At Indiana University, a professor named Günther Jikeli suddenly replaced Mark Roseman as head of the Jewish studies program. Arno Rosenfeld brilliantly reported on this rather bonkers story for the Forward, with extra background in his newsletter. It’s a wild ride of a tale, with the university abruptly handing Jewish studies over to a German gentile… in the name of fighting antisemitism.

It is an odd story with more levels than I can do justice to here, but the essential is this: Roseman, per Rosenfeld, is not a pro-Palestine activist, but just a going-about-his-business senior English-Jewish academic researching the Holocaust. The issue was not that Roseman was in some way controversial, but rather that Jikeli is a more of warrior in the fight against anti-Zionism. And that’s the direction the Trump administration is trying to nudge academia these days.

There is an Onion headline that comes to mind: “Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement.”

It’s ironic to the point of seeming like satire, and arguably detrimental to the very cause it’s ostensibly helping, but there’s more to it. To get at what I mean, I need to do a mini-dive into my own history with Jewish studies.

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Coming of age in Manhattan in the 1990s, I always knew I was Jewish, but it really was just that, something I knew myself to be. It’s not exactly that I didn’t give it much thought (I’ve always been an overthinker) but it was not an organizing principle of my life. There were peers who sought out Jewish culture clubs or what have you, but I was (and, am) neither religious nor much of a joiner, so I did my own thing. My Jewish identity expressed itself through reading Philip Roth novels, watching The Nanny, and an endless fascination with matzah and all associated foodstuffs. (Farfel! Meal! Brei!) But there were always enough other Jews around, and more communally-involved ones, that my Jewishness didn’t much register. As in, I was never in situations where someone would be like, Which one is Phoebe? The Jewish one.

Then I got to college, at the University of Chicago, in 2001. For the first time in my life, I was regularly meeting people who found my Jewishness something worth remarking upon. I was far from the only Jewish student there, but I had plenty of classmates who’d met few or no Jews previously. Some........

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