Anti-Semitism on College Campuses

Great Debates
141

Speaking as a Jew, I’ve experienced antisemitism from time to time. And I’ve NEVER been scoffed at when I’ve mentioned it to non-Jews. Honestly, I’m dubious.

I read your daughter’s experience, and that was appalling. And speaking as a very part time college instructor, some of that explicitly violates my mandatory training, and I’m pretty sure I’d be fired if a student complained that i was demeaning them for their ethnic or religious background. (Well, there might be an investigation, but i expect I’d be suspended until it concluded.) I’ve had a lot more training around discrimination than i have around sexual harassment, fwiw, and i suspect sexual harassment is a more common problem.

142

I know that’s what it’s supposed to be, but people to me seem to be taking it in all kinds of crazy directions so I’m surprised that anyone is denying that there is a strain of binary thinking in progressive circles. It was significant enough for me that I had a crisis of identity and left social media. My professional peers, my friends from college, all kinds of people were becoming sanctimonious thought-suppressing jerks. And I wasn’t far behind. So I had to get myself out of that or become someone I didn’t want to be.

So yeah of course it exists. I think we can look at where anti-Semitism comes from in right-wing circles and we can also look at how it shows up in progressive circles and acknowledge that the nature of progressive anti-Semitism might be different because it grows from a different worldview. I don’t think it’s accurate to say progressive ideals in and of themselves logically lead to anti-Semitism, but I think we can look at ways that a progressive worldview can distort someone’s understanding of reality to the point that they dismiss or excuse anti-Semitism. I haven’t personally seen this happen with regard to anti-Semitism because I’m not on social media, but we know it’s happening or else this thread wouldn’t exist – and I’ve seen it happen for a lot of other identities. We can be thoughtful about all the potential root causes of anti-Semitism (and the way potential solutions might differ depending on the adherent’s worldview) without bowing to right-wing propaganda. That’s the kind of nuance we need in basically all political discourse, IMO.

143

I would say something similar, but not identical. Antisemitism will show up differently in progressive circles than in conservative circles–but I don’t think it’s because the “progressive worldview” is distorting their understanding of reality. Rather, I’d say two related things:

  1. There’s no “progressive worldview,” but there are some sets of ideas that are commonly accepted in progressive circles.
  2. Antisemitism can thrive when there’s a distorted understanding of those ideas.

For example: progressivism does focus a lot on social power dynamics and inequalities, and looks at whether people are benefiting from, or suffering from, unequal treatment. A shoddy understanding of progressivism (which certainly does show up, here and elsewhere) categorizes people along a single axis, or at best along a points-based axis: a person who has a lot of “benefits” points is therefore an oppressor, and a person who has a lot of “suffers” points is the oppressed.

But that’s clearly foolish, and that’s not what any prominent progressive thinker, from bell hooks to Ibrim X. Kendi to Thomas Piketty to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, has advocated for. Instead, from my understanding, everyone who’s thought seriously on the subject has pointed out that a person can benefit from inequality in one case, and suffer from it in another. The wealthy White lesbian trans woman has a different experience from the poor Black straight cis man, but there’s no oppression Olympics that says the woman needs to shut up, or the man needs to sit down. Everyone brings different experiences to the table.

When I was in college, I was in a seminar about (I think) The Wealth of Nations when a classmate went on a rant about the evils of capitalism. After a few minutes I stopped him and asked, genuinely curious: “How are you defining capitalism?” He stared at me and finally answered, “Greed.” That was it: that was the basis of his rant.

This wasn’t an indictment of our educational system, nor was it an indictment of anticapitalist beliefs. It was a sign that undergrads can be pretty fucking stupid sometimes. His stupidity manifested in anticapitalist ways; had I been at a business school, his stupidity would probably have manifested in the form of rants about union thugs.

Mr. “Capitalism is greed” had a tremendous misunderstanding of the reasonable critiques of capitalism, but he was pretty harmless. If he’d had a similarly tremendous misunderstanding of intersectional theories of oppression, he might have been antisemitic, which would’ve been much more harmful.

