When Yale launched the Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA) in 2011, it was hailed as an academic effort to examine the longest hatred with rigor and depth. Fourteen years later, the program again promised scholarly rigor and attention to both ancient and contemporary antisemitism, including contested topics such as Zionism. Now almost a year after its 2025 relaunch, the YPSA has developed into an institutional effort to dodge the hardest questions surrounding antisemitism. The program avoids analyzing antisemitism in modern anti-Zionist movements by confining itself to safer historical and abstract discussions.
YPSA’s 2025 work was dominated by lectures, book talks, and conferences, mostly co-sponsored by other Yale organizations, often making them indistinguishable from general humanities and Jewish studies programming elsewhere at the university. Most of YPSA’s recent events such as The Many Lives of Anne Frank, The Fate of Bulgaria’s Jews during WWII, and Poetry and Memory, address topics worthy of study on their own, but taken together they situate Jews as a secondary subject within broader historical and cultural narratives, rather than as the central analytical focus of antisemitism itself.
When YPSA does address Zionism or contemporary antisemitism directly, it does so from a safe analytical distance, primarily offering conceptual overviews. An event such as The Ideology of Settler Colonialism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict treats anti-Zionism as an intellectual object rather than a critical movement whose rhetoric and practices contribute directly to antisemitism. Another talk titled Campus Antisemitism, Past and Present, functions as an introductory conversation focused on the personal experiences and institutional background of the YPSA’s new managing director. In both cases, the program’s emphasis on framing and retrospection creates a noticeable distance from examining how antisemitism operates within contemporary political movements, including anti-Zionist ones.
Antisemitism deserves, and requires, serious scholarship. Yet the YPSA treats it superficially by stacking their events calendar as a substitute for research, selectively narrowing the forms of antisemitism it is willing to confront, and making personnel and governance choices that undermine its stated mission. At a time when antisemitism is at an all-time high, Yale must do better than wasting its limited resources on a program that only confuses the public on antisemitism.
This article was originally published in JewishOnliner.org
