Academia is trying to rewrite Jewish history.
Matthew Nouriel
Meanwhile, highly qualified Jewish faculty are either run out of academia or their lives are made intolerable the moment they dare teach the truth about Zionism and antisemitism.
This is a guest essay by Matthew Nouriel, an Iranian and Jewish writer and activist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Recently, the University of San Francisco’s Jewish Studies & Social Justice program announced that it had brought in Hadar Cohen to teach a course titled “Arab Jews: Histories, Politics, and Identity.”
At first glance, it might sound like a welcome step — a Mizrahi Jew given a platform in academia. But a closer look reveals a much deeper problem.
Cohen is not a historian, not a scholar of Middle Eastern Jewry, and has no advanced academic training in Jewish Studies, Middle East Studies, or History. Her background is in engineering, “alternative divinity programs,” and “spiritual activism.” Hadar proudly states that, “Each aspect of her work is done through a political lens.” What qualifies her to teach such a course is not academic rigor, but that she fits the ideological script academia demands. And that is the point.
Universities once upheld rigorous standards for who could teach courses on complex histories: advanced degrees, peer-reviewed scholarship, expertise grounded in years of study. Increasingly, those standards have been replaced by a different qualification with the ability to embody and promote a set of activist frameworks that align with the university’s brand of “social justice.” This is not education; it is indoctrination. It compromises the very integrity of academia by prioritizing ideology over scholarship, activism over accuracy.
The very title of Cohen’s course gives away the bias: “Arab Jews.” This is not a neutral term. It is a politicized label, largely rejected by Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. It collapses Jewish identity into Arab nationalism and erases the historical truth that Jews were indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa long before Arab conquest.
or centuries, Jews in Arab lands were not considered Arabs. They lived under the dhimma system1, tolerated, but legally and socially subordinate. Tunisian-Jewish writer Albert Memmi put it bluntly: “The term ‘Arab Jews’ is obviously not a good one. … We would have liked to be Arab Jews, [but] centuries of contempt and cruelty prevented it.” To have our narrative framed through a term we overwhelmingly reject is not representation; it is distortion.
Cohen herself has written: “Zionism has no space for an Arab Jew like me.” But this misses the point entirely. Zionism was, and still is, fundamentally a decolonization project. Jews are not colonizers in the Middle East; we are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, whose presence and sovereignty predated both European imperialism and Arab conquest.
If we are speaking honestly about colonization, it was the Arab-Muslim empires, beginning in the 7th century, that spread across the Middle East and North Africa, supplanting local languages, cultures, and religions with Arabic and Islam. That is precisely why so many Jews from Morocco to Iraq reject the label “Arab Jews.” To accept it would be to adopt the identity of our colonizers, the very people who treated us as second-class citizens for centuries and who, in the 20th century, expelled us en masse. Many of us have an aversion to that term for the same reason Indigenous peoples elsewhere reject identities imposed by colonial powers.
It is impossible to tell the story of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa without naming Islamic antisemitism. For centuries, Jews lived under the dhimma system, tolerated, but marked as second-class, taxed as inferiors, and regularly subjected to humiliation and violence. Pogroms like the Farhud in Iraq or the expulsions from Egypt, Libya, and Yemen in the 20th century were not isolated events; they were the culmination of a long history of subjugation.
This is precisely why so many Jews whose diaspora experiences were in these countries are staunchly Zionist. Our Zionism is not abstract; it is born of lived experience: centuries of Islamic antisemitism, followed by dispossession and exile. To pretend otherwise, to erase this reality in the name of “Arab Jewish” identity politics, is not only offensive; it is profoundly unacademic. It rewrites history to suit a contemporary ideological agenda rather than telling the truth.
Yes, Mizrahi Jews faced hardship and discrimination in Israel’s early decades. That history is real. But Israel has also done remarkable work to unify Jews of every background. Shared schools, neighborhoods, military service, and culture have fused Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews together. Intermarriage across communities is widespread. Today, Israeli identity itself is inseparable from Mizrahi music, food, politics, and literature. While work remains to close socioeconomic gaps, Israel is not a place where Mizrahi identity is erased by Zionism. On the contrary, it is the one place where it flourishes.
