Recent campus debates teach us an important lesson about bigotry and how to deal with it
Is anti-Zionism any different from anti-Semitism? The question is probably the most accurate seismograph we’ve got to measure where one stands on the ever-tremorous political grounds we all walk when we talk about Israel. Not that there’s necessarily any right or wrong answer; civil, well-meaning people can make arguments on both ends. Yes, because Jews and Jewish life cannot be reduced to the national aspirations of the Jewish state. No, because anyone denying Jews, alone of all the world’s nations, their right of self-determination is by definition a hater. It’s not an altogether useless debate to have, but it’s not the debate we’re having.
The debate we’re having, true to our times, is both dumber and more malicious, and it was on display this month as at least two of our finest institutions of higher learning, Stanford and Oberlin, treated us to the intellectual equivalent of watching a tightrope walker trip and go splat on the asphalt. Out west, a member of the school’s student senate argued that it was not anti-Semitic to argue that Jews control the media, the banks, the government, and all other social institutions. And in the Ohio enclave of righteousness, several Jewish students published a letter in a student newspaper defending a disgraced professor who had posted similar allegations on her Facebook page about the Jews’ malevolent omnipotence.
Both pronouncements are worthy of consideration. Like any good work of modern art, they’re one part parody, peenging poseurship at its most delightful, and one part dirge, announcing the death of good, rational thought. At Stanford, the portentously named Gabriel Knight, a junior on the school’s student governing body, claimed that it was, like, totally cool to talk about how the Jews control the world. “Questioning these potential power dynamics, I think, is not anti-Semitism,” sprach Knight. “I think it’s a very valid discussion.”
