Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?

Meanwhile, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)—the oldest academic association for scholars of genocide, which had previously condemned human rights crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Myanmar’s attacks on the Rohingya people—appeared to have nothing to say in any direction. Though the organization was founded with aspirations to prevent genocide, not just study it, it has not issued any statements related to Israel or Gaza since October 7th, 2023. In that time, the IAGS website has only addressed the region once, in a policy brief by Sara E. Brown, who holds a PhD in comparative genocide studies and now runs the San Diego office of the American Jewish Committee, describing Hamas’s actions as “genocidal”; the site has not published any briefs on Israel’s actions in Gaza. Melanie O’Brien, the current IAGS president, told me in July that it “baffles” her that no one in the organization has proposed a resolution on Israel or Gaza, and that perhaps members feared not being able to garner a majority vote. She also speculated that academics might fear professional consequences for speaking up. In the current environment, it’s a credible anxiety: In June, Segal received an offer to become the new director of the Holocaust and genocide studies center at the University of Minnesota, only to have it unilaterally rescinded by the interim president, under pressure from local Jewish groups. And this past summer, a foundation ended its funding and withdrew its name from the Holocaust and genocide studies center at Ramapo College, a small public school in New Jersey, after they deemed its director’s actions insufficiently supportive of Israel.

As their institutions have flailed in addressing the relentless Israeli assault on Gaza, and their colleagues have split into irreconcilable camps over whether to describe it as genocide, many scholars have diagnosed a “crisis” in the field of genocide studies. For some, the contradictions inherent in studying genocide from within institutions silent on or even supportive of it have become untenable. In June, Israeli Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov resigned from the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies, the journal attached to the major Holocaust museum, where he had served for two decades. For editors of a Holocaust journal “to act as if the . . . extraordinary carnage by Israeli troops, including the killing and maiming of thousands of children, is either none of its business or perfectly justified will leave a stain on the journal and on Yad Vashem for generations to come,” he wrote in his resignation letter to the editorial board.

Genocide studies has been beset by deep contradictions since its founding four decades ago. The field owes its existence to a surge of Holocaust scholarship, which inspired academics to expand their research to other genocides, but also constrained their ability to recognize them as such. Many of the specific circumstances of the Holocaust were transformed into standards for the act of genocide in general, with researchers assuming that annihilatory intentions must be spelled out, as in Hitler’s Final Solution, and victims must be unarmed, like most European Jews. Today, while many academic centers use the phrase “Holocaust and genocide studies” to describe their focus, the relationship between “Holocaust studies” and “genocide studies” remains vexed, with scholars locked in debate about whether to measure other instances of mass violence by their likeness to the case study that launched the field. “Some say that ‘Holocaust and genocide studies’ is like saying ‘cucumber and vegetable studies.’ The cucumber is a vegetable, so why would we give it a privileged, separate treatment from the rest of all the vegetables?” said Uğur Ümit Üngör, a historian at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. Those who hold this view have been more likely to push for the field to include the study of colonial genocides and to see the Western-led international order as an agent of, not just a bystander to, genocidal violence. Their work has helped expand the concept of genocide to apply in varied international and historical contexts, even as international law has lagged behind and the crime of crimes has become ever more difficult to prove and prosecute.

Now these simmering tensions in the field—crystallized within competing academic associations and journals—have burst into public view in disparate responses to the aftermath of October 7th. “Conservative Holocaust scholars tend to argue that Hamas demonstrates antisemitism reminiscient of that of the Nazis, while many genocide scholars see Israel as perpetrating a genocide, the crime of crimes associated in everyone’s mind with the Nazis,” said Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The former camp has more support from donors, administrators, local politicians, and the Jewish organizations that have played a significant role in building the field; as a result, academics like Segal who apply their analysis of genocide to Israel’s actions have sometimes found themselves marginalized or embattled at institutions with ostensible commitments to genocide prevention. “Raz [Segal] presents a perfectly serious and sober analysis of why Israeli state actions in Gaza constitute genocide. Yet it triggers anger, fear, and rage—all of it centered around the role of Israel. It seems to me that’s a problem in the field, if we cannot take our analyses and apply them without fear or favor,” said Debórah Dwork, a historian who founded the Strassler Center for Holocauset and Genocide Studies at Clark University, where she once suprvised Segal. Indeed, some fear that the field’s tendency to exceptionalize Israel will render it impotent—or worse. “What’s the point of this field?” said A. Dirk Moses, a historian who serves as senior editor at the Journal of Genocide Resesarch. “Is it, in fact, enabling the mass killing of Palestinians in the name of self-defense and genocide prevention? If that’s the case, then the field is dead—not only incoherent, but complicit in mass killing.”

