Judith Shulevitz

Glad to see a non-Jewish organization take an unequivocal stance against Jew hatred. The Ontario Camp Association flatly rejects the demonization and would-be boycott of Canadian Jewish summer camps. Sadly, not something that happens everyday. ontariocampsassociation.ca/about/special-…

I wrote a piece about Toni Morrison's complicated views on black history. What about Confederate statues? someone asked. Leave them up, she said. Talk about them. Hang a noose around their necks. She wasn’t kidding. Which explains some things about her novels. Gift link. theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

This an incredible, incredible story. It’s about a massive fortune being deployed, grant by grant, to transform the humanities into an activist training ground. By ⁦@Tyler_A_Harper⁩ theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

I’ve spent the last year working on a story about the Mellon Foundation, the mega-wealthy private nonprofit that has a monopoly on humanities funding in America. The article, about how Mellon has held the humanities hostage to its progressive political ideology, is out today. 🧵

George Washington set the benchmark for presidential temperament. Here's how Trump blew it up. theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

Superb piece on the silence of the left on the protest in Iran by @galbeckerman theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

The National Portrait Gallery removed key details from the caption under Donald Trump's photograph. It still has a story to tell—@JudithShulevitz looks deep into the portrait and describes what glowers back: theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

Like some demonic trickster, Trump moves through the world robbing it of speech. I analyze a case of censorship at the National Portrait Gallery--and the bullying new portrait of him that just went up there. Gift link. @TheAtlantic theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

The National Portrait Gallery removed key details from the caption under Donald Trump's photograph. It still has a story to tell—@JudithShulevitz looks deep into the portrait and describes what glowers back: theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

Washington's portrait set the benchmark for presidential temperament; Trump's occupies a whole other universe. Me on the National Portrait Gallery and the president with the gorilla posture, in The Atlantic. (Not paywalled.) theatlantic.com/culture/2026/0…

The @WSJ has analysed 13 other incidents where ICE agents have fired into civilian vehicles & identify a pattern of agents boxing in running vehicles while engaging in escalatory & intrusive tactics which police are trained to avoid. wsj.com/us-news/videos…

@TenuredRadical @lawler4ny Last point: you may not like Lawler's tendentious characterization of the IHRA order, but he was referring to that.

To be clear, quoting the Daily News: "Among them was an order Adams issued earlier this month that pushed back against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a movement that supports putting economic pressure on Israel’s government and Israeli companies in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The order prohibited senior city government officials from making any city contracting moves or engaging in any policy “that discriminates against the state of Israel, Israeli citizens based on their national origin, or individuals or entities based on their association with Israel.” The order threatened to subject city employees to disciplinary proceedings if they are found violating that restriction. Yet another revoked order directed the city to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Critics say that definition conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism." nydailynews.com/2026/01/01/mam…

This is a lie @lawler4ny.

@CHSommers Thank you!

@JudithShulevitz Wonderful news!

A new book by the murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk reflects on his practice of keeping the Sabbath. The book is often divisive and rarely humble, but has moments of seriousness, beauty, and cross-partisan appeal, Judith Shulevitz argues. theatlantic.com/books/2025/12/…

"His turn toward the Sabbath took him in an unexpected direction, and the book contains evidence of genuine spiritual struggle, which is the best testament a man of faith can leave." @JudithShulevitz on Charlie Kirk. theatlantic.com/books/2025/12/…

