Jewish Studies in America runs on two currencies now, and they no longer trade at par.<\/p>\n
The first is scholarly credit. It goes to the researcher who takes an inherited category, shows it does not hold, and then does the work in languages, archives, fieldwork, objects, law, or numbers to provide the replacement. The second is institutional credit. It goes to whoever can promise a president, a donor, or a federal investigator that the university is combating antisemitism, protecting Jewish students, honoring Holocaust memory, or defending Jewish civilization. A scholar can hold one currency in great quantity and almost none of the other. Some of the sharpest people in the field are invisible to donors. Some of the most visible people in the field such as Deborah Lipstadt do not set anyone’s research agenda.<\/p>\n
No department owns the discipline. It sits in history, religion, literature, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, law, and a scattering of endowed centers. The Association for Jewish Studies carries well over 1,900 individual members and a conference of some 1,200 people across roughly 190 sessions. Authority is dispersed by design and by accident, which means the live questions get set by conference divisions, institute themes, and book prize.<\/p>\n
The hottest question is what antisemitism is in the American setting. Not whether it rose after 2023, which everyone concedes, but what belongs under the name. Is it one prejudice among many, a distinct conspiracy structure, a form of racialization, a religious inheritance, a political tool, or some braid of all of them? How much of it comes from the right, the left, religious subcultures, online media, or the ordinary indifference of institutions? Where does campus anti-Zionism cross over? Can a university police conduct without policing historical judgment? And the which interventions reduce hostility rather than produce a statement, a training, an investigation, and a settlement.<\/p>\n
Maurice Samuels<\/a> at Yale<\/a> built the most durable house for that question. He founded the program there in 2011<\/a> and has argued for keeping the subject historical while the politics around it boils. Jonathan Judaken<\/a> (b. 1968) at Washington University<\/a> is the one climbing fastest as a conceptual questioner. His work puts antisemitism into conversation with racism, colonialism, and critical theory, asks whether the inherited definitions still do any work, and collected a major historical prize in 2025<\/a>. Lila Corwin Berman<\/a> at NYU<\/a> asks the institutional version, which is the sharper one: who gets to found an antisemitism center, write its mission, hire its staff, and speak for scholarship to the people writing the checks. Her willingness to criticize centers built around a predetermined mission<\/a> has raised her standing among colleagues worried about who controls the field. Jeffrey Veidlinger<\/a> at Michigan<\/a> supplies the institutional answer. He runs a center that studies antisemitism alongside other hatreds and has held that comparative line against pressure to narrow it into advocacy. <\/p>\n Leonard Saxe<\/a> and the Cohen Center<\/a> at Brandeis<\/a> hold down the empirical side. They run the surveys and campus studies<\/a> that let anyone test a claim about Jewish students. The strength is evidence. The limit is that measurement inherits its definitions before the first question gets asked, so the survey can only settle arguments the survey design already permits. Public figures such as Deborah Lipstadt<\/a> (b. 1947) carry enormous visibility.<\/p>\n The second live question is who counts as Jewish in America. The old version worried about intermarriage and disappearance. The new version asks about people with one Jewish parent, converts, Jews of no religion, Black and Asian and Latino Jews, queer and trans Jews, Haredim, secular Yiddishists, and anyone whose Jewishness is familial, political, linguistic, or occasional. Do population surveys find Jewish identity or manufacture an administrative copy of it? Who disappears when a foundation defines a countable population before deciding what to fund? Berman is the strongest senior questioner here because she ties identity to money and institutional power. Sarah Bunin Benor<\/a> supplies an answer. Her work on Jewish languages shows people performing difference through vocabulary, accent, naming, and setting. Michigan has made the argument explicit by choosing Jewish peoplehood as a future institute theme. The continuity vocabulary is losing scholarly credit while surviving in fundraising, where urgency sells.