American Jewry Is Drifting From Israel—Now We Know Who Taught It

By: Ronn Torossian

When a third of American Jews tell pollsters that Israel is committing genocide, the reflex in Jerusalem is to blame social media, the Gaza war, or a generational mood. The more uncomfortable answer is that someone taught them—and that someone has a name, a title, and often an endowed chair.

A new audit “Who Teaches Judaism in America?,” by the Ronn Torossian Foundation reviewed 2,499 faculty records across Jewish Studies, Israel Studies, Hebrew, and Holocaust Studies at American universities and cross-referenced each against nine petition campaigns from May 2021 through Spring 2026. A documented anti-Israel signal was carried by 51.9 percent. Among the professors who specifically teach these subjects, 39.5 percent. In the Ivy League, 72.3 percent.

These are the people who shape American Jewish understanding of Israel at the exact age it hardens into conviction. And a majority of them are on record, by signature, against the Jewish state.

Define the terms, because the number invites disbelief. A “signal” meant something explicit: endorsing BDS, calling Zionism “settler colonialism,” accusing Israel of “genocide,” describing the Jewish state as a system of “Jewish supremacy,” or joining Faculty for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voice for Peace. Criticizing a particular Israeli government, opposing settlements, backing a two-state solution—none of that counted. The bar was high. Half the field cleared it anyway.

And the line is moving one way. In May 2021, about 100 Jewish Studies faculty signed the founding declaration branding Zionism a “settler colonial” project. By March 2025, the “Not in Our Name” letter drew 3,400-plus signatures—the largest Jewish faculty petition ever recorded. By Spring 2026, the University of Michigan alone produced 1,488 endorsements of anti-Israel speech at commencement. Every campaign larger than the last. This is not a spasm. It is a trajectory.

The ladder is worth seeing whole. Roughly 100 signers in May 2021. Four AcademicsForPeace petitions gathering 700 to 1,300 each through 2023 and 2024. 1,200 Jewish professors against the IHRA antisemitism definition in May 2024. 3,400 on “Not in Our Name” in March 2025. 1,488 at a single commencement in 2026. Read in sequence, it is not a debate cooling. It is one heating.

The concentration is worst where it does the most damage. The audit logged signals at 313 institutions, clustered at Columbia (41), Princeton (35), Penn State (32), NYU (31), and Yale (30). Of the thirty most severe campuses, twenty sit among the sixty American schools with the largest Jewish student populations. The capture is densest exactly where young Diaspora Jews are.

The individual campuses fill in the picture. NYU logged 148 faculty joining boycott efforts, the highest in the country. Michigan produced a 297-signer Jewish-faculty campus letter and 1,488 commencement endorsements. UCLA saw antisemitic incidents rise 3,000 percent and settled a civil-rights suit for $6.45 million. At Oberlin, roughly the entire core Jewish Studies faculty carries a signal. These are the departments a Jewish family is choosing between.

Consider the transmission in plain terms. A Jewish eighteen-year-old arrives on campus with an inherited, largely unexamined attachment to Israel. The person assigned to deepen it—the Hebrew instructor, the Israel Studies lecturer, the Holocaust historian—has, in a documented plurality of cases, publicly endorsed boycotting Israeli universities or called the country’s conduct genocide. Four years later that student turns up in a poll, doubting the Jewish state and open to the word “genocide.” The polling result and the faculty result are the same fact, measured at two ends of one pipeline.

None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only that the person at the front of the room believes what a majority of the field now signs and that an eighteen-year-old, as eighteen-year-olds do, absorbs the convictions of the adult grading the papers.

The Holocaust field, of all places, is leading the turn. In August 2025 the International Association of Genocide Scholars resolved that Israel is committing genocide. Raz Segal, an endowed professor at Stockton, called October 7 “a textbook case of genocide” six days after the massacre. Frances Tanzer (Rose Professor, Clark), Nitzan Lebovic (Apter Chair, Lehigh), and Alon Confino (PenTishkach Chair, UMass Amherst) all endowed, all signatories. The discipline built to say “never again” is teaching the next generation to say it about the Jews.

There is a second finding, and for the Diaspora it may be the more damning one. These faculty organize constantly, thousands of signatures, nine campaigns, in five years. Not once did they organize for the Jewish students beside them. When encampments blocked those students from class, when “globalize the intifada” was chanted at their dorms, the professors who teach Judaism did not circulate a letter in their defense. AMCHA finds a third of Jewish students say their own faculty foster a hostile, antisemitic environment. The teachers were not neutral. In the numbers, they were a cause.

This is the mechanism behind the polling that alarms Jerusalem. It is not mysterious, and it is not going to reverse on its own. These professors are tenured. The infrastructure is not self-correcting.

So the honest question for the organized Jewish world is not how to reform these departments. It is what to do now that the drift has been measured. Federations weighing campus partnerships can read the file before they sign. Parents can choose a university with information they never had. Donors can ask, before the next gift, what the chair they are funding has actually endorsed—fourteen current chairholders sit in the signatory lists, in positions Jewish families built. And Israeli universities, which teach these same subjects from inside the country and in the language, can offer the alternative American Jewish Studies has stopped providing.

For Israel, this is not a curiosity about American campus politics. The American Jewish community is the country’s deepest strategic relationship outside Washington, and that relationship is transmitted—or severed—in exactly these classrooms. A generation taught by its most trusted scholars that Zionism is racial supremacy does not arrive at neutrality. It arrives where the polls now find it.

And the answer, when the organized community is ready to face it, will not come from within the American academy. Authentic Zionism—rooted in Hebrew, in the land, in the lived reality of Jewish sovereignty—is not going to be taught from Columbia’s Yerushalmi Chair or UCLA’s Israel Studies center. It is going to be taught in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva, by scholars who serve in the IDF and carry the consequences of the policies their American counterparts only sign petitions about. Bar-Ilan, Ariel University, IDC, The Technion, and Ben-Gurion should be building the alternative now. The demand is there, and it grows every semester the American programs drift further from the families who fund them.

And we should say plainly what the audit forces into the open. This is not only capture, and not only drift. Many American Jews—including a great many of those paid to teach the young about their own people—are, sadly, enemies of the Jewish state. The full study—2,499 records, 1,298 signals, 14 endowed chairs, 313 institutions, at olam.business—is sickening, yet not surprising. The future of Jewish learning will be built where Jewish sovereignty actually lives. 

Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist. “Who Teaches Judaism in America?” was conducted by the Ronn Torossian Foundation and olam.business.