In December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT were brought before Congress to respond to the rise of antisemitism on their campuses after October 7. When they were asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct, all three demurred. It was a shocking hearing, and within weeks, two of the three had resigned from their posts.
This drama fixed the paradigm through which many Americans now understand the problem of antisemitism on college campuses: as primarily a failure by weak leaders to protect vulnerable students from harassment. This narrative is clearly true—Jewish students have been targeted by antisemites, and the administrators tasked with ensuring their safety have failed in many instances to do so. But this isn’t the whole story. The rise in antisemitism on American campuses has deeper roots, and far more dramatic consequences, than just the mistreatment of Jewish students and the failure of the officials who permit it. To understand this, consider what a university is for.
Universities shape elites. Harvard, UPenn, and MIT are not vocational schools: they are training grounds for the next generation of American politicians, businessmen, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Their graduates become heads of state; they run Fortune 500 companies; they build the technologies the rest of us use every day; and many end up staffing universities themselves. Whatever a student learns at Harvard, he will carry with him into his adult life—and that life is highly likely to be one in which he wields power and influence.
For many decades after 1945, American universities took their responsibilities seriously. The purpose of education is to nurture the mind—to fill it with truth and beauty, to train it to reason clearly, justly, and logically—to make it excellent. Part of this process is carefully breaking down ideological blinkers, which is to say, prejudices. It’s an old trope that the young and educated will shake off the bigotries blinding their elders, but at least in the 20th century, there’s been truth in it. Since 1964, consistent surveys have found that each new generation of Americans was less antisemitic than the last, and the educated least of all. A university education helped a young person unlearn the world’s oldest hatred. Until now.
In the Anti-Defamation League’s latest survey, the pattern of the last sixty years has reversed. For the first time since its surveys began, the young are now more antisemitic than the old. Americans in their twenties and thirties are now more sympathetic to the ancient slanders—the money, the power, the divided loyalty—than their parents are, and far more so than their grandparents. Two months after the October 7 massacre, two-thirds of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four told pollsters that Jews “as a class” are oppressors and should be treated as such.
The reversal, however, is selective. The postwar university did an excellent job uprooting the old antisemitism of the right—the antisemitism that was justified in the name of race or in the name of Christianity. Education still works against this strain; a British study found that a university degree still corresponds with less of this kind of Jew-hatred. But it does not touch, and increasingly, seems to foment, the new antisemitism. This is antisemitism dressed up as anti-Zionism, which, when tested, reveals no less bigoted underlying assumptions. The new antisemitism is alive and well on university campuses, thanks to two main strains of thought—one incubated by the left, and the other embedded in Islam.
For the first time since its surveys began, the young are now more antisemitic than the old.
This is the real scandal of campus antisemitism. The harassment of Jewish students is only the visible symptom of a systemic failure. Universities, the institutions that once uprooted the world’s oldest hatred, now seed antisemitism in the young. Our elites are being trained into antisemitism, not out of it. And it’s not mere bigotry; it is eliminationist.
The new antisemitism looks unlike the old on its surface, because those who peddle it agree on certain taboos. The postwar project made it impermissible across the board to condemn a people explicitly on the basis of race or religion. The new antisemitism avoids doing so. Its two dominant strains get around the prohibition through different means—the left condemns Jews on grounds other than race or religion, and Islam puts its hostility to Jews beyond the reach of modern progressive criticism.
The campus left sorts humanity according to three crude axes: rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, white and non-white. On each of these three axes, it assigns Jews to the perennially guilty side. Jews are cast as wealthy, though many are not wealthy at all. They are counted as white, no matter their origins. And Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, is cast as an evil colonial power: the archetypal oppressor in a narrative determined to find one. Because these charges are not explicitly about race or religion, they don’t trip the same postwar alarm as the old antisemitism still does. But left-wing antisemitism, construed through these axes, draws the same conclusion: the Jews, as a people, are the architects of the injustice and corruption in the world. At Harvard, the university’s own task force on antisemitism found that Jewish students were being asked to prove they were “one of the good ones” by denouncing Israel and rejecting any attachment to it.
Left-wing antisemitism is viral on university campuses because it was developed there. Its intellectual home is a cluster of modern disciplines—decolonization studies, critical race theory, gender studies—that treat the oppressor-oppressed binary not as a hypothesis to be tested but as the key to all mythologies. Students who take courses in these fields aren’t taught to question or test this framework against reality, but to filter all reality through it. Its conclusions are proffered as moral absolutes. You cannot argue against this framework without being accused of siding with the “oppressors.” It is a framework that cannot tolerate dissent, and this has been borne out not only in classroom debates but in administrative decisions and in hiring. In December 2025, Columbia’s task force on antisemitism found that the university had not a single tenure-line professor of Middle Eastern history or politics who was not explicitly anti-Zionist. A Columbia student who wants to learn more about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and make up her own mind about the situation today, will be taught by partisans of one side only.
