{"id":1094,"date":"2025-08-18T12:20:44","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T12:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/?page_id=1094"},"modified":"2025-08-18T12:44:44","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T12:44:44","slug":"media-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/?page_id=1094","title":{"rendered":"Why the academy matters"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Why the academy matters

<\/b>The effort to create scholarship on antisemitism within the academy today is essential for the continued flourishing of Jewish communities \u2013 and of Western society.<\/strong>

By David Barak-Gorodetsky and Jacob Dallal<\/strong><\/p>

It is wrong to understate the importance of the university in Western society. While it is also hard to quantify immediate return on investment, the trickle down effects on society are proven. Mathematicians who work on obscure formulas one day may find
applications in GPS satellites or microchips.

In the humanities and social sciences the trickle down effect on society is also
significant, if less often acknowledged.

Case in point: the lethal jargon used against Israel today was born in British universities by British and Israeli scholars in the 1980s and 1990s who were the first to use the words ethnic cleansing and genocide to describe Israeli action against Palestinians.

In those years, they were written off as just a few quirks, but with time \u2013 and Qatari and Saudi funding of Middle East departments \u2013 their narrative took hold.
They were so successful that today any student taking a basic course on the Middle East will hear Israel described as an \u201coccupier\u201d and \u201caggressor. The terms genocide and ethnic cleansing have become commonplace to describe Israel in the real world.
Similarly, concepts such as the \u201cmatrix of oppression\u201d and \u201cintersectionality,\u201d all began at the university and have made their way into society at large.

This has come to affect Jews in the West today, regardless of their stance on or affinity for Israel. This is especially true on university campuses, where anti-Israel and anti-Jewish student activists are met with faculty and administration who are either sympathetic to their stance or cowered into silence by it.

To reverse this trend, one needs to combat this new form of Western antisemitism in the place where it began and which continues to feed it: the university.
While there are ample scholars expositing on how demonic the Jewish state is, there are few scholars or academic papers in peer-reviewed journals questioning whether this may be a new form of antisemitism.

Until very recently, the few scholars of antisemitism worldwide focused their study on the Holocaust or earlier forms of antisemitism. No one wanted to discuss, write about, or research contemporary antisemitism in its most recent form: in its overlap with anti-Zionism.

The recently reconstituted Elizabeth and Tony Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism is one of the very few university-based research centers dedicated to scholarship on contemporary antisemitism.

We are co-hosting with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism the largest academic conference on contemporary antisemitism, which brings together a growing number of academics from a variety of disciplines who have recently begun to focus on antisemitism because it has become such a critical issue today. Next year\u2019s conference will be held at the University of Haifa.

With an accomplished group of international fellows specializing in topics and geographies across the globe \u2013 from India to the former Soviet Union, from France and Hungary to North America \u2013 we are here to research, publish, and discuss antisemitism in its contemporary forms in an academically rigorous and fearless way.
The effort to create scholarship on antisemitism within the academy today is essential for the continued flourishing of Jewish communities and for the health of the academy and, by extension, Western society.

David Barak-Gorodetsky and Jacob Dallal direct and manage, respectively, the Elizabeth and Tony Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa.<\/p>

Published March 2023 in the Jerusalem Post<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why the academy matters The effort to create scholarship on antisemitism within the academy today is essential for the continued flourishing of Jewish communities \u2013 and of Western society. By David Barak-Gorodetsky and Jacob Dallal It is wrong to understate the importance of the university in Western society. While it is also hard to quantify […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":28,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"elementor_header_footer","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1094","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1094"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1104,"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1094\/revisions\/1104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/compercenter.haifa.ac.il\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}