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Paper short abstract

Drawing on autoethnographic experience after 7 October 2023, this paper examines how a Jewish studies scholar became an unexpected public intellectual in the Netherlands and how ideological gatekeeping, silencing, and contested expertise reshape academic freedom in polarized times.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on an unexpected transformation following 7 October 2023, when my position as a professor of Jewish studies became an unavoidably public role. Trained as a historian of colonialism and Jewish history, I found myself compelled to speak publicly about context, complexity, and historical framing in debates on Gaza and Israel/Palestine. I had never imagined myself as an “academic activist,” yet circumstances blurred the boundaries between scholarly expertise, personal identity, and political positioning.

Based on an autoethnographic account of my experience in Dutch academia, I examine how speaking as a Jewish studies scholar about Israel/Palestine generates layered forms of silencing: professional marginalization, the withdrawal of collegial solidarity, and the policing of “legitimate” expertise. Teaching at a university with a large Muslim student population and working within a progressive intellectual milieu that once felt like home, I encountered unexpected fault lines. The post–7 October moment produced both exclusion from familiar scholarly communities and forms of support from unlikely quarters.

I argue that these dynamics reveal a hegemony of thought within contemporary academia, and a widening gap between professed commitments to pluralism and the reality of ideological gatekeeping. By tracing how silence is imposed, negotiated, and sometimes resisted, this paper asks what academic freedom means when certain forms of speech—and certain speakers—are rendered transgressive. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on self-silencing, expertise, and the conditions of knowledge production in politically polarized times.