By Dinah Bucholz

An octogenarian professor may seem like an unlikely warrior, but Edward Beck has been fighting Jew hatred for more than 60 years, ever since he was severely beaten as a school child, and he has now emerged from retirement to take up the sword again.

In addition to his warrior’s helmet, Beck has worn many hats during his long career, often simultaneously. The psychologist and professor is best known in the academic world for his two decades at Penn State Harrisburg, though he also worked at Rutgers, City University of New York, and Walden University. He served as president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association and held leadership roles within the Pennsylvania Counseling Association, where he also served as president.

As if he weren’t busy enough, he actively joined Jewish community leadership, beginning with his role as leader in his temple youth group as a student. When he and his wife, Esther, moved to Harrisburg, he “became immediately involved in Jewish communal life,” he said, serving as vice president of Jewish Family Service and on the board of the Jewish Federation.

“I served on just about every board that existed in Harrisburg, with the exception of temple boards,” the Huntingdon Valley resident explained. “I wanted the temple always to be a place where I wasn’t managing things,” but to be a haven “for respite and recharging,”

The child of a Holocaust survivor and a refugee from Eastern European pogroms, Beck accepted European accents and antisemitism as a fact of life. After enduring a traumatic beating at the hands of schoolmates for the accident of his birth, he realized that he wanted to be “the strongest Jew I could be,” a feeling that crystallized when he met Esther, the woman who would become his wife.

The Birth of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East

Things came to a head in 2002, when the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement began gaining steam on college campuses. With his penchant for organization, he decided to spearhead an institution he called Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. With help from Laurie Zoloth from Northwestern, Judith Jacobson from Columbia, and a rabbi friend who helped with funding, he formed a group of academics that fought misinformation about Israel. Under his stewardship, the organization grew to nearly 100,000 scholars at universities across the country, an accomplishment in which he takes great pride.

But his proudest achievement was organizing 41 Jewish Nobel laureates to sign a letter in 2010 opposing BDS, an accomplishment he said he still can’t believe he pulled off. These academics were highly respected, he said, and at the time, their words carried enough weight to stem the tide for a while.

“That was the word coming down from Sinai,” he said, and it effectively shut down BDS on college campuses across the country.

The Academic Landscape After Oct. 7

Although the landscape on college campuses changed after Oct. 7, Beck said the changes had begun well before then, in 2005, when he started seeing more foreign donations to colleges, as well as an influx of foreign academics and students. The groups that fund these universities had a campaign primed and ready to go after Oct. 7, “and it was no accident that the student protests all looked alike on campus, to the ordering of the same encampment gear,” he said.

“Anybody who denies that this wasn’t a well-coordinated soft-belly attack designed to erupt on college campuses after Oct. 7 is fooling themselves,” he said. “I don’t want to say it was brilliant — but it was brilliant.”

He also said that Oct. 7 didn’t so much change the atmosphere on college campuses as reveal what was already there. “It elevated it. It brought it to the surface,” he said.

The professor had a message for college students: to carefully seek out information from across the political spectrum and apply critical thinking skills to arrive at the truth.

“Get your heads out of TikTok,” he said. “Start reading balanced, vetted reports. If you don’t know what critical thinking is, learn about it and use it. And if you do it successfully, you’ll end up on the right side of what’s going on, and you may have to change your position — and it may not be popular.”

He advised Jewish faculty to take advantage of the law whenever they witness abuse.

“Take action,” he said. “There’s plenty of resources. The ADL is providing legal help.”

“I’ve become a huge fan of lawfare,” he explained. “If your administration is not enforcing policies, hold them accountable through lawfare. If you’re experiencing antisemitism, file a Title VI.”

Emerging From Retirement

The professor had been in retirement on Oct. 7, but the work of a group that fights antisemitism on college campuses called the Academic Engagement Network, which was founded in 2015 but which burst into view after the deadly massacre, reenergized him and excited him enough to want to wade back into the fray.

“I felt I had some gas left in the tank,” he said. Having recently returned from a conference in Haifa of the Contemporary Anti-Semitism Studies Association, he was brimming with enthusiasm for its work as well, which engages in academic research to fight antisemitism.

Beck joined the faculty of Gratz College to “work with the next generation of scholars on combating antisemitism,” he said. “I’m not an academic expert in antisemitism, but I am an experiential leader in the area with a faculty background, so I’ve got a unique background to help with activism.”

When asked if Oct. 7 changed his thinking, he said he never thought he would see in his own lifetime a climate in academia that echoed 1930s Germany. Referring to the conference he had recently attended, he said, “That’s exactly what we’re dealing with. Academics are isolated … They are being boycotted. They are not getting their papers published. They are not being invited to conferences.”

The situation today is worse than the 1930s because of its global nature, he added.

Beck said that through all the challenges of fighting antisemitism, he never felt the urge to walk away, saying it’s “not in my nature.”

“Very early in my life, I said, ‘If I’m going to take a hit for being Jewish and an advocate, I might as well be as strong as I can for as long as I can.”

But it’s his wife and “muse” who keeps him going. Esther is his biggest fan, he said, and his biggest motivator.

“So I’m a hopeless romantic, but that’s what keeps me going. That is for the record,” he quipped.

Dinah Bucholz is a freelance writer.