<\/p>\n Third, Haredi life. For decades much American Jewish scholarship treated liberal denominational Judaism as the center and Haredim as a remnant with a birthrate. That position is gone. David Myers<\/a> and Nomi Stolzenberg<\/a> reframed the subject when they showed how a disciplined religious community uses American constitutional law<\/a>, municipal incorporation<\/a>, electoral bargaining, and property development<\/a> to carve out autonomy inside a liberal state. Ayala Fader<\/a> took the other route and found the doubters who stay inside, running concealed intellectual lives through their phones. Chaya Nove<\/a> is the young scholar rising, and she argues the field romanticized Yiddish as the language of a murdered European past while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of people speaking and changing it in Brooklyn and Rockland County. Programs that keep treating the liberal synagogue as representative American Judaism will lose relevance. Institutions that combine language, ethnography, law, and sociology will gain.<\/p>\n Fourth, whether the field can stop treating Ashkenazi experience as the unmarked default. The question is whether emancipation, secularization, assimilation, diaspora, race, and modernity look different when the story starts in Salonica or Baghdad or Rabat instead of Berlin or Warsaw. Sarah Abrevaya Stein<\/a> at UCLA<\/a> and Devin Naar<\/a> at Washington have made Sephardi and Ottoman material central. The AJS has written race, gender, queer studies, disability, and digital humanities into its formal divisions.<\/p>\n Fifth, the premodern question. Was there ever a single coherent Judaism, or have scholars projected a later idea of unified religion backward onto communities that shared little? How much authority did rabbis hold over people who left no texts? Mira Balberg<\/a> reads rabbinic material<\/a> as a system for organizing bodies, knowledge, and selfhood. Ra’anan Boustan<\/a> has pushed social heterogeneity, material culture, and the construction of tradition. The movement runs from canonical text alone toward text plus archaeology, inscriptions, objects, food, illness, and the neighbors. Philological mastery still commands respect and no longer sets agendas.<\/p>\n Sixth, Jewish law and ethics. Julia Watts Belser<\/a> made disability<\/a> an analytic category, working across ethics<\/a>, gender<\/a>, sexuality<\/a>, and rabbinic interpretation<\/a>. Rebecca Epstein-Levi<\/a> is rising fast on sex, risk, consent, and Jewish ethics, and she does the rare thing of posing the question and building the framework in the same book. This area has intellectual energy and little money, because its conclusions do not convert into a campaign.<\/p>\n Seventh, Holocaust memory after the survivors. Preservation is solved. The new questions are epistemological. Does digital testimony preserve encounter or simulate it? What breaks when an interview gets chopped into searchable clips tagged by someone else’s categories? What happens when a generative system produces plausible testimony that never happened? How does a scholar write about ordinary survival, compromise, and postwar family wreckage without bending it toward redemption? Hannah Pollin-Galay<\/a> has gained standing by making language part of Holocaust history. Nove’s work treats recorded testimony as a linguistic archive carrying dialect, class, and migration. Public history institutions are gaining money faster than the archival theorists are gaining lines.<\/p>\n The eighth cluster has no commanding figure yet. Podcasts, streaming instruction, digital archives, online conversion and doubt, and models trained on digitized Jewish texts by people who cannot read them are all remaking who counts as an interpreter of Judaism. Michigan has already named media as a theme. The risk is that Jewish Studies cedes the whole territory to computer scientists and communications faculty with method and no Hebrew.<\/p>\n On askers and answerers, the field rarely rewards a provocateur. Berman<\/a> asks who controls American Jewish institutions and categories and money, and demographers and institutional historians fill in behind her. Judaken<\/a> and Samuels<\/a> set the conceptual terms on antisemitism<\/a>, Saxe<\/a> and Brandeis<\/a> supply the counts, Veidlinger<\/a> supplies the model of a center that survives its own funding. Myers<\/a> and Stolzenberg<\/a> reframed Haredi<\/a> autonomy as an American legal development, and Fader<\/a> and Nove<\/a> answer at close range with what people say and believe. Belser<\/a> and Epstein-Levi<\/a> do both jobs.