I'm pasting in a brief excerpt of Columbia's Antisemitism Task Force's fourth and final report , which is on academic freedom and the classroom. This part is a statement of rights and responsibilities that I found measured and sane (link to whole thing in first reply): 1. Academic Freedom A. No Orthodoxies Like free speech, but in a more structured way, academic freedom seeks to uncover the truth by promoting debate. The right response to a flawed idea is not to suppress it, but to discredit it. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed about free speech in his dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919): "Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out." In this spirit, a fundamental aspect of academic research and teaching is that the state of knowledge is constantly changing. Open disputation within the boundaries of serious academic inquiry, rather than certainty, is central to the production of knowledge. The ongoing academic project is inconsistent with rigid, permanent orthodoxies. Although there may be a temptation to hire only faculty who share views that are common within the faculty and to reward students who also share those views—if only because their ideas and approaches may seem more persuasive to those who hold them— this impulse must be resisted. To promote vibrant debates that advance the frontiers of knowledge, universities should ensure that hiring, admissions, and grading decisions do not breed intellectual homogeneity. In class syllabi, there should be no ideological litmus tests for assigned readings, though the spirit of curation for academic quality that applies to all academic matters at Columbia should apply to these choices. As many critics have observed in recent years, universities have failed to achieve intellectual diversity on various dimensions. Some departments (including at Columbia) do not include faculty members who would offer a different and academically valuable perspective on important issues. Some classes have a moralizing tone, often understood by students as demanding they agree with the professor’s view, which closes down discussion and discourages students from thinking for themselves. B. Insulation From Outside Influence To ensure robust debate, universities must avoid conformity imposed not only from within, but also from outside. Government can present challenges to academic freedom. In Europe, research universities are mainly under the official control of their national governments (although faculty arguably have de facto control in many ways). That academic freedom has mainly—though certainly not always—flourished in this circumstance demonstrates that government involvement is not automatically threatening, if there is a degree of mutual respect and trust. Historically, the challenges in the United States have been different. Many of the leading universities here are private—and thus under the formal supervision of their boards of trustees—while the leading public universities operate under the direct purview of boards appointed by governors and state legislatures, rather than the national government. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the emergence of the federal government as a major funder of higher education, through research grants, student grants and loans and other programs, has meant it has joined the state governments as a constant presence— and at times a source of pressure—in both public and private research universities. This pressure has intensified in 2025. Private universities (and many public universities) also are heavily reliant on private philanthropy. This is nothing new; five of the eight Ivy League universities are named after donors. A key lesson from the early twentieth century dispute at Stanford (which is also named after a donor), noted above, is universities should not allow private funders to impose orthodoxies, just as they should not allow the government to do so. It is not persuasive, though, automatically to consider every example of influence on the university by donors, trustees, or government to be prima facie malign. Many of us are proud to occupy chairs endowed by donors. Our treasured undergraduate core curriculum began during the First World War as a course called War Aims, launched at the behest of the U.S. Army. University Extension became the School of General Studies in 1947 as a direct consequence of Congress’s passage of the G.I. Bill. Government efforts to promote civil rights have helped transform universities, pressing institutions that once engaged in blatant discrimination to welcome students, faculty, and staff from a wide variety of backgrounds, without discrimination. The high-profile research grant programs of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have immensely strengthened the university, while generating innovations that have transformed health care, enhanced the U.S. economy and improved the lives of the American people in countless ways. Government initiatives like Pell Grants, Fulbright-Hays grants, and National Defense Education fellowships and grants have also been important, funding language education and the development of area studies institutes at universities. C. Academic Freedom and the Rights of Students Since a fundamental mission of a university is to educate students, their rights must be protected. From the beginning, academic freedom has been understood as pertaining to students as well as faculty members; in the terminology of the German inventors of the concept as we know it, its two key components are lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit, the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn. These freedoms are equally important. The power imbalance between instructors and students makes it imperative that a great university guard against singling out or unfairly treating students in academic settings because of their identity or their views. Classes should not stray from openminded intellectual exploration into indoctrination—even, or especially, in service of what the professor believes to be a morally urgent cause. Part V will offer examples of what we have heard about students’ classroom experiences, and Part VI will also offer recommendations about how best to protect academic freedom in the current environment. 