Antisemitism and Universities
It's not the prevalence in the population that matters. It's the virulence of the variant.
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OFF-CAMPUS VERSUS ON-CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM
Professor Musa al-Gharbi, a scholar whose work I admire, argues in “Misunderstanding Antisemitism in America,” that the image of American universities as “hotbeds of anti-Jewish animus” is “demonstrably mistaken.” He presents evidence showing antisemitism to be relatively scarce among highly educated people, academicians, and progressives. Unfortunately, his data fail to make his case—in large part by missing the fact that antisemitism is not a uniform phenomenon. Off-campus antisemitism may, in fact, be more widespread than on-campus antisemitism, but it is at universities that the most virulent, impactful varieties flourish.
My essay, “Antisemitism's Sharp Left Turn,” argued that campus-based antisemitism is pervasive among professors, administrators, and students. Dr. al-Gharbi says:
“Institutions of higher learning are purportedly hotbeds of anti-Jewish animus, indoctrinating impressionable young people into a leftist ideology that paints Jews as extraordinarily privileged, Israelis as oppressors, Hamas as brave freedom fighters and Palestinians as blameless victims. Many people I deeply respect have embraced claims like these in recent weeks. However, I believe these narratives are demonstrably mistaken.”
Using COVID as a metaphor, I argue that there may be widespread sniffle-inducing Omicron Variant antisemitism in less-educated corners of America, but universities are where you find the Delta Variant antisemitism that leaves Jews gasping for air. As was true of Delta-COVID, the mitigation strategies aimed at minimizing virulent antisemitism are as destructive as the disease itself. Dr. al-Gharbi offers the good news that American antisemitism is sparse and declining, but his data don’t undermine the argument that American universities are hotbeds of anti-Jewish animus.
With antisemitism, as with COVID, it’s not the prevalence in the population that matters, but, rather, the virulence of variants. Throughout this essay, I’ll use “Omicron-Antisemitism” and “Delta-Antisemitism” as shorthand.
OMICRON-ANTISEMITISM
Other than occasional Jew-hating trolls on social media, my most recent encounter with antisemitism came a decade ago, when I gave a tree-cutter an unusually large tip. He responded with, “Man! Thanks! I can tell you’re no Jew!” (He was bewildered when he learned I was.) In childhood, I often heard slurs. A few times, anti-Jewish graffiti was painted on our synagogue. Jews couldn’t set foot in the local country club. Certain neighbors stared icily when we walked past their homes. Occasionally, schoolyard bullies forced us to fight.
Such irritations were unavoidable, but we almost never feared for our lives, safety, or property. We felt no need to hide our identity or to self-censor. The KKK had a small, flaccid presence in our town, but even its members chatted politely when they shopped in my parents’ store. (Klansmen didn’t advertise their affiliation, but we knew who they were.)
An exception to this calm came and went in June 1967. My mother was terrified that Arab armies would crush Israel and launch a Second Holocaust. She feared that contagion could reach America. My parents’ store had large windows, and Kristallnacht was still within memory. She was enormously heartened when Israel crushed three incompetent armies and when we heard almost nothing but encouragement and support—even from those who traditionally dropped slurs and enjoyed their exclusive country club.
DELTA VARIANT ANTISEMITISM
After Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, Jewish students on American campuses experienced an explosion of virulent antisemitism unlike anything I ever experienced. From the New York Times:
“Pro-Palestinian students at George Washington University used a library facade to project giant slogans like ‘Glory to Our Martyrs.’ Next to a Jewish fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania, someone scrawled ‘The Jews R Nazis.’
At the Cooper Union, a private college in New York City, frightened Jewish students huddled behind locked doors at a library, while demonstrators shouted ‘Free Palestine’ and banged on the doors and windows. And at Cornell, a computer science major was arrested, accused of making online threats to shoot up a kosher dining hall and rape and murder Jewish students.”
At Stanford University, a since-suspended instructor ordered Jewish students to stand in a corner and berated them as “colonizers.” Students hesitate to refuse or protest, as he controlled their grades. Berkeley's Dean of Law said, “never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.” The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn equivocated emotionlessly when asked whether calls for genocide against Jews qualified as permissible speech. Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers said, “I have lost confidence in the determination and ability of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard leadership to maintain Harvard as a place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.” In an off-campus incident in Los Angeles, a 69-year-old Jewish man holding an Israeli flag was killed by a college instructor. At Cornell, History Professor Russell Rickford found Hamas’s orgy of rape, murder, torture, and kidnapping “exhilarating.” From The Hill:
“One Jewish professor was called out by name and falsely ‘accused’ of having served in the Israel Defense Forces in a rant delivered by another professor in the latter’s class; shortly thereafter the bulletin board outside her office was vandalized. And Israeli staff and faculty working on American campuses are bearing some of the worst instances of workplace antisemitism. Some have taken a leave of absence or quit their positions outright.”
