I first became acquainted with Dara Horn when I read her book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Although it’s not a masterpiece, it’s very good and well worth reading. Her thesis— derived from editors who always asked her to write about dead Jews like Anne Frank, but never about living ones—is that people are willing to show respect for Jews, but only if they’re gone. (This of course resonates with the feeling of people about the Israelis killed on October 7 as contrasted with the feeling of many towards living Israelis.)
In a long article in the recent Atlantic, Horn writes broadly about the demonization of Jews on college campuses, and the title gives the topic. Her answer to the title question, though, is something I hadn’t thought about: Jews are simply accused of whatever is the most prominent moral failing in the Zeigeist, and right now that is “oppression”.”whiteness,” and “settler colonialism”.
Read by clicking on the headline, or you can find the article archived here:
Horn begins by discussing the fracas in the House hearing when three college presidents said the wrong thing. As I’ve emphasized, and Horn agrees, saying that calls for genocide of the Jews is indeed free speech so long as it doesn’t violate the provisions of the First Amendment limiting speech (e.g., if it’s liable to cause predictable and imminent violence, to produce a biased workplace, etc.). Where those colleges had erred wasn’t to enforce the First Amendment when it came to Jewocide, but their failure to enforce free speech in all other matters; e.g., they were hypocritical. Horn was also on the advisory committee convened by Harvard to recommend fixes for campus antisemitism (like many Jewish students, including ours, those at Harvard have been intimidated by vocal and aggressive pro-Palestinian students). And yes, genocidal calls like “Intifada revolution!” or “from the river to the sea yadda yadda” are also legal speech under the First Amendment, but violation of campus rules associated with such speech, like blocking buildings or vandalism, is not legal speech. This is a distinction that my own school has yet to make.
Horn on the nature of the problem:
Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.
The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.
As I’ve said, what I found most interesting about the piece is Horn’s thesis, which sounds reasonable, that antisemitism is always around, but shapeshifts, glomming onto the Evil Trope du Jour:
The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.
In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.
Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.
Today the trope is Social Justice, and so we’re accused of being oppressors, and white colonial ones to boot (Jews who are of Middle Eastern origin are, in what is almost a a hilarious term, called “white adjacent”). The constant shifting of why they’re guilty forces Jews to constantly prove that they are not guilty. No other group, I think, has to do that. Here’s one particularly odious scene described by Horn after she wrote an op-ed for the NYT about the October 7 massacres:
Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists’ GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn’t enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, “Show the rapes!”\
The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman’s naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It’s a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman’s body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? “Show the rapes!”
That’s pretty ghoulish, and can’t even be seen as purely salacious unless the shouter was a total pervert. No, it is at least a call to see evidence, although there was already plenty of evidence that yes, women were reaped on October 7—and in previous pogroms as well.
One note: Horn pins some of the blame for the antisemitism of intellectuals on DEI. (Remember, we’re trying to understand not just the particular form of modern antisemitism, but why academics are antisemitic in the first place. If it’s connected to DEI, then it can be seen as piggybacking on social justice, which Leftist academics regard as the paragon of virtue.)
One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.
DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.
This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.
Yep, one more thing to blame on DEI. And indeed, the Jewish students at my own university are beleaguered by the feeling that they’re surrounded by antisemitism, something I learned from a Zoom discussion las week with a dean and a campus rabbi. If this antisemitism is indeed on campus, as it must be for these complaints to be true, then where does it come from? From all the demonstrations, poster, and sidewalk chalkings of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the consortium of students called “UChicago United for Palestine.” And especially from the abysmal failure of the University to punish these groups when they violate University regulations. Our Jewish students are fully aware of this failure of punishment, which of course simply heartens the pro-Palestinian activists to engage in further illegal activities, leading to more intimidation. They have promised to continue demonstrating illegally.
