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The latest round of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants announced Wednesday includes a $6 million award for an academic institution that has been the subject of a series of complaints for undermining academic freedom and whose leadership is facing a federal lawsuit over allegedly violating the First Amendment rights of a Jewish student.
The award, given to Indiana University, furthers the implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on combating antisemitism, according to a press release announcing the awardees. Critics warn that those orders are part of a conservative agenda that instrumentalizes accounts of rising antisemitism to advance a decades-long effort to undermine academic freedom, crack down on campus dissent, and remake public education. The administration has repeatedly wielded claims of antisemitism to attack its political enemies—from withholding billions in funding for high-profile universities to jailing prominent Palestinian human rights defenders, like Mahmoud Khalil. Its move to exploit genuine fears of antisemitism in order to undermine democratic norms has been decried by Jewish leaders and rights groups.
The $6 million grant will fund a project titled “Addressing Antisemitism as a Global Challenge: Political, Cultural, and Intellectual Sources and Manifestations.” The project is a three-year program of “scholarly convenings, publications, and podcasts on addressing antisemitism as a global challenge” produced in partnership between Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, according to the press release announcing the award. The $6 million in support is by far the most granted to a single institution in this cycle, with the next largest outright grant coming in at just under $1 million.
The project’s director, Alvin Rosenfeld, founded the ISCA in 2009. One of the institute’s focuses is “new antisemitism,” a framework that presents anti-Zionism as a novel form of Jew-hatred—conflating anti-Zionism or criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. The approach gained traction in the 1990s and has become even more entrenched in recent years, increasingly being used by pro-Israel groups to obscure Israel’s attacks on Palestinians following its invasion of Gaza in October 2023 and to punish dissenters. Rosenfeld has continued to endorse the approach. Last year, he told The Forward that “The hostility that calls itself anti-Zionism is not a dispassionate affair at all, and since October 7 it has become really very fiercely, fiercely antisemitic.”
“Rosenfeld has his own long history of denouncing Jews who oppose Israel or Zionism, declaring them antisemitic and indeed blaming them for others’ antisemitism,” said Emmaia Gelman, founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. “Now, with $6 million in federal funds and a university institute, he becomes another supercharged node in the right’s war on students, faculty, and knowledge.”
Rosenfeld is not the only one on Indiana’s campus who subscribes to the “new antisemitism” framework. The university garnered headlines for a shakeup in its Borns Jewish Studies Program last year, which saw another adherent, Günther Jikeli, installed as the program’s interim director. The university’s chancellor tapped Jikeli, a non-Jewish German academic and ISCA’s associate director, to replace Rosenfeld, the program’s founder and longtime director, in August. Graduate students received no announcement about the change, and faculty interviewed by the Indiana Daily Student, the campus paper, called the move “unprecedented” and expressed concerns about the erosion of academic freedom in the department.
The academic council at Jewish Voice for Peace also condemned the move, warning that it had caused “significant harm to both academic freedom and shared governance, and thus also to the academic integrity of the Borns Jewish Studies Program.”
Jikeli then grabbed headlines of his own when, in September, he booted Sabina Ali, a Jewish doctoral student in the program he had just been appointed to oversee, from a Zoom workshop because her profile picture featured a drawing of a woman wearing a keffiyeh and the slogan “Free Palestine.” The following month, Jikeli overruled a unanimous faculty committee decision and denied Ali’s request for travel funding to present her research at a national religious studies conference. His email gave no reason for the denial of funding, according to a federal lawsuit Ali filed last month. Jikeli, Indiana University’s board of trustees, and the executive dean of its College of Arts and Sciences are defendants in the suit, which alleges First Amendment violations and breach of contract because of Jikeli’s actions. A new director has not yet been appointed to lead the Borns Jewish Studies Program per its online faculty page.
The grant announced this week is not the first that the NEH has awarded to further the aims of Trump’s executive orders on combating antisemitism. The conservative Zionist nonprofit Tikvah was granted $10.4 million last September—the largest grant the NEH has ever awarded.
“This isn’t a new tactic. Right-wing donors for decades have funded institutes on U.S. campuses whose jobs are actually to undermine public knowledge on issues from climate change to racism,” said Gelman. “Now we’re seeing Zionist and other right-wing groups join together to do this—and they’re supported by Trump’s NEH.”
This is a developing story. If you have information you’d like to share, you can reach Marianne on Signal @mariannedhe.26
