The Anti-Defamation League has joined other Jewish groups in criticizing Yale University’s decision to cancel a program dedicated to the study of anti-Semitism.

The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism was discontinued after a faculty review committee concluded it did not meet the university’s standards for research and teaching.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, said the decision “leaves the impression that the anti-Jewish forces in the world achieved a significant victory.”

The American Jewish Committee said the anti-Semitism initiative’s termination would “create a very regrettable void.”

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a group that fights anti-Israel bias on college campuses, suggested that Yale was buckling to pressure from Iran, whose Intelligence Ministry in January 2010 placed Yale on a list of 60 institutions it considered part of a U.S.-Israeli-British plot to “subvert” the Islamic Republic.

However, Yale officials said at the time of Iran’s announcement that the listing would have little effect on the university, and professed to be baffled as to why Iran targeted Yale.

Donald Green, who heads Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, said the anti-Semitism program is being canceled because, unlike other similar programs, it did not generate research articles in top-tier academic journals. — jta & ap