2. Academic Freedom Responsibilities A. Professionalism and Methodological Rigor Academic freedom and free speech are related but distinct domains. Each is essential to university life in a different way. The difference between them is crucial. (Our task force offered its views on protecting free speech in its first report.) Academic freedom pertains to a highly curated professional activity; universities, as Matthew Finkin and Robert C. Post put it, “hire, promote, grant tenure to, and support faculty on the basis of criteria of academic merit that purport to apply professional standards.” All of us in the academic community spend a great deal of time judging and reviewing student applications, scholarly work, student papers and exams, grant applications, and so on, in a spirit of applying rigorous judgments informed by years of training. In other words, free speech by definition is not curated, while academic freedom “requires precisely that ideas be treated unequally,” Finkin and Post write—“that they be assessed and weighted, accepted and rejected.” John Dewey put it well in 1902, in what may have been the first full-dress defense of academic freedom by a leading American scholar: “To investigate truth; critically to verify fact; to reach conclusions by means of the best methods at command, untrammeled by external fear or favor, to communicate this truth to the student; to interpret to him its bearing on the questions he will have to face in life—this is precisely the aim and object of the university.” As a result, the freedoms that apply to speakers at the Sundial—the landmark at the center of Columbia’s Morningside campus that traditionally has been a prime location for political speech—are not identical to the freedoms that apply in the classroom, where discussions should be more measured and considered. To maintain their legitimacy and independence, universities should demonstrate that they maintain and enforce professional standards for teaching and research. In this spirit, the AAUP’s original Declaration of Principles, eager to persuade other university stakeholders to restrain themselves where purely academic matters are concerned, offered assurances about what professors would do with their freedom. They would engage in “competent and patient and sincere inquiry,” present their findings “with dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language” and avoid “sensational modes of expression.” B. Stewardship of Open Inquiry in the Classroom Even as scholars deploy their expertise, they must be open to opposing viewpoints, and willing to consider the possibility that the prevailing opinion of the moment may well wind up being superseded. As Max Weber put it in his essay “Science as a Vocation,” which set out to identify the moral and ethical core of the academic profession: “In the realm of scholarship... we all know that everything we’ve done and are doing will be obsolete in ten or twenty years. That is the destiny of such work—what’s more, that is the point of such work.” That academic life is professionalized doesn’t mean it is devoted to generating immutable truths, or in any specific moment academics should be seen as undeserving of challenge. We should remember the incident that led Jane Stanford to demand Edward Ross be fired was a speech Ross gave calling for a ban on immigration from Asia, on the grounds that Asians were an inferior race. (Jane Stanford’s opposing position, that railroads needed “coolies” to provide cheap labor, is just as offensive.) Some of Columbia’s most prominent senior professors also had views we’d now find abhorrent. John W. Burgess, founder and longtime head of our graduate program in political science, was a leading eugenicist; the historian William Archibald Dunning relentlessly promoted the view that the government’s granting of civil rights and voting rights to the formerly enslaved had been a terrible mistake. Ongoing disputation within professional norms is at the heart of academic life. That standard views within academe have been continually revised demonstrates that at no moment should the standard academic view be regarded as unchallengeable. This spirit of openness must animate not only our faculty workshops and laboratories, but also our classrooms. The AAUP’s original Declaration of Principles took pains to address professors’ teaching. It said: “The teacher ought to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matter in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definite opinion of his own.” A few years later Max Weber put it more pointedly: “politics does not belong in the lecture hall...a prophet or demagogue does not belong in a lecture hall. To the prophet, to the demagogue, I say: Go out into the streets and speak there, in public.” In a historically important statement in 1940, the AAUP called on teachers to “be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial subject matter which has no relation to their subject,” and urged them, when speaking on political subjects outside the classroom, to endeavor to “show respect for the opinions of others.” As faculty members at Columbia, we have been entrusted with the solemn responsibility to teach a remarkably gifted student body. We should impart knowledge and skills, so they learn to think critically and deeply about the great issues of our time. Our mission should be to teach them how to think, not what to think. Some faculty may prefer not to share their opinions at all. When others choose to do so, they should ensure students are comfortable exploring and embracing other perspectives. As a best practice, faculty should introduce other legitimate, academically debated points of view as well. This should be done in the same spirit as the literature reviews that begin most academic publications: acquainting students with the major intellectual disputes in the field, so they can learn to evaluate them independently. To do otherwise is to abridge the academic freedom of our students. Columbia’s current Faculty Handbook strongly endorses the foundational need to maintain an atmosphere of respect for all students and to avoid a politicized classroom. It says: “Faculty should confine their classes to the subject matter covered by their courses and not use them to advocate any political or social cause. ... Faculty should allow the free expression of opinions within the classroom that may be different from their own and should not permit any such differences to influence their evaluations of their students.”

Judaization?