RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/opinion/publishing-literary-antisemitism.html

This month, an account on X with the handle @moyurireads and 360 followers published a link to a color-coded spreadsheet classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. Titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,” it reads like a cross between Tiger Beat and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The novelist Emily St. John Mandel, the author of “Station Eleven” and “Sea of Tranquility,” earned a red “pro-Israel/Zionist” classification because, according to the list’s creator, she “travels to Israel frequently talks favorably about it.” Simply for posting a link to the Israeli chapter of the Red Cross, the novelist Kristin Hannah was deemed a “Zionist,” as was the author Gabrielle Zevin for delivering a book talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization. Needless to say, the creator of the list — whose post on X announcing it garnered over a million views within a few days — encourages readers to boycott any works produced by “Zionists.”

The spreadsheet is but the crudest example of the virulently anti-Israel — and increasingly antisemitic — sentiment that has been coursing through the literary world since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Much of it revolves around the charge of genocide and seeks to punish Zionists and anyone else who refuses to explicitly denounce the Jewish state for allegedly committing said crime. Since a large majority of American Jews (80 percent of whom, according to a 2020 poll, said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of their Judaism) are Zionists, to accuse all Zionists of complicity in genocide is to anathematize a core component of Jewish identity.

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

As is always and everywhere the case, this growing antisemitism is concomitant with a rising illiberalism. Rarely, if ever, do writers express unanimity on a contentious political issue. We’re a naturally argumentative bunch who — at least in theory — answer only to our own consciences.

To compel them to express support or disapproval for a cause is one of the cruelest things a society can do to writers, whose role is to tell society what they believe, regardless of how popular the message may be. The drawing up of lists, in particular, is a tactic with a long and ignominious history, employed by the enemies of literature — and liberty — on both the left and the right. But the problem goes much deeper than a tyro blacklist targeting “Zionists.”

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/371559/all-the-darkness-they-cannot-see-the-tunnel-vision-that-drives-faculty-antisemitism/

All these faculty members can see are Israeli offenses, only Israeli offenses, out of their context, which they see as aggressions and describe using such inflammatory language as “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacy.”

After Oct. 7 I didn’t think I could be more shocked than by seeing American campuses explode in support rather than condemnation of that barbaric massacre. I was wrong. Now after seven months of open season on Jews both rhetorically and physically, culminating in the encampments on well over 100 campuses, I find myself struggling not to think of the disastrous years 70 C.E., 1492, and 1939, alongside America of 2024. 

Oddly, though, even though the encampments break so many campus rules and often local laws, my starting point is actually to be sympathetic to them. I think about how I would act, say, during the early 1940s, when I learned that a genocide against the Jewish people was occurring and people were not paying attention. Wouldn’t I protest, loudly? Disrupt “business as normal”? Maybe even break a few rules or laws? I hope that I would. 

The problem, then, isn’t the mayhem, per se (though it’s appropriately against the rules and must be — is long overdue for being —punished). It runs deeper, rooted in the academy itself: It’s that these people falsely believe a genocide is occurring (when it clearly isn’t), and misidentify the true genocidal agent (as we’ll see). More generally, it’s that they have adopted an entire narrative that is one-sided, oversimplified, ignorant of history, often counter to the facts, mistaken about who are the good guys and the bad, and driven, ultimately, by hatred and bigotry—and that licenses the outrageously immoral violence of Oct. 7.

A painful glimpse of all this may be found in a revealing statement recently issued by some 90 faculty and staff at Connecticut College, constituting almost half the fulltime faculty at this typical liberal arts college, in “solidarity” with the encampments. Much is objectionable in it; but we will look only at one sentence: 

“We also stand in solidarity with Israeli organizations and activists who oppose Israeli apartheid and Jewish supremacy …”

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/4671152-democrats-fight-against-hate-crimes-vanishes-in-the-face-of-antisemitism/
Julian Epstein is the former chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and former staff director of the House Oversight Committee.

For the past few decades, Democrats have consistently demanded a strong response to the rising number of hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, ancestry or sexual orientation. Among other things, they have insisted on universal condemnation of the crimes and vigorous enforcement of federal laws that criminalize hate crimes. 

Spurred by the brutal hate murders of James Byrd Jr., and Matthew Shepard in the late 1990s, the Department of Justice has prosecuted hundreds of these cases in recent administrations, including 70 convictions by the Biden Department of Justice as last September. As chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee years ago, I was involved in the push for stronger enforcement. It was a central part of the Democrats’ civil rights agenda.  

But now the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem on its left flank, and its tune has changed a bit. Leftist professional organizers have mobilized student groups and mobs elsewhere to attack, harass and obstruct the free movement of Jews — all of which are crimes.   

Many openly support Hamas and the October 7 civilian massacre, calling for the destruction of Israel and for the repatriation of Jews to places like Poland. One student leader at Columbia asserted that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” in a livestream video. (University officials took no disciplinary action until the video was widely publicized.)   

Of course, the spike of over 8,873 antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2023 — a 140 percent increase from the previous year — was somewhat predictable.  

Numerous progressive groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (which counts among its supporters Democrats in Congress) and local chapters of Black Lives Matter celebrated Hamas’s genocidal attack as an act of liberation. A progressive Columbia professor called the attack “awesome”; one at Cornell was “exhilarated”; a Stanford instructor segregated Jewish students in an apparent slander of Israelis for being imagined “colonizers.” Democrats have largely looked the other way and declined to namecheck any of these bigotries.  

What would Democrats say if paid organizers incited mobs to attack Black students, impede their movement and publicly demand their repatriation to Africa? What would they say if college professors and their curricula slurred the ancestral heritage of Hispanics? They would rightly be outraged and would insist on maximum legal consequences against the perpetrators. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-palestinian-visits-auschwitz/

The first Palestinian to have visited a Nazi concentration camp was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, who spent the war years in Berlin. He had a nice chat with Hitler on November 28, 1941, captured in a famous photograph here. Al-Husseini expressed to Hitler his enthusiasm for the Final Solution. He was befriended by Heinrich Himmler, and there is some evidence, not conclusive, that the Mufti may have been taken to Auschwitz by Himmler, or possibly by another person he had befriended, Adolf Eichmann, to see how swimmingly things were proceeding there. It is certain that the Mufti visited the concentration camp at Tebbin, for there are numerous photographs of him at the site together with high Nazi officials, as can be seen here.

As his contribution to the Nazi war effort, Hajj Amin el Husseini is known to have raised several Waffen SS battalions consisting of Bosnian Muslims. He also broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda to the Arab world throughout the war.

In January 2020, in quite a different spirit to that exhibited by the Mufti, a group of 25 Muslim faith leaders visited Auschwitz, in what was at the time called a “groundbreaking” visit. “To be here… is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” the Saudi head of the Muslim World League said during a tour of Nazi death camp with members of the American Jewish Committee.

Now another Palestinian has just been in the news for his visit to Auschwitz, not undertaken In the spirit of sympathy for the victims that the delegation of Muslim faith leaders exhibited but, rather, in a triumphant mode, demanding that Jews everywhere “return” to where they belong — that is, to the Nazi death camps. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this latest example of a Palestinian expressing murderous antisemitism can be found here: “Palestinian man visits Auschwitz, publicly calls on Jews to return there ‘where they belong,’”