https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitism-at-the-cooper-union
Last night, a small cluster of Jewish students barricaded themselves in the library of Cooper Union, while a crowd outside banged on the doors chanting: “Free Palestine.”
Scenes like this have become familiar on college campuses. Radical activists have spent years devising strategies to drown out and, in some cases, physically threaten undesirable voices. In March 2017, masked activists at Middlebury College mobbed the social scientist Charles Murray, chasing him and others into a car. They shoved and pulled the hair of the faculty moderator for the event (who said that she disagreed with Murray about many issues). These tactics of revolutionary exception are now being used to target Jewish people on campuses and in cities across the United States.
The ugly displays of anti-Semitism that have erupted across the United States over the past month are at once the extension of the racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020 and a profound challenge to the legitimacy of this supposed reckoning. One of the reckoning’s premises was that the urgency of injustice demanded the suspension of civic order and the norms of a liberal society. Rioters were thus permitted to torch public buildings, loot businesses, and tear down statues of “problematic” figures from the past. When the New York Times ran an op-ed by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to help put down violent riots, the newsroom dissolved into a struggle session that ended in the departure of multiple staffers, including editorial page editor James Bennet. In workplaces across the United States at that time, an inopportune comment on Zoom could mean defenestration. For defenders of the reckoning, confronting the history of racism demanded such consequences.
Despite years of warnings about the importance of democratic norms and liberal democracy, the American establishment mostly blessed these efforts. Foundations poured hundreds of millions of dollars into identity-politics activist groups. Major public institutions adopted the creed of the reckoning. Even mild criticisms of ideological purges—such as the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”—were treated as reactionary screeds. Terrified of right-populism, part of the political establishment might have seen the reckoning as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump-supporting “deplorables”; or maybe anti-Trump coalitional politics simply demanded silence in the face of these excesses.
Now the promissory note of the reckoning has come due. In habituating people to the idea that righteousness justifies the abrogation of individual dignity and dismissal of political pluralism, the reckoning taught lessons deeply at odds with the functioning of American democracy.
