinds. In an essay announcing the Gratz program, Feinberg bemoaned “the velocity, intensity and normalization of Jew-hatred” following the Hamas attacks, citing in part “a 361% increase in antisemitic incidents in the U.S.” That figure referred to nearly 3,300 such incidents recorded by the ADL in the three months after October 7, 2023, compared to the same period in 2022. Its tally for all of 2023 — 8,873 antisemitic incidents — was the highest since it began tracking in 1979.
But after the Hamas attacks, the ADL had changed what it was counting. It broadened to cover certain expressions of “opposition to Zionism” and “support for resistance against Israel or Zionists,” while adding that it was “careful not to conflate general criticism of Israel or anti-Israel activism with antisemitism.” It specified that its “approach to Israel-related expressions comports with the IHRA definition.”
Yet when a journalist and an activist applied an alternate definition to the 2023 data, they concluded that more than 1,000 incidents were misclassified as antisemitic — “all cases of speech critical of Israel or Zionism.” The biggest divergence was over pro-Palestinian rallies, including slogans like “from the river to the sea.” The ADL calls that phrase “an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland”; many Palestinians and others do not agree. The ADL’s defense of its methodology and of Israel — its CEO has said “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” — has alienated left-wing Jewish groups amid the climbing Palestinian death toll in Gaza. Feinberg, who said he supports the IHRA definition because its expansiveness reduces the chances of missing potentially antisemitic incidents, noted that many other surveys besides the figure he cited also indicate an increase in experienced antisemitism.
"What I think people are worrying about is that there’s a feeling, somehow, that Jews are trying to privilege their own experience over and above the experiences of others."
“What is antisemitic vis-à-vis Israel and Zionism?” said Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. “That is the million-dollar question.”
“Consensus around these categories has broken down entirely in wider society and in the field itself,” said McGeever, of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
These divisions are evident in the feelings stirred by Gratz’s Ph.D. program. “I’m not convinced that you can train students in a discipline that is called ‘antisemitism studies,’” said Avinoam Patt, a professor at Holocaust studies at NYU and director of its Center for the Study of Antisemitism. The center doesn’t grant degrees, but funds and hosts historians, scholars of law and religion, psychologists, and others, in keeping with Patt’s view of the subject as a “complex social-historical problem” best tackled by different fields.
“I think the body of knowledge about antisemitism is a little narrow for a Ph.D. when you compare it to, say, a Ph.D. in history or a Ph.D. in English,” said Jeffrey Veidlinger, a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. He leads a research center called the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, which was initially conceived to “combat antisemitism” but has expanded to study and teach about different kinds of religious- and ethnic-based hatred. Gratz’s framing, Veidlinger worries, risks foregrounding the conclusion before the inquiry. When he wrote a book on the Ukrainian pogroms that killed more than 100,000 Jews from 1918 to 1921, “I did that through the discipline of history, and I see that antisemitism was one of many motivations for the anti-Jewish violence of that period,” he said. “But if I’m doing it under a program of antisemitism, it seems that it’s already predetermined that the cause of the violence is going to be antisemitism.”
Feinberg said that this skeptical view misunderstands the subject that the program is striving to trailblaze. Antisemitism, he said, is connected to inquiries about religion, race, nationalism, conspiracy thinking, political violence, law, education, trauma, democratic culture, and more. “Antisemitism studies is not narrow at all,” he said. “In fact, it is far more encompassing than most traditional disciplines.”
Image: Feinberg speaks to community members at a launch event for the new Ph.D.Gratz College
He and others involved with Gratz told me they believe that their work can be used to help combat discrimination against other marginalized communities. The college weaves some of them into the conversation, with coursework on racism in America and Jewish-Black relations. But the Ph.D.’s titular focus has no direct precedent. While some Holocaust scholars have Ph.D.s in Holocaust studies, it’s more common to specialize in the subject while training as a historian or literary scholar. One can focus on anti-Black racism in the pursuit of a doctorate in African American studies, but the degree itself is not called “anti-Black racism studies.”
