Antisemitism, American Style
Eclipsing Divestiture
An effective way to curry favor with an irascible benefactor is to scold its critics at a public event those critics don’t attend. Uncontested accusations tend to stick, the nuisances can be vilified to the max, and the speaker gains a point with a benefactor who prefers anonymity.
Joe Biden accomplished this in his “antisemitic” speech delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance on May 7. The charge leveled: antisemitism. The accused: the students holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses across the country protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza since Hamas’s attack on Israel October 7, 2023.
A day of Holocaust remembrance is a time of severe reflection. The memorial events held worldwide1 enjoin us to focus without flinching on the worst of what humanity has done and, consequently, can do. The gravity of the ceremonies leaves no room for “they did it, not me” exoneration.2 As members of the human race, we all must reflect on what we are capable of and acknowledge some degree culpability in order — as President Biden appropriately pointed out — to make sure it never happens again. Yes, it is important that we remember.
However, on this occasion Biden placed humanity’s collective guilt squarely on the protesting students: “There is no place on any campus in America — any place in America — for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”
To gut demands for divestment and thus appease anyone threatened by the tectonic financial shifts those demands would initiate, Biden went straight for the jugular.
Biden’s right. Neither are campuses the place for distilling moonshine or enriching uranium. But no one’s doing that, either. Staunch testimonies have emerged from supportive faculty, non-mainstream media, and police stating that the student protests are neither hateful, violent, nor antisemitic.34 What happens to be hateful about the protests is what those students are demanding: the divestment of billions of university dollars from companies benefiting from what students see as Israel’s commission of genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza. The demand evidently makes someone highly uneasy.
To gut such unsettling demands and thus appease anyone threatened by the tectonic financial shifts those demands would initiate, Biden went straight for the jugular: he charged the students with antisemitism. Echoing widely trafficked falsehoods about the Hamas attack, he started off with a whopper: that Hamas was “driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people.” He didn’t say Hamas attacked the Palestinians’ oppressor, who happened to be Jewish; he said Hamas attacked Israel to expunge the Jewish race from existence, conflating the Hamas attack with the Holocaust. Biden stressed, “It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis,” indulging another popular fallacy that the Palestinian-Israel conflict began October 7 with Hamas’s attack. Israel’s long history of brutalizing and confining Palestinians Biden redacted. And, unforgivably, he echoed certain items of grotesque misinformation about the Hamas attack, concocted to enflame fears of antisemitism, which have since been debunked and for which further investigation is demanded.5
In calling out the “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America,” Biden lent validity to accusations made by infuriated members of the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce, who also zeroed in on the issue of antisemitism on campuses, broadcasting the controversy as a life-threatening issue for American Jewry. On December 5, 2023, the committee called in presidents of three major U.S. universities and submitted them to a punishing examination. Loaded questions included: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate the code of conduct of your school? Yes or no. Do you equate the word intifada with the Holocaust? Yes or no. Would you suspend a student for screaming ‘kill all Jews’? Yes or no.6
While the answer to each of these questions is clearly “yes,” what befuddled the presidents was being pressured to confess to non-occurrences. Evading the yes/no trap, they attempted to explain in broader language the policies their universities embraced when it came to prejudice, racism, sexism, transgender issues, hateful language, and free speech. That was not wanted.
A one-word answer would have had Magill admitting either indifference to or toleration of what the committee in no uncertain terms denounced as antisemitism raging on her campus. She would be damned either way.
In a caustic lambasting, U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik demanded Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, say whether the university would take disciplinary action should any student be caught saying “from the river to the sea” or “intifada.”7 Gay said no and explained: “We do not sanction individuals for their political views or their speech. When that speech crosses into conduct that violates our behavior-based policies, bullying, harassment and intimidation, we take action.”
That was not satisfactory.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill fared no better. In hesitating to answer the committee’s incriminating questions, she earned a rebuke from Josh Shapiro, Democratic governor of Pennsylvania: “It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews . . . There should be no nuance to that — she needed to give a one-word answer.” But a great deal of nuance was involved. A one-word answer would have had Magill admitting either indifference to or toleration of what the committee in no uncertain terms denounced as antisemitism raging on her campus. She would be damned either way, and was.