Meanwhile, highly qualified Jewish faculty, those with advanced degrees, peer-reviewed publications, or years of teaching experience, are either run out of academia or have their lives made intolerable the moment they dare to teach the truth about Zionism or antisemitism.
Professor Andrew Pessin at Connecticut College was hounded into professional isolation after a pro-Israel post was misquoted and denounced as racist, while Columbia University’s Shai Davidai was investigated, banned from campus, and ultimately driven out despite being cleared. Both stark examples of how Jewish faculty who speak honestly about Zionism or antisemitism see their lives made unbearable.
I also recently spoke with a Mizrahi Jewish professor who experienced this firsthand. She had published two books, was highly qualified, and taught a university course on the history of modern Israel, a class Jewish students had requested after growing tired of the ahistorical revisionist narratives offered in their Middle Eastern Studies department.
In her course, she presented both Jewish and Arab perspectives, even inviting the professor who taught Palestinian history to address her students. She made clear she was eager to reciprocate and speak in that professor’s classroom as well, but the invitation was never returned. Her students (about 30 in total, not all Jewish, including some Christian Arabs) were grateful for the balance she brought. Not a single student ever filed a complaint.
But the professor of Palestinian history ensured that she would not be offered additional classes. Because she was not tenured, she was quietly pushed out. Later, at another prominent university, she refused to sign the anti-Zionist faculty statements regularly circulated by colleagues. Realizing she would never be granted tenure under such conditions, she left academia altogether, driven out by the same ideology that had once driven her family from their home in the Middle East.
The pattern is clear: Universities only want Jewish Studies professors who will conform to what is deemed an “acceptable Jew.” This is evident as well in the appointment of Shaul Magid at Harvard Divinity School, brought in at a time when Jewish students were already facing a hostile climate. The well-known American rabbi, David Wolpe, who once served on Harvard University’s antisemitism advisory board, described Magid as “a gracious human being and an estimable scholar of Jewish texts, notably Hasidism,” but added pointedly, “I profoundly disagree with his stance on Israel and wish Harvard Divinity School would appoint someone whose views reflect the mainstream of the Jewish community.”
Even when Jewish scholars are respected in their fields, it is their political reliability — not their expertise or balance — that determines whether they are elevated or erased. Others are denied tenure, disinvited, or pressured into silence. And yet, in their place, universities elevate voices like Hadar Cohen — individuals selling snake oil, with little to no scholarly training in the field, but whose rhetoric fits the ideological mold academia wants to project.
This is not about education; it’s about politics. And it’s a collapse of integrity. The uncomfortable reality is this: Cohen has been elevated not because she represents Mizrahi Jews, but because she doesn’t. Her narrative aligns with the propaganda academia prefers, one that frames Jews from Muslim-majority countries as “Arab Jews,” downplays Zionism, and provides ammunition for anti-Zionist rhetoric.
In doing so, she has allowed herself to be positioned as a token: the rare Mizrahi voice who can be weaponized to legitimize a broader academic project that is, in fact, hostile to the overwhelming majority of Mizrahi Jews and our lived experience.
And here is the most dangerous part: College students, already primed to obsess over this issue, will run in droves to sit in her class. They will eagerly tokenize her as an “as a Jew” voice, then regurgitate her rhetoric as evidence that their own antisemitism, cloaked as “anti-Zionism,” is justified, because a Mizrahi Jew said it. This is how disinformation works: not by silencing Jews outright, but by platforming fringe voices who can be used to launder antisemitism through a Jewish mouthpiece.
This is what makes the situation all the more infuriating.
The appointment of Hadar Cohen is not progress; it is tokenization. It is propaganda dressed up as education. It is yet another example of how academia has lost its way, sacrificing integrity for ideology. And for Mizrahi Jews, it is a painful reminder: Our story is still being told for us, by those who do not speak for us, in institutions that care more about the narrative than about the truth.
But at the end of the day, Hadar Cohen herself is not to blame. She is doing what many would do — stepping into opportunities when they are offered. The fault lies with a system of academia that elevates unqualified voices because they serve an ideological agenda, while silencing or sidelining those best equipped to teach our history with honesty and rigor.
The crisis here is not about one course or one individual; it is about a university culture that has abandoned truth for tokenization, and scholarship for propaganda. That is the real stain on academia, and it must be addressed.
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