Professor Jeffrey Cohen

The Ohio State University

Bio

Jeffrey H. Cohen is professor and director of the Transnational Research Lab at Ohio State University. His work critiques standardized models of mobility and social change through a focus on how households navigate risk, vulnerability and economic restructuring. His books include Cultures of Migration, a comparative analysis of human mobility through time. Expanding his scope, the discussion of anthropology and antisemitism critiques the growth of tribalism in the field following the 2023 boycott.

Disciplinary Tribalism, Antisemitism and Antizionism in Anthropology

Abstract

Anthropology’s growing tribalism reorganizes legitimacy and dissent by replacing ethnographic inquiry with a moral schema grounded in a colonizer/colonized binary. Confronting the AAA’s 2023 boycott of Israeli academics, I show how moral alignment precedes analysis, recasting disagreements as ethical failures and rendering Jewish and Israeli scholars as invisible. These dynamics produce antizionism and ambient antisemitism in the field and limit analytic possibilities moving forward. How can anthropology confront these harms and sustain intellectual freedom?