A Jewish Studies Purge at UC-Irvine?

There's a brewing controversy bubbling up at UC-Irvine, where Jewish students are protesting the decision to terminate the contract of a popular lecturer who had been teaching a class on Jewish Texts under the auspices of the campus' Center for Jewish Studies. The lecturer, Daniel Levine, is a Rabbi affiliated with the campus Hillel chapter. There are two open letters currently circulating in support of Levine and condemning his termination, you can read them here and here.

There are a lot of moving parts here, and situations like this almost always have lots of little nooks and nuances that can be hard for an outsider like myself to spot. But here's my best attempt to summarize what appears to be going on.

The Center for Jewish Studies is not an independent department at Irvine. It is run as a minor out of Irvine's humanities division and is specifically overseen by the Department of History. Levine is not a permanent member of the faculty, but he was by all accounts a popular teacher who was well-liked and respected by the campus' Jewish community. The official rationale for his non-renewal is that two new tenure-track hires with interests in Jewish Studies mean that his course can be taken over by permanent faculty members, offered every other year. The Jewish students counter that the new faculty members' specific subject-matter expertise does not seem tailored to the Jewish Texts course; further, they believe that Rabbi Levine would have been able to maintain teaching the class on a yearly (rather than biannual) basis.

But there's a bigger issue lurking. Among the demands of UC-Irvine pro-Palestine protesters has been for the university to cut ties with "Zionist" organizations and individuals. The chair of Irvine's history department, Susan Morrissey, is part of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine group which has endorsed these demands. The suspicion amongst the Jewish students is that Rabbi Levine was ousted from his position as a backdoor means of instantiating these demands. This fear is amplified by the fact that both of the new hires appear to be, at the very least, very sharp critics of Israel -- one was a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace at UCLA, and both are signatories to a letter written three weeks after the October 7 attack demanding (among other things) "the end of all U.S. funding to Israel immediately." In essence, the students believe that Morrissey effectively instituted a purge -- replacing a Jewish Studies lecturer who was embedded in the campus Jewish community but (or perhaps, and therefore) was tainted by his association with Hillel and "Zionism" with alternatives who would be less effective in serving the Jewish community (and the community of students interested in the Jewish Studies minor) but were more ideologically congenial and aligned with the political demands of Prof. Morrissey and the pro-Palestine protesters.

None of the above is incontestable. The public explanations from the powers-that-be at Irvine might be entirely on the level. It is far from uncommon that the sorts of considerations that drive faculty hiring and teaching assignments (particularly at a large research university) do not align with what undergraduates believe or expect should motivate who ends up in the classroom. Other than the tidbits identified above, I have no specific knowledge regarding either of the two new tenure-track hires at Irvine; they may be able to cover Levine's class with aplomb. And certainly, there is nothing intrinsically odd about replacing an external part-time lecturer with a tenure-line faculty where possible.

Nonetheless, it is abundantly clear that the Jewish Studies contingent at Irvine has ample reason for both mistrust and discontent. From their vantage, they're losing a great teacher and community member with inadequate replacement, for reasons that seem inscrutable, in a context where their very discipline and their broader standing in the Irvine community seem to be threatened by powerful forces, including the very campus leaders who made the decision at issue here. When a powerful university actor says they support doing a thing (here, cutting ties with the "Zionists"), and then that actor does something that is to say the least compatible with that thing (terminating Levine's appointment), observers are entitled to infer that the thing happened for the reasons that the actor publicly articulated. That isn't dispositive, but its certainly probative, and nobody can or should fault the students for not buying that Morrissey is acting for neutral and purely professional reasons.

In essence, Morrissey put herself in a position where she lost the presumption of trust that might normally accord to decisionmakers in her role. No matter what the "truth" is (which may be unknowable), we have a situation where deep damage has been done to the Jewish Studies minor and the relationship between its overseers and the community it purports to serve. It is clear that, to say the least, the Jewish Studies community does not feel as if the powers-that-be who made the decision to terminate Levine and who are guiding the new direction of the Jewish Studies minor are receptive and responsive to the views of the most-affected stakeholders (maybe if they occupied someone's office? But alas, the hypocrisy trap....).

In any event, at minimum, the Jewish Studies students and the broader Jewish community at Irvine are entitled to more receptivity from Professor Morrissey; to believe that her orientation towards them is not one of hostility and that she views them as a stakeholder to be engaged with, not an obstacle to be overcome. If she cannot restore that relationship of trust, then it may indeed be better if the Center for Jewish Studies be moved into a different portfolio, with leadership that can do the job that she cannot.