Taking anthropology as an especially illuminative case study, this paper examines how national and global politics have both drawn scholars to study the Middle East and created gendered and racialized minefields in their academic lives. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with over one hundred Middle East anthropologists of varying backgrounds and generations, it tracks the intersection of politics and identity over time in a discipline that views itself as particularly sensitive to positionality. By the 21st century, Middle East anthropology included greater numbers of female and Middle Eastern scholars than ever before, yet the field remains largely white and the region remains understudied within anthropology despite being a focus of the so-called War on Terror. These tensions make anthropology a revealing example of larger trends related to gender and race/ethnicity in the broader interdisciplinary field of Middle East studies. The paper first explores the ways that gender and race/ethnicity influence how scholars are drawn to Middle East anthropology at different historical moments, and suggests that knowledge production is political from its inception in a future academic’s social life. U.S. foreign policy in the region, as linked to domestic racial and gender hierarchies, shapes the experiences of women and Middle Eastern – especially Arab and Arab-American – scholars, in graduate school and on the job market, often in negative ways that must be navigated through complex practices of self-protection and even self-censorship. These issues persist in various forms throughout these scholars’ professional careers, including in their teaching and public lectures. In addition to confronting both overt racism and sexism, often based on stereotypes about the Middle East, female and region-related scholars must deal with a range of microaggressions. These scholars also face greater monitoring of their teaching and more intense political pushback related to Palestine. Indeed, while any scholar who teaches or speaks about Palestine or Palestinian communities may face political pushback, female and Arab-American scholars in particular are most likely to encounter hostility and attack. The paper concludes with some reflections on how the situation in anthropology might be replicated, or even magnified, in other disciplines.