If the murder of George Floyd sparked a needed national reawakening about racial injustice, then the eruption of protests against Israel after Oct. 7 sounded the alarm on resurgent antisemitism, horrifying in its own right and symptomatic of other problems besetting the academy. Demonstrators and their apologists try to argue they are not antisemitic, “just“ anti-Zionist; but telling Jews to “go back to Poland” and recommending a “final solution” crosses the line into what Leon Wieseltier aptly called the “ancient foulness.” Those and other chants were excused and even encouraged by faculty who may not represent the academic mainstream but whose actions (or silence) exacerbate public distrust for the whole system. Accusing Zionists of being white supremacist settler colonialists injures the already fragile Black-Jewish coalition and exposes deep fissures in our academic edifice. As Deborah Lipstadt warns, antisemitism is the sign of pathology that affects everyone, not just the Jews. 

As the dean of an education school (and past president of the National Academy of Education), I ask myself if our field is especially culpable for the current crisis — and, regardless, if we can lead the way toward alleviating it. My answers, respectively, are “probably not” and “hopefully yes.” 

U.S. colleges and universities enroll close to 20 million students. About 3,000 protestors were arrested since Oct. 7, many of them not students. Of the 33 people arrested at GW for violating university policy and city law, for instance, six were students (out of a total enrollment of 25,000). That probably says more about the reticence of universities and their local police to intervene than about the prevalence of underlying anti-Israel sentiment.

In any case, where do schools of education, which enroll about eight percent of the total college population, figure in all this? Although it is customary to saddle educators and where they are trained with responsibility for many societal ills, I would urge caution. For example, catalog listings and syllabi are crude predictors of what happens in classrooms. As I noted in my recent book, the goal of a course for future social studies teachers is to “acquaint students with issues, trends, philosophies, methods, materials, organization, and basic instructional procedures.” Some innovative programs focus on ethical implications of artificial intelligence, social media and data science, with little hinting at underlying antisemitism or other unwelcome themes; even some places that embrace the “master/colonizer” rhetoric are home to distinguished programs of scientific research. 

Then again, my optimistic bias is tempered by other evidence. For example, education faculty are members and fellows of various disciplinary societies whose records are revealing. The Association of Asian American Studies was the first such group to sign on to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS). The American Studies Association board endorsed BDS, although some members sued on grounds the leadership had overstepped; the American Anthropological Association initially rejected BDS, then reversed itself; the American Psychological Association placed blame squarely on Israel, and some of its vocal members want more than BDS; the American Sociological Association aligned with “the Palestinian people and their ongoing struggle for liberation”; and the Middle East Studies Association surprised no one with their one-sided condemnation of Israel. The most recent entrant into this gang warfare was the American Historical Association, which used the occasion to enrich the contemporary vernacular with yet another “cide bar” [sic].

Conspicuously absent from the bandwagon were the National Academy of Education, which issued a morally clear statement, and the American Educational Research Association (whose membership is roughly 25,000), which had been quick to issue statements on other horrific events (George Floyd, Ukraine) but perhaps wisely stayed mum after Oct. 7. For many Israeli and other Jewish members of AERA, silence was felt as betrayal, though some wry observers commented that we were probably better off: Efforts by extremist members to disrupt the 2024 annual meeting by circulating anti-Israel statements to be read during research presentations were painful but mostly inconsequential. 

Moving from diagnosis to treatment, can education schools play a special role in addressing this crisis? The short answer is yes, based on our comparative advantage as scholars and practitioners of pedagogy and, in particular, “teaching difficult history”. Here are four themes to guide action:

1. What to think or how to think?

Is our professional goal to instill values and preferences or to equip people with analytical tools to help them reach their own judgments? Of course, the answer is some of each. But self-conscious attention to that binary is essential, and the fine work of education scholars can guide our colleagues across the academy. By interrogating ourselves voluntarily, perhaps using an imagined scale of neutrality and indoctrination, we might stanch the flow of poisonous dogma in academic discourse generally (and curb the spread of antisemitism specifically).

2. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

As the outgoing chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley noted, “Just because you have the right to say something doesn’t mean it’s right to say.” How should faculty wanting to motivate understanding of America’s racial history choose material for their students to study? Does effective teaching about the Holocaust always benefit from showing footage of Nazi atrocities? Is it instructionally effective (and morally defensible) for an anti-Zionist professor to tell students “It’s not [their] fault [they] were born in Israel?” With financial support from university leaders and philanthropists, education faculty could offer peer tutoring on the subtleties of pedagogical discretion.

3. ‘I used to think, and now…‘

Some critics cringe at the intrusion of personality and identity in the workings of science, but when used judiciously, “positionality” statements can flag hidden threats to objectivity. Let’s take this further, inspired by an anthology that models a courageous willingness to update one’s “priors”: My amendment is to retitle the rubric as “now I [still] think,” the triple-entendre to suggest it is okay to change one’s positions, or hold on to them, if the choice is based on rational thought and balanced inquiry. With philanthropic support, group sessions for faculty, staff and students to work through real examples would be therapeutic. 

4. Black-Jewish relations

Colleagues who disagree with me about the Middle East know me as a partner in the struggle for racial justice and have heard me advocate for rebuilding the coalition between Jewish and Black Americans. The current state of polarization has upped the ante for such efforts. At GW, webinars on antisemitism have been organized by our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) office; a summer institute on including Jews in DEI programs attracts faculty from education schools around the country; and DEI leaders have joined study missions to Israel. A new joint effort is planned to bring together Black and Jewish students for sustained dialog. Call me naïve, but the backlash against DEI, fanned by extremists who never much cared for civil rights in the first place, can be steered back toward “mend it, don’t end it.” In the week we honor the memory of Martin Luther King, a great Zionist, attention to our coalition seems all the more obvious.  

This isn’t the first time Jews have been singled out for hateful violence, nor is it the first time that fanatics have ganged up against traditions of liberal education. As we pray for the continued release of our precious hostages, let us commit to sustaining the fight against seemingly incurable antisemitism. With help from our philanthropic friends, education schools can lead the way.

Michael Feuer is the dean and a professor of education at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University. His latest book, Can Schools Save Democracy? Civic Education and the Common Good, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2023. The author is grateful to Dick Atkinson, Amy Berman, Chris Bracey, Chip Edelsberg, Sarah Feuer, Jonathan Feuer, Regine Feuer, Ben Jacobs, Adena Kirstein and Walter Reich for comments on earlier drafts. Parts of this article draw on Feuer’s recent essay in Fathom and on his New Year message to the GW community. The views expressed are the author’s and do not represent institutional positions of GW.