American higher education is now the epicenter of global antisemitism
And it's not simply an aberration but a flashing red alert about the deep corruption of our most valuable social institutions against which we need to mobilize - now!
As the Israel-Hamas war drags on, virulent antisemitism seems to have become the new norm on campus for colleges and universities in the United States.
Every day a new incident, or some sort of disturbing situation, is reported in the press. Just this past alone week antisemitic episodes, including federal investigations, have been disclosed at Swarthmore College, Ohio State University, State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Virginia, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Several weeks ago Jewish students filed a lawsuit against Columbia University for “severe and pervasive antisemitism”, and on Tuesday the school’s administration-appointed task force released a report describing what has been going on in detail.
The task force report lamented “the isolation and pain many Jewish and Israeli Columbia affiliates have experienced in recent months”.
It recounted how “while mourning Hamas’s unspeakable atrocities on October 7, some Jewish and Israeli Columbia affiliates have been the object of racist epithets and graffiti, antisemitic tropes, and confrontational and unwelcome questions, while others have found their participation in some student groups that have nothing to do with politics to be increasingly uncomfortable.”
Meanwhile, Muslim students told a U.S. House Committee that antisemitism on campus isn’t the entire story. Anti-Islamic bigotry and harassment is also on the rise, according to their testimony.
And an op-ed columnist for the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, complained that since the departure of the school’s controversial president and the complex administrative reshuffle that followed in its wake, nothing has really changed.
And what is worse, she wrote, “many at Harvard believe that antisemitism is made-up or exaggerated.”
The writer, an Ashkenazi Jew, declared: “I’m scared that some of my classmates, or even my professors, hate people like me.”
Antisemitism is in many ways Western civilization’s original sin, but the fact that it is exploding everywhere among our cultured and educated elites paints an even darker picture of what is happening behind the scenes.
The trend cannot be blamed simply on progressive overreaction to the Israel-Hamas war. A search of archived news articles over the past five years reveals a rapid acceleration of efforts to villify Jews and the study of Judaism in college and university curriculum. Some random examples can be found here, here, and here.
The mere fact that blatant outbursts of Jew-hatred erupted on numerous elite campuses within 24 hours of the appalling attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023 – long before the country’s military even had time to react, let alone enter Gaza – is compelling evidence that many prominent apologists for the new antisemitism are baldly confusing cause with effect.
As Jewish professor and demographer Gary A. Tobin made clear in a groundbreaking book The Uncivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses, published in 2009, the burgeoning of academic antisemitism of the 21st century is merely the most visible symptom of the corruption of American higher education overall.
Moreover, it does not really differ that much from what in Nazi Germany during the 1930s came to be known as the “anti-semitism of reason” that became fashionable among erstwhile non-political scholars.
As historian Alan Steinweis observes, “the humanistic values that were betrayed between 1933 and 1945 were not so much those of the German professoriate of the time as those of today’s scholars working in liberal democratic intellectual environments”.
According to Tobin, such values, which are everywhere in evidence in the present era, include a preoccupation with one’s professorial lifestyle and self-interest, a lack of engagement with the whole of civil society itself, and the competitive obsession of institutions of post-secondary learning not just with grants and endowments, but with their own “brand” and social positionality.
He writes:
The hunger for money, combined with the inefficient use of the billions that universities do receive, may lead to unimaginable instability that has not been seen in the not-for-profit world. …the drive for resources without a moral compass lies at the core of the uncivil university.
Universities in general – and university faculty, specifically, who rarely will allow themselves to be challenged by ideas that do not somehow geminate within their own stifling little growhouse for groupthink – are more apt to succumb to outside pressure groups, particularly if the latter is apt to offer financial incentives as well.
One recent factor bolstering this tendency is a movement among external funders to entice tenured academics, or those on track to receive tenure, to abandon the tradition of rigorous and meticulous research assessed through peer review with something blandly termed “public scholarship” (or sometimes “publicly engaged scholarship”).
The Henry Luce Foundation, founded in the twentieth century by the famed newspaper magnate, has been exceptionally forthright in both promoting and funding this trend.
On the face of it the notion of “public scholarship” is a wonderful invention. It answers the age-old objection of the average detractor of higher education that scholars not only cannot effectively communicate with the public, but are rewarded for narrow and esoteric types of inquiry that fail to serve the public interest.
As a former professional journalist myself who has not only been all over the national media at times as well as having written far, far more for a popular audience than I have for my more distinguished academic colleagues, I understand both the value and importance of scholars learning to communicate with the public at large.
But the reality is that learning to write, or to “engage”, the public cannot be simply incentivized with short-term grants.
The well-worn adage that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear applies equally well to academics whose primary commitment is to advance their own overspecialized professional interests and very often merely offer an “activist” flourish to their own, personal unreflective ideological agendas.
A patent illustration of the latter is Religion Dispatches, an online journal or “e-zine”, which was founded by respected academics and as recently as 2014 described itself as the internet’s premier forum for thoughtful discussion of religion in the public sphere.” For a short time it was even hosted by the prestigious Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
But in 2018 for some unknown reason it was handed over to Political Research Associates, an extreme leftist and ideology-driven foundation based in Somerville, Massachussets that characterizes itself as “a social justice and research strategy center” that is “devoted to supporting organizations, civic leaders, journalists, and social sectors that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society.”
