Features
Bias in America’s Colleges Produced Modern Anti-Zionism
By HENRY SREBRNIK Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, professors at the Claremont Colleges in California, have just completed a study, “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,” published July 10, 2025, that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the most contentious topics: racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion.
They used a unique database of college syllabi collected by the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP). The OSP has amassed millions of syllabi from around the world primarily by scraping them from university websites. They date as far back as 2008, though a majority are from the last ten years. Most of the data comes from universities in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia.
“Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out.”
In the summary of their findings, “Professors Need to Diversify What They Teach,” they report that they found a total lack of ideological diversity. “Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.”
Teaching of Israel and Palestine is, perhaps no surprise, totally lopsided, and we’ve seen the consequences since October 7, 2023. Staunchly anti-Zionist texts — those that question the moral legitimacy of the Israeli state — are commonly assigned. Rashid Khalidi, the retired professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is the most popular author on this topic in the database. A Palestinian American and adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization delegation in the 1990s, Khalidi places the blame on Israel for failing to resolve the conflict and sees the country’s existence as a consequence of settler-colonialism.
The problem is not the teaching of Khalidi itself, as some on the American right might insist. To the contrary, it is important for students to encounter voices like Khalidi’s. The problem is who he is usually taught with. Generally, Khalidi is taught with other critics of Israel, such as Charles D. Smith, Ilan Pappé, and James Gelvin.
Not only is Khalidi’s work rarely assigned alongside prominent critics, those critics seem to hardly get taught at all. They include Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis, a professor at Shalem College in Israel. Gordis’s book appears only 22 times in the syllabus database. Another example is the work of Efraim Karsh, a prominent historian. His widely cited classic, Fabricating Israeli History, appears just 24 times.
For most students, though, any exposure to the conflict begins and ends with Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978. Said is the intellectual godfather of so many of today’s scholars of the Middle East, thanks in no small part to this classic book. Said was a Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist from a prominent Christian family. Educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities, two of America’s most distinguished centres of higher learning, he taught at Columbia University, another Ivy League institution, until his death in 2003.
Said was no crude antisemite. His writings were aimed at academics and intellectuals and he has, in my opinion, done more damage to the Jewish people than anyone else after 1945. Said claimed to be the first scholar to “culturally and politically” identify “wholeheartedly with the Arabs.” But he was also a political activist for the Palestinian movement opposing the existence of Israel.
Said warned PLO leader Yasir Arafat that if the conflict remained local, they’d lose. Join “the universal political struggle against colonialism and imperialism,” with the Palestinians as freedom fighters paralleling “Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, and black Africa,” he advised.
(In this he was not the first, though. Fayez Sayegh, a Syrian intellectual who departed for the United States and completed his Ph.D. at Georgetown University in 1949, preceded him. Also an academic, his 1965 monograph Zionist Colonialism in Palestine stands as the first intellectual articulation of Zionism as a settler colonial enterprise, arguing that the analytical frameworks applied to Vietnam and Algeria apply equally to Palestine. The treatise situated Zionism within European colonialism while presenting it as uniquely pernicious.)
Israel’s post–Six-Day War territorial expansion helped Said frame Israel as “an occupying power” in a 1979 manifesto titled The Question of Palestine. Alleging racial discrimination as the key motive was a means of transforming the “Zionist settler in Palestine” into an analogue of “white settlers in Africa.” That charge gained traction in a post-Sixties universe of civil rights, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and Western self-abnegation. The work sought to turn the tables on the prevailing American understanding of Israel: It is not, in fact, an outpost of liberal democracy or refuge from antisemitism, but an instrument of white supremacy.
Orientalism popularized a framework through which today’s advocates on behalf of Palestinians understand their struggle against the state of Israel and the West generally. Said casts the Western world as the villains of history and peoples of the East as its noble victims.
The essence of the book, Said concluded, is the “ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.” It falsely affirms “an absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior.”
So it was impossible to take Zionism seriously as one among the myriad nationalist movements that emerged in the nineteenth century, much less to see Israel itself as a land of refugees or the ancestral homeland of Jews. And, indeed, Said’s Orientalism singles out Israel for special rebuke, suggesting that the state could be justified only if one accepted the xenophobic ideology at the core of Western civilization. Israel’s defenders, particularly those who lament the lack of democracy in the Middle East and fault Arabs for their militancy, represent the “culmination of Orientalism.”
Said is widely acknowledged as the godfather of the emerging field of postcolonial studies, and his views have profoundly shaped the study of the Middle East. Said also inspired – and in some cases directly mentored – a generation of anti-Zionist U.S. scholars whose dominance in the academic study of the area is unquestionable today.
The political left that emerged trained itself to read every conflict as the aftershock of colonialism. The ideological narrative of oppression and resistance allowed even the jihadist to become a post-colonial rebel.
It’s hard to overstate the academic influence of Orientalism. The authors note that “As of this writing, it has been cited nearly 90 thousand times. It is also the 16th most assigned text in the OSP database, appearing in nearly 16 thousand courses.” Orientalism is among the most popular books assigned in the United States, showing up in nearly 4,000 courses in the syllabus database. Said’s work appears in 6,732 courses in U.S. colleges and universities.