The AMCHA Initiative tracks antisemitic incidents at colleges. As of 2/9/24, its website lists 6,852 incidents since 2014 at 681 universities—searchable by school, date, and other variables. The posts don’t capture the extent to which Jews on campuses suppress their views and hide or understate their identities to avoid becoming posts on AMCHA’s website—just as COVID prevalence data do not indicate the costs of masking, social distancing, and business/school closures. Some have criticized AMCHA’s definition of antisemitism as overbroad and, as is true with practically any organization in this sphere, its methods and methodologies are subject to criticism. Individual readers can form their own opinions on these questions. (NOTE: “AMCHA” is Hebrew for “your nation” or “your people.”)
DR. AL-GHARBI’S ESSAY
Following are selected quotes from Dr. al-Gharbi’s essay, accompanied by my commentary. For clarity, I’ll indicate which passages were written by Dr. al-Gharbi, by two other individuals, and by myself.
AL-GHARBI: “… surveys suggest that more than 80 percent of scholars who work on Middle East issues self-censor on the topic of Israel and Palestine. Overwhelmingly, this self-censorship entails refraining from criticism of Israel …”
GRABOYES: This leaves the possibility that 20% of scholars do NOT self-censor.
AL-GHARBI: “Young people’s attitudes tend to be fairly stable throughout their college careers, and the limited change that occurs seems to be driven much more by peers than professors.”
GRABOYES: Students’ animus may pre-date their arrival on campus—shaped, perhaps, by K-12 educators and social media. By this wording, professors do have some effect. And radicalization by peers is as dangerous as radicalization by professors.
AL-GHARBI: “Exacerbating this problem, many inappropriately conflate trends among young people as a whole with trends among college students in particular and then inappropriately blame institutions of higher learning and ‘radical professors’ for trends that are common among young people writ large, even those that did not attend college.”
GRABOYES: This supports, rather than refutes, the argument that university campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism. If young people are prone to antisemitism, then one would expect the worst excesses at universities, where most of the population consists of antisemitism-prone young people, with little moderating influence from older, less antisemitic adults.
AL-GHARBI: “college attendance and completion are inversely correlated with antisemitism. … Higher education also corresponds to greater knowledge about the Holocaust and lowered propensity to engage in Holocaust denial. … And although this question is importantly distinct from antisemitism per se, the more college Americans get, the more likely they become to express positive views of Israel (and the less likely they become to view Israel unfavorably).”
GRABOYES: None of this precludes the presence of virulent, life-disrupting antisemitism on campus. Nor does it differentiate between Omicron-Antisemitism and Delta-Antisemitism (or between subvariants). I’ll add that one of my recent essays (“The Hollowness of Holocaust Remembrance: Hitler to Hamas, Eugenics to Equitism”) argues that post-October 7 events suggest that Holocaust education has proven to be a massive failure. In addition, I would say that campus antisemitism has been brewing for many years and that October 7 merely revealed the depth of the problem.
AL-GHARBI: “Why are so many people convinced that the opposite is true? … In part, it’s because, as has chronically been the case in ‘campus culture war’ discourse, narratives about colleges and universities after October 7 have been driven heavily by sensationalized events at a small number of elite schools whose culture, policies and students are deeply unrepresentative of higher ed writ large.”
GRABOYES: As noted above, the AMCHA Initiative has documented thousands of incidents at hundreds of colleges. Some readers will argue that many incidents listed entail “anti-Zionism,” and not antisemitism per se. I link to their site because theirs is the most comprehensive collection I have found, and their posts have sufficient evidence to enable readers to evaluate the validity of their posts. I would argue that the posts include vast numbers of indisputably antisemitic incidents at hundreds of institutions, but again, readers ought to judge for themselves. And as for the “small number of elite schools” that Prof. al-Gharbi mentions, they have disproportionate influence across American academe and American society.
AL-GHARBI: “And far from being a product of “kids these days” internalizing leftist ideology, the observed increases in antisemitism are driven almost exclusively by shifts among young people on the far right.”
GRABOYES: I argued in my previously mentioned essay that: “it’s obvious that the greater problem today lies on the left.” I said, “Right-wing antisemitism today comes mostly in two forms: (1) off-putting remarks and irritating attitudes by otherwise normal people who have little or no particular power over Jewish lives, and (2) wild-eyed conspiracies and episodic violence by small numbers of marginal loners. Left-wing antisemitism, in sharp contrast, is highly organized and endemic among swarms of people endowed with considerable power over the daily lives of Jewish Americans. … Right-wing antisemites hold little sway over conservative politicians, while left-wing antisemites have an electoral hammerlock over many left-of-center politicians.”