Genocide studies started, quite literally, with a dream. In the 1960s, a Jewish American psychologist named Israel Charny went to bed after passing a licensing exam and had a graphic dream about Nazis throwing Jewish children against a wall, “their brains splattering all over.” Charny, now in his nineties and living near Jerusalem, took this as a sign. “What the dream said to me was, ‘My God, you’re now a specialist in human behavior. You need to understand how and why people do things, and you don’t know a goddamn thing about how and why they did the Holocaust,” he told me. He resolved to devote his life to studying the Holocaust and other genocides.

At the time, the concept of “genocide,” broadly defined as certain acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” had received little academic attention since it was introduced by the Polish Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin in 1944 and codified by the United Nations in the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Cold War international order’s bipolar split prevented any common effort to investigate and prosecute genocide, while the Holocaust itself had not yet been established as a central historical touchstone in the Western narrative. But the 1970s saw the rise of Holocaust memory, aided by the explosive popularity of the 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, and prompting a 1979 US presidential commission recommending a Holocaust museum on the National Mall. For scholars like Charny—many of them Jewish political scientists or sociologists with personal connections to the Holocaust—it was an opportunity to think about what links might be drawn between the Holocaust and other instances of mass racialized violence. They found common cause with scholars in the Armenian diaspora seeking to expand awareness of the Armenian genocide, and set out to create opportunities to study the concept of genocide together.

Their early efforts encountered significant political opposition. In 1982, Charny sought to co-organize one of the first international conferences on the study of the Holocaust and genocide. True to his cohort’s political leanings, it would be hosted in Israel, with the Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel acting as conference president. Charny told me that when he relayed the plan to Israeli politician Gideon Hausner, best known as the chief prosecutor in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hausner threatened to call the Knesset police and have him arrested: “How dare you speak of other genocides along with the Holocaust,” Hausner reportedly said. A similar sentiment reigned at the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, which backed out of the conference. Meanwhile, Turkey got wind of planned sessions about the Armenian genocide and pressured the Israeli government to shut down the event; government officials tried to oblige, calling participants and urging them not to come. Wiesel pulled out when the Israeli government told him that Turkey was threatening reprisals against Turkish Jews if the conference went forward—a claim later revealed to be false. But Charny refused to buckle to pressure, and the conference went forward in Tel Aviv.

The field grew over the next decade, and Charny and three other scholars officially formed the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) in 1994. They came together just as the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides reintroduced the concept into Western public consciousness. If liberal democracies had been feeling optimistic about the world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and comfortable memorializing the Nazis as long-ago vanquished foes, witnessing two contemporary genocides was destabilizing. For IAGS scholars, the moment underlined their conviction that their organization ought to be dedicated to genocide prevention, not just scholarship. In keeping with the legacy of the Allied Powers’ defeat of Nazi Germany, their image of prevention relied on muscular intervention by the United States and other Western liberal democracies. This approach was most famously espoused by the journalist Samantha Power, later a United Nations ambassador under Barack Obama, whose 2002 book A Problem From Hell surveyed the limp American response to multiple 20th-century genocides and posited that in cases like Bosnia, the US could have saved lives by following through on threats to intervene militarily. Power’s book received the top prize from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, the first US-based genocide studies institute, whose leadership at the time overlapped with IAGS’s. For the parts of the field that saw Power’s book as a touchstone, the hope was that scholarship could support the international norms she had advanced by providing policymakers with information about warning signs of genocide and strategies for intervention.

