The Coming Jewish-Student “Brain Drain”

After the most recent outbreak of campus antisemitism in America, the Israel Association of University Heads issued a statement denouncing the mistreatment in question and voicing their support for Jewish and Israeli members of the offending institutions. “We will do our best to assist those of them who wish to join Israeli universities and find a welcoming academic and personal home,” they concluded. The heads of all nine public universities in Israel signed the joint statement.

Other initiatives followed encouraging students to leave American higher education for Israel. Such a move would, according to the Kohelet Policy Forum, allow students to “enjoy a level of academic study higher than that offered in the United States, where excellency is currently being eroded by progressive insanity, which aside from being marinated in Jew-hatred, is also destroying all academic endeavor.” That policy recommendation has since been adopted by Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and seems to find some resonance among American Jewry.

In addition to moral decline, America should, in its own best interest, be concerned about a potential brain drain. The Jerusalem Post, for instance, reported about a high-school senior from Washington, D.C., who had applied to four universities in the U.S. but, after October 7, 2023, decided to start her bachelor’s degree at Hebrew University’s Rothberg International School. According to the article, she “is among many recent high-school graduates who have reconsidered their college plans in light of the anti-Israel protests that [have] swept across U.S. campuses.”

Yet students seeking real education in Israel might not always find it there. In addition to moral decline, America should, in its own best interest, be concerned about the potential brain drain caused by pushing Jews out. History shows that that action has never ended well for any country.

But should American Jewish students consider it in their best interest to attend college in Israel?

The question is more complicated than it might appear. Without question, it was intellectually embarrassing when, in 2021, some 200 scholars—mostly American—signed an open letter denouncing Israel’s “ethnonationalist ideologies” and “settler colonial paradigms.” And these were scholars of Jewish and Israel Studies! Even more troubling, the letter used the neo-Nazi term “Jewish supremacy.” But the letter was also signed by Professor Amos Goldberg of the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. Hypocrisy aside, the fact that Goldberg signed on to such things while living in Israel—and working in East Jerusalem—is an indicator that students seeking real education in Israel might not always find it there.

I certainly have my doubts that such students would encounter serious scholarship in Hebrew University’s Israel Studies program, judging by the self-description of its academic head, who just returned from a sabbatical in Paris:

Dr. Berda has been highly engaged in social justice activism and politics in Israel. […] Her master’s thesis … explores the influence of Colonial administrative legacies on the contemporary military civil administration in the occupied territories.

I wonder if this “occupation” includes Berda’s office space at Rothberg International School in East Jerusalem. For that matter, I wonder why she isn’t moving back to New York where she was born if she believes that “for Palestinians, all of historic Palestine is their homeland,” while for Jews that is true only “on a spiritual level, on a religious level.” Tellingly, Israel Academia Monitor headlined its coverage of these claims, “Yael Berda: Anti-Israel Activist Disguised as an Academic.”

The Hebrew University was founded by intellectual giants such as Albert Einstein. Martin Buber was one of its founding professors. Gershom Scholem taught there. And now? A law professor was suspended and arrested last year on “suspicion of incitement after questioning [the reality of] Hamas rapes and other atrocities during the October 7 attacks and saying Israelis are ‘criminals’ and ‘should be afraid’,” reported the Times of Israel. The self-described feminist professor was defended by many of her colleagues. Yuri Pines, professor of Chinese studies, for instance, resigned in protest from his position, including as the director of the Confucius Institute. If Hebrew University were a Zionist institution, he wrote, it would no longer feel like “home” to him. Yet that’s exactly what made it his home. Pines was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel in 1979. The irony writes itself.

Immense learning is still taking place in the Start-Up Nation apart from these instances of academic careerism and activism. Immense learning is, of course, still taking place in the Start-Up Nation apart from these instances of academic careerism and activism. But in universities? Well, not always. Certainly not when a doctoral candidate at Hebrew University wrote a research paper framing basic morality as a form of racism. The lack of rapes of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers stems from their dehumanization in soldiers’ eyes, argued the paper. Published by Hebrew University’s Shaine Center, this “research” was even awarded a prize, on the recommendation of a committee of the university’s own professors.

But Israeli higher education, like its American counterpart, has so far failed to adequately address many of its pressing issues. This aggressive denial of reality extends beyond the humanities, as the case of a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute illustrates. He accused Israel of running a “concentration camp.” Consider also the case of a computer-science lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who said that IDF soldiers execute infants and that they are raised to do so.