AL-GHARBI: “… most college students aren’t regularly encountering the perspectives of Republicans. Both their classmates and professors tend to be overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party. Antisemitic attitudes of people on the right, regardless of their baseline severity or prevalence, are largely irrelevant to college students’ daily lives. As a consequence, Jewish students, regardless of their own ideological leanings, tend to be concerned about antisemitism on campus from the left more than the right.”
GRABOYES: This is crucial to my point. A Jewish college student is surrounded by young Americans, whom Dr. al-Gharbi’s data suggest are especially prone to antisemitism. Their professors are almost uniformly left-leaning. Even if antisemitism were an undifferentiated pathology, universities would be hotbeds of antisemitism by dint of demographic concentration. But, the off-campus/on-campus differential is exacerbated by the Omicron/Delta distinction.
AL-GHARBI: “One thing that compounds this confusion is that many conservatives are militantly pro-Israel despite (and sometimes, because of) holding negative views towards Jews. Consequently, insofar as people mistakenly conflate views towards Israel with views towards Jews, they may significantly underestimate antisemitism on the right (in addition to overestimating antisemitism on the left).”
AL-GHARBI: “the Americans most likely to embrace ‘woke’ ideology — are the least antisemitic people in the country by far.”
GRABOYES: I will gladly take a pro-Israel Omicron-Antisemite over a Delta-Antisemite taking to the streets on October 8, chanting “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary.” This brings up another issue; I’d guess that in surveys, right-of-center Omicron-Antisemites are more inclined to air their prejudices than are left-of-center Delta-Antisemites.
AL-GHARBI: “Antisemitic views are far more common among non-whites than whites, and are particularly prevalent among Black and Hispanic Americans. FBI hate crime data shows a similar pattern: non-whites seem significantly more likely (per capita) to commit hate crime than whites. …”
AL-GHARBI: “Many of the U.S. subgroups with an especially high propensity towards holding antisemitic views or engaging in bias incidents also tend to be politically aligned with the Democratic Party. However, this is not because these subsets of society tend to skew ideologically left. In fact, within the Democratic coalition, non-whites, less educated voters, et al. are especially unlikely to self-identify as ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive.’ They vote Democrat for practical reasons (such as support for social safety nets or government programs) while largely rejecting left cultural ideology — self-identifying as ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ instead.”
GRABOYES: Here, Dr. al-Gharbi gives an inconvenient truth about left-of-center antisemitism and then falls into what logicians call the “No True Scotsman Fallacy”—defending a generalization by denying the validity of counterexamples. In effect, he dismisses most left-wing antisemitism—and some of the more violent manifestations—by arguing, in effect, “The demographics in question may constitute a majority of liberal/progressive voters, but, the antisemitic ones are really kind of conservative, so they don’t count.”
This combines two distinct problems. First, it illustrates a methodological problem inherent in relying on self-description. And second, it reflects motte-and-bailey confusion into the discussion: are we talking about people who vote liberal/progressive or about people who really, really feel liberal/progressive?
Dr. al-Gharbi is on his shakiest grounds when he seeks to use opinions of Jews to prove that left-wing antisemitism is marginal or that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are distinctly different phenomena.
AL-GHARBI: “And as right-aligned antisemites consistently emphasize, many ‘cultural left’ frameworks like critical theory were, in fact, created by Jewish scholars. They are not the core driver of antisemitism in America.”
GRABOYES: Jewish origins of anti-Jewish schemes has many historical precedents. Karl Marx was a Jew, and yet he was also a snarling antisemite. Leon Trotsky was a Jew, and yet he was a founder of the rabidly antisemitic Soviet Union. Dr. al-Gharbi tells us:
AL-GHARBI: “… it is simply false to assert that liberals and progressives are especially inclined towards antisemitism. In fact, a majority of Jewish Americans, themselves, identify as liberal.”
GRABOYES: Indeed, many Jews are liberal/progressive on most issues (social safety net, government programs, abortion, etc.), and many have knowingly or blindly overlooked the antisemitism of their allies on the left. Sen. Chuck Schumer recently said:
SCHUMER: “Many of the people who have expressed [antisemitic] sentiments in America aren’t neo-Nazis, or card-carrying Klan members, or Islamist extremists. They are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers. … Not long ago, many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all.”
