Yale University, which has come under fire this month for its decision to shut down a small research institute on anti-Semitism, announced plans on Monday to create a new center that will deal with the same topic. The new center, to be known as the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, is expected to begin its work this fall.
Unlike its soon-to-be-closed predecessor, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, the new program will be led directly by Yale faculty members. It will also have a different academic home. While the old program operated within Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the new venture will be housed in the Whitney Humanities Center.
In an interview on Monday, Charles Asher Small, the executive director of the closing center, said he feared that the new program will be too focused on literary and historical analyses of Jewish suffering, and insufficiently concerned with contemporary anti-Semitism, especially the rhetoric of the Iranian government. Mr. Small is not a Yale faculty member, and his employment will end when his center shuts down on July 31.
Mr. Small said that the university’s memo announcing the new program was “concerning, because their statements were directed toward historical forms of anti-Semitism and the collections of Judaica in Yale’s library. It’s important to understand history, but we have to apply the lessons of history to contemporary contexts. Scholars have an obligation to address contemporary genocidal expressions of anti-Semitism.”
Mr. Small added that he believes no Yale faculty members today have much expertise or interest in contemporary anti-Semitism. (He softened that comment by adding that there is no reason why Yale faculty members could not develop such expertise. “There are a lot of very intelligent people here,” he said. “Many scholars who are now drawn to this issue are people who migrated intellectually because they realize that it’s a pressing concern, that we need to understand what is unfolding in the world.”)
The new center’s convener, Maurice Samuels, replied to those comments in a written statement provided by Yale’s public-affairs office. “The new program will discuss both contemporary anti-Semitism and historical anti-Semitism,” he said. “I am of course deeply concerned by the recent upsurge in violence against Jews around the world, and I want YPSA to address these concerns. I also believe that we gain a great deal by placing current events into historical context.”
Mr. Samuels is a professor of French and the author of Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2010). He has taught a course at Yale called “Representing the Holocaust.”
A Yale committee determined this spring that Mr. Small’s institute had not generated enough peer-reviewed research, a charge that Mr. Small rejects. He believes his center was actually targeted for closure because Yale faculty members were uncomfortable with its emphasis on contemporary anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.
Some scholars at Yale and elsewhere have indeed criticized Mr. Small’s institute. Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, in London, wrote two weeks ago that he was pleased the institute would close, because he felt it was so politicized that it was unhealthy for the broader scholarly study of anti-Semitism. And Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, wrote last week that while much of the Yale institute’s work was strong, some of it was unscholarly advocacy.
Other scholars, meanwhile, have written in defense of Mr. Small’s institute. Walter Reich, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University and a member of the institute’s academic board of advisers, wrote last week in The Washington Post that it is hypocritical to criticize the institute’s conferences for including political advocates, when advocates routinely appear at academic conferences on “genocide, human rights, women’s studies, African American studies, Hispanic studies, gay and lesbian studies, and nuclear proliferation.”
Mr. Small said Monday he is hopeful that his institute will find a new academic home. “We have been getting positive feedback from other universities around the country, which I have been heartened by,” he said.
In a second written statement, Mr. Samuels, the new program’s leader, said, “I will not refrain from exploring any controversial contemporary topic. I will simply do my best as a member of the faculty to ensure that all academic work associated with YPSA reflects Yale’s tradition of scholarly excellence.”
