Campus Anti-Semitism in 1970 An encounter with fringe lunatics then gave a foretaste of today’s bitter hatred. By Jonathan Kellerman
I was a junior at the University of California, Los Angeles when Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban came to town. It was Nov. 12, 1970, and he’d arrived to give a speech on Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors. Alongside thousands of other students eager to hear him, I strolled to Pauley Pavilion, one of the campus’s largest venues.
On the way, my friends and I passed a small, vocal group of anti-Israel protesters, a motley bunch I’d seen on campus over the past year: three Libyan exchange students, a middle-aged German woman and a few members of Students for a Democratic Society, a radical group.
One of the SDSers confronted us, hurling insult after insult. He ended his tirade by screaming that we were Nazis. We walked on and enjoyed an eloquent, well-received speech by Eban. But the encounter remained with me.
Here I was—a second-generation American who had lost several relatives to the gas chambers, the son of a decorated World War II veteran who had fought the Nazis and survived both D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge—being branded as Hitlerian. What could be crueler and crazier?
Anti-Semitism at elite universities isn’t new. Those opposed to Israel planted the seeds of hatred following the Six Day War in 1967. Israel won that military conflict, but its enemies have since dominated the war of words.
The protesters at Eban’s speech were similar to today’s culprits: Arab students, leftist radicals and old-school Jew haters. The difference is that in 1970, most people regarded the SDSer and his ilk as fringe lunatics. Today, they’re mainstream. In 1970, Jewish students generally weren’t afraid to express themselves. I did so freely as a columnist and editorial cartoonist for the campus newspaper.
I found that UCLA in the 1970s welcomed a diversity of opinions, and people treated one another civilly. Professors concentrated on research and teaching rather than operating as an ideological bloc.
As a graduate student in clinical psychology, I learned about a defense mechanism called projection—attributing one’s own character defects to others—that helped me to understand the SDS member. But it still doesn’t excuse the viciousness of his verbal assault, and it hasn’t provided comfort as Jew-hatred on college campuses has risen steadily. The situation has deteriorated to the point where self-styled scholars and their acolytes barely flinch at the decapitation of babies and blame the victims for terrorist violence.
Even so, I hold onto hope that sunlight is the best disinfectant. I’m confident that as the truth about educational degradation becomes more widely known, the roots of hatred embedded decades ago will be yanked out and relegated to the dustbin of history.
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