Saying Things “Jewish” in the University After October 7: A Context for Understanding a Predicament

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.