Some Academia Wake Up to the Antisemitism They Were Trained to Avoid ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, April 20, 2026

Some Academia Wake Up to the Antisemitism They Were Trained to Avoid

H-Judaic, the main scholarly network for Jewish studies, just announced the inaugural meeting of a new Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism, convening May 4 on Zoom and led by FIU professor Iqbal Akhtar. The framing is careful — "the intersection of antisemitism and Islamic contexts," an agenda built around "research mapping" and "identifying gaps." Read past the academic register, though, and something remarkable is happening: a mainstream scholarly network is forming around a subject the academy has spent decades pretending did not exist as a distinct category worth studying.

This is part of a larger shift. Andrew Pessin's Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism launched in late 2025 with a seven-webinar lecture series, a roster that has grown past seventy scholars, and a multi-volume foundational book project now soliciting contributions. Pessin's diagnosis is blunt — antizionism is "the dominant ideology in the academy," and serious scholarship on it has been corrupted to the point that the standards themselves need to be rebuilt. ICSA's explicit model is that antizionism has its own history, internal logic, tactics, and archive, and that these need to be mapped with the same rigor that historians of antisemitism have applied to other variants. The Movement Against Antizionism, Stop Antizionism, and a growing number of faculty resilience groups are pulling in the same direction.

What makes the Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism interesting is the piece of the puzzle it addresses. Surveys by the ADL and others have consistently shown that antisemitic attitudes in Muslim-majority countries run at extraordinary levels — often two to four times higher than in Western populations — and the diaspora communities carry measurable portions of that freight with them. Everyone in the field knows this. Almost nobody in the field will say it on the record, because the topic sits directly on top of the third rail of Western academic life: anything that could be framed as Islamophobia ends careers, and the taxonomy of acceptable bigotries has long placed Muslims in the protected column and Jews in the privileged one. The result has been a strange silence in which French authorities have scrubbed the Muslim identity of attackers from public descriptions of antisemitic assaults, and Arab antisemitism has been a hate that scholars cannot bring themselves to name even as they catalogue every other variant.

The silence is not only political cowardice; it is methodologically disastrous. Antisemitism is a shape-shifter, and its different hosts produce different pathologies. Christian supersessionism, Enlightenment racial theory, Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism, Black Hebrew Israelite replacement theology, Nation of Islam conspiracism, and the theologically grounded Jew-hatred embedded in significant strands of Islamic tradition each have their own origin, internal grammar, and relationship to Zionism as both provocation and response. Treating them as a single undifferentiated "rising antisemitism" produces analysis that cannot predict anything and interventions that cannot work. You cannot counter a theological claim with a civil rights framework, and you cannot counter a conspiracy theory with sensitivity training. The field has been systematically blurring these categories for so long that treating Muslim antisemitism as its own object of study is, in 2026, a minor scholarly revolution.

The detail that makes this particular initiative unusual is that Akhtar is Muslim. He founded Miami Interfaith after October 7 to build Jewish-Muslim dialogue in South Florida, hosts the Interfaiths podcast with frequent Jewish guests, and studied Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern topics as an undergraduate. A Jewish scholar announcing a network for the study of Muslim antisemitism would be dismissed in much of the academy as a polemicist before the Zoom link went out. A Muslim scholar announcing the same network, from inside a Muslim Studies center, creates space that did not exist the week before.

Whether the network produces serious scholarship or whether it gets captured and defanged by the surrounding disciplinary pressures is an open question. But the fact that these institutions are being founded at all — and that they are being founded simultaneously, across the Jewish/non-Jewish divide and across the antisemitism/antizionism distinction — suggests that a tipping point has been reached, even if it is only among a minority of scholars who have integrity.

As someone who has been writing about Muslim antisemitism for years, this is gratifying.