PRA also claims that its mission in recent years has been to expose “the dangerous intersections of Christian nationalism, White nationalism, and patriarchy”.
Most recently, it seems to have added to its the stated agenda a transparent campaign of academic antisemitism.
For example, Religion Dispatches now sports on its masthead along with other such garden variety areas of primary journalistic coverage as “racial justice”, “sex/gender/justice”, and “Christian nationalism” a special section that features ongoing reporting on “Israel’s War on Gaza”.
Note that the heading is not “The Israel/Gaza War” but “Israel’s War on Gaza” as if October 7 were merely incidental. As it turns out, that is exactly its approach.
In a February 6 article entitled “Why Antisemitism is an Insufficient (And Risky) Explanation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 Attack on Israel”, noted Portland-based “religious studies” scholar and Middle Eastern expert Shane Burley, author of such nuanced titles as Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse, argues that there is no evidence Hamas’ “ideology influenced the decision making and moral conviction” (You can disregard the group’s quotation from the Qur’an in its original charter about the obligation to kill Jews, a passage scholars contextualize while Hamas does not).
“When we look at this particular attack”, Burley opines, “the callousness seems more explainable by the colonialism that formed the Palestinian resistance and the guerilla, asymmetrical nature those movements utilize; and even if antisemitism motivates some individuals who took part, this is hardly evidence that the movement itself primarily operates from that particular ideological lineage”.
Yes, we get it and follow its logic. If we take this kind of sophistry seriously, then it folows that those white supremacists who lynched black people in the Jim Crow South were not primarily motivated by racism. On the contrary, their acts are easily “explainable” by the legacy of Reconstruction.
Other recent essays in Religion Dispatches include “Why 95 Percent of Jewish Israelis Support a ‘Plausible’ Genocide’” and “Meet the ‘Bronze Age Zionists’ – Far Right Jews Embracing Fascism in the Wake of October 7”.
No hyperbole or stereotyping here.
The first article starts out by dismissing virtually all the reported incidents of Hamas’ atrocities, including the incidents of mass rape recently confirmed by the United Nations. It concludes with the blasé statement that the source of everything that ails the region which the Romans long ago named “Palestine” is the existence of Israel itself, which of course is the centerpoint of Hamas propaganda.
“The logic of the Jewish state, the preference for Jewish life and the commitment to ensuring Jewish security above all else has reached its final destination: overwhelming support for a plausible genocide”. Eat your heart out, Adolph.
The second article is a rather pointless and protracted pensée on a very obscure gaggle of alt-rightists on X (formerly Twitter) who claim to be Jewish, even though they amount to only “a few dozen,” as the author admits.
At the same time, the author asserts they are worth writing about because they “reflect, in extreme form, broader trends in the political landscape”. Then, launching into a full-bore tirade, the author clarifies it all.
In their thirst for vengeance and dominance, they channel the id of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as its terrible death toll continues to rise. Right-wing Israeli and American Jewish right-wing leaders eschew 4chan for a larger political stage—but they too seek alliances with White Christian nationalist leaders, denigrate liberal Jews, and celebrate an ethos of muscular Judaism. They have no need for a niche internet subculture, because they possess a state apparatus, and aligned institutions to propagate their ideology.
The above of course is total nonsense, and what is worse – it manipulates some of the most perverse and venerable antisemitic tropes, and even incorporates an increasingly popular contemporary one – the Jew as Nazi!
The section on “Christian nationalism” follows the same sordid trajectory of historical falsities, overgeneralization, condemnation by association, and constant repetition of an invented buzzword (i.e., CN itself) in the context of some grave, but unspecified social or political “threat” to the point its uninformed listeners are willing to bring out the torches and pitchforks and assault innocent victims as antisemitic mobs did in the Middle Ages.
I have dissected the Great “Christian Nationalist” scare and how it has been ballyhooed by many of the same academics with thin credentials, some of whom regularly write for Religion Dispatches, here, here, and here.
The CN designation serves the same semiotic function in such flights of the fevered anti-Christian imaginary (once it was just applied to evangelicals, but now it is often Catholics also) as “the Jew” or “the Jewish question” have in antisemitic hate rhetoric from the past.
It is a frightening time when academics are regularly employed as propagandists and as agents for sophisticated strategies of information warfare deployed to discredit and marginalize, with the ultimate aim as in Nazi Germany of demonizing and criminalizing entire religious groups.
It is even more frightening when we realize that more and more academic administrations quietly encourage, or even back financially, the participation of their employees in these sorts of ventures because they give their employees “public visibility”.
In addition, professional societies who are prepped to rise up in outrage when there is a single item in the news about racial or gender injustice, habitually ignore antisemitism in their own ranks.
As former United Nations minister Ahmed Shaheed warned in an interview as far back as 2019, “the growth of antisemitism worldwide is a sign that other forms of hatred and xenophobia are becoming more destructive and widespread.”
Invoking the well-trodden metaphor, antisemitism is “the canary in the coal mine of global hatred,” Shaheed declared.
The fact that higher education in America now seems to be epicenter of antisemitism is about as frightening as one can get.
It is time to mobilize and challenge the beast head on.