The evolution of anti-Semitism on campuses

 City Journal:

Last night, a small cluster of Jewish students barricaded themselves in the library of Cooper Union, while a crowd outside banged on the doors chanting: “Free Palestine.”

Scenes like this have become familiar on college campuses. Radical activists have spent years devising strategies to drown out and, in some cases, physically threaten undesirable voices. In March 2017, masked activists at Middlebury College mobbed the social scientist Charles Murray, chasing him and others into a car. They shoved and pulled the hair of the faculty moderator for the event (who said that she disagreed with Murray about many issues). These tactics of revolutionary exception are now being used to target Jewish people on campuses and in cities across the United States.

The ugly displays of anti-Semitism that have erupted across the United States over the past month are at once the extension of the racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020 and a profound challenge to the legitimacy of this supposed reckoning. One of the reckoning’s premises was that the urgency of injustice demanded the suspension of civic order and the norms of a liberal society. Rioters were thus permitted to torch public buildings, loot businesses, and tear down statues of “problematic” figures from the past. When the New York Times ran an op-ed by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to help put down violent riots, the newsroom dissolved into a struggle session that ended in the departure of multiple staffers, including editorial page editor James Bennet. In workplaces across the United States at that time, an inopportune comment on Zoom could mean defenestration. For defenders of the reckoning, confronting the history of racism demanded such consequences.

Despite years of warnings about the importance of democratic norms and liberal democracy, the American establishment mostly blessed these efforts. Foundations poured hundreds of millions of dollars into identity-politics activist groups. Major public institutions adopted the creed of the reckoning. Even mild criticisms of ideological purges—such as the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”—were treated as reactionary screeds. Terrified of right-populism, part of the political establishment might have seen the reckoning as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump-supporting “deplorables”; or maybe anti-Trump coalitional politics simply demanded silence in the face of these excesses.

Now the promissory note of the reckoning has come due. In habituating people to the idea that righteousness justifies the abrogation of individual dignity and dismissal of political pluralism, the reckoning taught lessons deeply at odds with the functioning of American democracy.

It grows ever clearer that the hunt for “microaggressions” and the impulse to expunge America’s historical figures might not be simply the products of refined sensitivity or some naive excess of care. Instead, the yearning for extraordinary measures to confront “injustice” can speak to darker impulses—to dominate, to humiliate, and to hurt.

The true cost of these tactics has become more explicit. In cities across the world, activists rip down pictures of people, including children, taken hostage by Hamas. Such actions send clear message of animosity: the sufferings of Jewish hostages should be erased. No monuments for the wrong people has become a chic sentiment in elite American spaces. Now that logic is being chillingly applied to those slain, maimed, and abducted by Hamas.
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The latest comeuppance followed Israel's justifiable response to mass murder by Hamas operatives.  Now that it is responding there is an outcry for a cease-fire.  That seems like an idea that not only perpetuates an injustice but would lead to further mass murders.  Hamas is an organization composed of racist religious bigots.  They are the modern-day equivalent of the Nazis.  The mass murder of Jewish non-combatants triggered this response.  It has become a necessary deterrent to future crimes.

What is surprising is that so many on college campuses are willing to support this racist bigotry.  When I was in college I had many Jewish friends.  I was not only working but trying to finish my undergraduate degree in three years so I did not have time for fraternities although I did have friends who were in them and was somewhat surprised that my Jewish friends had their own fraternity.  That was one of my first experiences with realizing there was still anti-Semitism on campus even if it was muted.  Today it does not appear to be muted on some campuses.  That is a problem that colleges and universities need to address.