Jewish Academics Embrace the Old Christian Image of the Vengeful Jew

Last month, we rebroadcast my 2024 conversation with the UCLA historian David N. Myers, in which we debated my contention that academic experts on Jewish studies shouldn’t use their knowledge and research as a weapon for skewering their fellow Jews—and that all too often, they do. This is precisely what Myers did in a July 31 article in the Forward, where he claimed that Jews “are not the victims,” but “the victimizers” because of the Israeli war against Hamas. He then sought historical antecedents for such bad Jewish behavior.