Pithy as it is, the problem is that it gives no mechanism for defining the in-group. The in-group is not static; out-groups eventually get invited to the club if they meet some conditions. In the US, Irish and Italians (and others) went from one group to the other. Why? It’s complicated, but civilization-vs-barbarism is a pretty reasonable approximation for how immigrant populations assimilate over time. Masses of unassimilated immigrants aren’t in the club yet.
Selectively quote much? Yeah 21% in the EU, not selected just among college campuses, identifiably from the left is pretty big but you’re ignoring the data that follows about in the U.S. requires some impressive work on your part.
The perception of Jewish students on campuses at least is that it is coming more from peers of the Left than the Right, at least according to Inside HigherEd:
Obviously neither of us have hard numbers on the political beliefs of those endorsing antisemitic beliefs and who are Holocaust deniers (a scary large fraction of young adults), but blithely dismissing denying that there is such thing on the Left comes off badly.
ETA
To some degree. And to some degree the identification of which has more power and is therefore evil is real.
Exactly. My full statement was
You coincidentally left out that last sentence.
Yes, I’m aware there is antisemitism on the left. But the antisemites who shoot up synagogues or make detailed plans to do so or SWAT synagogues with fake bomb threats are overwhelmingly white supremacists and similar, and are not especially likely to come from among the ranks of “progressives”.
Progressives are more likely to boycott Israel.
I’m a lot more frightened of the white supremacists, honestly.
Left-wing antisemitism? Since when?
Antisemitism from the NSDAP, the Tsar, the French Army officer class, the British Establishment, the Catholic Church, etc. etc. Sure. But I’m not seeing a lot of Left-wing antecedents there.
Your can look back at reprehensible attitudes in the old US Left: labor unions that objected to Blacks coming North and breaking strikes; the Grange and the New Dealers not wanting Black farmers on the Plains, Women’s rights activists engaged in eugenics. Maybe some nasty remarks from HL Mencken, but the Left just doesn’t have skeletons in its closet against Jews like it does Blacks.
But now a surge of anti-Israeli demonstrations that took a lot of old Liberals by surprise, but along with opposition to the treatment of Palestinians, where’s the traditional Jew hate? I don’t mean by the Arabs and Iranians: I’m sure they’re quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to each other by heart. But where on the college campuses are even the “push them into the sea” crowd preaching ethnic claptrap?
At what point did the Left put down Marx and Franz Fannon and start reading Alfred Rosenberg?
Yet this thread is about antisemitism on college campuses and where it’s coming from. Yes shootings are scary. And fortunately they are still very rare events. The more mundane is OTOH much much more common. And again the perception of Jewish college students is that is more from the Left than the Right or unaffiliated haters. If you have evidence that disputes that, more than your guess, please share it.
Or a possible explanation of it?
Maybe the Jewish students are imagining it?
Maybe progressive students condemn racism sexism and classism overwhelmingly but have the same amount of antisemitism as society writ larger? Just because.
Or maybe there is something in how progressivism is being sold and packaged that is resulting in it?
Admittedly I identify less as a progressive than as center Left but then again more as a progressive than as a moderate. And so the Right weaponizes progressive antisemitism and its blind eye to it as a means of specious attacks on progressivism as a whole? Such does not recuse those of us who endorse those values from engaging in critical analysis about why it is happening.
LOHD’s repeated automatic verdict of not guilty to any responsibility is troubling. Yes they finally, many posts in, allowed that antisemitism on the Left is something that needs to dealt with, but had a priori dismissed any possibility that messaging by progressive leadership allows for it.
I can only cite my college-student friends, and that’s hardly a representative sample. And it’s limited to a couple of schools. But that’s certainly not what I’m hearing.
The stuff that’s been in the news has mostly been Arab students, not “progressives”, as best as i can tell.
Since fucking forever.
Jews were the boogeyman of the Right, and equally of the Left, Jewish bankers and capitalists exploiting the worker, responsible for keeping them poor, in a cabal.
So Jews were evil to the Right because they were communists, and evil to the Left for being capitalists. Antisemitism has been there from before Marx but certainly from Marx on.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/socialism-without-antisemitism
Really this blind spot is scary.
