America’s Universities Do Not Have an “Antisemitism” Problem. They have a Fascism Problem.

Trump’s charge that universities are hotbeds of antisemitism is absurd and is just a pretext to undermine America’s most import centers of liberal values. This assault is a vital piece of the overall fascist project we are witnessing today.

American higher education has been anything but antisemitic for the last century. Indeed, Jews have been historically overrepresented as a percentage of the faculty and students. While Jews make up 2.2 percent of Americans, they comprised over 20 percent of the faculty at the top ten universities in the 1980s, and an astonishing 50% of the “top intellectuals” of that era. From the 1920s on, Jews have had among the highest rates of college-going of any ethnic group.

There are several reasons for the strong link between universities and Jews in the 20^th Century. Certainly, elite universities discriminated against Jews in the early 1900s; Harvard famously placed a quota on Jewish admissions in that era. But, unlike anti-Black, Mexican, Asian and Native American discrimination of that time, antisemitism did not take the form of state-backed legal sanctions; it remained the private purview of colleges, housing developers, businesses and social clubs. That is, while Jews in that era indeed faced private discrimination, they also enjoyed the public recognition that they were white during the Jim Crow era. As a result, Jews were able to find new avenues for upward mobility that only whites could achieve, such as in the new public sector law firms (spawned by the New Deal), and the rapidly growing entertainment industry and fields of medicine of the 1930s. As Jews achieved success through these routes, private sector antisemitism diminished (Although it never disappeared, especially among the very same white Christian nationalists who now are leading the charge against antisemitism!),

Certainly, Jews quickly grasped that higher education was the road to upward mobility. But even more, there was and is an important connection between Jewish cultural identity and the values of modern higher education as well. As Steve Mintz explains in Inside Higher Education (2023):

…(I)t seems to me that one can speak of a secular American Jewish faith—which involves activism, the arts and culture, entrepreneurship, intellectualism and science, behavioral, physical, psychological and social—and an American Jewish legacy—that, at its best, is a commitment to cultural pluralism and social justice, to peshat (intensive study and exegesis of texts), tzedakah (charity as a moral obligation), and tikkum olam (the obligation to repair and improve the world).

These values are not just Jewish values, they are core values of modern liberal thought. Liberalism itself evolved rapidly in the post-fascist world of the 1950s and 1960s, with the dawning recognition that individual liberty for all can only exist in the condition of political and economic democracy for all.

At their best, American universities embrace a commitment to these values. Of course, universities (and their academic disciplines) did NOT embrace these values before the 1970s. Universities claimed to embrace science and meritocracy even as they actively excluded the voices of people of color, women and queers. The deepening commitment to democratic values resulted from political action by graduate students and faculty in the 1970s-1990s, in which Jewish academics often played a central role. By the beginning of the 21^st Century, virtually all universities understood that all academic/professional fields benefit from their commitment to inclusive hiring and culturally plural perspectives.

MAGA’s fascist project aims at remaking the United States into a white Christian nation. The values of American higher education run directly counter to MAGA, and so a vital part of the MAGA strategy is to take down the universities. And, like all fascist movements, their assault on higher education is legitimized by a white nationalist pretext, which in this case is to claim that antisemitism is running amok on American college campuses.

Their parlor trick was to force colleges to adopt a definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that states that criticisms of Israel are antisemitic. This absurd definition (see my previous posts on this topic) label all student and faculty support for Palestinians’ right to simply exist in the face of Israel’s genocidal assault as antisemitism. This definition made it possible for a gang of right-wing Zionists in Los Angeles (who were not UCLA affiliated) to physically attack the non-violent pro-Palestinian encampment of UCLA students and faculty in April 2024, injuring dozens, and get away with it with only one arrest while UCLA then dismantled the encampment. This definition made every Zionist student who said that pro-Palestinian activities “made them uncomfortable” into victims of antisemitism rather than people who were defending genocide. This definition demanded that pro-genocidal speech be given the same protections as all legitimate speech. This parlor trick allowed universities to try to silence leading Jewish voices against Israel’s genocide, such as Judith Butler at UC Berkeley and Analise Orleck at Dartmouth.

