The Magnes Zionist: How Ideological Funding is Harming Israel and Jewish Studies in the United States

When I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the 70s, I became interested in Jewish historical political economy. Back then the problem with pursuing such an interest came mostly from the unwillingness of many in Eastern European studies to take Jewish history and politics seriously as well as from sensitivity or aversion to any discussion that might validate historical non-Jewish complaints against Jewish business or political culture.

In How Ideological Funding is Harming Israel and Jewish Studies in the United States, Jerry Haber identifies the increasing problem of the ideological debasement of American scholarship by wealthy Jewish donors to American universities.

I have to qualify that the problem became palpable much earlier than he suggests. For example, Marty Peretz funded a Harvard professorship for the incompetent racist Zionist Ruth Wisse in the 90s and not in the 2000s.

We are more aware of the problem today because not only have more non-Jews have become interested in Jewish and Israeli studies, but they have often collided with the wall of corrupt Jewish social networking and of Jewish racism.
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