The Jewish Quarterly

The Jewish Quarterly has cultivated literary journalism of the highest standard for almost 70 years. It is an independent publication that explores Jewish issues, and issues of humanity from a Jewish perspective.

The Jewish Quarterly is published four times a year – in February, May, August and November. Each issue features a major political or cultural theme, investigated in long-form essays by prominent voices from around the world. JQ’s mission is not to advocate, but to investigate complex and pressing matters of politics, religion, history and culture, and to do so in depth.

Founded in 1953 by Jacob Sonntag, JQ’s new editor is Jonathan Pearlman. The Jewish Quarterly is published out of Australia and is distributed and accessible worldwide.

JQ259: Mindless, What Happened to Universities?

Extremism, antisemitism and intolerance are thriving on campus. How did this happen?

"Some programmes are well on their way to running Zionists out of their unit. That will put an end to complaints of antisemitism." –Cary Nelson

After October 7, the university – an institution dedicated to the search for truth, knowledge and freedom – became overrun by a toxic and dangerous fervour. Civil discourse was abandoned as campuses became the epicentre of hate speech, conspiracy theories and antisemitism. Yet, as Cary Nelson reveals, this betrayal of the university's ideals was decades in the making.

In this groundbreaking essay, Nelson, an academic and writer whose years of involvement in university organisations has made him a leading expert on higher education, explains the causes of the institutional failure that has been evident on campuses worldwide. Mindless shows how universities came to abandon a commitment to shared intellectual principles and fractured into disciplines that – unconstrained and unchecked – slid towards conformity and indoctrination.