<\/p>\n If department means department, NYU’s Skirball<\/a> has the strongest claim: breadth, Berman’s American Jewish history center<\/a>, and a new antisemitism center<\/a> that embodies the exact tension she has criticized. For choosing frontier questions on purpose, Michigan’s Frankel Institute<\/a> has the best claim, since its run of themes reads like a map of where the field is going. Penn’s Katz Center<\/a> holds greater all-field convening prestige without binding fellows to a mission. Brandeis<\/a> leads on contemporary evidence. Yale<\/a> remains the respected address for antisemitism as a scholarly subject. UCLA stays near the top for Sephardi<\/a> and Mediterranean work<\/a><\/p>\n Moving up intellectually: Berman<\/a>, Judaken<\/a>, Veidlinger<\/a>, Benor<\/a>, Belser<\/a>, Epstein-Levi<\/a>, Nove<\/a>, Pollin-Galay<\/a>, Ayelet Brinn<\/a>. Moving up institutionally: Michigan<\/a>, NYU<\/a>, Brandeis<\/a>, Cornell on the strength of a five million dollar gift that endows faculty lines<\/a>, Florida Atlantic with a twenty million dollar gift and a new building<\/a>, Denver with an endowed chair<\/a> and expanded course offerings<\/a>. Capacity and visibility are not the same as leadership, and the newer money buys the first two.<\/p>\n Indiana’s program<\/a> has taken the clearest damage<\/a>. A longtime director removed, a specialist in contemporary antisemitism installed over faculty objection, and then disputes over what a graduate student may research and travel to present. The removed director lost power and gained sympathy. His replacement gained control and became a contested figure inside the profession. Columbia’s standing suffers less from anything its Jewish Studies faculty did than from the spectacle of a university negotiating its academic priorities under a federal funding threat. At Washington, established faculty objected when the university built a parallel antisemitism operation staffed by people without equivalent expertise in the field, which is what bypassing a discipline looks like from inside it. A federal agency spent months trying to compel Penn to hand over names of Jewish faculty, students, and staff before dropping that demand this month. <\/p>\n Claims of closure from the left exist. The profession’s vocabulary and conference structure lean left-liberal, and work defending Zionism as a legitimate Jewish attachment or treating Jewish peoplehood in normative terms draws more suspicion than comparable work in anti-colonial framing. I have not seen a case of a left-led program stripping funding or replacing leadership over a research question that matches the documented record at Indiana. The field is pressed from four sides at once. Donors want compliance with a mission. Administrators want reputational cover. Governments want a demonstrable action. Activists want moral clarity. Scholars want permission to make distinctions that inconvenience all four.<\/p>\n The funding picture explains most of the rest. Targeted money floods in while the surrounding humanities contract. A single federal humanities grant of more than ten million dollars, the largest that agency has ever made, went to a Jewish civilization project whose purposes were named before the research began. Against that, the discipline’s own open awards look like pocket change: a thousand dollars for contingent faculty research, five thousand toward a first book, thirty-three thousand for a dissertation year, fifteen thousand for the top book prize. Many of the new antisemitism positions are temporary, off the tenure track, or housed in administration, which produces the strange result that the best-funded subject in the field employs the least protected scholars. Not every targeted gift restricts; Cornell’s appears to buy durable faculty capacity, and Michigan has shown that donor money can fund a comparative program. The test is whether the gift pays for scholars and infrastructure or for a conclusion.<\/p>\n Rank the money and you get the field’s future. Antisemitism, Holocaust education, student protection, and Jewish civilization are climbing. Demography and communal identity hold steady because they yield findings a foundation can act on. Sephardi, Haredi, race, gender, disability, and digital work rise in reputation while receiving little support. Languages, archives, philology, and ancient and medieval history keep their intellectual standing and lose bargaining power, because they cannot promise a president anything by Friday.<\/p>\n The danger is the conversion of a field that investigates Jewish life into a service provider hired to confirm what a university, a foundation, a government, or a communal organization already believes about Jewish life. Watch the grant titles. Wherever the title contains the finding, the research has already been spent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jewish Studies in America runs on two currencies now, and they no longer trade at par. The first is scholarly credit. It goes to the researcher who takes an inherited category, shows it does not hold, and then does the … Continue reading