But, as you say, it’s not a logical outgrowth of progressive beliefs. It’s a dangerous distortion of progressive beliefs by dummies.

144

To be clear: no might about it. Many do. Or at least understand it differently than you and I do. To be fair I am a descriptivist. Progressivism is, should be, led by the younger generation. Words and concepts are defined by how they are used and understood by them. You and I may think one think but usage is what it is. Subtlety and complexity does not spread well through social media.

No offense but you are not part of the generation we are discussing. I have also experienced antisemitism from time to time. And even as an old fart I can say back in my college day I recognized my complaining about it (and the fight that resulted) to the one Black member of my fraternity was … poor form. I certainly wasn’t going to register anything. (Nor did I even feel offended by innocent ignorance of the young woman from a small town who honestly thought I should have horns.) And that was long before this current college era.

You can scoff but the surveys documenting the hesitancy to report and the lack of being taken seriously when reported were linked to earlier in this thread.

145

Absolutely. “Might” in my sentence doesn’t mean “I don’t know for sure.”

I feel like the second sentence is a prescriptivist thing to say, and I disagree with it. Undergrads are babies and think dumb things. Not always, but often enough that there’s tremendous value in humility as a youth, in reading and really trying to grasp the theoretical framework that’s been established. To the extent that some folks, of whatever age, are distorting an excellent and nuanced framework in a way that leads to bigotry and oppression, no way in hell am I going to cede progressivism to them.

146

A bit of an elitist and prescriptivist take. “Leadership” doesn’t define how concepts get used. Those dummies represent many of our so called best and brightest. They are not only the future, they are much more than you or I, the present. Their cultural understanding is what it is.

147

If calling bigots “dummies” is elitist, then pass the Dom fucking Perignon.

148

I agree with most of what you wrote, but aren’t we getting into No True Scotsman territory, here? Just as there are feminists who despise men, there are people who identify as progressive who have a binary approach to oppression, or who are trying to rack up as many oppression points as possible. That may not be what the originators of these ideas intended, but people have taken them and run with them in whatever way suits them.

To be honest, the only agenda I had in starting this thread was getting it out of the other thread. I’m interested in the discussion but I wouldn’t have started this thread on my own, without a reason.

I don’t follow conservative news sources. The closest I’ve come in years was following Jonathan Haidt on Substack, because he was doing a lot of research on social media use in teens. He recently wrote a rant similar to Demon Tree’s and I was so put off, I stopped following him. There’s a smart way to consider those ideas and there’s an intellectually lazy way, and he gave me vibes on the latter. Plus he wrote The Coddling of the American Mind which I didn’t realize was an anti-progressive screed until I heard the takedown on If Books Could Kill.

I barely follow “liberal media” either. I follow whoever seems to be thoughtful in their approach to a wide range of issues and I am more interested in intellectual rigor than anything else. But I definitely consider the motive of anyone whose content I am reading.

The idea that I got my opinions from conservative media is just baffling. I got them from scholarship and fellowship with progressive activists because, well, I sorta am a progressive activist. But I am one who has come to think differently about certain issues than a lot of my peers.

149

Sure. What started my participation in the thread was the scoldy rant that absurdly suggested that antisemitism (or a “double standard”) “arises logically from current progressive beliefs” and proceeded to make all sorts of broad brush accusations against progressives. If instead we say that antisemitism can find a home among those people who call themselves progressives but who reduce everything to a binary proposition of oppressor and oppressed and then further act as though only those who are most oppressed have any claim to the term and go on to suggest that any action the oppressed take is justified–well, now we’re saying something more accurate, but also talking about a much smaller group, rather than indicting progressivism as a whole.

I’ve been involved in progressive politics since I was volunteering with Act Up! at the age of sixteen. I’ve noticed the idiots in the community at least since the age of twenty. (I don’t like to think about where I fit in the intervening years). But the idiots are there because there are idiots everywhere. They are an indictment of being an idiot, not of being progressive.

