Tal Fortgang Destined to Fail Northwestern’s initiative to combat anti-Semitism does not respond to student protesters’ shallow worldview.
Even among the jarring snapshots that emerged from this spring’s anti-Israel encampments, imagery from Northwestern University’s “Liberated Zone” was particularly vile. In addition to the usual signs calling for the elimination of Israel, the campus was defaced with a depiction of a crossed-out Star of David—a symbol not just of Israel, but of the Jewish people. Perhaps most horrifying was a sign featuring Northwestern’s Jewish president, Michael Schill, caricatured with horns and blood dripping from his face, with a dialogue bubble reading, “I [heart] genocide.”
At the time, Schill indicated that Northwestern would take the blatant anti-Semitism seriously. “[W]hen I see a Star of David with an X on it, when I see a picture of me with horns or when I hear that one of our students has been called a ‘dirty Jew,’ there is no ambiguity,” he said. “This needs to be condemned by all of us, and that starts with me.”
Nothing more than that condemnation materialized. Northwestern did not punish any student demonstrators. In fact, the administration negotiated an end to the encampment by acquiescing to several of the group’s demands. Schill had formed an Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate in November 2023, but it disbanded in May after failing to find consensus on appropriate language to address festering Jew-hatred.
The kicker came last week, when Northwestern took a step likely to be emulated by other universities seeking to fend off lawsuits alleging violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. Schill announced that Northwestern would provide “expanded resources” and “educational opportunities” to combat “antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate.” At the heart of the plan: “Mandatory trainings on antisemitism and other forms of hate will be used in September at incoming student orientation and over the Fall Quarter for all returning students.” Naturally, there will also be “an integration of antisemitism and Islamophobia into the work of our Institutional Diversity and Inclusion Office, including a new religious literacy program.”
Some condemnation. Even leaving aside Northwestern’s inability to admit that it has a specific and ongoing problem with Jew hatred, the plan demonstrates that the school, like so many others, fundamentally misunderstands or refuses to confront the particular brand of anti-Semitism now infecting elite institutions.
Consider the students or faculty responsible for caricaturing Schill as a bloodthirsty demon. They may or may not have known that they were invoking anti-Semitic tropes. But their motives were ideological: they believed no one, in good faith, could support what they believe is a “settler-colonialist” and “genocidal” Zionist entity. To the vandals, no good-faith disagreements could be had about the history of the region and competing claims to the land. Rather, they believed that Schill is an apologist for colonialism and genocide, who sides with the oppressors out of sheer venality.
Regardless of how attuned they were to European history and Jews’ history of persecution, what animated the demonstrators was the sense that they were obviously righteous and that Schill—for equivocating at all on the Israel issue—was obviously evil. The facile oppression analysis at the heart of anti-Israel discourse, not a lack of understanding of anti-Semitism or “religious literacy,” explains their conduct.
So-called anti-Semitism training can educate away students’ use of certain symbols and save Northwestern the embarrassment of not expelling those too uncouth to use code words. But the root of the problem is not the use of offensive language. It is the broken educational system that flattens complex historical and geopolitical issues into simple (and false) tales about white Jewish colonizers and indigenous Arab victims. Put another way, the problem is not that “from the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” is offensive; it’s that anyone (especially our supposed best and brightest) would chant it in the first place, thinking that eliminating Israel would be a desirable outcome.
To its limited credit, Northwestern pledged to host “[a] set of lectures and panels on antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism as well as the history and politics of the conflict in the Middle East.” That anti-Semitism is lumped in with unrelated bigotries is not encouraging—and these events are not mandatory, meaning they won’t attract the students that could most use the correctives. But a bold exploration of the history of the region could challenge the oppressor-versus-oppressed framework that gives rise to students’ undue moral confidence. A history lesson about Jews’ millennia-old connection to the land of Israel, or about how calling Jews “colonizers” is old Soviet propaganda, might do the trick.
A truly ambitious program to combat anti-Semitism might even point out that calling Jews in Israel “colonizers” is inherently anti-Semitic because it denies that precisely what makes Jews one people is a shared history dating back to ancient Judea; such a denial requires calling Jews poseurs and frauds. Surely many students do not realize that this premise is logically necessary to calling Israel a settler-colonial state and believe in good faith that Israel is a vestige of the age of colonization, not what emerged in its aftermath. Correcting that historical misunderstanding and the anti-Semitic canard that allows it to persist would not merely demonstrate that Jews and Arabs have competing claims to the land between the river and the sea. It would reveal that, according to the finders-keepers logic of decolonial theory, the student demonstrators’ script must be flipped. But that would undoubtedly invite enormous backlash from students and faculty who are already prone to calling these arguments Islamophobic or violations of free speech. It probably hasn’t even occurred to those tasked with designing mandatory-training curricula. In other words, it won’t happen.
The best way for colleges to deal with their anti-Semitism problem—aside from having a zero-tolerance policy for students who engage in organized rule-breaking—is to stop teaching that all conflict should be viewed through the lens of oppression analysis. Students, encouraged to engage in real geopolitical analysis, will be less likely to demonize those who support the Jewish state. Making that a reality would require universities to overhaul their course offerings and curricula, and probably shut down their offices of diversity and inclusion. None of that is going to happen, either.
Instead, campus radicals will use their new “education” in anti-Semitism to learn which words they can and cannot use as they continue along their analytically facile, morally self-assured way.
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