But for many emerging Gen X scholars interested in genocide, this orientation was unsatisfying. They had entered academia during the rise of postcolonial studies and took a particular interest in Indigenous genocides perpetrated by the very same states—the US, Australia—that were now being called upon to practice prevention. The Samantha Power model seemed particularly dissonant amid America’s bloody invasion of Iraq, which underscored how US intervention was likely to become its own driver of humanitarian catastrophe. As Jessica Whyte, a professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, wrote in a recent article for the Journal of Genocide Research, Power’s paradigm “always distorted the role of the US by assuming it was necessarily a reluctant liberator rather than an active agent of genocidal or mass violence.”

Jürgen Zimmerer, a historian of German colonial history, was among a group of academics turned off by IAGS’s apparent investment in Western power. “We said, ‘Your model assumes the world system is working, and those who commit genocide are an aberration of the system,’” he recalled. “But what if this world system is itself the root cause of genocide?” Indeed, as the writer Linda Kinstler recounted recently in The New York Times Magazine, the international order has long been shaped by powerful states hoping to insulate themselves from accountability: The language of the Genocide Convention itself was massaged by Soviet UN delegates seeking to avoid scrutiny for mass killings of domestic political opponents, and by Americans worried about being held liable for rampant lynching and Jim Crow. In 2005, Zimmerer organized a conference drawing attention to the 1904–8 German colonial genocide of Herero and Nama people in Namibia. A group of attendees decided to create an alternate genocide studies association for scholars with a more critical postcolonial approach, the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGs), of which Zimmerer became the founding president.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, these fissures in the field became especially pronounced whenever scholars turned their attention to Israel and Palestine. Many of the field’s founders were liberal Zionists who saw Israel as a country of perpetual Holocaust victims and an extension of the moral Western order. Attacks on Israel, literal or figurative, were therefore interpreted as potential harbingers of genocide. In 2005, when then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech in which he purportedly called for Israel “to be wiped off the map” (the translation is disputed) and then engaged in Holocaust denial soon after, IAGS issued a statement arguing that, given Iran’s nuclear weapons program, his remarks constituted a threat of genocide. But when an Israeli deputy warned in 2008 that Palestinians risked bringing a “Shoah” upon themselves if Hamas continued to fire rockets—roughly a year before Israel launched a deadly ground invasion of Gaza—IAGS stayed quiet. For some scholars, the double standard was jarring. “If IAGS is going to set itself up to pronounce on each episode . . . in which questions of genocide arise, then it cannot appear to be partisan, as it has over recent events,” Martin Shaw, a British sociologist who would author several mid-2000s volumes on the definition of genocide, wrote at the time in a letter to the IAGS listserv, later published on his blog.

INoGs members, on the other hand, drew connections between their research on colonial and settler colonial societies and Israel’s expulsion and subsequent occupation of Palestinians. In 2006, the Journal of Genocide Research published “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” a seminal essay by the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, in which he cites Israel as an example of a settler colonial society exhibiting warning signs for a potential genocide of Palestinians. In 2010, the journal hosted a written exchange between Shaw and Bartov, the Israeli Holocaust scholar, over whether the Nakba, Israel’s expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians in the process of founding the state in 1948, could be defined as a genocide. In response to Shaw’s contention that it could, Charny told The Forward that INoGs’s scholars were “slowly but surely, insidiously, under a smokescreen of their good English manners and their supposedly dispassionate point of view, becoming a hotbed of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish sentiment.”

This response from a founder of the field may capture why it has long struggled to attract Palestinian scholars. “How many Palestinian students apply to graduate programmes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies around the world? Usually none. How many Palestinian scholars identify themselves as scholars in this field? They, too, can be counted on one hand,” Segal wrote in a co-authored article in the Journal of Genocide Research this past March. Honaida Ghanim, director of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies in Ramallah, pointed out that the field’s origin in Holocaust studies has intertwined it with the State of Israel from its early days and ensured its popularity among Israeli academics, making it appear to Palestinians as the province of their oppressors. The founders of genocide studies seemed committed to the ethos of never again for anybody—“except for the Palestinians,” Ghanim said. “Palestinians are the exception of almost everything.”