Antisemitism is being elevated as singularly worth studying at a time when the Trump administration is suing universities for allegedly tolerating anti-Jewish hostility. It has arrested pro-Palestinian student protesters and terminated billions in funding, much of which was supporting studies about racial and ethnic minorities. Republican-led states are restricting classroom teachings construed as promoting diversity. Muzzling discussions about anti-Black racism while ramping up research on anti-Jewish racism is an “awkward disjuncture,” said Waxman, of UCLA, one of the campuses named in a civil-rights lawsuit by the Department of Justice. “Are these universities also investing resources in the study of Islamophobia?”
Feinberg said that these events actually reinforce the need for an antisemitism-studies program, because it can train scholars to distinguish real crises from manufactured ones. To other scholars, criticism of the nascent field feels antisemitic in and of itself. David Hirsh, CEO of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, an independent research center that frequently collaborates with Gratz, said antisemitism should be studied in a framework that includes other forms of discrimination. “But what I think people are worrying about is that there’s a feeling, somehow, that Jews are trying to privilege their own experience over and above the experiences of others,” he said. “I think that is what is going on in these kinds of concerns. And the idea is that, again, the Jews are up to something.”
At some of the country’s most prestigious universities, the antisemitism-research apparatus is taking the form of new centers. In November 2023, NYU announced that it was establishing the Center for the Study of Antisemitism with a seven-figure gift “at a moment that cries out for new study, new insights, and new solutions to combatting this age-old hatred.” The moment came less than six weeks after the Hamas attacks and a day after three students sued the university for allegedly tolerating anti-Jewish discrimination. That December, following a flurry of Gaza protests, the University of Michigan announced it would start the Wallenberg Institute, named for a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. In January 2024, the University of Toronto said it would build an antisemitism-studies lab.
A handful of campus-based antisemitism-studies centers had previously been operating in Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and, in North America, at Indiana and Yale Universities. Yale’s, created in 2006, was shut down five years later and reinstated as a different program by administrators concerned that it had not “supported sufficient faculty research.”
But after October 7, elite campuses — already dogged by right-wing accusations of “woke” teaching and racially motivated admissions — came under unprecedented pressure to prove that they were protecting Jewish students. That December in Congress, the University of Pennsylvania’s president testified that calling for the genocide of Jews could violate the institution’s code of conduct, depending on the “context.” It was a lawyerly statement that seemed at odds with higher education’s championing of diversity and inclusion, and she resigned in the backlash. (Harvard’s president soon followed.) “If you asked me in the summer of ’23, before everything that happened in the fall happened, I probably would have said, ‘Antisemitism is not on my radar,’” said Steven Weitzman, who directs Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. “It was a really abrupt situation forced on us by circumstances.” Weitzman’s center has since hired its first postdoctoral fellow focused on contemporary antisemitism, acting on one of several recommendations from a Penn task force convened to improve Jewish safety.
Like Weitzman, the professors overseeing the new antisemitism initiatives at NYU, Toronto, and Michigan come from Jewish-studies centers and departments. It might seem a logical match, but Weitzman believes that “antisemitism studies is really the study of non-Jewish culture.” To understand why the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, he said, requires researching non-Jewish German history and the psychology of the perpetrators. Feinberg also thinks “there are many people in Jewish studies who would tell you, This is not what I signed up for,” he said. “And that’s great, because that provides the natural opening for antisemitism studies to exist.”
After decades of growing through the largesse of Jewish donors, Jewish studies now appears to be competing with antisemitism studies for capital. The National Endowment for the Humanities last year terminated hundreds of research grants about Holocaust history and Jewish culture — then bestowed $10.4 million, its largest award ever, to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative think tank that promotes Jewish ideas, “to combat the normalization of antisemitism.”
