Universities must reckon with their antisemitic past and present

At the university where I teach in Melbourne, I often picture a group of young men walking toward a lecture theatre, sitting in a campus café, or addressing a student assembly; and then imagine them wearing kippot. Can anyone guarantee they wouldn’t receive even a strange stare, let alone harassment, social exclusion, or students turning their backs on them when they speak? Universities have seen a rise in antisemitism, expressed in different ways but in line with and echoing the escalation of violence and Jew-hatred seen more broadly in society, that culminated in the horrific Bondi beach Islamist terrorist attack and the earlier attacks on synagogues, schools, shops and restaurants.
As a former student and academic, I’ve walked on campuses that share an unsettling silence. It took me years to fully understand the depth of this silence and the weight of this history. The cemetery was not just erased; its gravestones were repurposed for footpaths, walls, and university buildings, its memory buried along with those it once honoured. This was not unique to Thessalonica. But the scale was staggering. Before the Holocaust, Thessalonica’s Jewish population was one of the most vibrant in Europe, nearly wiped out in a matter of months.
That physical erasure of Jewish lives and memory is echoed today across many Australian universities, by a different kind of violence: denial and distortion. Physical obliteration has become rhetorical distortion. Some of this is born not by malice but of ignorance. Historical illiteracy, political shallowness, and even basic geographic confusion are widespread, making antisemitism easier to mask and harder to name. Some, however, is driven by a profound lack of historical and moral clarity. The moral clarity once expected in academia is now blurred, and in some cases, inverted and possibly incentivised. In today’s academic environment, there are professional rewards for activism (relevance, visibility, status, and funding), especially when it parrots dominant narratives disguised as scholarship.
In Greek, the word “to distort” is διαβάλλω (diavallo) from which we derive Diavolos, the Devil. The Distorter. What better metaphor for what we see now? Facts twisted into weapons. History ignored or reinvented. And a growing population of students and academics with no historical anchor to interpret the present, especially events like those of October 7. Some academics prefer to ride the wave of dominant narratives than to interrogate them. Activism masked as research offers moral high ground with little to no scrutiny. It feels radical, but follows the crowd in the most conformist way possible. It helps normalise distortion by repetition and justify violence.
The stories we bury become the foundations of the institutions we build. And if we do not speak of them, they will shape us anyway, in silence, through fear, and through repetition. Universities, historically seen as beacons of truth and light in the community, have a duty to confront their complicity, both historical and current, in exclusion, silence, and violence.