I think LHOD was the one who dismissed someone else citing that as evidence earlier in this thread?
Indeed the article I cited addresses that the magnitude of the problem varies significantly across campuses. Glad you see the problem with your small sample size that seems to not be representative of the larger pool.
This thread is about US college campuses, and even off-campus incidents in US cities. You’re dragging in European history.
Now please cite significant antisemitism in the American Left. The Left where 3/7ths of the Chicago Seven were Jewish; where the US Right had to find a Jewish judge to fry the Rosenbergs so the obvious antisemitism of the McCarthy era wouldn’t be quite so obvious.
Yes, but i think that framing of the question is right wing propaganda. There is antisemitism throughout America, and in much of the world. The only thing special about college campuses is that they house a lot of young adults, late teens and early twenties. Some college campuses tend to be liberal, others conservative, largely reflecting the populations they draw from. There has recently been a lot of pro-Palestinian activity on college campuses (because young adults have the time to rally, if i had to guess) and yes, that’s been tinged with both anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment. But i really don’t think either is unique to “college campuses”. I think the right is trying to discredit higher education, and is calling a lot of attention to college rallies when frankly, the real threat to Jews mostly comes from other places.
I think i mentioned there’s a gas station nearby that has a “no Jews” sign in the window. I think it’s really unlikely that the employee who put that up is “progressive”. I bet they’re just a bigot.
There’s antisemitism all over the place.
Oh come on. @Spice_Weasel started the thread. Is she part of the Right Wing propagandist machine?
Give me a break. No discussing the mundane Jew hate and blind eye to it on college campuses coming from points Left because there’s worse that scares you more and acknowledging it might help messaging of the Right?
We can be afraid of violence from neo Nazis and the like, upset at the gas station bigot who likely votes Trump, and address root causes of increasing antisemitism and Holocaust denialism in young adults, many of who identify more as progressive than conservative, at the same time.
I’ll even grant that I believe (without proof) in society at large more virulent antisemitism comes from the Right than the Left. Part and package of resentment that many MAGA folk have to all others.
The Left though is my house and my people. I want little tolerance for antisemitism in my house. And instead I see college presidents to posters minimizing it. “I don’t see it. What flickering gaslights?”
There is a critical difference between the white supremacist antisemites and the college campus antisemites. The white guys with guns are lone wolf individuals.
. The progressives who call for genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews “from the river to the sea” are backed by government-supported universities whose presidents testify in Congress and proudly defend antisemitism.
Funny. I consider myself progressive, and yet that’s the axis I center my beliefs on.
I just differ vastly from conservatives on what I consider civilization (social cohesion, good public order, systems of welfare, learning) and barbarism (unhinged individualism, rule through violence, greed-is-good mentality, ignorance as a virtue). The oppression/oppressed axis is a consequence of focus on that axis, but not a separate one or a dominant one. The civ vs barb axis works even in more-or-less egalitarian situations.
It works for Israel/Palestine, too. I just differ very greatly from conservatives as to whether Israel is a well-functioning nation.
Or maybe, as seems all too common, they’re conflating all opposition to Israel with antisemitism.
Sure they are.
I’d suppose you also differ on the details. Religious conformity supports social cohesion. It’s probably the first and remains the strongest method of ensuring such across thousands of years. But I suspect that’s not a method you endorse, despite its obvious success.
Of course, all of these traits are in the eye of the beholder. Everyone thinks their way is the right way of running a proper society. For me, the value of personal liberty generally exceeds that of “good public order”, and a proper civilization requires conflict.
Until someone comes up with something better, The Three D Test to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Israeli Policy (and it’s always hard right Israeli policy) should work
Delegitimization (no form of Zionism is acceptable); Demonization (the racist Jew-hating that I contend is absent in the Left) and Double-Standards (which I will admit to seeing in the idiotic Ward Churchill leftists who want Israel ended but want the Great Plains returned to the Native Americans).
Very much so.
… once all the heretics are dead.
To the same extent that abstinence-only education suppresses STDs and teen pregnancy, sure.