American colleges and universities have no future in Trump’s fascist state. Every academic field, all the sciences and all humanities, are based on ideas that run counter to MAGA’s belief system. Any attempt to conciliate the Trump administration, such as Berkeley turning in the names of 160 anti-Zionist students and faculty, is simply opening the doors to a political movement that seeks the total destruction of academia as we know it.

American universities must unite into a single voice rejecting the IHRA equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It is a Trojan horse that opens the gates for fascism, and the utter destruction of higher education as we know it.

Universities’ Hypocracy Towards anti-Israeli War Protestors

Panicked university administrators are making a major blunder if they think they can appease rightwing inquisitors by unleashing the police on students protesting the Israeli war against Palestine.

In the last two days, over 2000 students have been arrested, and many more will face expulsion from their schools for their “disruptive activities.”

University officials claim that they are not violating the students’ (and faculty’s) free speech rights by doing so. Instead, they–like the rightwing McCarthyists in Congress and the police–are depicting the demonstrators as violent antisemites.

Some university administrators argue that the presence of a single student who uttered extremist language about Zionists on a widely circulated video (leaked from one Columbia student’s supposedly confidential disciplinary hearing) proves that the encampments are antisemitic. Some pro-Zionist students and faculty also claim that the encampment makes them “uncomfortable” and “unsafe,” and that the encampment’s presence therefore interferes with their right to an education.

Free speech experts largely agree. Paul French, a First Amendment scholar, maintains that anti-Israeli speech, like all speech, is always conditional, and that universities are obliged to protect it only if it does not interfere with the normal functioning of the institution. The ACLU, in an advisory memo it sent to universities, makes the same argument.

According to university leaders, the right to free speech means that “both sides” have the responsibility of conducting themselves in a civilized manner, by which they mean the Cambridge debate model’s ‘exchange of ideas.’ To them, the presence of the encampments on their campuses has created an unjustifiable disruption of the educational process.

The students who are risking everything by occupying encampments and university buildings see it differently. They believe that their institutions are derelict in their lack of concern for a massive human rights violation in which they (through their investments) are directly complicit. The protestors refuse to allow the ‘normal functioning’ of universities to render Palestinians invisible continue under these dire circumstances.

The fact that pro-Zionist students (and some faculty) feel uncomfortable is in no way evidence of universities allowing an antisemitic climate to fester on their campuses. Their discomfort is a sign of the success of the protests at insisting that their schools acknowledge the Palestinian peoples’ plight and Israel’s responsibility for it. Pro-Zionists are outraged that the silent support for Israel’s war has been broken.

The protestors correctly call out a double standard in the concern about antisemitism. While school administrators are being hammered by Republicans in Congress for allowing “antisemitic protests” to take over the universities, there has been virtually no concern raised for the many people on these campuses who feel that continued silence in the face of the staggering human rights violations of the Palestinian people makes them feel marginalized and unsafe. This is especially the case for the many students of color who see the parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and racism in America.

Let’s be honest here: in their effort to showcase antisemitism on campuses, almost all the major media outlets have failed to cover the sorrow expressed by most protestors for the Israelis who lost their lives or were raped or were taken hostage in Hamas’ October 7 attack. The media has been quick to cover extreme statements made by individual participants, such as the videoed Columbia student saying Zionists have no right to live. The same mainstream media routinely ignore the widespread anti-Palestinian statements often made by supporters of Israel’s war, many of which are overtly racist.

But, much to my surprise, the New York Times has done an excellent job refuting the canard that the protesters were prone to violence. Their reporting–with videos, no less–show that all the violence that happened at UCLA on May 2 was instigated by pro-Israeli thugs who physically attacked students in the encampment for five hours before police were called in only to arrest students and break up the encampment. Similarly, the TImes interviewed “outsiders” arrested at Columbia, and showed that almost all of them were neighbors who rushed to defend the students when the NYPD showed up.