If anybody from the administration is reading this, be aware of the situation and of the consequences, which include reduced contributions by Jewish donors and falling enrollment of Jewish students:
Amazingly, Jewish students, whose numbers have dramatically declined at Harvard in recent years for reasons no one seems able to explain, did not respond to all this with their own hate-speech campaigns. Instead, both before and after October 7, Harvard Hillel’s students have reached out to their peers among Harvard’s anti-Israel activists—asking not for a cease-and-desist, but for a dialogue, or even just a cup of coffee. Let’s get to know each other, they offered. The anti-Israel activists refused to engage. Jewish students tried again; they were rebuffed again. And again. This was hardly surprising. For some anti-Israel activists, even merely talking to “Zionists” (a label applied to the 80 percent of American Jews who regard Israel as an essential or important part of their Jewish identity) counts as “normalization”—that is, treating Jews as if they were normal humans, rather than embodiments of evil.
The decline in Jewish students is a general trend: read the Inside Higher Ed article “Jewish student enrollment is down at many Ivies.” And it’s gone down a lot at places like Harvard and Columbia in the last few years.
Besides the waning of students and donations, there’s always the possibility that students could bring a Title VI lawsuit against a university for allowing a climate of bigotry to exist. This has happened at Columbia University and now, notably, at Harvard, where I’m told the students have a pretty good case. Here’s some evidence cited by Horn:
The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. Coercing that silent agreement was the goal, and it was achieved not through arguments or evidence, but through the most laughably idiotic heckler’s veto: screaming at, chasing away, freezing out, or spitting on anyone who dared disagree with supporting the most successful Jew-killers since the Nazis. This left the great minds of Harvard debating the finer points of free speech for hecklers, instead of wondering why their campus was populated by hecklers. The question of why Harvard’s hecklers were heckling in favor of Hamas’s barbarism was too disturbing to consider, and so public discussions ignored it completely.
This heckling was not unrelated to the education that Harvard itself provided. Classes existed at Harvard, it turned out, that were premised on anti-Semitic lies. A course at the school of public health called “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” looked at case studies from South Africa, the United States, and Israel; its premise—not a topic of discussion, but the premise on which the course was built—was that Israel is a settler-colonialist state. (A Jewish student who wrote to the professor questioning what they saw as the ideological slant of the readings was told that it was “insulting” to suggest that the course had an agenda.) The “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its 7 million Jews. (The program is a partnership between Harvard and Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution where an Israeli journalist was
expelled from an event in 2014 just because she was Israeli and Jewish.)
An astonishing number of pop-up lectures, panels, and events at Harvard both before and after October 7 were centered on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—a worthy topic addressed with almost no mention of Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years. Nor was there much mention of the fact that Hamas was founded in connection with the global Muslim Brotherhood, or of its comically wealthy sponsors in the Persian Gulf. Students had many opportunities to learn about Palestinian suffering from oppression by evil Jews, but far fewer opportunities to learn, for instance, about Hamas’s success in co-opting foreign aid and crushing dissent, or the intifada that students hoped to globalize. Outside of their engagements at Harvard, some guest speakers publicly endorsed extreme anti-Semitic lies, including the straight-up blood libel that Israelis are harvesting Palestinians’ organs or that the Israeli military uses Palestinian children for weapons testing. One could hardly blame students for repeating their educators’ claims.
If you want to see the Harvard lawsuit, click below:
And so we see a combination of factors that lead campuses to become antisemitic: a latent form of antisemitism activated by DEI, the wokeness that sees Jews as settler-colonialists, and an ignorance of history that allows people to buy into historical inaccuracies about the history of Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. But of course the point of such an analysis is not to philosophize about antisemitism but to change it. And here’s Horn’s solution, at least for Harvard:
It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.
Will this happen at Harvard? I’m hopeful. Will it happen at the University of Chicago? I’m not so hopeful since administrators are loath to even admit there’s a problem, much less take action to curb illegal conduct. Perhaps things will calm down after Israel wins the war, but given the pervasiveness of antisemitism and hatred of Israel, I’m not so sure.
