The turmoil began with the abrupt replacement of the department’s longtime director, continued with a clash between the new director and an ardently pro-Palestinian graduate student, and culminated last week with a statement of support for the new director from the college’s dean.

The conflict, first reported by the student newspaper, began in August, when the longtime director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Mark Roseman, unexpectedly stepped down a year before his term ended. Roseman said he was told, without explanation, that IU’s newly installed chancellor, David Reingold, sought to replace him.

Günther Jikeli, a scholar of antisemitism and associate director of IU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, stepped into the role.

Soon after taking over, Jikeli clashed with graduate student Sabina Ali, who identifies as Jewish and supports the Palestinian cause. He expelled her from a Zoom seminar for displaying a “Free Palestine” image and later denied her travel funding to present a paper critical of “Jewish indigeneity” claims related to Israel. Jikeli said her work was “political activism, not scholarship.”

Many of the Borns Jewish Studies faculty and graduate students have publicly sided against Jikeli, fearing that his actions will threaten academic freedom and damage the reputation of one of the oldest and most storied Jewish studies programs in the country.

“We used to have a Jewish studies program where we knew we had political differences, but we had really great academic working relationships,” said Sarah Imhoff, a tenured professor who has been at IU for 16 years. “And that has significantly deteriorated.”

At the same time, dozens of faculty at universities around the world, most of them in Jewish studies, have signed a letter to the dean supporting Jikeli. They wrote that he was “facing an entirely unwarranted political assault on his professional integrity and judgment.”

“What Professor Jikeli is trying to do is restore rigor and objectivity in the department,” Allon Friedman, a medical school professor on IU’s Indianapolis campus and leader of multiple pro-Israel advocacy groups in the state, told JTA.

Friedman continued, “We’ve seen over the last few decades a real deterioration — not only the quality of scholarship in Jewish Studies in particular, but also an injection of politics that is oftentimes anti-Israel, if not overtly antisemitic. That’s what we’re seeing here.”

Jikeli, who is not Jewish, declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for this story. Representatives for IU and the dean’s office did not return repeated requests for comment.

Jikeli’s appointment in August came as a surprise to Roseman, who directed Jewish Studies at IU from 2013 to 2020 before reassuming the position last year. Roseman, who unlike Jikeli is Jewish, told JTA he stepped down after Jikeli told him that Reingold, who was named chancellor in June, had privately offered the director role to him.

This was considered a highly unusual arrangement for an academic program, where directors are not typically forced out before the end of their term and any replacements would typically be vetted by committee.

“I was surprised by it, obviously. It didn’t make sense to me to continue not having the confidence of the campus leadership,” Roseman said. He added that, in his eyes, “the program operated very harmoniously.” He remains affiliated with the program as a tenured faculty.

Jikeli told the Indiana Daily Student that he, too, was given no reason for the leadership change. Seemingly no one in the program was. At a meeting with Rick Van Kooten, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Jewish studies faculty asked why their director was being replaced now.

“I can’t tell you that,” the dean responded, according to multiple accounts of the meeting.

[…]

Before the leadership change, Ali’s politics encountered little pushback within Jewish studies — although some faculty and students had expressed discomfort behind closed doors. But under Jikeli, it quickly became an issue.

Her Zoom picture became a sticking point in September when it was visible during a program event, as Imhoff prepared to present her own latest research to colleagues. According to those in attendance at the Zoom lecture, Jikeli ordered Ali to remove the pro-Palestinian image or he’d kick her off the call. When she refused, he booted her — prompting a mass exodus from nearly all of her colleagues, who reconvened in a separate Zoom meeting, sans Jikeli, to discuss the research.

The incident infuriated many on campus who viewed Jikeli’s actions as a violation of academic freedom, with one professor calling his behavior “autocratic.”

In an email obtained by JTA, Ali wrote, “The irony is not lost on me that I — a Jewish student — was excluded from a Jewish Studies event for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, while you, a ‘scholar’ of antisemitism, used your authority to decide what kinds of Jewish expression are acceptable.”