Mick Hartley

A useful essay from Adam Louis-Klein, in Sapir, on “the latest pseudoscience to overtake academia”:

In his 1946 book Hitler’s Professors, linguist Max Weinreich documented how the German university — then the pride of Western scholarship — fell with terrifying speed into the service of Nazi ideology. Within months of Hitler’s rise to power, professors across disciplines had issued declarations of loyalty. They did so not only to secure their posts but to align themselves with a social and political movement that promised prestige, resources, and renewed relevance. Entire research institutes were founded, fields reorganized, and new disciplines invented around the “Jewish Question.”

Weinreich revealed a moral and epistemic collapse that converted scholarship into ideology. Anti-Jewish libels  do not circulate on their own. They require institutional prestige to stabilize them. The university has long been an effective instrument for transmuting defamation into knowledge, serving not as a barrier to harmful ideology but as its most efficient vehicle.

At the moment of writing, the university has been lost to a new pseudoscience: antizionism. And there are Jewish faculty, like Fishberg before them, who lent it credibility. Our urgent and ambitious task is to make them see the scholarly error, as Fishberg eventually did, and get them to reverse course.

What the Nazi university did with the “Jewish Question” the contemporary university now does with the “Zionist Question.” Entire disciplines — anthropology, among them — have been reorganized around antizionist libel, based on a Manichean worldview in which “Zionist professors,” “Zionist ideologues,” and “Zionist administrators” are singled out as enemies of justice. In this imaginary, “Zionist” does not denote genuine persons or positions; it works as an all-encompassing metaphor of corruption that must be purged.

Antizionism is the ideology that treats Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty as an intrinsic injustice. It is today’s evolved form of anti-Jewish hate, less crude than classical antisemitism, but no less potent. Antizionism is more abstract, systematized, and rhetorically refined — ideally suited to academic environments that reward oppositional performance and repackage hostility as critical thought.….

Academia: the breeding ground of pseudoscience. Particularly US academia.