JEWISH STUDIES UNDER SIEGE: Academia’s Failure to Protect Zionists

This lecture examines how anti-Zionism on university campuses has evolved into a sophisticated form of antisemitism disguised as social justice. Dr. Jarrod Tanny argues that portrayals of Israel as powerful, conspiratorial, and globally harmful echo propaganda once deployed by both Nazi and Soviet regimes, now reframed in progressive terms.

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Dr. Jarrod Tanny is Professor of History and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Between 2008 and 2010 he was the Schusterman post-Doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Ohio University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, focusing on Russian and Jewish history. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he completed an M.A. at the University of Toronto and a B.A. at McGill University. 

His monograph, City of Rogues and Schnorrers (Indiana University Press, 2011), examines how the city of Odessa was mythologized as a Jewish city of sin, celebrated and vilified for its Jewish gangsters, pimps, bawdy musicians, and comedians. 

He is currently working on a larger study on Jewish humor in post-World War II America and its place within the larger context of the European Jewish past. This project has yielded multiple scholarly essays on Jewish comedy and popular culture.

Given his academic work on Jewish humor, Tanny just published a book titled The Seinfeld Talmud (Academica Press, 2023) a satiric take on the hit TV series, in which the great rabbis of the Talmudic era gather in the Yeshiva to discuss and debate the issues raised in each Seinfeld episode weighed against Judaic law. In 2025, he independently published a short semi-biographical set of stories titled Tales of a Yid in Dixieland: Bible Jokes, Southern Folks, and the Woke Who Shame the Jews.

He has also published numerous op-eds on antisemitism in The Forward, Tablet Magazine, The Times of Israel, The Jewish Journal, and The Jewish Review of Books.

Tanny’s growing alarm over the rise of antisemitism on college campuses and the seeming indifference of faculty led him to establish the Jewish Studies Zionist Network, an association for Jewish studies scholars who are pushing back against the demonization of Israel and its supporters in the academy.