The scandal is not what antizionist syllabi teach. It’s what they have to hide.

In graduate school, the conclusions often arrived before the evidence. The texts were already chosen, the interpretations already implied, and the rooms had a temperature you learned to read fast. Occupation. Apartheid. Settler-colonialism. Resistance. These weren’t just assigned readings—they were the vocabulary of belonging. You used them or you were the collective sigh when you raised your hand. These terms were canonical, the syllabus was the scripture, and the professor was…well, I’m sure you’ve met some.

I used them. I was good at theory and I cared about justice, so of course I’m going to side with the colonized, the subaltern, the wretched of the earth. I knew Fayez Sayegh, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Patrick Wolfe, and I felt like I was doing the serious, morally grounded work that was needed in our neo-liberal hegemony. I was, in the language of Philip Jackson, being educated in the hidden curriculum.

The Hidden Curriculum

Not the assigned texts. The unwritten rules. The things the room transmits without ever naming. The lesson underneath the lesson. Those intangible social norms, expectations, and values that influence your perspective. Jackson coined this term in Life in Classrooms (1968), after a B.F. Skinner-trained career of measuring children like lab rats. He attended a Stanford seminar on primates that made him realize he’d been studying kids the way researchers studied monkeys.

His student, Elliot Eisner, named its companion in 1979: the null curriculum. The subjects and authors who get buried because they complicate the lesson. The texts that are never assigned. The non-canonical works. The ones that complicate the trajectory of your arc.

Every course has both the hidden and the null. I didn’t notice the hidden curriculum until I took courses that made students uncomfortable. Or, until I did. I remember giving a presentation on the horrors of the First Crusade in front of Muslim and Catholic students. Not as easy as it sounds. I took a course on American Religious history and the room got silent when I asked how the settlers could think America was so special, like it was some kind of garden of Eden. The silence was broken by a Mormon student.

I read a syllabus for one course, and could not help but ask the professor why the chips were stacked so tightly in favor of his perspective. He paused, “You know, you’re right. They do.” Seems he had never thought of it before.

The point I’m making is that sometimes the only way to see the unseen, is for others to make it obvious. I had never had an awakening to Jewish pain outside of my studies, until October 7th made it impossible to ignore.

And here is what I know—don’t need to be told, just know—what those rooms do to Jewish students. To be the student whose people’s right to exist as a nation is a question at the colloquium. Where Zionism is deployed as a synonym for evil. Where you understand, quickly and without ambiguity, that the room is not built for you. That your identity is the complication the curriculum cannot concede. We all saw what that environment eventually........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)