By now, some of the early divides in genocide studies have faded. IAGS’s founding generation has mostly retired, and their successors, whose careers were forged in the shadow of the War on Terror, are more skeptical of US military intervention. But the fault lines over Israel remain. Nowhere is the rift between “Holocaust studies” and “genocide studies” more evident today than at the University of Southern California (USC), which is home to two genocide institutions: the Shoah Foundation, an organization founded three decades ago by Steven Spielberg to record Holocaust survivor testimony, and the Center for Advanced Genocide Research (CAGR), conceived as the Shoah Foundation’s academic research arm in 2014. The Shoah Foundation long ago expanded beyond Holocaust testimony, recording the experiences of survivors of other genocides and mass atrocities, including the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and the Guatemalan genocide. But in recent years, according to a piece in the conservative Jewish News Syndicate, “private donors had reportedly sought . . . a shift from an earlier, more general focus on genocide” to a “renewed focus on the Holocaust and antisemitism.” In 2022, the foundation hired as its new executive director Robert J. Williams, a historian and US delegate to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the body responsible for a 2016 definition of antisemitism that has been used globally to repress pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist speech. CAGR, meanwhile, is run by the Holocaust historian Wolf Gruner, a signatory of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, an alternate definition of antisemitism intended to counter the IHRA. The center separated from the Shoah Foundation in 2021 to become an independent university institute, though the vast archive of Shoah Foundation testimonies remains a cornerstone of its fellowships and coursework, which promote research on a wide variety of instances of genocidal violence. “The Shoah Foundation leadership developed other priorities than supporting its academic research center. Let me just say that,” said Gruner.

After October 7th, the Shoah Foundation immediately announced that it would collect testimonies from the survivors of the Hamas attacks. A short-term employee of the foundation, who asked for anonymity to avoid professional consequences, told me they did not observe any discussion about Gaza at the foundation, even as scholars in the field began publicly raising the alarm about genocide. In an interview with CNN, Williams said October 7th was an “act of antisemitism” that put the taking of testimonies “squarely within our mission,” but acknowledged that the foundation would not be documenting the experiences of Palestinians in Gaza, implying that it did not see such work as part of that mandate.

That spring, USC canceled the commencement speech of its valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a Muslim American student who had linked to a pro-Palestine slideshow on her Instagram, following a pressure campaign by pro-Israel groups. Tabassum noted in a statement that she was a “student of history who chose to minor in resistance to genocide, anchored by the Shoah Foundation.” Indeed, the minor, which is advised by Gruner, includes several classes that make use of Shoah Foundation research materials. Gruner wrote to the school paper to vouch for Tabassum: “I am appalled that you seem to have fallen for a campaign which conflates antisemitism with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views for political purposes,” he said, addressing university leadership. The Shoah Foundation, meanwhile, spoke up only to distance itself from Tabassum: “Recent claims of association with the USC Shoah Foundation are inaccurate and have led to confusion about our role, values, and mission,” the foundation said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We must ensure [Holocaust] history is not distorted or used to dehumanize anyone, including the Jewish people and those living in the State of Israel.” Gruner told me he “can’t really fathom” why an organization founded to counter hate would publicly back away from an undergraduate student facing false antisemitism accusations “rather than defend her.” (The Shoah Foundation declined to make Williams available for an interview and did not respond to detailed requests for comment.)

The field’s breach over Israel has also turned on another longstanding ideological tension: Can atrocities committed in the course of military conflicts be considered genocidal? While many scholars argue that the majority of genocides have in fact occurred during wartime, others have contested the crime’s relevance to these cases. In the field-defining 1981 book Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, South African Jewish sociologist and apartheid opponent Leo Kuper described events ranging from the French massacres of Algerians during colonial occupation to the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as genocidal in nature. In a review in The New York Times, Telford Taylor, an American lawyer who had served as lead counsel in a number of Nuremberg prosecutions, was skeptical: Events like Hiroshima and the Allied bombing of Hamburg were “wartime actions,” he wrote, which meant that they were not committed with an “intent to destroy” a particular group. “Berlin, London and Tokyo were not bombed because their inhabitants were German, English or Japanese, but because they were enemy strongholds,” he wrote.