But although it was a major source of controversy, both then and now, it is rarely assigned with any of the critics Said sparred with, like Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, or Samuel Huntington. Instead, it’s most often taught with books by fellow luminaries of the postmodern left, such as Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler.
All these ideas are now embedded into diversity, equity, and inclusion identity politics, and “humanitarian” outrage over supposed Israeli “settler-colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.”
The ground for the massive pro-Hamas college and university encampments, and attacks on Jewish students, was prepared decades ago. The long march of progressives through American institutions over the past decades has taken its toll on society.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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Musings from Dizengoff Street – by Bruce Brown
(August 8, 2026)
Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem. Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black. Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat. For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos. With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café. While shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas. So the wife and I thought we would check it out. And. Yes. Buy something to support the business. Uproar. Not. Blocked entrances. Not. Storming the café. Not. Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers. The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews. Mostly teenagers. And yes. Shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem. Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” But I did enjoy my iced matcha.
(August 6, 2026)
Here we go again. Another round of forever negotiations. As someone who negotiates for a living. The way things are going in the straits. If I had to recommend a book on the subject to a new hire. Between The Art of the Deal, A Presidential Edition by Donald J. Trump or The Real Art of the Deal by the Mullahs of Iran with a special forward by the IRGC. Well. I would choose the latter.
(August 3)
Bravo Yoav Segalovitz, Liberal Yesh Atid MK and Monsour Abbas, United Arab Ra’am MK and party head. For breaking a glass ceiling where a Jewish lawmaker joins an Arab political party. No less a political earthquake in my little shtetl. Which can significantly impact coalition block arithmetic and posturing and strategy in the upcoming elections. Now Ra’am can be considered a legitimate ‘Zionist’ partner when forming coalition blocks and potentially pushing the ‘center left/right’ party over the 60 seat majority threshold. In our crazy parliamentary democracy defined by a multi-party (about fourteen!!), proportional representation system. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Israel’s proportional representation model of governance is the best parliamentary democracy system except for all other forms of working democracies. Stay tuned for more amateurish political musings as we move towards Israel’s 26th national election – five of them held since 2019.
(August 1)
Although both sides say they are open to diplomacy. Neither really trusts the other. And American military action, or its threat, continues. I read headlines in the middle of the night -it’s a nervous habit lately– that the Dynamic Duo of Trump and Netanyahu may again strike in unison. Possibly this weekend. Yikes! Prompting me, at 2:30 AM, to dash around the house stocking my safe room. Bottled water. Canned food. Medicines. Documents. The beat goes on….
If it’s crazy here. It’s insane in Italy. With a recent online ‘Jew Hunt’ in the Milan area. Before being removed, the digital forms urged reportings of Israelis and Italian Jews staying in local hotels. The infamous Global Sumud Movement -yes, the one coordinating ‘peace and humanitarian’ flotillas to Gaza- was somehow connected. Although they deny involvement?! This deranged decree was looking to identify Zionist tourism and Zionist neo-colonization in Italy. I’ll stick with stocking the saferoom.
Then there’s New York Mayor Mamdani, a Global Sumud Movement supporter, threatening to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York. But since discovered he has no legal right for such a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic antic. Maybe Mandami should be arrested! Or at least impeached. For being a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic mayor.
Here’s a post Bruce sent us Friday, July 31:
WARTIME MUSINGS
Should credible threats against FLOTUS and ‘FSOTUS’ (first son..) not be justification to attack first.
As for yesterday’s summit. Netanyahu really can’t win. Explainer. If Trump now attacks without victory its ’cause of Netanyahu. If Trump now attacks with victory its ’cause of Trump. And, in Israel, if Trump doesn’t attack -victory or not- Netanyahu failed in his eighth meeting with Trump. And if Trump does attack -victory or not- half the country will vilify Bibi anyway. Missing a permutation?
Ya. I know. Kinda’ need a definition of victory for that musing to work.
And here in my little shtetle. We go to sleep unsure if there will be a code red in the middle of the night. And if not. We wake up thinking it will be tonight. How do you define stress?
Seemed like an appropriate way to end this musing.
Bruce Brown is a former Winnipegger who made aliyah to Israel over 35 years ago. Bruce first began writing for us – in his own inimitable style, in 2012, during what was known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” His occasional musings on aspects of life in Israel that were far from what you’d typically read in other reports from Israel were hugely popular – both in the print Jewish Post & News and on this website.
We’re now glad to report that Bruce is back writing for us – this time on a regular basis. We will post Bruce’s reports as they arrive – with the date of each post at the beginning of that post.
Here’s some information about Bruce – and awards he’s received for his writing:
Bruce Brown. Canadian born. Now living in Israel (for a long time). Bruce works in Israel’s hi-tech sector by day and, in spurts, is a somewhat inspired writer by night. He received the American Jewish Press Association’s award for writing excellence in 2019 and 2025. And wrote the 1998 satire, “An Israeli is….” Bruce’s musings are political, social, economic and personal. With lots of biting, contrarian, sardonic and irreverent insight.
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