Yale University’s decision to shutter its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism and replace it with the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has inspired considerable controversy, much of it highly acrimonious. On the one hand, this is surprising. YIISA was a tiny institute without much of a profile at Yale, much less in the world at large. On the other hand, it had the term “anti-Semitism” in its name, and so any actions involving it are bound to arouse the passions of the professional Jewish community and a certain segment of the punditocracy that keeps watch on the issue. Add to this the groups and individuals who have appointed themselves to the job of policing academia for signs of social and political deviancy, and you have all the ingredients necessary for a (kosher) food fight.
On the face of it, Yale’s decision was rather straightforward and unspectacular. A university-appointed committee of review examined YIISA’s scholarly output and found it lacking. What’s more, the program’s founder and former executive director, Charles Small, had no formal academic connection to Yale and had founded the institute elsewhere, using the Yale name to increase its visibility and prestige. Given that, after all, Yale is a university and scholarship is its business, it could hardly be asked to sit still and see its good name exploited by a center that it thought failed to live up to its academic standards.
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