The protests have already achieved a major victory by legitimizing the idea that anti-Zionism is not by itself antisemitic. And, for the many Jewish students and faculty who are participating in the encampments, a really radical idea is now being discussed: that Zionism itself is, in the words of Naomi Klein, “a false idol” that betrays the foundational values of Judaism. Here’s a link to Klein’s speech at a New York rally on April 26. (Readers of my blog can look at my discussion of this idea in earlier posts, which I attributed to Shaul Magid.)

The universities’ self-righteous notion of protestors’ violation of ‘free speech’ is obscene. The protest movement was necessitated by the universities’ complete marginalization of Palestinian voices, as well as students’ concerns about racism, colonialism and militarism that were triggered by Israel’s war against Palestine. And when students raise their point of view, they have been met by complete resistance, and now, with violence. Universities do not want a real exchange of ideas: they want conformity to their notions of education, with all of their race, class and gender biases.

These schools’ problem is that they do not understand or value the importance of conflict in for the creation of new ideas.

The current battle on college campuses certainly is about a conflict over Israel and Palestine but its also about core educational values. Student protesters are demanding that their institutions change their curricula and their behavior. It’s about students’ refusal to allow their schools to turn a blind eye while Israel, with U.S. backing, commits massive human rights violations against Palestinians (not only in Gaza but on the West Bank and inside Israel itself). But it’s also about their schools’ continuing shortcomings on creating a diverse and inclusive curriculum and campus climate. It remains to be seen if these students have the fortitude and political savvy to force their schools to acknowledge the justice of their cause, and whether they can counter the blood-thirsty calls of rightwing Republicans and increasingly militant Zionists for the violent repression of their movement.

This battle is not the first of its kind. The anti-Vietnam War and civil rights/Black and brown power movements battled their colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s and succeeded at creating space for ethnic studies programs, bringing the study of globalization, race and ethnicity into the social sciences, and forcing universities to institute affirmative action programs in hiring faculty and admitting students.

What we who stayed in academia learned in the long, hard struggles of the 1960s-1990s is that institutions do not change quickly, or voluntarily, especially when the demand for changes is coming from marginalized people. But we did make difference, and so can students today.

I am betting on the students: once people have developed the commitment to social justice that they have shown, they do not back down when times get tough. And do not forget: the war still rages, and as Israel commits new atrocities, the students’ call to action will grow even more insistent.

The Gaza Encampments are History in the Making

Students at American colleges and universities are again making history. ‘Gaza encampments’ have been erected at dozens of colleges and universities around the country, making this one of the most important student movements since the 1960s. We are now hearing of new encampments every day, including now in Australia, Great Britain and Germany.

And, unlike in the 1960s, many faculty members are participating in and supporting these encampments, especially after their students face repressive actions initiated by panicked university presidents.

As a student protester myself in the 1960s, I could not be more excited or prouder of what I am seeing on college campuses today.

There are real parallels between the anti-Israeli war movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Just as students in the 1960s mobilized against an unjust war, students today are moved to action by the deeply disturbing role the U.S. is playing in enabling Israel to engage in an aggressive war against Palestine in open defiance of international law and public opinion.

And just like in the 1960s, the anti-Israeli war protests are already forcing a shift in the war itself, as the United States and Israel find themselves increasingly isolated and condemned for human rights violations. Biden is certainly feeling the pressure. He has already defied Netanyahu by building a dock for humanitarian aid to unload in Gaza and by forcing Israel to drastically scale back a planned attack on Iran and by putting economic sanctions on some right-wing extremist ‘settlers.’ It seems likely that as the protests build (especially if and when Israel invades Rafah), the U.S. will start withholding military supplies for some Gaza operations.

Of course, Republicans are sticking to their defense of Israel’s war, and are using all their power to try to force universities to repress the student protesters. Columbia University has emerged as ground zero because of the large Zionist presence on the campus and in New York City as a whole. There, more than anywhere else, university officials are under intense pressure to crack down on the Gaza encampment and have already called hundreds of NYPD officers to the campus to make mass arrests of students, who were then all summarily suspended from school without any academic due process. Despite her efforts to placate Republican lawmakers, Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik is under growing pressure to resign, with House Speaker Mike Johnson demanding her removal for failing to safeguard Jewish students from “violent, antisemitic” protesters. (He also called for the mobilization of the National Guard—perhaps thinking about what happened at Kent State in 1970?).