Ed Beck, a retired mental-health counselor and academic in the Philadelphia area, is among those who think that Jewish studies has failed to sufficiently advocate for Jewish interests. “I’m not interested in how many knishes a Reform Jew can eat versus an Orthodox Jew can eat, which is kind of the things they study in Jewish studies,” he said. “I’m interested in: Why do they hate us, and why do they want to kill us, and what can we do to stop that?” He is concerned that more Jewish-studies professors do not oppose the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.
"When the lines blur between scholarship and advocacy, both of them suffer."
But after withholding from universities for years, he and his wife, both children of Holocaust survivors, donated to Gratz’s new Ph.D. program. Seed funding came from the Isidore and Penny Myers Foundation, a Jewish-American family charity in Southern California and a first-time Gratz donor. “We’re creating a new layer of defense that we’ve never had before,” said the chair, Jay Myers.
All in all, the antisemitism-studies Ph.D. has been a big fundraising boost for tiny Gratz. “Unfortunately, following October 7th, that became the most relevant conversation for donors,” said Naomi Housman, the college’s director of institutional advancement.
A draw of the growing program is its work-for-course-credit opportunities, including devising lesson plans for the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and consulting on antisemitism-education projects with UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency. Gratz also partners with advocacy groups whose missions are to combat antisemitic and anti-Israel attitudes in higher education and elsewhere, like the Academic Engagement Network, StandWithUs, Alums for Campus Fairness, and the ADL. Students helped the ADL design a survey for measuring antisemitic attitudes on college campuses, and a Gratz communications class will soon be taught by Matt Williams, vice president of the ADL’s Center for Antisemitism Research. “If I were at the CDC, I could hire people with a master’s degree in public health,” he said. “At ADL, I can’t hire people with master’s degrees in fighting antisemitism. Thanks to Ayal, I might be able to soon.”
To Feinberg, it makes sense for experts in antisemitism to team up with groups fighting antisemitism. “The idea that I design a program and intervention that reduces prejudice, but I wouldn’t want to work with the people that could actually employ it and scale it,” he said, “that’s just silly.”
Others in academe, though, see these partnerships as unconventional, if not concerning. “When the lines blur between scholarship and advocacy, both of them suffer,” said James Loeffler, a professor of modern Jewish history at the Johns Hopkins University. “The whole concept of a Ph.D. is that it’s an academic degree, it’s preparing you for academia,” said Shaul Magid, a professor of modern Jewish studies in residence at Harvard Divinity School. “To have a Ph.D. to prepare you to go to work at the ADL, what’s the point of that?”
But if the demand, infrastructure, and funding exist, there’s little to stop a field from being born — even one “rife with dissensus,” in the words of Jonathan Judaken, a professor of Jewish history and thought at Washington University in St. Louis. True to that nature, antisemitism scholars may soon have not one, but two professional organizations. Judaken plans to start one of them, tentatively called the International Association for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
The other — which Judaken said he probably wouldn’t join — will be called the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association, founded by Gratz College; the University of Haifa, in Israel; and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. It will be announced at a July conference that expects to draw more than 500 researchers, more than a threefold increase from the inaugural gathering four years ago at the London Centre. That center — whose mission is “to challenge the intellectual underpinnings of antisemitism in public life and confront the hostile environment for Jews in universities” — already hosts lectures and seminars, publishes books, and runs a network of more than 100 research fellows, including Gratz students. Hirsh, its CEO, described Gratz as a collaborator in the effort “to construct our own communities of scholarship.”
Feinberg will edit a new research journal to be published by the association. “As antisemitism studies is now becoming a formalized field,” he said, “we need serious scholarly infrastructure.”
That infrastructure has not yet minted any Ph.D.s. But in a few years, Berger, the Gratz student, is confident that the program will get her where she wants to go. “There will be doors that are closed to me because of this degree,” she said. “And I’m okay with that.”
