Why don’t higher education researchers study antisemitism?

When we first began conducting research on antisemitism in higher education, we expected to find at least a small body of literature. We did not anticipate that scholarship on this topic, so prominent in public discourse over the past few years, including in relation to universities, would be almost invisible.

In early 2025, we searched the archives and databases of a range of flagship higher education journals, including six identified in bibliometric research as the top ones in the field. Yet across decades of scholarship, we found only one article with “antisemitism” in its title or abstract. Our search was not systematic but the result was nevertheless striking.

Across higher education systems globally, antisemitism has become a highly contested subject of media coverage, parliamentary inquiries and university policy debates. Surveys, inquiries and hearings have documented Jewish students’ and scholars’ fear, exclusion, disrupted study and weakened belonging.

Among others, a 2026 nationally representative UK survey of 1,000 students across 170 institutions found that 23 per cent had witnessed behaviour targeting Jewish students. A 2026 government-commissioned Canadian report found that 96 per cent of Jewish students had experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the previous year, while 72 per cent limited what they said in class about being Jewish. And Congressional questioning of university presidents in the US, alongside Senate, Parliamentary and Royal Commission inquiries in Australia, has fuelled fierce debate over what constitutes campus antisemitism and how universities should respond.

Although increasing politicisation in the past few years might have further discouraged scholarly engagement on antisemitism, it also makes rigorous research more urgent. Only robust evidence can move the discussion beyond contested polemics and diminish the threat of wider opinion being dictated by the loudest voices.

The more specific question is what kind of research is missing. We focus on a particularly notable part of the gap: research that examines antisemitism as a research problem in higher education. We ask how university governance, equity policies, curricula, academic cultures or approaches to academic freedom shape the experiences of Jewish students and staff – and institutions’ capacity to recognise and respond to it. Such research is needed to contextualise available evidence, compare experiences across institutions and evaluate institutional responses.

The persistence of this gap requires explanation. Part of that explanation could relate to the conventions of academic publishing. Journals expect submissions to anchor themselves in an established body of field-specific literature. Where that literature is thin, new submissions struggle to demonstrate how they extend an established scholarly conversation or make a contribution recognisable to the field. So there is something of a chicken-and-egg problem.

This aligns with a 2025 review of 50 years of leading higher education journals, which found that Jewish identity was typically reduced to religion, excluding Jewish experiences from critical conversations about identity, equity and inclusion.

Disciplinary siloing compounds the problem. Research on antisemitism is not absent; it has long been examined in adjacent fields, such as Jewish studies, Holocaust studies, religious studies and history. But these insights are most often published in specialised outlets, such as the Journal of Jewish Education and Antisemitism Studies. This limits opportunities for scholars to encounter, cite and build on that work.

The scarcity of research in the field of higher education is particularly consequential in controversial areas, such as determining the boundary between antisemitism and legitimate political expression. Political contestation, particularly around Israel and Palestine, may make some scholars and journals cautious, but contestation is a reason for more research, not less. Stronger theoretical and empirical work can support more consistent, evidence-based responses.

Filling this gap will require more than isolated studies. Higher education journals could encourage research through special issues or dedicated sections. A recent special issue of American Psychologist on antisemitism shows what can happen when a discipline deliberately brings researchers together around an underdeveloped area of inquiry.

Alongside such editorial initiatives, conceptual work is needed to establish how antisemitism can be investigated in the field. Our recent article in Higher Education Research and Development, one of the rare papers to address antisemitism explicitly in a mainstream higher education journal, takes a step in this direction. We propose a theory of change for addressing antisemitism in higher education that moves beyond reactive responses by identifying concrete pathways towards sustained, long-term impact. The theory also informs broader debates about how universities address discrimination.

Associations in the field can build this research infrastructure. Special interest groups could bring together scholars working at the intersection of antisemitism and the field of higher education’s established concerns, such as equity, academic freedom and university governance. This would foster the collaboration and mentoring needed to move this problem from isolated papers into a mainstream area of inquiry.

Antisemitism is already a major issue for universities; it is time for the field to recognise it as a serious subject of inquiry.

Mali Rezaei is a research fellow at Monash University, specialising in peace education and inclusion in higher education.

David Slucki is the Loti Smorgon chair of contemporary Jewish life and culture and director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at [!Monash University!].