Most people would accept the claim that Oct. 7 was an inflection point in Jewish history. But fewer realize that it was also an inflection point for university professors of Jewish history, particularly those who are themselves Jewish.

I once wryly told an Israeli ambassador that my job is to teach Jewish history, not to defend the State of Israel. But what about defending Jewish students? I am not a diplomat, nor a politician. I am a historian and a mother. I also happen to be Jewish, which, given my field of study and my name, is impossible to hide. It is something I have therefore chosen to publicly embrace, for better or for worse.

The consequence is that I have found myself taking on a pastoral role, something for which I have no formal training and a responsibility that feels daunting. And yet, over the past two years, in the shadow of more official structures, I have taken it on. I am not alone. In conversations with colleagues across continents, whether in large universities or small ones, in places with flourishing centers for Jewish life or, like my own at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands, with little more than a simple WhatsApp group of Jewish students, we find ourselves making things up as we go along in a rapidly changing geopolitical and campus reality.

Over the past two and a half years, a wide range of students and staff have reached out to me, sometimes from the most unexpected places and even from universities that are not my own. What they share is an attachment to Judaism, often though not always an attachment to the State of Israel, and a profound unease about the climate on campus and in society more broadly.

I have spoken with anti-Zionist Jewish students upset by what they see as a lack of empathy among fellow Jews for Palestinians. I have spoken with fervently Zionist........

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