150

Thank you. I wish there was a like button.

It’s very difficult to talk about these issues when every point runs into ‘you’re misinterpreting progressive ideas’. But if you see people who subscribe to a certain belief system acting like sanctimonious, thought-suppressing jerks, it’s not unreasonable to think that the belief system had something to do with it.

And congrats on mostly getting off social media, it’s really not good for most people, but so difficult to give up.

Yes, exactly. I don’t want anyone to bow to right-wing propaganda, but too often the idea is used to dismiss and ignore genuine problems.

151

It’s not difficult, not really. Just don’t misinterpret progressive ideas. Others are managing just fine.

152

Some of the issue is explicit bigotry, some slightly under the surface … and the people doing that would be aghast at being labeled such. To their self perceptions they are anti racist! You crazy to think of them as bigots!

But the bigger volume is the bulk who either are just fairly apathetic to expressions of antisemitism beliefs, or even sympathetic to and understanding of those who express them, because they have it so hard. And of course those who in various ways deny that it happens or who define the issue away as those who do it are just a few dummies …

No such is not a logical outgrowth of progressive ideals. It is an evolutionary branch of it though and one with a long pedigree. Logic is as disinvited as some Jews are from some campus groups.

153

Agreed–and that’s pretty much what I meant when I called them “dummies.”

154

As far as I can tell there are two different issues here, and they’re both intertwined.

  1. There is the historical anti-Semitism which manifests in physical attacks on Jews, and is virtually always a product of right wing bigotry, encouraged by either religious authorities, fascist leaders, or monarchs, and carried out by armed mobs, soldiers, or assassins / spree killers radicalized by racist propaganda.

  2. There’s a number of leftists/progressives who are against, or are perceived to be against, the existence of Israel. Not of Jews, but of the country of Israel.

The thing is that Israel was set up to provide a refuge from point # 1. Most of the people living in Israel today are descended from people who came there specifically to get away from thing # 1. The very existence of Israel is supposed to be a “lifeboat” or “safe room” where Jews can go when #1 happens, and looking at history , it ALWAYS seems to happen.

If the people from group 2 are seen as enabling the people from group 1, a lot of Jews are going to think of them as anti-Semites. I get it. It’s understandable.

That’s the issue here, it’s not that there are left wing progressives chanting to kill Jews or to dismantle the “Elders of Zion” or smashing the windows of synagogues or anything. It’s that the people saying “from the river to the sea” are in favor of taking away the aforementioned “safe room” from Jews, so that Jews will be vulnerable to all the aforementioned things happening.

I mean, it’s not hard for me to understand. The Jews collectively in history are like a kid who has been raised in abusive foster homes, spent years living homeless on the streets, being kicked around and abused, and then this person finally manages somehow to obtain a fortified castle to live in. Regardless of HOW that castle was obtained, how could anyone reasonably expect him to give it up, in light of the history that led up to that point?

155

Another part of it is that the anti-Israel narrative promoted by a lot of left wing college students is that Israel is a settler colony that displaced an indigenous people, whereas Jews will say that THEY are the indigenous people. It raises questions of who gets to claim indigenous ancestry to a land, and who doesn’t, and I do think this intersects with a form of racial or ethnic bigotry. Are today’s Jews an indigenous people of Israel? If not, why and when did they lose that status? Is there like a “statute of limitations” on being an indigenous people? Is it that they got expelled from their land so long ago that it “doesn’t count” anymore?

Obviously you can tell that today’s Ashkenazi Jews have a substantial of European genetics, but that is also true of a lot of Native American tribal members today, and nobody would argue that THEY’RE not indigenous. There’s a whole group of First Nations in Canada called the Metis who are collectively a mixture of French and other European descent, with Aboriginal people, and they are still acknowledged as an indigenous nation despite this mixture.

