After producing two books, seven articles and a course that earned widespread accolades from the student body, James Russell was sure he'd be a shoe-in for tenure at Columbia University.

But Russell, an expert in Armenian studies, soon learned that other factors besides the quality of his scholarship were under consideration.

"Two senior professors in my department explained that I could not expect, as a Jew, to be kept as a tenured professor in the Middle East department," he said.

Now, three years later, Russell, a tenured professor at Harvard University, speaks brazenly against anti-Semitism in academia.

Addressing more than 100 people at the Gershman Y on a recent Sunday morning, he pointed to numerous examples of what some have referred to an "academic jihad."

He called Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor who espoused the Arab cause, the "academic apostle" of radical Islam. Russell blamed Said's "pseudo-scholarship" for painting Israel as a colonial tyrant and Arabs as hapless victims.

"It created an innocent and passive Arab population, raped by imperialists and colonized by Zionists," explained Russell. The scholar also said that Said's work engendered "a general sympathy for the Arabs as postcolonial revolutionaries, together with an easy antipathy towards Israel."

He added that such "scholarship" misrepresents the Middle East, and its history...