The last time around, when no one was looking, blue chip Jewish Studies colleagues and elite universities provided cover to the rightwing Tikvah Fund and its network of academic programs and online platforms. The plan then was to use university programs and Jewish Studies faculty to promote the larger project of the conservative fund, namely insinuating anti-liberal content into U.S. universities and the liberal American Jewish public. Most of these programs shut down after having spent out the capital given to them by the Fund, which had at the time $66,000,000 to spend down. The fund moved on to support the anti-democratic coup still underway in Israel.

The one and only reason the Tikvah Fund worked at the time was because they secured what was the unknowing cooperation of Jewish Studies faculty and university programs in creating an anti-liberal echo chamber. That was the plan, about which I wrote at the great but now defunct Zeek Magazine and about which I continued to write at the blog. The Tikvah Fund was an organized shell game. It pretended to be the one thing it was not, a free and open forum, not an ideological platform. A lot of us were attracted by the opportunity and attention and financial support and were simply duped by the idea of “Jewish ideas.” It has since become clear that Tivkah and the related Tablet Magazine were always what they are now, a front for the conservative Jewish right.

The news now, reported the JTA is that the National Endowment of Humanities canned funding for important and innovative research-projects in Jewish Studies while funneling some $10,000,000 to Tikvah in the name of combatting ant-Semitism, etc. The Tikvah Fund, supported by and supporting the Trump Administration assault on civil society, is now in direct competition with Jewish Studies. competition comes at a moment of political straitjacketing and intellectual-budgetary austerity on U.S. campuses. Jewish Studies programs are today under the hatchet by university bureaucrats. It remains unclear how Tikvah plans to spend the money allotted to them. Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen calls the grant from the NEH “an ambitious educational project” that answers “the perverse ideology of anti-Semitism with the enduring majesty of Jewish civilization.” “My answer to the critics: come learn with us,” he wrote to the JTA.

The NEH announcement makes reference to promoting “the best of humanities scholarship.” The funding will support “the creation of a Jewish civilization curriculum for middle and high school students, implemented through teacher training and school partnerships; an expanded fellowship program for high school students providing intensive seminars on Jewish civilization; development of university courses in the Jewish humanities, to be offered in partnership with new Western Civilization BA programs at various major academic centers; public programs on the problem of anti-Semitism and the significance of Jewish civilization; a series of scholarly books on the meaning of Jewish resilience in the history of the United States and the Western world; and a fellowship program for early-career journalists who seek to write about anti-Semitism and advance knowledge of Jewish history and culture.”

But who wants to come learn with Tikvah? Who are the scholars who are going to come train this new cadre of Tikvah fellows? Who will teach these new seminars and university courses in “Jewish Humanities” at a time when the Humanities are being throttled in the larger university ecosphere? What “major academic centers” will host MAGA based BA programs promoting Judeo-American exceptionalism? An indelicate and unpleasant onus falls on Jewish Studies faculty. Who will teach the classical texts and modern Jewish literature, art, and philosophy? Will the Tikvah Fund even plan this time around to go to Jewish Studies colleagues in what is now, clearly, a bald attempt to fold Jewish tradition and Jewish life into the new authoritarianism in the Age of Trump? It is hard to imagine they succeed in getting much traction the second time around, if that is, in fact, the idea.