Moses, of the Journal of Genocide Resesarch, argues that these deep-seated dynamics are partially responsible for the field’s paralysis over Gaza, as Israel and its supporters in the academy claim that its goal is not the destruction of Palestinian life but the military defeat of Hamas. “These are actually combat operations aimed at taking out military targets,” said Norman J. W. Goda, a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida, on the Quillette podcast in February 2024. “[It] certainly cannot be shown right now that these are operations aimed at killing civilians as such.” Moses believes such arguments are clearly refuted by revelations from +972 Magazine that Israel is using an artificial intelligence system to track when Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members are at home with their civilian families and neighbors so that Israeli forces can bomb them there. “It’s not unintentional, and it’s not even collateral, it’s calculated,” he said. “And when you marry that with the public statements of Israeli leaders, then it’s impossible to ignore that there’s a fusion of military and genocidal logics.” And yet, Moses disagrees with Segal’s assessment that Gaza is a “textbook case” of genocide, precisely because of the military pretense. “The Holocaust is the textbook case of genocide, right?” he said. “The case we’re dealing with now is a limit case”—and, Moses said, is poised to challenge the existing assumptions of the international order and the field of genocide studies.

But if ongoing fights over Israel and Palestine could spell the end of certain orthodoxies, some fear they could also spark a backlash that will ultimately reentrench them. Hebrew University’s Goldberg raised concerns about the renewed focus on “genocidal intent,” a key metric within international law as well as academic discussion; at the ICJ, Israel claimed that statements by government ministers painting every civilian in Gaza as the enemy should be considered “rhetorical, made in the immediate aftermath of an event which severely traumatized Israel,” and not an expression of wartime policy. To Goldberg, the interpretation of intent that requires a clear plan of annihilation as a smoking gun appears fundamentally conservative, at odds with the cutting edge of genocide studies. In a recent piece in the Journal of Genocide Research, he writes that even the latest scholarship on the Holocaust has rejected such frameworks, citing the research of the Holocaust scholar Alon Confino, who argued that instances of mass violence “develop within a political atmosphere and imagination . . . in which there is no room for the ‘other.’” If this political imagination of exclusion holds significant cultural force, “it need not have an articulate ideology or even a detailed plan” to create the conditions for genocide. For Goldberg, Israeli society’s widespread embrace since October 7th of “the idea that Gaza must be completely destroyed” clearly demonstrates the solidification of such an imagination. He fears that, by splitting hairs about intent, Israel’s defenders may be thwarting the field’s progress toward more complex understandings of genocide: “We might be going back to a very ‘intentionalist’ genocide definition, although we don’t even understand the Holocaust like that anymore,” he told me. “It’s so limiting, it’s so artificial, and it betrays the reality of state mass violence.”

Since the establishment of the Genocide Convention, international bodies have frequently aligned with this more conservative approach. In 2007, in the only instance in which the ICJ returned an official finding of genocide, the body ruled on Serbia’s killing of an estimated 100,000 civilians during the Bosnian War, resolving that only in one specific instance—the 1995 Srebrenica massacre—could the actions of the Bosnian Serb forces be said to have targeted Bosnian Muslims as such, and therefore be defined as genocidal. In The New York Times Magazine, Kinstler wrote that the ruling, by deeming only a tiny fraction of the killing to be genocidal, “reinforced the status of ‘genocide’ as a somewhat inscrutable and unimaginable crime, underscoring the gravity of the offense while establishing such a high bar for genocidal intent that it would become virtually impossible to hold states responsible.” A result, paradoxically, is that a focus on genocide can end up facilitating, rather than preventing, mass violence. In 2005, for example, a special UN commission of inquiry released a report describing horrific and rampant violence against civilians by Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militias in Darfur, but attributing it to “counter-insurgency warfare,” precluding the genocide classification. Newspapers around the world ran headlines like “UN Panel Sees No Genocide in Darfur” and “Report on Darfur Says Genocide Did Not Occur,” creating the impression that Sudan had been exonerated, and sapping some of the popular and institutional energy for stopping the violence. Some scholars fear a similar situation with respect to Israel and Gaza: Because “the current precedent is extremely restricted,” Moses told me, he doesn’t believe the ICJ will rule that Israel is committing genocide. Such a result could both impede Palestinian attempts to seek justice and diminish the credibility of international legal institutions. “The current debate is whether the Genocide Convention is at all relevant to what’s happening in the world, or if it will be a dead letter,” said Sultany. “Is the Genocide Convention merely a historic document, denouncing the past, rather than a legal document that can potentially protect civilian populations from mass slaughter in the present?”

