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I’m a Jewish Zionist College Professor: My Colleagues and I Are Under Attack

Samuel J. Abrams

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The Sarah Lawrence campus. Photo: Wiki Commons.

“We’ve watched your joy in every small victory & your grief and rage when the NYPD breaks your bones & the bones of your friends … You give us hope. We’re so proud of you.”

These are not the words of radical student activists. They come from my own colleagues at Sarah Lawrence College, where I have taught for nearly two decades. They were posted publicly on the official Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine Instagram account. Professors celebrating broken bones. Educators glorifying violence. Teachers recruiting students not for scholarship, but for “resistance.”

This is the reality of American higher education in 2025. A powerful new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) confirms what I’ve witnessed firsthand: activist faculty, not just students, are driving some of the worst antisemitism on our campuses.

While the public fixates on student protests — the encampments, the disrupted commencements, the viral confrontations — the real danger often lurks in faculty lounges and department meetings. According to the survey of 209 Jewish faculty members, more than 73 percent have personally witnessed antisemitic incidents from colleagues, administrators, or staff. These are not impressionable undergraduates, but the very people entrusted to model scholarly discourse and uphold the core principles of academic freedom.

The transformation of professors into activists is no longer subtle. At Sarah Lawrence, the Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine chapter routinely posts messages defending radical actions, including one justifying a call for intifada on the school’s free speech board: “Sarah Lawrence Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine standing with our students today in their defense of what the free speech board was designed for. Here’s hoping that in a time of so much cowardice & ignorance (the English translation of the word ‘intifada’! become a way to shut down political opinion) @sarahlawrencecollege can defend the courage & the knowledge of these students fighting for the new day.”

This isn’t education. It’s antisemitic intimidation masquerading as scholarship. Faculty are no longer celebrating intellectual achievement, but glorifying physical confrontation and ideological conformity. They aren’t opening minds; they are closing ranks.

The ADL and AEN report exposes just how widespread and organized this movement has become. Nearly half of queried faculty in the opt-in survey report the presence of Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters on their campuses. Where these chapters exist, they are not academic societies but activist cells. Their work is not the pursuit of truth, but the advancement of a political program through intimidation and disruption. Since October 7, 2023, the network has expanded to over 130 chapters nationwide. The effect on Jewish faculty is profound: more than a third now hide their identity to survive professionally, while those who have experienced harassment are nearly eight times more likely to consider leaving academia entirely.

The report captures the human toll. One faculty member described how their department chair, openly pro-Hamas, turned the department into a literal encampment, plastered with “river to the sea” slogans. When a handful of Jewish faculty objected, the chair mobilized 50 people to attack them verbally, with one telling a Jewish colleague, “you have all the money and power.” These are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of a movement that has taken hold in far too many institutions.

Universities that move swiftly to punish microaggressions and mandate bias training suddenly discover complexity and nuance when Jews are targeted. Administrators who champion “safe spaces” tell Jewish faculty to be patient, to understand context, to accept that “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism” even as their Jewish colleagues flee campus for their own safety. This selective enforcement is more than hypocrisy; it is institutional complicity.

The numbers reflect the consequences. In 2024, reported campus antisemitic incidents rose by 84 percent, reaching 1,694 documented cases — nearly five every single day. Universities have become the epicenters of anti-Jewish hatred. While some schools, like Vanderbilt, have improved their response, most remain paralyzed or unwilling to confront entrenched activist cultures among their own faculty.

At stake is the meaning of academic freedom itself. Professors can and should debate Israeli policies or any other contentious topic. That is the essence of higher learning. But academic freedom does not mean turning classrooms into indoctrination camps or making colleagues fear for their safety.

When faculty celebrate students having their “bones broken” by police, when they organize campaigns to exclude Israeli scholars from conferences and journals, when they instruct students not to cite “Zionist authors” even in unrelated subjects, that is no longer scholarship. It is activism wearing academic robes.

The danger extends far beyond campus walls. Universities do not simply educate individuals; they shape the habits of an entire generation of leaders. Students trained to see dissent as betrayal and ideological conformity as virtue will carry those habits into newsrooms, courtrooms, boardrooms, and government offices. When faculty replace education with indoctrination, they corrupt not only the academy, but the democratic society it exists to serve.

I have lived this crisis personally. A colleague once physically assaulted me for refusing to condemn Israel. Administrators shrugged when I was boycotted for being openly Jewish and Zionist. Members of my own department have led teach-ins filled with hate and half-truths. These were not abstract debates about politics or foreign policy; they were direct attacks on my ability to teach and to exist openly as a Jew and Zionist on campus.

Across the country, countless faculty now hide who they are to survive in institutions that claim to value openness and diversity. Campuses have become minefields where a single word about Israel can end a career. The ADL and AEN data confirm what we are living: a crisis not merely of policies but of values. Universities must decide whether they are places of learning or places of ideological enforcement. They must decide whether they will protect all minorities or only those aligned with the prevailing activist culture.

I have spent my career defending the liberal arts ideal: that education means engaging with difficult ideas, not enforcing orthodox ones. But that tradition will not survive unless others join in this defense. Alumni can withhold donations until meaningful reforms are made. Legislators can insist on equal enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Parents can choose schools that protect all students and faculty. Boards of Trustees can reclaim their oversight role and hold universities accountable to their core missions.

If we fail to act, we risk a future where universities complete their transformation into ideological factories — places where conformity is rewarded, dissent is punished, and entire groups of scholars are driven out. That is not only a loss for Jewish faculty or Jewish students. It is a catastrophe for the American democracy universities are supposed to strengthen.

When faculty abandon education for activism and administrators turn a blind eye, higher education ceases to serve its most basic purpose. The choice before us is stark: reform now, or watch as the very institutions tasked with preserving free thought become the engines of its destruction.

If our universities can no longer protect truth-seekers from mobs, they cannot protect democracy itself.

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Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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