The year I received my PhD, I landed the best job on the market: a position at an R-1 research university in Seattle. I arrived with the conviction that a university is for everyone who walks through its doors. As an Israeli-American, secular Jewish academic, I believed I had something to offer the Jewish community in all its diversity and the non-Jewish community at once. I did not see those obligations as competing but continuous. 

After the Oct. 7 attacks, every one of those beliefs was tested, and I found myself suddenly at odds with my colleagues. The question of who Jewish studies is for had never felt so painful, nor so crucial to answer. My colleagues feared I would make the center look like an advocacy center, and I had to ask what it would mean to meet all students where they are, including the Zionist students. 

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I was director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle on Oct. 7, 2023, the day I learned that one of our own recent alumni, the peace activist Hayim Katsman, had been murdered by Hamas terrorists. We held his memorial within days, in the department’s only conference room, and we kept it small and quiet because the campus outside was openly celebrating the violence that had killed him. We were too frightened to make it in public and discouraged from drawing attention to ourselves.

What followed was two years of the same bind, which I have described in a recent essay for Nashim: Jewish studies students begged me to model civil discourse; university leadership told me to wait, that tensions were too high and to keep a low profile. I was told not to join the local Jewish community relations council and not to state publicly that the center was there for Zionist students too — all while I was holding space for colleagues to my right and my left.

So I did the invisible labor of keeping courses on Israel in the curriculum, keeping students mentored and funded, supporting my faculty colleagues whether they were Zionist or anti-Zionist, under increasing hostility on campus and decreasing resources — until I was burning out and was told that if I couldn’t handle the pressure, I should resign. Having asked the president, my chair and my colleagues for intervention and been let down by each, I stepped down as director.

Our campus experience

Donors deserve a clear-eyed account of what Jewish students experienced on my campus.

In 2024, UW’s antisemitism task force surveyed more than 1,200 Jewish and Israeli students, faculty and staff. Sixty-five percent of Jewish students and 95% of Israeli students reported feeling compelled to hide their identity; 60% and 92%, respectively, had felt unwelcome in campus spaces; and 41% of Jewish students had been blamed for the actions of the Israeli government. 

Students learned that to be a Zionist — to hold the ordinary, mainstream Jewish conviction that Israel has a right to exist — was to be treated as racist and genocidal. Staying quiet was no defense as department after department posted statements condemning the genocide and demanding everyone take a stand. A student who declined to declare herself an anti-Zionist was presumed guilty. Jews were accepted on campus contingently: welcome so long as we relinquished our commitments to Israel.

A professor of ethnic studies feels no tension between commitment to the community she studies and her standing as a rigorous scholar; her field was built on the premise that the two go together. Jewish studies was built on the opposite premise, and since the Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath, it has been easier to climb aboard the anti-Zionist bandwagon than to stand between Jewish students and the crowd. Some colleagues chose solidarity with the protesters over everything else. In practice, that meant they would not set foot in the Hillel — not even for a dinner we had to hold there because it has the only kosher catering kitchen in town — and dismissed dialogue itself as “normalization.”

Masua Sagiv has written beautifully about how this moment calls for chokhmat lev, wisdom of the heart: the capacity to understand what another person is carrying and to respond without dismissing them, even when you disagree. To some of my colleagues, wisdom of the heart would have looked like a threat to scholarly objectivity. That is the real divergence between us. It’s not a policy disagreement, but a difference in what and whom we think the university is for and what it means to serve it wholeheartedly.

Here is what that cost at my center in two years. My assistant director resigned in the fall of 2023 because he could no longer tolerate the atmosphere on campus. Our only Israeli doctoral student left his program that spring, after gently letting me know that I (as an Israeli-American) had personally made the center a target of boycott. An Israel Institute–funded postdoc left halfway through his term. Since I stepped down, most of the center’s long-term professional staff have been laid off. I am on medical leave from my tenured position, hoping my health — and my trust in academia — will return.

What philanthropy can do now

I have concluded that many Jewish studies units cannot serve Jewish students who identify as Zionists and who want the mainstream Jewish community to be part of their futures. Not all of them, and not forever, I hope, but in enough places that we should stop pretending otherwise.

That is precisely why Jewish institutions with a strong sense of mission to the Jewish people matter so much at this moment. Their commitment to daily life beyond the ivory tower is not a liability — it is their mission. At Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago, professionals already working in Jewish spaces receive rigorous graduate education in Israel and Jewish studies plus leadership coaching, because the people holding our institutions together need both. And at Gratz College, the offerings range from graduate certificates for working educators to an executive PhD in Jewish studies, and include a master’s and PhD in antisemitism studies grounded in the empirical question of what works to dismantle it. As Ilana Horwitz argued recently in Sources, Jewish education assumes a stable, sequential life course and an economic security many Jews no longer have. Many now arrive at serious Jewish learning later in life, off campus, when they are ready for it, whether it’s a doctoral program a working rabbi can complete on sabbatical, a fellowship an Orthodox woman can hold from home or a micro-credential a day-school teacher can finish between semesters.

I am not arguing that we abandon Jewish studies in universities. There are dedicated faculty doing extraordinary work there, and they deserve support, too. But the institutions whose mission is training the next generation of Jewish leaders are doing it with a fraction of the endowment, staff and security a flagship university takes for granted. We have an opportunity — and I would argue an obligation — to redirect resources to the colleges and seminaries doing that quiet work.

Additionally, people who give their careers to Jewish communal service should not have to sacrifice their health or financial stability. That means four things: scholarships so that future teachers, chaplains and rabbis do not begin a life of service in debt; endowed faculty positions at institutions with a commitment to service, so that scholars pushed out of the university have somewhere to go that is not out of the field entirely; funds for coaching, rest and sabbatical, because these are foundational Jewish values and because the burnout crisis will not be solved by training more people to burn out; and capital support for Jewish institutions like Gratz that are building when everyone else is contracting.

Let us build the learning spaces our community deserves. The work of Jewish education is too important to leave to institutions that cannot, or will not, protect the people who do it.

Mika Ahuvia is a scholar of ancient Judaism on medical leave from the University of Washington. She teaches online at Gratz College and is a North American Scholars Circle Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.