Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 5, 2025

Do Bad People Make Bad Professors of Jewish Studies?

A misguided feminist attack on the field.

In 2021, “MeToo” caught up with the field of Jewish studies. The controversy stemmed from revelations, three years earlier, of the bad behavior of Steven M. Cohen, the leading authority on American Jewish demographics and a serial harasser of female colleagues. What was most disturbing about the episode, as Ruth Wisse noted in Mosaic, was the attempt to connect Cohen’s shameful conduct with his scholarship, and his interest in the survival of the Jewish people. Now the scholars Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff have, in effect, expanded this claim into a book, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies.

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