Friday, February 16, 2024
From Ian:
Dara Horn: Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies
Dara Horn: Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies
The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. Coercing that silent agreement was the goal, and it was achieved not through arguments or evidence, but through the most laughably idiotic heckler’s veto: screaming at, chasing away, freezing out, or spitting on anyone who dared disagree with supporting the most successful Jew-killers since the Nazis. This left the great minds of Harvard debating the finer points of free speech for hecklers, instead of wondering why their campus was populated by hecklers. The question of why Harvard’s hecklers were heckling in favor of Hamas’s barbarism was too disturbing to consider, and so public discussions ignored it completely.Melanie Phillips: Never again
This heckling was not unrelated to the education that Harvard itself provided. Classes existed at Harvard, it turned out, that were premised on anti-Semitic lies. A course at the school of public health called “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” looked at case studies from South Africa, the United States, and Israel; its premise—not a topic of discussion, but the premise on which the course was built—was that Israel is a settler-colonialist state. (A Jewish student who wrote to the professor questioning what they saw as the ideological slant of the readings was told that it was “insulting” to suggest that the course had an agenda.) The “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its 7 million Jews. (The program is a partnership between Harvard and Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution where an Israeli journalist was expelled from an event in 2014 just because she was Israeli and Jewish.)
An astonishing number of pop-up lectures, panels, and events at Harvard both before and after October 7 were centered on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—a worthy topic addressed with almost no mention of Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years. Nor was there much mention of the fact that Hamas was founded in connection with the global Muslim Brotherhood, or of its comically wealthy sponsors in the Persian Gulf. Students had many opportunities to learn about Palestinian suffering from oppression by evil Jews, but far fewer opportunities to learn, for instance, about Hamas’s success in co-opting foreign aid and crushing dissent, or the intifada that students hoped to globalize. Outside of their engagements at Harvard, some guest speakers publicly endorsed extreme anti-Semitic lies, including the straight-up blood libel that Israelis are harvesting Palestinians’ organs or that the Israeli military uses Palestinian children for weapons testing. One could hardly blame students for repeating their educators’ claims.
Out of respect for Gay’s request that our committee’s discussions with administrators remain private, I won’t share here anything that we talked about in our many meetings. But I will say that one thing we did not discuss was Gay’s congressional testimony on this topic, for which she and other administrators never asked for the advisory committee’s advice. Instead, they consulted lawyers, a choice that backfired on national television.
The horror that the hearing laid bare was something far worse than a viral gaffe. Harvard was already being investigated by the Department of Education for allegations of violating Jewish students’ civil rights under Title VI, and perhaps the president was advised against admitting any institutional failure. (In January, a group of students sued Harvard, describing the university as a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”) Still, the only morally tenable position would have been to admit failure, to reveal that the problem was not all in Jews’ heads; that there truly was an anti-Semitic environment at these incubators of American leadership; that these universities, along with far too many other pockets of the country, had reverted, slowly and then all at once, into what they had been a century earlier: safe spaces for high-minded Jew hatred—not in spite of their aspiration that education should lead to a better world, but because of it.
I made a pilgrimage this week to the the area of the south-western Negev that was devastated by the Hamas pogrom on October 7.New Documentary Aims to Arm Jewish Students with Facts about Israel’s History to Combat Surge in Campus Antisemitism
It was a lot to take in and process. Here are some of the things I saw and heard which particularly spoke to me.
The eerie silence of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, whose once idyllic aspect is still visible through its shrubs and spacious landscaping despite the wrecked and deserted houses.
Outside his house sits Shachar, the only kibbutz resident who is still there.
They came from five directions, he says; between 300 and 600 terrorists. There were only 11 members of the kibbutz civil defence; they were prepared for only two, three terrorists, maximum. Seven of the 11 were murdered.
When the attack started, he said, he got a knife, told his wife Ayalet to get under the bed and stood guard at the door for 30 hours. The terrorists didn’t try to get in.
Why not? He shrugs. The house stands alone: others are connected in pairs. They seemed to be killing people in one of each pair of houses and leaving the other one alone, he says. They thought no-one was inside here, he says. And they were in a hurry. They didn’t think they would have time to kill so many. The terrorists expected the army to come at any minute.
Why did he come back to his house just a few weeks after the massacre, to live here alone, in the silence, in this place of death? He spreads his hands. It’s my home, he says simply. And I hoped that if I came back, others would follow. Not yet.
Further into Kfar Aza, the scene is very different. This is not tranquil. This is a place of the utmost horror. These houses are laid out in neat rows with neighbours facing each other across the pathway. In two of these double rows, the inhabitants of every single house were murdered or kidnapped. Not one house was spared.
Every house is wrecked. Outside each one are pictures of the murdered or the kidnapped who had lived there. Most are taped off. Every house has symbols painted on the outside by those who came to retrieve the remains of the slaughtered. A circle with a dot, we are told, means a body or body parts were inside.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel launched its retaliatory military operation in Gaza, college campuses have been aflame with an anti-Zionism that, more often than not, veers into antisemitism.
One recent college graduate, alongside her former professor, has created a documentary series aimed at educating people past the flashy signs and catchy slogans one might see and hear at an anti-Israel rally, toward a full understanding of what Zionism and anti-Zionism really mean. That series, “Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The History of Two Opposing Ideas” by Zoé Tara Zeigherman, had its Washington, D.C., premiere Thursday night.
The series, a five-episode look at the varieties of both its titular subjects, covers Jewish history and the development of Zionism, the intra-Jewish debates that occurred before Israel’s founding in 1948, and various strains of anti-Zionism from post-1948 Arab opposition to Israel to Soviet propaganda.
Zeigherman, alongside her former Georgetown University professor (and former member of Israel’s Knesset) Einat Wilf, began formulating the idea for the series in 2022, well before anti-Zionism and antisemitism shot to the fore of public debate following the October 7 Hamas attack. Zeigherman thinks the problem was always there, but now that college campuses are under a microscope, the documentary series is even more relevant.
“I think that what a lot of Jews have experienced since October 7 is kind of waking up to this feeling that something is seriously wrong; seeing protests on October 8, they’ve been feeling that something is mobilizing against Jews, and they don’t really understand what’s happening.” Zeigherman told National Review. “I had that feeling in the Black Lives Matter protest era when antisemitism was erupting online and I couldn’t understand where it was coming from.”
“If it can just help one young Jew the way Einat’s course helped me, that’s enough,” she told NR. “But I would really like to see it be part of something bigger, where Jews aren’t afraid to be Jews anymore — where we stand taller and prouder and go on offense as opposed to constantly defending ourselves and apologizing.”
Zeigherman initially came up with the idea for the series during her time as a Beren Summer Fellow with the Tikvah Fund, a nonprofit organization that promotes Jewish leaders and ideas, in 2022. While a fellow, she worked with individuals both inside and outside the Tikvah Fund to determine how to bring her vision to life.
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