Saying Things “Jewish” in the University After October 7: A Context for Understanding a Predicament
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Abstract
Particularly in the post-October 7 period, the use of the word or utterance “Jew,” or “Jewish,” is (once more) a pertinent example for understanding conflict, geopolitics, and the relation between religion and politics. Based on my ongoing ethnographic work, which explores how this is experienced in the Greek university world, I provide here a mode of understanding dominant ideological and/or intellectual origins of people’s stances in the academic workplace when they use, or encounter, the “Jewish” signifier. I do not provide ethnographic material as much as I provide a context for understanding the ethnography of a specific academic–intellectual universe. As a particular public sphere, the academic workplace has its own attitudes and strategies for handling ideological and politico-philosophical differences within itself. This condition, I suggest, can accommodate a felt predicament among interlocutors, colleagues, and other interrelated actors, as has been the case particularly during the last couple of years. The conflict in the Middle East brings the geopolitical into the classroom and onto campus in ways that may reconfigure and unsettle power relations and sentiment in the community. I trace the origins of this predicament through a synoptic genealogical trajectory from the 1960s to the present.
Topics
Antisemitism: In Education Systems Ethnography Main Topic: Antisemitism Universities / Higher Education October 7 2023 attacks + aftermath Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Conflict and Controversy
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Geographic Coverage
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This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Volume/Issue
16
Page Number / Article Number
1101
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Bibliographic Information
Saying Things “Jewish” in the University After October 7: A Context for Understanding a Predicament. 2025: 1101. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.3390/rel16091101
