In the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023 and the demonstrations on the College Park campus that called for “globalizing the intifada” and freeing “Palestine from the river to the sea,” pleas came from various groups within the UMD community to confront the subject of antisemitism. One group in particular, Faculty Against Antisemitism, pointed to the specific form of antisemitism that led to the mass murders perpetrated by Hamas, and called upon the administration and faculty, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, to address the origins and spread of this ideology where relevant in the curriculum. Two years later, in January 2026, publicly available evidence indicates that nothing at all has changed in the offerings by faculty in these schools. As far as we know, undergraduates and graduate students in ARHU and BSOS are still not able to take courses by scholars who will assign relevant readings or present well-established scholarship about the connections between Islamism, Jew-hatred and the justifications for military attacks on the state of Israel.
The Joint President-Senate Task Force on Antisemitism and Islamophobia of Fall 2024 ignored this issue. By introducing the term “Islamophobia” into its title, it obscured a core issue—antisemitism in an Islamist form— following the attacks of Oct. 7. The Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies lists 24 faculty in the field of “Religious Studies” Yet, so far as is publicly known, none of those faculty offer courses or include material that address the now world: famous Islamist advocates of Jew-hatred such as Hassan al-Banna, Haj Amin el-Husseini, Sayyid Qutb, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Ruhollah Khomeini or Yahweh Sinwar, or the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The antisemitism that drove Hamas in 2023 had its origins in the ideology of Islamism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that emerged in the 1920s and became more internationally known when some of its leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust. There is a significant scholarship on the connection between these modern forms of Jew-hatred and the resulting attacks on Israel and older traditions of Islam in the work of scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Norman Stillman, Jacob Lassner and Meir Litvak, among many others. The collaboration of Islamists with Nazi Germany has been documented in the work of Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel and other scholars in Germany and Israel. Yet, as far as we know, none of this research appears on the syllabi in courses taught by any faculty at this University. If so, such a focus has not been a prominent feature of course offerings. In view of the university’s annual budget of $2.98 billion and the Taskforce Report, it is disturbing that the administration and the faculty have not seized the opportunity to address this significant gap in the course offerings. They must do so now.
Scholarship about antisemitism should concern all faculty, not only in the humanities and social sciences, and especially those who, for years, have spoken about the importance of diversity and opposed racism. Yet the DEI office, now renamed “Belong and Community” office, has also done nothing to address this issue. That too is deeply disappointing. A faculty and administration that does not address this form of antisemitism—refuses to fight or even recognize a clear source of hatred— cannot claim that it is serious about addressing antisemitism in one of its most important historical and contemporary forms. Yet this is occurring on a campus where more than 6,000 out of a total of 41,000 students identify as Jewish—one of the greatest proportions in the country.
The Faculty Against Antisemitism group is aware that antisemitism takes right-wing forms. We are disgusted and angered but not at all surprised that Trump’s “America First” MAGA endeavor has spawned a bizarre collection of open antisemites, fans of Hitler and promoters of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Yet those repellent ideas have, as far as we know, no presence in the humanities and social sciences. Certainly, students should be made aware of the history of traditional forms of antisemitism associated with Nazism, white racism and the Holocaust. In 2025, however, students should also be learning about forms of Jew-hatred that emerged in the Soviet Union and under other Communist dictatorships, and within the global radical left since the 1960s. They should become aware that this incarnation of the secular political left has refrained from criticizing the propaganda of Hamas and indeed has often echoed it.
Unfortunately, in this regard, the University of Maryland, College Park, is not unusual. There is nothing unique about the absence of a diversity of interpretation and scholarly pluralism, or about the presence of a significant antagonism to the state of Israel manifest in statements signed by faculty not long after Oct.7. Typical as well is the absence, so far, of hiring of faculty who have both the ability and the desire to address this form of antisemitism. The current scholarly landscape at UMD College Park features a lack of pluralism and neglect of key scholarship in this area. We urge administrators and faculty to foster a culture of genuine pluralism and liberalism. We urge readers of Mitzpeh to inquire about whether change is taking place in College Park, and if not, to continue to call for intellectual pluralism and for the presence of faculty who are able and willing to offer scholarly examination of the Islamist antisemitism that inspired the Hamas murders of Oct. 7 and found expression in the chilling chants on our campus and others.