(I think it’s fair to say that the Palestinians are also an indigenous people to that land, and I’m pretty sure that genetic studies have proven that modern Jews are very closely related to these Palestinians. So I am in no way suggesting that they don’t also have a right to live in that land, and as free citizens, not the “living” in a slum like Gaza or under occupation."

156

Except there are.

There are specifically leftists who go from “Likud is a terrible group” to “Israel is a terrible group” to “Israel’s founding was deeply flawed” to “Israel shouldn’t exist” to “Jews around the world tend to support Israel” to “Jews are Zionist oppressors” to “Hamas was justified.”

These are lousy thinkers, and they’re not part of the tradition of careful and nuanced thought around intersectional issues; but they exist, and have been discussed in this thread and elsewhere.

But there are also those–Jewish and otherwise–who do the opposite. They go from “You disagree with Likud” to “You disagree with Israel” to “You think Israel shouldn’t exist” to “You support Hamas” to “You’re antisemitic.” This is just as sloppy a train of thought, and leaders on the American right freaking love to hop on this train. It’s an effective, if intellectually bankrupt, way to attack the left.

157

This is nonsense in about six different ways. Pure fantasy for the most part.

158

I wish we had a “like” button. This is an excellent post.

This is, too.

But i also want to say that a similarly sloppy and inaccurate claim is the chain:

There are progressives who are antisemitic

There are college students who are progressive

Therefore, our college campuses have a problem with antisemitism that needs to be addressed separately from the broader problem of antisemitism in our country.

I think that’s just a false narrative. Yes, there are progressive who are antisemitic. They aren’t, imho, the most dangerous or the most numerous antisemites, but they certainly exist.

And yes, there are college students who are progressive. Probably even in a higher proportion then the population at large. But… Penn, the college that came off worst of the three who testified, is not a progressive place. And even at colleges, i think there is more dangerous bigotry coming from the right than from the left. But too long ago, there were trucks driving around Harvard Square with large photos of students who signed anti-Israeli statements, including some who had already apologized. (The statements blamed Israel for the recent pogrom.) Last i heard, the funding for those trucks had been traced to… Utah, a well known hot bed of progressive thought. Yeah, that was not antisemitic bigotry, but it was dangerous bigotry.

159

Most of your post is simplistic excuse making and denying that there are actual Jew haters in progressive ranks.

This though? Goes beyond. It’s not taking away the “safe room”; it is cleansing the room of them that is being chanted.

To a very large degree it is more about which mythology you want to embrace.

In 1882 Palestine was sparsely populated, total about 300K.

Jews moved in from Europe bringing investment and jobs. Where that development happened Arabs moved to. There was between 1918 and 1947 a tripling of the Arab population in the region. In absolute numbers both Jewish and Arab populations suddenly increased by 1.2 million and the Jewish population by a bit less than 500K.

Both were immigrant populations and both had historic identification with the area. Jews moving in were not displacing a native population; it attracted migration from surrounding areas to where the jobs were. It was mostly a land of new arrivals. If only they could continue as that.

The displacement occurred after the Brits created a non viable checkerboard map and surrounding powers decided to grab land thinking it would be easy. Zionist elements were not completely innocent either. What might or might not have happened if Arab countries had decided instead to support the new Palestine identified as Arab with economic development has been a different thread’s alt history.

BTW a large number of Jews indigenous to Arab countries were forcibly kicked out. Few talk about them.

But history is immaterial to a good colonialist myth or one of ancient ties with constant presence.

160

AFAICT that take is a bit slanted toward the economic impact of European Jewish investment. At least as influential, again AFAICT, was increased Ottoman suppression of local tribal conflicts.

The fact is that there were plenty among the native population at the time (if you are still referring to the early 20th century) who thought, and said, otherwise. I get that there’s no one objectively right answer to the question of how much immigration by whom in what circumstances is an acceptable amount avoiding “displacement” of others, but you can’t just handwave the issue away by asserting that it didn’t exist.