RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/11/10/university-college-campus-culture-war-anti-semitism/

The surge of open hatred of Jews on college campuses is unprecedented in modern American life. We saw it outside universities in the 1930s, when it was openly preached by Detroit’s Father Coughlin and published by Henry Ford. We saw it from the KKK during the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The Klan targeted Jews, as a marginal group, as allies of black equality, and as vehicles to build solidarity in their target audience: poor, angry, Christian whites.

At universities we saw a different kind of prejudice. That bigotry was exemplified by quiet restrictions on Jewish students and faculty, referred to as “Gentleman’s Agreements”. Those agreements excluded Jews from fraternities and sororities at most schools. Harvard began the practise and stated their goal openly, while others followed in secret. This practice changed only when it was prohibited by civil rights laws.

These practices were obviously prejudiced, but they were a far cry from the open hatred, intimidation, and speech suppression we now see on campus. Some of that is an old mask stripped away, some is an increase in underlying hatred, and some is a collapse of any restraints on its public expression. The old mask was emblazoned with the coda, “We don’t hate Jews. We don’t hate Israel. We just oppose Israeli policies and support Palestinian rights.”

Well, if recent demonstrations are any guide, it turns out they do hate Israel. They want to see it wiped off the map. That’s the meaning of their constant chant, “From the river to the sea.” A Palestinian state that occupies all that territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean would extinguish Israel. That’s their “final solution” for the Jewish state.

Chilling as that goal is, the activists don’t stop there. They extend their hatred to all Jews, and they say so openly in campus meetings and demonstrations. That is led by extremist Muslims, who are part of the dominant coalition on campus. But it is embraced by their political allies. More on that coalition in a moment.

Decent Americans know something has gone badly wrong at our universities. This wider public recognises, quite accurately, that the attacks on Jews are only the latest, most visible examples of a more pervasive problem: the rise of intolerant, illiberal ideology on the far-Left. That has always been a problem on the far-Right, but they were never major players on campus or in elite media. The Left is.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-anti-semitism-in-1970-jew-hatred-anti-israel-academia-college-7c7373d0?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-students-meet-hostility-at-yale-israel-hamas-violence-terrorism-anti-semitism-1d6f81da?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

New Haven, Conn.

When we found out about Monday’s anti-Israel event at Yale, “Gaza Under Siege,” we scrambled to produce fliers offering some context. They detailed Hamas’s atrocities, its anti-Jewish charter, its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Our classmates awaiting the event weren’t interested. They yelled, “don’t take the paper!” and tore it up or threw it back at us.

Organizers refused us entry because we weren’t registered but waved others through who also weren’t on the list. The lecture hall was filled, and we resorted to sitting outside and pressing our ears against the door to listen.

What we heard was two hours of denial, lies and incitement. Speakers referred to the atrocities of Oct. 7 in the sanitized language of “civilians killed,” not beheaded, raped or kidnapped. They called the terrorist group “militant,” and one observed that “violent resistance movements often emerge in colonized spaces.”

Nobody mentioned the Hamas charter’s call to “fight Jews and kill them,” but somebody asserted that Israel aims to “inflict as much harm, damage, and death as possible.” One panelist remarked, “The one most important part of our conversation here today is that Israel is still occupying Gaza.” Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

One of the speakers flatly declared: “No matter what the solution is—a two-state solution or a one-state solution—the Israeli state cannot remain the state of the Jewish people.”

This event had broad institutional support from Yale. “Gaza Under Siege” was co-sponsored by the American Studies, Anthropology and Religious Studies departments; the programs in Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Middle East Studies; the Black Feminist Collective (co-directed by the head of Pierson College); the Ethnography Hub; the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; and Yalies4Palestine. The head of Jonathan Edwards College promoted it in a weekly email. The heads of Yale’s colleges had previously been instructed not to advertise a post-Oct. 7 Shabbat dinner invitation. That event was controversial, an administrator told Ms. Tartak.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/opinion/antisemitism-jews-campus.htm

Mr. Diamond is a senior at Yale University. Ms. Dror is a junior at Cornell University. Ms. Lederman is a senior at Brown University

Since the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, campus life in the United States has imploded into a daily trial of intimidation and insult for Jewish students. A hostile environment that began with statements from pro-Palestinian student organizations justifying terror has now rapidly spiraled into death threats and physical attacks, leaving Jewish students alarmed and vulnerable.

On an online discussion forum last weekend, Jewish students at Cornell were called “excrement on the face of the earth,”threatened with rape and beheading and bombarded with demands like “eliminate Jewish living from Cornell campus.”(A 21-year-old junior at Cornell has been charged with posting violent threats.) This horror must end.
Free speech, open debate and heterodox views lie at the core of academic life. They are fundamental to educating future
leaders to think and act morally.

The reality on some college campuses today is the opposite: open intimidation of Jewish students. Mob harassment must not be confused with free speech. Universities need to get back to first principles and understand that they have the rules on hand to end intimidation of Jewish students. We need to hold professors and students to a higher standard.

The targeting of Jewish students didn’t stop at Cornell: Jewish students at Cooper Union huddled in the library to escape an angry crowd pounding on the doors; a protester at a rally near New York University carried a sign calling for theworld to be kept “clean” of Jews; messages like “glory to our martyrs” were projected onto a George Washington
University building.

This most recent wave of hate began with prejudiced comments obscured by seemingly righteous language. Following
the Oct. 7 attacks, more than 30 student groups at Harvard signed on to a statement that read: “We, the undersigned
student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” There was no mention of
Hamas. The university issued such a tepid response, it almost felt like an invitation.