Research Fellow
Position Description
Project Overview:
In the past year, a wave of antisemitism and violence against Jewish students has surged. The ideas and attitudes undergirding this antisemitic philosophy, which had long been driven underground, have resurfaced with a vengeance. But what is driving antisemitism on campus? That is a question that does not boast of easy answers. Multiple factors are almost certainly at play, but one significant and as yet unexplored element in antisemitism’s resurgence is the role that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) establishment on campus plays in facilitating the ideas and people responsible for antisemitism’s spread.
The NAS proposes to investigate if DEI, whether this means DEI programs and the network of offices that support these programs or the professors and staff that promote its ideology, is tied, directly or indirectly, to antisemitism on campus. If we find evidence that ties exist between antisemitism and DEI offices and ideology, we will explore how these connections arise and what their results are, both on campus and in the broader cultural dialogue.
For instance, by tying explicitly ideological issues such as race and anti-colonialism to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, DEI bureaucrats have given anti-Jewish protestors the ability to cloak antisemitism in the protected language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Students calling for the murder of Jews are said to be simply “advocating for the oppressed minority” in Palestine. By framing it as oppressor v. oppressed, students and faculty alike have found themselves free to spread slander and calls for violence while still claiming status as victims.
Drawing out this distinction and showcasing how the DEI movement on campus provides the language that informs contemporary campus antisemitism, is a significant goal of this project.
The Research Fellow will help drive this effort by conducting on-the-ground research, background research, and interviews, and reporting on the links between DEI, antisemitism, and its various iterations on campus such as the boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) movement.
Responsibilities:
The Research Fellow’s primary responsibilities will include:
- Researching and conducting interviews to produce a case study of their college or university to investigate how DEI policies, personnel, departments, and ideology might underpin the growing tide of antisemitism on campus.
- Uncovering key DEI policies, rules, and regulations that enable antisemitism to flourish on campus, presenting them to the Senior Researcher and showing how they foster antisemitism on campus. Proposing measures specific to your campus, and more broadly, for reform that would counteract the effects of these edifices.
- Under the guidance of the Senior Researcher, crafting and filing public records requests as needed to identify and highlight instances of antisemitism on American campuses and their connection to DEI.
- Engaging in quantitative data gathering, or analysis as necessary, of college professors and their oeuvre to show the overlap between professors involved in DEI research and those involved in antisemitic activism.
- Clarifying the link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism to the furthest extent possible on your campus and by attending pro-Palestinian events, including talks and protests, and documenting the extent to which the rhetoric or other elements, like visual iconography, become antisemitic. Further elucidating this connection, and the connection to DEI, through interviews.
- Conducting background research on your university and university system, including detailing the history and culture of both, and working with the Senior Researcher to show how this background informs the case study and the larger study.
- Navigating university red tape and finessing bureaucracies to gain access to archives and other resources for the study, doggedly pursuing and scheduling interviewees even when difficult.
- Documenting visual campus culture as relates to antisemitism and DEI and gleaning all useful social media content from student groups and individuals with a connection to both or either.
Preferred Qualifications:
- An exemplary writer with strong interpersonal skills
- Undergraduate or graduate student in the liberal arts, history, journalism, education or a related discipline
- Enrolled or an alumnus/na at one of the universities chosen for the case study: Yale, Columbia, or UC Berkeley. Applications from other Ivy league schools will be also considered.
- Interest in antisemitism, higher education, and investigative journalism
- Desire to further NAS’s mission to improve higher education
- Demonstrated capability to conduct and organize research
Salary and Hours:
- 40 hours per week for the first two months during the summer, 20 hours per week for the following four months
- This six-month contract position will pay $4,500 for every month of the full-time portion of the contract and $2,250 for every month of the part-time portion
Reports to: Senior Researcher in Antisemitism, Benjamin Dorfman
For consideration: send a letter of interest, resume, and writing sample to Benjamin Dorfman at [email protected].