It is more than understandable if Americans are reluctant to study at places like Brooklyn College in New York, which once employed a faculty member who concludes that equations such as 2+2=4 do not demonstrate math’s ideological neutrality and that assertions otherwise “reek of white supremacist patriarchy.” Indeed, “the idea that math (or data) is culturally neutral or in any way objective is a MYTH. […] Who’s coming with me?” Apparently, the University of Haifa is. The professor in question now works there and served a term as chair of the Department of Mathematics Education. The same goes for the Israel Science Foundation, which awarded her a research grant for 2020-25.

In its short history as a modern state, Israel has achieved the most impressive breakthroughs in computer science and mathematics, among many other fields. The USB flash drive was invented in Israel, and so were drip irrigation, which saves up to 60 percent of the water previously used in agriculture, and a swallowable camera capsule for non-invasive GI tract diagnoses, now standard in gastroenterology. Israel’s long list of patents and Nobel laureates also speaks for itself. And now taxpayer money is spent smearing soldiers, denying rape, and finding out what equals 2+2?

Israeli higher education, like its American counterpart, has so far failed to adequately address many of its pressing issues. Among these is the replication crisis, which demonstrates the pseudoscientific nature (and often the absurdity) of social psychology. A study conducted by Israeli researchers from Herzliya and their partners at Stanford is a good example of this. The “scientific finding” was that children who read a text about people such as the (alleged) former IRA terrorist Gerry Adams—who gets described as a positive example—built a 59-percent higher spaghetti tower than a control group.

Israel is also not immune to the current erosion of academic standards as a result of entitlement and unserious work. Some of the most stimulating conversations in Israel can be found outside the university setting, among ordinary people, many of whom hold advanced degrees. In my experience, this has been far truer than with anyone at Hebrew University’s Department of Bible or its program for Israel Studies. One can find many people who know how to think, speak for themselves, and sometimes even publish—all without virtue signalling, trips to Paris, or office spaces paid for by a country they smear as illegitimate.

On the other hand, in America, Jews feel unsafe on college campuses at an unacceptable rate. According to a 2024 Brandeis report on campus antisemitism, more than 80 percent of Jewish students experienced hostile attitudes toward Israel, and 60 percent experienced hostile attitudes toward Jews. Even a third of non-Jewish students perceived hostility toward Jews on campus.

In America, Jews feel unsafe on college campuses at an unacceptable rate. Things may get even worse. Among the supporters of disgraced former Harvard president Claudine Gay was her colleague Derek Penslar, who saw reports of antisemitism at Harvard as “exaggerated,” according to a report by the U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce. Even former Harvard president Larry Summers stated that, due to Penslar’s appointment, he had “lost confidence in the determination and ability of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard leadership to maintain Harvard as a place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.” However, this didn’t stop Bar-Ilan University from inviting Penslar to guest-lecture on “Jews, Antisemitism, and Anti-Zionism in American Universities Since 1948.”

At least American students fleeing to Israel would escape antisemitic riots on college campuses. I found this quite ironic, so I asked Amnon Albeck to help make sense of it for this article. Albeck is a professor of chemistry and the rector (provost) of Bar-Ilan. I received no response.

But at least American students fleeing to Israel would escape antisemitic riots on college campuses. Well, according to an Israel Studies conference at the University of Haifa, those riots were merely “Anti-Zionist Campus Discourses.” The event was co-organized by the head of Haifa’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism. I’m not aware of a single publication of his on either subject. All I could find out was that, according to the Canadian Friends of Haifa University—who partly fund the Center and are listed as the contact—he is “an extremely busy individual” and was in London for the week.

Among the conference’s presentations were “Colonizing the Jewish Gaze” and “Zionist Lesbians: Invisible Intimate Relationships.” I fail to understand what that last presentation is supposed to mean. Have these “Israel experts” never seen Tel Aviv Pride? Have they never compared Israeli life with the realities of life in non-Zionist countries in the region? It almost seems like Israeli academia is often not about the production of knowledge at all but about buzzwords, ideology, and careers. To find those things, no one needs to leave America.

Yet, for their safety, it appears that Jews do leave at an alarming rate. It’s up to America now to determine whether it loves its Jews back or will continue to push them out.

Christopher L. Schilling is a lawyer and political scientist and the author of The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia (Hurst) and The Therapized Antisemite: The Myth of Psychology and the Evasion of Responsibility (De Gruyter).