And the Schmegegge of the Year Award Goes to… PETER BEINART, OMER BARTOV, & MIRA SUCHAROV!

And the 2025 Schmegegge of the Year Award Goes to… PETER BEINART, OMER BARTOV, & MIRA SUCHAROV!

They say misfortunes come in threes, and that’s no less true of Schmegegges. The Jewish Studies Zionist Network established a tradition when it was founded in 2022 to hand out an annual “Schmegegge of the Year Award” to the most half-witted prominent anti-Zionist professor of Jewish Studies or adjacent field who has done the most that year to spread false and misleading ideas about the Jewish state. JSZN believes that such people are especially dangerous because their academic credentials bear a stamp of expertise and therefore give gravitas to the propaganda they spew. We established this award to shame these people for abandoning academic standards to unjustly demonize the Jewish state and its supporters.

The first year’s recipient was NYU professor of journalism and editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, Peter Beinart. A year later, in 2023, the award was given to Brown University historian, Omer Bartov. The 2024 awardee was Mira Sucharov, a professor of political science at Carlton University in Canada. In 2025, all three of these people have proven that the adage is true, that “Once a Schmegegge, always a Schmegegge.”

For that reason, we have decided to give this year’s award to a trifecta of co-recipients: Beinart, Bartov, and Sucharov, all together as the Mt. Rushmore of Schmegeggedom, where they each deservedly belong. Their foolishness has been equal in measure to each other but has far surpassed that of anyone else in Jewish Studies this past year.

What did they do to earn their permanent place in the pantheon?

Let’s start with Beinart, the Schmegegge Originarius. In November, he accepted an unpaid invitation to speak at Tel Aviv University, where he lambasted Israel for its war against Hamas, which he called a genocide.

But that wasn’t Beinart’s most egregious act of daftness in this episode. When he returned from his trip to Israel, he was bombarded with criticism from the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) supporters accusing him of abandoning solidarity with the Palestinian cause by giving a talk at an Israeli institution. He responded to the complaints by apologizing for his dastardly deed of flying to Israel to have a conversation with other academics.

The groveling Beinart said, “It’s embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake. I dearly wish I had not made this one.”

Moving on to Omer Bartov, Schmegegge Secundus. In July, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” In that article, Bartov joined the chorus of anti-Israel propagandists in completely misrepresenting Israel’s goals in the Gaza war. While doing so, he shrugged off the expertise of major Holocaust scholars such as Dr. Norman Goda that reject the “genocide” framing of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

In addition to redefining the word, “genocide” to suit a simplistic narrative, Bartov also plays fast and loose with Holocaust history to maliciously compare Israel’s actions to fight Hamas with that of Nazi Germany’s against Jews. Bartov wrote, “Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing.” He added no context to their strategic decisions, neither the difficulties Hamas creates in targeting them and their weapons depots without firing on civilian bystanders, nor the significant efforts Israel’s army goes through to move innocent Palestinians away from targets, so they don’t get hurt. He calls that “ethnic cleansing.”

But Bartov is a genocide scholar, so we are all just supposed to take his word for it that Israel is committing genocide. Never mind that he arrived at these conclusions without the careful academic rigor we normally expect from scholars.

Last, we turn to Schmegegge Tertius, Mira Sucharov. How out of touch with reality does one need to be to believe that “Free Palestine!” is necessarily “a call for freedom, not for hate, bigotry and murder”? What level of myopia does it take to think that “Globalize the Intifada!” is not a call for worldwide violence against Jews? And yet, Sucharov has consistently insisted on her social media accounts that these things are true.

In one social media post, Sucharov criticized the shooter at the Capital Jewish Museum for shouting “Free Palestine!” just before carrying out his execution of two Israeli embassy staffers, as if this is an inappropriate thing to say as he was about to murder Israelis. It takes a real Schmegegge to think that this is intrinsically a phrase of peace that has only been appropriated this one time by a terrorist.

After a year of violent attacks on Jews all over the world, culminating with the massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia on the first night of Hanukkah, Sucharov still maintains that “globalize the intifada” is a peaceful slogan. According to her condescending screeds over social media, a calling for global intifada is merely a plea for global solidarity with the Palestinian people. She said, “Punishing or prohibiting the use of the phrase based on is presumed impact on some listeners ignores its patent ambiguity.”

Presumed impact? Patent ambiguity? We think the mounting death tolls from the violent attacks against Jews just in 2025 alone proves that there is no presumption or ambiguity going on. When people chant that phase, they mean exactly what we are hearing.

And while Sucharov does decry the events of October 7 as a “trauma of traumas” for the Jewish people, what she gives with one hand she takes away with the other. She went on to blame the atrocities committed by Hamas that day on the “Nakba.” She said, “But…the Palestinians have lived under untenable arrangements owing to the Nakba and the ensuing occupation.” In doing so, she threw blame for the entire violence of that day at the feet of Israel’s founders. It’s not simply 1967 she thinks is to blame for what happened. That would be bad enough, but she goes further and attributes Hamas’s brutalities to Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

For these reasons and many others, these three Schmegegges–Beinart, Bartov, and Sucharov—are each worthy of JSZN’s annual award of dishonor.

Please watch our official award ceremony