Antisemitic Assimilation in Academia:When the Academy and Jewishness Collide
by Adam Louis-Klein
One of the ways antisemitic assimilation works in academia is through the structures of authority, respect, and citation. If a scholar embeds antisemitic assumptions into their work—framing Jews as settler-colonial, denying Jewish peoplehood, erasing Jewish indigeneity—and that work gains traction among the (mostly non-Jewish) academic majority, it becomes something everyone is expected to cite and “engage with.” Those who refrain from doing so are often regarded as unserious or uncritical.
This creates a structural trap: Jews are pressured to acknowledge and reproduce frameworks that erase or attack them. The rules of scholarly legitimacy—engage the literature, cite the big names, show respect—end up enforcing conformity to discourses that deny Jewish continuity and identity. And many Jews, in order to be seen as legitimate within the field, internalize these frameworks. They assimilate into a version of academic professionalism that comes into deep tension with their Jewishness.
A clear example of how this works can be seen in Nadia Abu El-Haj’s Facts on the Ground (2001), a book that presents Israeli archaeology as a fabricated enterprise—rooted not in scientific or historical inquiry but in a racialized, eugenic Zionist ideology. Jewish interest in our own history and ancestry—exactly the kind of concern that is celebrated when Indigenous peoples engage in archaeological reclamation—is framed here as a sinister plot to dominate and dispossess. Even more troubling is the book’s uncritical reproduction of Islamist and pan-Arab conquest narratives, which deny any deep Jewish connection to the Land of Israel.
These narratives, themselves products of imperial erasure, are taken as self-evident counter-discourse rather than interrogated as political and theological projects of their own. Despite these basic distortions—framing Jews as a foreign, alien presence; employing antisemitic tropes; erasing Jewish identity—the book was institutionally rewarded and widely praised. Once established, it became part of the legitimate critical canon. To challenge its errors is to be marked as uncritical or ideologically compromised. The frame is already set, and dissent becomes structurally illegible.
This isn’t just an unfortunate side effect—it’s a textbook case of institutional racism. The term was coined in the academy to describe exactly this: systems that appear neutral but are structured around the assumptions of a dominant group. And yet, when Jews are the ones harmed, the academy becomes unable—or unwilling—to apply its own critical tools to itself.
In response, some thinkers have begun to call for a meta-critique—a mode of reflection that interrogates the very structure and authority of critique itself.(1) When academic prestige is wielded not as reason but as force, critique risks becoming indistinguishable from ideological aggression. What once aimed to expose domination now often serves to entrench it. The distinction between critique and bigotry begins to erode.
And this dynamic doesn’t only affect Jews. It creates new asymmetries, producing stereotyped figures of the always-evil and the always-innocent. “White Christians” become the designated targets of critique—flattened into a monolithic symbol of oppression, depicted only in negative terms—while Arabs and Muslims are cast solely as romanticized revolutionary victims. These racialized and civilizational scripts are not critical thinking—they are narrative dogmas. And the actual moral principles that originally motivated critique—consistency, self-reflection, a commitment to justice—are discarded the moment they become inconvenient.
Reclaiming the space for meta-critique—where the academy’s own assumptions, power structures, and hypocrisies can be examined—is not just a Jewish concern. It’s a concern for anyone who believes that intellectual honesty, moral clarity, and civil discourse still matter.
(1).https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-025-09612-8, https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049580/coming-clean/
Adam Louis-Klein is a writer, anthropologist, and musician, currently completing a PhD in Anthropology at McGill University. His work explores Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and contemporary antisemitism, drawing connections between civilizational identity, recursive ethnography, and the politics of indigeneity.