American Jewish students and Middle East studies

This is a rather annoying article: if this was published in an Arabic newspaper, it would have been declared anti-Semitic.  I don't like singling out Jewish students, just as I don't like singling out Muslim students.  As somebody who has been teaching at US universities for 25 years, there is no difference between Jewish and non-Jewish students.  The assumptions of the article is that all Jewish students are sectarian and obsessed with their religious identity.  Let me be specific in my criticisms.  The article says this:  " students and professors say that in classrooms, or in undergraduate study-abroad and postgraduate fellowship programs in the Middle East and in Arabic, it is not unusual for one-quarter or more of the students to be Jewish."  Any professor who counts in his/her head the number of Jewish students in the classroom is an anti-Semite.  And the question of Jewish students in a classroom varies by state and by city.  And in Chicago and Central Valley California, there is a large number of Assyrians in Middle East studies.  And then this:  "These students say their interest grew because of their heritage, not in spite of it. They feel a desire, even a duty, to understand a region where Israel and the United States are enmeshed in longstanding conflicts, and to act as bridges between cultures — explaining the Arab world to Americans, and America (and sometimes Jews) to Arabs."  This is a silly anti-Semitic comment (remembering that anti-Semitism, as the dreadful character Amos Oz put it, is when you think that Jews are inferior OR superior to others).  The notion that ALL Jewish students are bridges or want understanding is a wild generation.  Jewish students are like other students, and some want to serve as bridges and some want to urge war between the two regions.  It is a fact.  Just as non-Jewish American students are.  And this is another generation:  "As a group, the Jewish students tend to be politically liberal".  In fact, Middle East studies attract Jewish students who are liberal and Jewish students who are conservative, but the writer of this silly article wants to make Jewish students in Middle East studies uniquely motivated with the desire to serve humanity.  Give me a break.  And then this:  "They generally sympathize with Arab points of view".   How on earth did the author of this article reach this conclusion?   Generally sympathize with the Arab points of view?  How so?  Some do and some clearly don't.  And this statement from one of the students is quite revealing:  "“Just telling Jewish people that I was studying Arabic, I would get very, very negative reactions without even getting into the politics".  And then this from Zachary Lockman:  "“One doesn’t always want to admit to being Jewish in the Muslim world, but atheism is generally beyond comprehension, beyond acceptance,” said Zachary Lockman, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at New York University, who is Jewish, but not religious."  So does that mean that atheism is "generally within comprehension and within acceptance" in the US, Zach?  And no, it depends where one is.  Atheism in the US is more understood in San Francisco than in the deep south, for example.   And what is the purpose or thrust of the article: that Jewish students of Middle East studies deserve blenders but not non-Jewish students?