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| "German students march against the un-German spirit." Book burning in Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933. |
Today's "anti-Zionist" academic environment increasingly resembles the anti-Jewish academic world in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. I am not saying this as rhetoric - I am saying that the parallels are essentially exact.
German academia’s descent into antisemitism began before the Nazis took power. In the early 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, Jewish professors were already being singled out as carriers of something alien and corrosive. Nationalist student groups disrupted lectures, boycotted Jewish faculty, and circulated petitions demanding limits on Jewish influence in universities. This was justified not in racial terms at first, but in intellectual ones. Jewish scholars were accused of promoting abstract, cosmopolitan, un-German modes of thought that allegedly undermined the nation.
In the 1920s, the concept of “Jewish science” emerged. It was not initially shouted by thugs. It was articulated by credentialed academics. Nobel laureates like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark argued that modern physics, especially Einstein’s relativity, was not merely wrong but Jewish in character - overly abstract, detached from reality, ideologically corrosive. The claim was not that Jews should be excluded because they were Jews, but that their ideas were incompatible with German values. Identity was converted into an epistemic defect.
By the late 1920s, this rhetoric had saturated campus culture. Jewish scholars were heckled, isolated, and treated as moral and intellectual threats. Lists of Jewish academics circulated. Entire disciplines were scrutinized for “Jewish influence.”
When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the intellectual case had already been made. When the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was enacted in April 1933, purging Jews from universities, it did not feel like a rupture. It felt like a logical next step. Expulsions overlapped with intensified rhetoric. Book burnings followed. By the late 1930s, Jewish intellectual life had been eradicated from German universities. The state merely finished what academia had already prepared.
This is not ancient history. It is happening now.
This month, the Journal of Emerging Sport Studies published a paper arguing that the considerable contributions of Muska Mosston to the field should be stigmatized because he fought in the 1948 War of Independence, years before he moved to the US and created his theories. From the abstract:
Decanonise the ‘forefather’
Situating Muska Mosston’s Contributions to Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy within the Context of Zionist Settler Colonization of Palestine
Muska Mosston, renowned as a forefather of pedagogical innovation in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy, is celebrated for his Spectrum of Teaching Styles, which has permeated the field for decades. However, an examination of his biography reveals problematic ties to Zionist settler colonialism, including active participation in the dispossession and erasure of Palestinian communities. Using a decolonial lens, this paper critically interrogates the legacy of Mosston, challenging the normalisation of settler-colonial ideologies within academic discourse. In exploring Mosston's legacy through a decolonial lens, we are also compelled to reflect: How do we engage with the work of scholars whose lives and ideologies are deeply intertwined with systems of oppression? Can we separate the value of their contributions from the oppressive systems they may have been a part of? Furthermore, we urge professional organizations and academic institutions to reflect on their complicity in idolatrizing and therefore normalizing such legacies; we suggest instead that they employ practices that uphold truth-telling, advance healing, embrace ethics and actively reduce violence. By foregrounding these self-and institutional-reflective questions, we seek to advance a more equitable, ethical and axiologically reflexive scholarly practice in physical education and the sport pedagogy community more broadly.
Mosston's teaching framework reshaped how physical education is taught worldwide, moving away from rigid command-based instruction toward more adaptive, student-centered models. His work became foundational in the field and was developed entirely after he left Israel (not that this matters.) It had no political content. It had nothing to do with nationalism, war, or ideology.
Yet the reader is told that his military service, and his Zionism, is disqualifying for his theories built in the decades afterwards. It wants to retroactively erase his legacy in the name of morals.
Orwell himself would be astonished at the idea that marginalizing an entire field of study because of a strained conception of guilt by association is "ethical."
There is no real information of what Mosston's role in the 1948 war was. But this is irrelevant to the modern antisemites who want to cancel him. He was a soldier - that is enough to tar him. Jews who fought to defend their land in an explicitly genocidal war started by their Arab neighbors are heroes, not evil colonists, but that fact is hidden behind several layers of lies that are accepted as gospel by a wide swath of today's academics:
1) Zionism is racist.
2) Zionism is settler colonialist, apartheid and genocidal.
3) Anyone who ever joined the Israeli army is a participant in ethnic cleansing and is therefore a war criminal.
4) Anything they have done since then is tainted by the fact they are war criminals.
5) They must be erased, canceled, and their contributions to society should be minimized or dismissed.
These are not even debatable in today's academic environment. They are assumed true as starting positions in going even further.
This is Nazi logic, not academic ethics. This is exactly how “Jewish science” was treated in Germany. No individual wrongdoing was required. No specific acts needed to be proven. Jewishness itself was enough to cast doubt on one’s intellectual legitimacy, just as Israeliness or Zionism is today.. Once that move was normalized, exclusion followed naturally.
We are already seeing the modern equivalent of the 1920s stage. Campus disruptions, boycotts, and protests targeting Jewish or Zionist professors mirror the tactics of nationalist student groups in Weimar Germany. Lectures are shouted down. Speakers are disinvited. Hiring and funding are contested based on ideological purity tests. The justification is always "moral." Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, as a stain that disqualifies participation in intellectual life.
But this article takes things to a new level. A seeming minor piece in a sports studies journal is literally encouraging the erasure of an entire field based on the identity - not beliefs, not history, but Israeli Jewish identity - of one of its founders.
The modern antisemites knowingly target peripheral academic fields as testing grounds to see how far they can push their ideologies in areas that are not sensitive to antisemitism. I've seen anti-Zionist articles in poetry journals, communications studies, gender studies, child studies, environmental studies: the list goes on.
But they have a model they are following, consciously or not: the precedent of antisemitic German students and academics between the world wars and during the rise of Hitler.
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
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