The new antisemitism has old roots. The equation of Zionism with racism was a staple of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, and in 1975, the Soviet bloc and the Arab states wrote it into a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly. It wasn’t repealed until 1991. The Soviet line has now been reformulated in the vocabulary of “settler colonialism” and “apartheid” and it circulates on American campuses today as authentic scholarship.
The second strain of the new antisemitism employs the prohibition on judging a person by his race or religion in its own defense. Islam did not originate with white men, and so, in the 21st century, to scrutinize its doctrines or condemn its teachings is to be Islamophobic. In 2022, an art historian at Hamline University in Minnesota showed her class two celebrated paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. She warned her students in advance. Nevertheless, the university administration condemned the lesson as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic” and claimed that respect for Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” The instructor’s contract wasn’t renewed.
Shielding Islam from criticism means shielding doctrinal antisemitism. The textual sources of Islam—the Quran and the canonical collections of hadith—are openly hostile towards Jews. The Jews are variously described as corruptors, deceivers, unbelievers, and evildoers. This isn’t an extremist interpretation; it is what Islam’s holy books say, and as a result, it is what many people across the Muslim world believe. Hostility to Jews in the Muslim world runs wider and deeper than Westerners appreciate. It is not a fringe position, nor is it the exclusive province of political Islamists. When I was growing up, hatred of Jews was official state propaganda in Egypt, in the Gulf, and across North Africa. It was taught in schoolbooks and broadcast on state television, often by governments that were cracking down on the Islamic movement. This antisemitism was motivated in part by the politics of Israel’s founding, and in part because it suited the purposes of struggling regimes to blame their failures on someone else. But in directing their anger and resentment towards the Jews, these governments were capitalizing on a theological warrant contained in Islam itself.
Islamic antisemitism is not confined to the Arab world. In the ADL’s most recent global survey, ninety-six percent of adults in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, endorsed at least six of eleven classic antisemitic tropes. There are glimmers of hope—the UAE has purged its textbooks of old antisemitic material, and Saudi textbooks have recently improved too. But these reforms are little creeks of fresh water running into an ocean of hatred. There has not yet been a generation in the Muslim world that has not been raised to hate the Jews. In Christianity, antisemitism was defeated largely from within: theologians disputed interpretations of the Bible and concluded that contempt for the Jews was unchristian. No such reckoning has been meaningfully undertaken in Islam.
The unfortunate reality is that most Muslim immigrants to Europe and America arrive having absorbed this hatred, and they bring it with them. On Western campuses, Muslim students, in particular those who are immigrants, are received with deference: they are members of a protected category. Their grievances are treated as unquestionable testimony and their voices are given special weight. A prejudice that would be confronted in anyone else is left unchallenged in them, for fear of seeming culturally insensitive or “Islamophobic.” This is where the two strains run together. Islam supplies young Muslims with the conviction that the Jews are, at best, not to be trusted. The left supplies them with a progressive vocabulary through which to articulate this conviction, and an identitarian deference that shields them from criticism for doing so. For its part, the Islamist movement has long understood and taken advantage of this dynamic. Its strategists know what a university is worth: capture the elite, and eventually you will capture everyone else.
These two strains are more dangerous than mere bigotry. Antisemitic bigotry wants Jews kept at a distance, or kept out of institutions, but the new antisemitism, like the worst of the old, is fully eliminationist. On the left, the warrant for eliminationism comes from Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth, a founding text of decolonization studies, teaches that violence against a colonizer is not only justified but is indeed redemptive—“a cleansing force.” Casting Israel as a settler colony, in this paradigm, provides a justification for mortal violence against Zionists, which in practice, means Jews. Within days of October 7, National Students for Justice in Palestine sent its campus chapters a “toolkit” celebrating the massacre as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” The new antisemitism is unambiguous in its aims—it wants to globalize the intifada.
On the Islamic side, the warrant is older, and explicit. One hadith foretells that the Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight and kill the Jews, and the stones and trees cry out, “There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Hamas wrote this hadith into its founding charter, which also declares that there is no solution to the Palestinian question except through jihad. “Justice for Palestine,” to the people who chant this slogan, doesn’t mean prosperity or sovereignty for Palestinians. It means the mass slaughter and elimination of the people of Israel.
Antisemitic bigotry wants Jews kept at a distance, or kept out of institutions, but the new antisemitism, like the worst of the old, is fully eliminationist.