And who are these “violent, antisemitic protesters?” They are, like the protesters of the 1960s, those with the deepest commitment to social justice. They are the people who cannot go on with their studies when their country is aiding and abetting the mass murder of Palestinian civilians. They are the people who understand that the Israeli government is now the cutting edge of the worldwide right-wing movement, and that stopping this war is directly connected to stopping Trumpism in the United States. They are people revulsed by the racism of Israel’s callous disregard of Palestinian lives. And yes, a significant number of them are Jewish, a fact demonstrated by the beautiful celebration of Passover’s feast of liberation for all people at many of these encampments last Monday.

And who are the people referring to the protesters as “violent antisemites”? Well, most of the vocal Republican members of Congress consider themselves white Evangelical Christians, who until very recently referred to Jews as Christ killers, and many have a history of virulent racism in their political closets. All support unchecked police violence against Black people and Latinos, and all support the right of every American to carry guns.

If the parallels between the 1960s and the current movement are accurate, we can anticipate two major trends. First, there will be increasing repression of the protests. And second, in response to the repression, more and more people will join the movement. It is useful to remember that as late as 1967 only a small minority of students were even opposed to the Vietnam War, let alone actively protesting it. Yet by 1968, the anti-war movement had become capable of mounting nation-wide mobilizations, broad and powerful enough to force President Johnson to not run for a second term. Planning for national demonstrations against the Israeli war has already begun. Indeed, in the April 24 NY Times, David Brooks worried that the Democratic Convention (to be held in Chicago in August — as it was in 1968) might well be again the site of enormous protests that might doom the Biden Presidency.

Make no mistake about it: the students who are building the Gaza encampments are aware of the risks they are taking. They know (just as students in the 1960s knew) that what they are doing can lead to their arrest and/or expulsion from school. I would guess, from our experience in the 1960s, that the use of repressive force will grow in the coming weeks and months. But I would also guess that this movement is poised for a mass expansion which will surely happen when the IDF enters Rafah in the coming weeks.

The student movement will soon have to make a number of choices, just as we had to in the anti-Vietnam War movement. While I have all the confidence in the world in the current movement leaders, I just want to highlight some of the issues the anti-Vietnam War movement had to address as it matured. First, the early anti-Vietnam War movement expressed its solidarity with the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. But the movement could only grow by reframing itself as an anti-war movement to appeal to the broadest number of Americans. Secondly, the anti-Vietnam War movement had to address the fact that it was primarily a movement of white elite student, but that opposition to the war was actually greatest among people of color. Martin Luther King’s decision to oppose the war (and Muhammed Ali’s draft resistance) went a long way to creating powerful links between the anti-war movement and the civil rights/Black Power movements. Finally, the anti-Vietnam War movement become a movement for democracy against militarism. By doing all these things, the movement grew enormously. I am confident the anti-Israeli War movement will be able to navigate these issues with far greater insight than we did over half a century ago.

One side note: I am especially excited to see Jewish students boldly claim their Jewishness while condemning Zionism. As I have written in previous posts, there is no reason why Jews should be beholden to Israel’s current form of Zionism, and a million Jewish reasons to oppose it. The Passover Seders at the encampments were of great importance for the future of American Judaism.

Lastly, I want to point out that the students who are now becoming anti-war activists are being changed in ways they cannot now know, but in ways that most will carry with them for the rest of their lives. A study of people who participated in the civil rights movement in Florida in the 1960s and 1970s found that almost all of them made different life choices than their peers who did not participate. They chose different careers, different spouses, different friends, and lived in different places.

The students who today are daring to call on us to have a conscience are the best and the brightest among us. They understand the real purpose of an education and are now getting schooled in the most important lessons of their lives. I am so proud of them. We all should offer them our support and be prepared to join them in the national mobilizations soon to come.