Four days after the hearing, Magill resigned, a consequence that, judging from Stefanik’s gleeful reaction, pleased someone unseen and unnamed. “One down, two to go,” she X’ed. Gay’s resignation followed some weeks later. The congressional grilling had indeed been highly successful.
Shafik told NYPD the offending students had been “informed numerous times and in writing that they are not permitted to occupy this space,” then duly suspended. Quick work for someone who spent the single day of the camp’s existence in a bruising congressional hearing.
It can be imagined how Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik felt as she walked into those chambers on April 17, 2024, to defend her mishandling of the antisemitism polluting her campus. As the committee worked her over, Shafik successively agreed that pro-Palestinian student protests were “anti-Jewish,” hoped she had no antisemitic faculty, and dismissed university personnel whom the committee accused of using wrong words in a social post.8
The next day, Shafik told NYPD to clear Columbia’s campus of the offending students. She told police that, having been “informed numerous times and in writing that they are not permitted to occupy this space,” the students had been duly suspended. Quick work for someone who spent the single day of the camp’s existence in a bruising congressional hearing. Thus did turbocharged Shafik use the powers available to her to placate a committee intent on placating a benefactor by giving NYPD the okay to haul away “antisemitic” students for trespassing within hours of their suspension and consequent illegal presence on campus. Since then, police interventions on campuses have increased, with the encounters becoming rougher and, yes, at times violent. That’s what happens when armed forces dressed in riot gear intervene anywhere.
And there you have it, antisemitism American style, accusations of which are as effective as packing an AR-15, another American specialty. Aim it at your foes and poof! They’re gone. Train it on students and pro-Palestinian becomes anti-Jewish. Calls to divest from a genocidal military machine become anti-Israel. Anti-Israel becomes antisemitic. Protesting students become clear and present threats to universities and must be suspended. Suspended students become trespassers, outlaws, dangerous elements to be arrested and hauled off. The core issue — divesting from companies that profit from Israel’s assault on Gaza — gets trampled underfoot, the goal of the exercise.
In his concluding remarks at his May 7 address, Biden urged us to “put aside our differences, to see our common humanity, to stand up to hate,” but did not praise the students for doing exactly that. Sharing his take on the Congressional hearings with reporters, Governor Shapiro said, “It should not be hard to condemn genocide,” without mentioning that was precisely what those students were doing. Divestment was never brought up during these withering condemnations. Sort of trivial when facing down the monster of antisemitism? Or was this Potemkin fury meant to reassure someone not in the room that certain investments were safe?
To take heart, let’s recall the story where the little man working his wizard machine behind the curtain to puff smoke and belch fire falls to pieces once Toto draws back the curtain. Malignant power seeks dark, rotten spaces. To dispel it, all we need do is locate and expose it. Unfortunately, curtains are no longer used, and Toto is dead.
Since 2004, 12 countries hold observance ceremonies on January 27, the anniversary of the day of liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945. These include Germany, Britain, Italy, and Scandinavian countries. Other countries choose other dates, often to mark anniversaries of national events during the Holocaust. Since 1979, United States has chosen the eight-day period from the Sunday before Yom Hashoah to the Sunday after Yom Hashoah.
For the non-Jewish world, that is. It is a question if Jews participate in these mourning ceremonies the same way. From their perspective, emphasis might be on “you did it to us” grief. Were that the case, our Holocaust mourning memorials would perhaps salt wounds they strive to heal.
“Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism: Police ‘Body-Slam’ Jewish Dartmouth Prof. at Campus Gaza Protest,” Democracy Now!, https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/7/annelise_orleck_dartmouth_pro_palestine_protests.
After being called in by Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik to break up the school’s protesting students on April 18, 2024, NYPD Chief John Chell later questioned President Shafik’s assessment that the student protest posed “a clear and present danger”: “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.”
“60+ Journalism Profs Demand Investigation into Controversial NYT Article Alleging Mass Rape on Oct. 7,” Democracy Now!, https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/8/nyt_investigation.
The committee did not ask, “How was your vacation in Cuba?” which would have been as impossible to answer with yes or no as any of their other questions.
Stefanik did not ask how Gay would react if a student were heard shouting “Hallelujah!”
Joseph Massad, at the time serving as chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences academic review committee at Columbia University, wrote: “The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to the Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march in support of the Palestinians in their battle against their cruel colonizers. . . . No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.” Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?, The Electronic Intifada, October 8, 2023.