October 7th exposed to really everyone what many of us in and around the academy had known for years.

American universities, not all, but many, are failing catastrophically to educate the next generation about the history, cultures,

and politics of the Middle East. Instead of producing students versed in the region's complexities,

these institutions have become factories for ideological activism. And nowhere is this more true

than in the case of Israel and its history.

Zionism in the modern university classroom is rarely examined as a movement of national

liberation, but instead as a caricature of colonialism, racism, repression, and occupation.

And outside of the classroom, we've seen the most prestigious campuses in the United States

transform into nodes of anti-Israel activism and Jew hatred.

These are immense and long-standing problems, but instead of just diagnosing their sources and discussing their perils,

today we're going to talk to someone who's actually doing something about it.

Welcome to the Tikfoot podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

Robert Satloff saw this crisis clearly. Having published back in 2001, the eminent historian

Martin Kramer's short volume on the corruption of Middle East Studies, Ivory Towers on Sand,

Satloff has spent decades watching the fields drift toward anti-Israel political

advocacy. As the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,

he decided to stop complaining and found his own professional master's program. Working with

Pepperdine University, the Washington Institute has established a completely new graduate

program designed to train policy professionals with rigorous scholarship and historical accuracy

without Israel bias. The program offers full scholarships, accepts no foreign funding, is fully

accredited, and will convene its inaugural cohort in Washington, D.C. this fall.

If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play,

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