Book Review: College Zionists Confront the Abyss, by Cary Nelson

Cary Nelson is the elder statesman of researching and exposing anti-Zionism on campus. A former president of the national American Association of University Professors, he has had a front seat to the decay of academic freedom as the academy has embraced anti-Israel positions as normative and even the AAUP now endorses academic boycotts of Israel. 

He has written many books on the topic, and I have reviewed several of them. This new book, College Zionists Confront the Abyss: The Aftermath of October 7 in Higher Education and Its Consequences for Progressive Politics, specifically covers how universities reacted to October 7.

Among all his books I've read, this is perhaps the most passionate. Nelson is a professor of English and he writes beautifully, but even with his command of the language he struggles to describe October 7 and admittedly fails. Simple words cannot convey the horror of that day. He enlists excerpts of poems written about October 7 in an attempt to even approach describing how monstrous the pogroms that devastated the Gaza envelope were. He tries to write dispassionately but some things are distorted by objectivity; his emotions come through and this is to his credit. 

Nelson effectively contrasts the depravity of the Hamas attacks with the celebrations that greeted them on North American campuses. These celebrations were immediate and genuine, independent posts on social media that glamorized Hamas and rallies organized within hours that were meant to redirect any  sympathy for Israelis into blame.

It reminded me of something I thought or perhaps wrote years ago in the wake of people justifying suicide bombings: there is literally nothing Palestinians could do that would make people think that they are in the wrong. The example in my head was if Hamas were to wire up a baby with a bomb belt and throw her into a crowd of Israeli civilians, it would be justified by the anti-Israel crowd. October 7 provided a direct proof of my theory; the most depraved acts are transformed into heroic when they are done against Israel. 

Nelson then describes the situations on campus where any chance of people empathizing with Israeli pain was overwhelmed by a combination of happiness at the attack, manufactured outrage at Israel's response. and insults at anyone who dared express pain at what Hamas did as supporting genocide. Even Judith Butler, who initially gave a measured statement of disagreement with Hamas' methods while downplaying and contextualizing them, noted months later that she was attacked by those who felt that any statement that even hinted at disapproval of Hamas was out of bounds.

Nelson does a careful takedown of a number of prominent academics who used October 7 as a reason to spread hate of Israel. Russel Rickford ("I was exhilarated!"), Gilbert Achkar ("A spectacular feat"), Zareena Grewal ("It's been such an extraordinary day!"),  Omer Bartov ("I'm a Genocide Scholar. I  Know It When I See It), Tamari Kitossa ("the miraculous Hamas attack on the Be'eri kibbutz,) as well as Butler are expertly dissected. 

Nelson rightly writes an entire chapter about Lara Sheehi, whom I've discussed in the past. Not only is she as extreme a hater of Israel as can be imagined, she also is trying to change the entire field of psychoanalysis to make Zionism considered a mental disease. The one with the apparent disease is Sheehi herself; Nelson examines a book she wrote called Psychoanalysis Under Occupation where she discusses a case, told to her by a Palestinian therapist, of a woman suffering from anxiety who couldn't leave her home without permission from the men, wanted to marry her love but her family disapproved, beat him up and forcing him to flee to another country, then she was forced to marry another man against her will. Sheehi's indirect diagnosis? Her anxiety came from Israel's separation barrier with the West Bank. That gives a small idea of her obsession. 

More troubling is the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, a group that started to make it easier for fcaulty across the US  to organize anti-Israel events and share resources. Astonishingly for academics, they refuse to share platforms with any Zionists - not Israelis, but Zionists - in any venue that they have a choice. Debate, which they know they would lose, is called "normalization" and they say flatly that anyone who disagrees with their extremist positions "celebrate mass murder."  In light of the statements they themselves made about October 7 (their partner SJP called it "a historic win for the Palestinian resistance"), this is the height of irony. 

I admit I was frustrated at Nelson's description of the organization he co-founded to fight anti-Zionism on campus, the Faculty for Academic Freedom & Against Antisemitism. I'm outside the academic framework but there are so many organizations that are righting the same fight (ISGAP, StandWithUs, Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism, AMCHA, CAMERA and ADL's campus branches....) and the Jews and Zionists cannot seem to get their act together. So they all compete for the same funds when their goals are roughly aligned. Find a good administrator who can figure out how to organize all of these, consolidate the duplication, funnel the funds to one place, establish metrics for success,  measure against them, and drop any programs that are a waste of time. Above all, think bigger. The problem is not only anti-Zionism, but the epistemology and philosophy behind it, which is a much larger universe - we need strategy and I have not seen any (besides my own modest Derechology project.) Tactics are important but they don't work very long.   /End rant.

The epicenter of today's antisemitism is in the academy and Cary Nelson is the best chronicler of the disease. College Zionists Confront the Abyss is an important book. It is a shame it is priced like an academic book, roughly $50 both paper and Kindle.  But if you want to know how bad things are now, and a hint of how bad they might become, this is the book for this moment. 

---

 

Books by Elder of Ziyon

Reclaiming the Covenant Protocols He's an Anti-Zionist Too! At Ptach Lo (ebook) The Muslim Question (ebook, $8) Sarah Makes the World Better (ages 3-8)

More at: media.elderofziyon.com · Substack