Silver Spring, Md. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The true measure of a scholar is not the number of books they publish or the titles they hold. It is whether they speak when human beings are starved, bombed, and erased as a people. By that measure, some of America’s most visible academics have failed.
As Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza continues, major human rights organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), have documented atrocities: starvation wielded as a weapon, the systematic and deliberate destruction of nearly all hospitals and medical clinics, the flattening of all schools and community centers, and the bombing of shops, bakeries and aid convoys. Despite urgent pleas from the UN, which has described the current situation as “beyond horrific,” Israel continues to block lifesaving food and medicine from reaching the civilians of Gaza.
This is not “self-defense.” The Hamas that carried out the October 7, 2023 massacre ceased to exist long ago. In May 2024, Hamas agreed to a deal that would have secured a permanent ceasefire, the release of all Israeli captives, full withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the beginning of Gaza’s reconstruction. But Israel refused. President Biden and Vice President Harris, who could have forced compliance with the threat of a weapons embargo, instead cowered. The atrocities continued.
To call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “war” is a misnomer. What continues is an Israeli well-orchestrated and US-funded campaign to make the entire Gaza Strip unlivable – through bombardment, blockade, and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical care – so that Palestinians cannot survive as a people. Leading genocide scholars call it what it is: genocide.
And yet, the voices we would most expect to rise in outrage are silent.
Dean Barbara Krauthamer of Emory University, a historian of African American history and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, knows well that annihilation does not begin with gas chambers but with dehumanization, siege, and atrocities. Yet she has chosen silence while Palestinians are massacred even at “aid distribution centers” – where Israeli forces have already killed more than 1,800 starving, unarmed civilians as they tried to collect food.
Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, among the most influential voices in American legal academia, has likewise refused to condemn Israel’s crimes. In October 2024, even after more than 40,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—had already been murdered, he denied that Israel was committing genocide. To this day, he refuses to acknowledge Israel’s responsibility for the famine killing children and babies and the massacres at the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” sites. On the most urgent humanitarian crime of our time, his voice is absent.
And Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory University’s renowned Holocaust studies scholar who was appointed by President Biden in March 2022 as “U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism,” has also remained conspicuously silent. Throughout her career, she has invoked “Never Again” countless times. Yet when Israel deliberately starves children to death in Gaza, she says nothing.
When interviewed recently by Ezra Klein from the New York Times, she had only this to say: “Anger at Israel gives the antisemite a good excuse for ramping up their antisemitism.” She could have urged Israel to stop these crimes, to lift the deadly blockade, to allow the UN to feed 300,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition. She refused.
Their silence is not just a moral failure. It violates the very Jewish values they so often invoke. Jewish law is unequivocal: pikuach nefesh—saving a life—overrides almost everything else (Talmud Yoma 85b). Our sages teach: one who destroys a life, it is as if they have destroyed an entire world—and one who saves a life, it is as if they have saved an entire world.
To starve and kill civilians is not a moral gray zone; it is one of Judaism’s gravest violations (Maimonides, Laws of Murder and Preservation of Life 1:14). These crimes betray not only international law, but the Torah’s core ethics. What is unfolding in Gaza is a Chillul Hashem, a desecration of God’s name, of unimaginable proportions.
Judaism’s central prayer Shema Yisrael — “Hear O Israel!” (Deut. 6:4) which these scholars are most familiar with — is a command not merely to listen to God and obey Judaic rituals. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks teaches, it is a call “to listen to the silent cry of the lonely, the distressed, the afflicted, the poor, the needy, the neglected, the unheard.” Yet, for political or institutional reasons, these Jewish academics have shut their ears to the cries of Palestinian men, women and children being slaughtered daily.
Photo by Xavier Cee on Unsplash
Krauthamer, Chemerinsky, and Lipstadt are not obscure figures. They are among the most visible leaders in American academia—teachers of the next generation about integrity and justice. By remaining mute in the face of genocide they send a corrosive message to students across the US: that principles are optional, that morality bends to politics, that genocide can be met with polite indifference when the victims are Palestinians.
Their silence is not neutrality. It is complicity. It mocks the purpose of scholarship: to use knowledge to prevent suffering, to expose and correct injustice, to speak out when others remain silent. As Elie Wiesel warned,”Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
History will not forget this silence. Future generations will not care about the honors, the books, or the lectures. They will remember who spoke—and who turned away.
If American scholars refuse to raise their voices while thousands of human beings are being annihilated with U.S. weapons and support, then their scholarship is hollow. It is tainted with blood. They will be remembered not for their scholarship but for their silence and shame.
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