Given the Convention’s failure so far at achieving the latter, Moses, for his part, is skeptical that the word “genocide” can ever transcend the narrow legal interpretation. He has recommended replacing it with the concept of “permanent security,” which he describes in his much-discussed 2021 book The Problems of Genocide as “a praxis in which . . . civilians are targeted collectively and preventatively as security threats.” He argues that this framework captures more of the violence commonly practiced by powerful states, including “missile and drone strikes, blockades, and sanctions.” “Clearly, the deliberate destruction of a people is a terrible crime; but why is it worse than the foreseeable destruction of many people?” he writes. Still, some scholars who share Moses’s general orientation remain convinced of the usefulness of the genocide category. The lawyer and anthropologist Darryl Li wrote in Dissent in January 2024 that he finds it counter-productive to problematize the notion of genocide at the exact moment when Global South and anticolonial movements have laid claim to it, demanding in mass protests and the ICJ case that the Genocide Convention protect them as well. By charging genocide, Palestinians and their allies are “democratizing [the term’s] power,” he argued, “extricating genocide from a desiccated legalism that serves the status quo and injecting it with an explicitly anticolonial politics.”

Indeed, it may be an indication of the stakes of the moment that Moses has continued to argue that Israel is committing genocide even as he casts doubt on the term’s value. However much he wants to unpack the term’s problems, “we’re stuck with the concept,” he told me. It’s a challenging dynamic, in which the need to unpack the fraught history of the legal classification threatens to trap scholars in minutiae. Ghanim, for her part, said she has found the debate over the past year somewhat alienating: “I can understand the theoretical engagement, but when this is something you are witnessing now, whatever you call it, I don’t care,” she said. “Whether it’s genocide or war crimes, that’s not the issue. The issue is how to stop it.”

Since October 7th, these debates have taken place against a backdrop of McCarthyist censorship within the academy, where faculty expressing pro-Palestine views have been fired, doxxed, and subjected to disciplinary processes. These dynamics can be especially acute within Holocaust and genocide studies centers because of their affiliation with local Jewish communities, which often participate heavily in the centers’ public programming and make up a significant portion of the donor base. Segal confronted such a scenario last June, when a hiring committee at the University of Minnesota selected him to be the next director of the school’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. His appearance on campus for a job talk had already caused some controversy because of his public accusations of genocide against Israel; the daughter of the professor who had founded the center was concerned about him being a finalist, The Chronicle of Higher Education later reported. But the search director told The Chronicle that the scholars tasked with picking a candidate had been impressed with Segal’s work engaging with Jewish, Armenian, and Indigenous community groups in his role at Stockton University.

The storm began as soon as the center’s interim director announced to the advisory board on June 7th that Segal had been given the offer, according to public records obtained by Jewish Currents. Two professors who were members of the board immediately resigned in protest; one of them, who had cited Segal’s “extreme” views in a resignation email, informed her husband, a law professor, who went on to tweet about their complaints. The posts prompted the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Minnesota and the Dakotas, the major local Jewish advocacy group, to blast the news to its email list two days later, encouraging the community to lobby the university’s interim president, Jeffrey Ettinger, to rescind the job offer. The administration received hundreds of emails, and donors sent ominous warnings: “If this appointment stands, it will almost certainly make fundraising for this Center, [sic] grind to a halt,” Lynne Redleaf, a member of the board of trustees who runs a large family foundation, wrote to Ettinger. Many letters emphasized that it would be okay for Segal to join the history faculty, but that it would be inappropriate for someone with strong pro-Palestine views to lead a center that worked on the Holocaust and collaborated closely with the Jewish community. “There was this anxiety that I—an Israeli Jew, a scholar of the Holocaust, with Holocaust survivors in my family on both sides—am somehow a threat to the study of the Holocaust,” Segal told me.