The old antisemitism of the right hasn’t disappeared. It is being deliberately rekindled, chiefly among disaffected young people who find in conspiracy theories and ethnic grievance an outlet and explanation for their disappointments. This form of antisemitism is still dangerous—it produced the Holocaust—but it differs from the new strain in two ways that matter. First, it is born of grievance rather than of principle. Its adherents look for the hidden hand of the Jew because they are lost and looking for meaning, and a grand secret narrative offers that. This form of bigotry has shallower roots than the principled antisemitism of Islam and of the left. It can be fought through education and social influence. Second, we already know how to defeat the old kind of antisemitism. After 1945, Western societies scrubbed its narratives from textbooks and newspapers, condemned it publicly, and taught the young to recognize and reject it. With the new antisemitism, our universities are doing the opposite. The three strains of antisemitism are like weeds in a garden. We know how to root out the right-wing one, but we’re currently watering the other two.
The three strains of antisemitism share a conceptual structure, and that structure is what makes antisemitism particularly corrosive in a university context. Antisemitism is conspiracist. It offers a single grand, rough, ugly narrative—who pulls the strings, who has the money, why things are so hard—which offers people psychic relief from the struggle of understanding the world as it really is. True scholarship subordinates narratives to evidence, and seeks to grasp things as they really are. Ideology, by contrast, subordinates evidence to narrative. Ideologues do not seek to grasp things as they really are; rather, they declare how things are, and treat every fact undermining their conclusion as yet more proof of a grand conspiracy against them. The new antisemitism has maintained this structure. In the ADL’s 2024 survey, nearly a third of Americans agreed that supporters of Israel control the media—the old canard, with “Zionist” in place of “Jew”—and younger Americans agreed at markedly higher rates.
A university that is committed to the pursuit of truth—a university that is doing its job—should be killing such ideas on contact. It should expose them to sunlight—the best disinfectant—and train its students to test grand narratives and conspiracy theories against reality, and to distrust narratives that claim to explain everything. American universities are not doing their job. Instead of uprooting ideology, they are seeding it in their student populations. They are teaching young people to sort the world into oppressors and oppressed before they’ve had any meaningful contact with that world, intellectually or simply as independent adults.
The consequences of this miseducation will be dire for everyone. An education that replaces actual thinking with ideological sorting will produce graduates who are credentialed but unable to reason well. The young engineers of Silicon Valley may be brilliant, but they are so morally untethered that they encounter a cultish and lukewarm utilitarianism and find no reason not to embrace it. Minds left empty—minds unmoored from first principles—can be filled with anything, including hatred.
The danger of campus antisemitism extends far beyond the campus. It didn’t materialize out of thin air after October 7; it had been cultivated in classrooms for decades, and has only become obvious because the generations schooled in it are now old enough to occupy positions of real power. The encampments of 2024 were not the vanguard. They were the loud, chaotic manifestations of a bigotry that is now established in newsrooms, foundations, boardrooms, and government agencies across the country. The consequences for statecraft are already visible. In 2006, the administration of George W. Bush—a graduate of the Yale class of 1968—pressured Saudi Arabia to purge its schoolbooks of religious hatred. Bush and his generation understood what that hatred would lead to. Yale graduates today, by contrast, have been taught that Israel is a colonial oppressor. If these graduates end up, as some surely will, at the negotiating table with Arab heads of state, will they defend Israel’s right to exist? It seems unlikely.
The most commonly proposed remedy to campus antisemitism overlooks all this. Many decent people, rightly alarmed for the safety and well-being of Jewish students, argue that they should be folded into the DEI apparatus as another protected category. It won’t work. The paradigm of ranked identities is what created and fueled this hatred in the first place. We cannot kill the beast by feeding it.
What is needed, rather, is the opposite of DEI. The grievance fields—decolonization studies, critical race theory, gender studies—should be shut down. They are seedbeds of malice, and a degree in any of them is expensive and worthless. It is bad for the graduate, bad for the university that confers it, and bad for the society that must absorb it. A graduate trained to hate Jews as oppressors carries that training with him into his adult life. If any field is worthy of preservation, it must be restored with real scholarship; Columbia’s own task force urged the university to hire Middle East scholars who are not anti-Zionist. Codes of conduct must be enforced against calls for the killing of Jews, exactly as they would be against calls for killing of any kind. And universities must restore their own first principles: no text, no theory, and no faith should be exempted from critical examination—not the Quran, not critical race theory, and not the oppressor-oppressed progressive paradigm.
The paradigm of ranked identities is what created and fueled this hatred in the first place.
Left to themselves, our universities will do none of this. The three university presidents who faced Congress in 2023 were weak leaders, but they weren’t merely weak. They presided over institutions that had lost their sense of purpose. It falls to university trustees, to legislators and donors, and, ultimately, to the parents of university-age children to demand that the university do its job: teach young people to think, and thus to reject clumsy conspiracy theories and coarse bigotry. It can be done. I was taught as a child to curse a people I’d never met, and my education in the West helped me to unlearn what I had been taught. Western universities once did that for students like me. They must be made to do so again.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a globally recognized women’s rights activist, bestselling author, founder of the AHA Foundation, and the founder of Restoring the West, where she serves as a contributing editor.