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Greg Bouwer
IINZ
A teacher in Auckland introduces Year 13 students to Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides as he is largely known) – one of the most important Jewish philosophers in history, a 12th-century thinker whose work on ethics and war sits comfortably alongside Augustine and Aquinas.
Within minutes, the class erupts in laughter. Students start taking photos.
Why?
Because, they say, they are being made to read “Zionist propaganda”.
Let that sink in.
Maimonides died in 1204. Modern political Zionism emerged in the late 19th century.
And yet, in a New Zealand classroom in 2026, a medieval Jewish philosopher is dismissed –not engaged with, not debated, not even read – but ridiculed as a mouthpiece for a political ideology that would not exist for another 700 years.
This is not just ignorance. It is something worse.
It is the reflexive treatment of anything Jewish as inherently political, inherently suspect, and ultimately illegitimate.
No one laughs at Augustine and calls him Vatican propaganda.
No one dismisses Aquinas as medieval church spin.
But introduce a Jewish thinker – even one writing centuries before the modern era – and suddenly the rules change.
Identity replaces argument. Labels replace understanding. And ridicule replaces thought.
What happened in that classroom is not harmless. It is not ‘just kids being kids’. It is a learned instinct – one that says Jewish intellectual tradition does not belong in the category of ideas to be examined, but in the category of narratives to be rejected.
That instinct has a name. And it should make us deeply uncomfortable.
Because once you teach students that they can dismiss a body of thought based on who they think produced it, you are not teaching them to think – you are teaching them not to.
You are teaching them that some ideas do not need to be understood before they are condemned. You are teaching them that history can be rewritten to fit present-day grievances. And you are teaching them that mockery is an acceptable substitute for argument.
This is what intellectual collapse looks like in real time.
A course on religion and war ethics – the perfect setting for careful comparison, for nuance, for disagreement grounded in understanding – instead becomes a stage for ideological reflex.
The tragedy is not that students disagree with Maimonides. The tragedy is that they never even got that far.
Because the moment they saw “Jewish”, they believed they already knew what they were looking at.
That is not education. And it is not a small problem.
If a 12th-century philosopher can be dismissed as modern propaganda, then the ability to distinguish past from present has already been lost.
If identity alone is enough to disqualify an argument, then the discipline of reasoning has already been abandoned.
And if students feel more comfortable laughing at an idea than grappling with it, then something in the system has gone very wrong.
The issue here is not what is true. It is whether truth – or even the attempt to seek it – still matters at all. Because if this is the level of engagement we are now producing, then the real lesson being taught in that classroom is not about religion, or war, or ethics.
It is that some ideas can simply be waved away.
And that is a lesson no education system can afford to teach.
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