At first, the university defended Segal’s hiring, but Ettinger appeared to find the backlash persuasive. He forwarded the complaint from Redleaf to Rebecca Cunningham, who was soon to take office as the new president. “Another one, from a VERY reasonable and supportive person,” he wrote. On June 10th, Ettinger’s office informed the press that it was pausing the hiring process to allow “additional members of the University community” to give their opinions. The same day, the president wrote to Segal that his offer had been rescinded. This spurred protests from the hiring committee, local progressive Jewish alumni and organizations, and representatives from the faculty senate, but Ettinger stood firm. The university said it still planned to offer Segal a position on the history faculty, but, more than six months later, Segal says he has not received one.

Similar developments have emerged elsewhere. In 2022, Jacob Labendz, a historian of 20th century Central European Jewry, was hired to direct the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Ramapo College in New Jersey; the center was named for the family foundation that had become its primary funders in 2014. This past spring, someone began anonymously circulating a 39-page dossier about Labendz featuring screenshots of several of his tweets, including one from October 7th in which he criticized those “dehumanizing Palestinians and Hamas fighters” as well as those “dehumanizing Israeli civilians,” writing that “dehumanization is the seedbed of genocide and ethnic war.” As a result, the local Jewish Federation and JCC canceled joint programming with the Gross Center, and the Gross family complained to the college president. An investigation by the college cleared Labendz of all wrongdoing, affirming his freedom of personal speech, but the Gross family continued to call for his firing: “We don’t want anything to do with the center as long as Jacob Labendz is running it,” Lauren Gross, the daughter of the funders, told the local Jewish Link at the time. “Frankly, it is better that [the center] gets shut down because a Holocaust center should not be made to showcase Palestinian and Islamic professors criticizing Israel.”

Ultimately, in the summer, the “long-standing collaboration between Ramapo and the Gross Foundation came to a mutual close,” according to Ramapo spokesperson Brittany Williams-Goldstein, and the center dropped the donor’s name. Lauren Gross confirmed the end of the relationship: “We said, ‘If you’re not going to remove him, we will no longer pay one penny for a Holocaust and genocide center with a director that is claiming in public spaces that Israel is committing a genocide,” she told me. “It was a blight on our name.” The financial commitment for the year had already been paid, she said, but there would be no future funding. Labendz is now trying to build a broader base of donors. While the center’s survival is secure, he said that situations like his show how the interests of the field of Holocaust and genocide studies have diverged from the priorities of some of its Jewish supporters. The Jewish community remains an important base, he said, but so do other communities affected by genocide. “It’s really a difficult tension,” said Frances Tanzer, a Holocaust historian and director of graduate study at Clark’s Strassler Center, “because there’s a duty to public engagement and there’s also a duty to advancing a field of scholarship, which might not mean supporting an affirmative sense of communal belonging.” (The Strassler Center has faced its own tensions: In April, a longtime administrator at the center announced her resignation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed after grad students objected to her introducing a talk by an Israeli soldier at another local university, raising concerns that she had been presenting her pro-Israel views as representative of the center.)

At both Clark and Ramapo, university leadership ultimately backed their scholars and students, refusing to intervene in the centers’ affairs despite outside pressure—but cases like Segal’s cast a worrisome shadow. In general, Goldberg warns that even as genocide scholars shift toward work “which can be much more critical of Zionism and colonialism,” their institutions are “leaning more conservative” in the face of heightened donor scrutiny and Israel advocacy. Abdelwahab El-Affendi, a scholar of genocide studies and president of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, lamented the trend toward repression: “If we have the key universities in the world sacking their teachers for writing things which are critical of genocide, then I think genocide studies will become pointless,” he said.