GRABOYES: Dr. al-Gharbi provides a chart indicating that substantial numbers of young Jews agree with statements such as, “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians,” “Israel is an apartheid state,” and “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the US.” One can certainly criticize Israel’s history or governance or conduct of war without showing a hint of antisemitism, but if one argues that Israel is engaged in genocide, apartheid, or U.S.-style racism, one is employing antisemitic tropes—plain and simple. That many young Jews employ such rhetoric doesn’t negate that fact. Sarah Lawrence College Professor Samuel Abrams, writes that a particularly disturbing phenomenon consists of Jews accepting the often-libelous rhetoric of anti-Zionism and advocating the censorship of pro-Israeli sentiments. He notes parallels between this behavior and that of pre-WWII European Jews engaged in what he calls “Jewish defensive assimilation”:
ABRAMS: “In pre-war Europe, many Jews felt intense disdain and pressure against them; rather than speak up and push back, many took an appeasement approach thinking that by looking like they are part of an illiberal and dangerous group or ideas, the antisemitism could be held in check. Similarly, the tendency for 20th-century American Jews to align with liberal and progressive causes may be seen as partially motivated by a selective reading of the Jewish tradition, and the motivation to align with the forces most unsympathetic to Jewish group vitality and survival.”
AFTERTHOUGHTS
In my childhood, we were friendly with a Jewish man who was active in the John Birch Society, which exhibited antisemitic tendencies. Once, he tried—unsuccessfully—to get my father to attend a JBS meeting, saying, “You’ll probably agree with 90% of what we have to say and will only disagree with 10%.” My father responded, “Even if that were true, a human body that is only 10% cancerous is still mighty sick.” Though they remained friendly, that response ended his attempts to proselytize my father.
In early 2020, only a small percentage of Americans contracted Delta Variant COVID, but a substantial number of those who did so experienced dire consequences. Furthermore, mitigation strategies—masking, isolation, business and school closures—likely damaged society far more than the illness itself did. In 2024, over the course of a year, a huge percentage of Americans contract Omicron Variant COVID, but with relatively few exceptions, they experience only mild sniffles, fever, and aches. Present-day mitigation strategies are relatively unobtrusive. I dare say that few Americans would say, “I prefer the COVID of 2020 over the COVID of 2024 because there were far fewer cases.”
And, just to offer some hypothetical numbers, I’ll gladly choose a population with 50% Omicron-Antisemitism over one with 5% Delta-Antisemitism. I suspect the incidence is far higher than 5% across American universities.
LAGNIAPPE
ABOUT PROF. MUSA AL-GHARBI
I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some information on the gentleman who whom I am disagreeing. First, I’ll share the following short video, where he explains that his deep interest in politics resulted from the death of his twin brother, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan:
A sociologist at Stony Brook University, he is also the Daniel Bell Research Fellow at the Heterodox Academy, whose board of directors includes Jonathan Haidt (co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind) and my friend Jeff Flier (former dean of Harvard Medical School and a fierce advocate for academic integrity). The Heterodox Academy describes itself as follows:
“a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization of thousands of faculty, staff, and students committed to advancing the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research.”
Dr. al-Gharbi’s essay on antisemitism offers a deeply moving self-description:
“This is an issue that is near to my heart. As a Muslim who has done a lot of work on interfaith engagement, I view it as an imperative to stand with other ‘people of the book’ — especially when they face persecution on the basis of their identity as Jews or Christians. On a more personal level, I have been supported throughout my intellectual journey by Jewish scholars who saw something in me that others did not, who helped me flourish as an academic and human being. I would not be where I am today, indeed, I would not be who I am today, were it not for Jewish mentors and colleagues who stood with me every step of the way. … As a consequence of these experiences, relationships and commitments, I take antisemitism very seriously.”
Despite my disagreement with this particular essay, I salute Dr. al-Gharbi’s deep interest in antisemitism, his interfaith efforts, and his obvious devotion to an open, liberal society. There’s lots more on his life story at his website.
Dr. al-Gharbi says “[S]urveys suggest that more than 80 percent of scholars who work on Middle East issues self-censor on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Overwhelmingly, self-censorship entails *refraining* from criticism of Israel …” and, amazingly, adduces this datum as evidence those 80 percent of scholars are *not* antisemitic!
What you are seeing now, to use your analogy, is the virus mutated and let loose upon a body already wracked by another disease, DEI. The young people, already prone to do what young people do - rebel, have been fed decades of hate and the belief that people of various backgrounds must be separated and judged accordingly. The outcome, if considered in those terms, is fairly predictable. Thus the wry "welcome to the club" that you see amongst many conservative white males. Unless and until we once again begin teach that people are individuals, not members of some monolithic group with their moral value cooked in at birth by their immutable characteristics, the path will get harder and darker for anyone on the "wrong" side of the road.