Seth Mandel: A Test of Jewish Civil Rights in America
“Our German laws and our ethical outlook admit Jewish equality,” the German economist Werner Sombart advised a century ago, “but if you Jews want to preserve it, do not take it too seriously. Always stick to the second place.”Seth Mandel: The Ivy League Doesn’t Want To Be Saved
Sombart did not say this menacingly. It was more like a friendly reminder that equal rights in law and equal rights in practice are two very different animals.
The great Zionist thinker and minority-rights champion Vladimir Jabotinsky quotes this Sombart line in a disquisition on assimilation. Jabotinsky notes that in reality, you can’t ask humans to succeed less than they are capable of doing. And when the Jews are successful, “equality” begins to mean “proportionality,” which inevitably gives way to the quota system. Jabotinsky says he’d heard Westerners defend this from the standpoint of “social congeniality,” when in fact it should really be called what it is: “racial purity.” Writes Jabotinsky: “The harm of such phraseological disguises is in their insidious plausibility: they lend themselves gracefully to inclusion in a system in full accordance with liberal treaties and democratic constitutions.”
Sound familiar? It should, because when Jewish history doesn’t repeat, it at least rhymes.
The laws of civil rights and the rules and norms of educational institutions are well known and all-inclusive—as written. But the major problem for Jews is that, in our time as in Jabotinsky’s, it varies as to whether these laws and rules are worth the paper on which they are written.
But here’s an important test. A century ago, insisting on the rights Jews are nominally provided (in Europe primarily) would invite state-sanctioned violence and mass exodus. What would happen today if the Jews of America stand our ground on the legal claim that we are equal citizens?
That is the idea behind numerous private civil-rights lawsuits against universities, such as the one against Columbia that I mentioned yesterday. But there’s another angle to this: When it comes to the denial of equal rights, the federal government has a responsibility to act. And it might actually be doing so.
Coincidentally, this appears to be an accepted faculty attitude at Columbia as well. Mackenzie Forrest, an Orthodox Jew who faced religious discrimination at Columbia, including being removed from her academic program, is suing the school. After the October 7 attacks, Columbia became, like plenty of other schools but especially those in the Ivy League, one big hate rally. Harassment of Jews on campus was rampant. The school sent an email to all students offering “special accommodations” to deal with the chaos on campus, and Forrest decided to take them up on it, requesting to finish her semester over Zoom, as other students have done at the school. Forrest, though, was denied permission to do so and told that she “is the only person feeling unsafe.”UNRWA Is the Tip of the Iceberg at the UN
Her attorney told National Review that the faculty retaliated for her complaints by threatening to fail her if she didn’t leave the program. Earlier in the year, the administration had responded to her request for seeking a Sabbath exemption by encouraging her to ask her rabbi for permission to break the Sabbath instead.
Columbia’s contempt for Jewish students is a pattern. On February 12, Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House education committee, sent a letter to Columbia’s president and trustees as part of its investigation into campus anti-Semitism. The letter makes for bracing reading: it recounts two decades of incidents at the school, very much including harassment and intimidation by faculty, and the administration’s unwillingness to take action. It is a fairly shocking document.
The committee letter then requests from Columbia all manner of documentation from the past three years—anti-Semitism complaints and responses, disciplinary action, internal investigative documents, foreign funding, changes in recruiting and enrollment of Jewish students, plus everything it can find related to October 7 and its aftermath.
I look forward to seeing what they find, but I know what they won’t find: the slightest bit of effort to make Jews feel anything but unwelcome on campus. You would think, in the wake of October 7 and the spectacularly embarrassing congressional testimony of some elite school presidents, these institutions would at least go through the motions to appear to act consistent with their professed rules, norms, and values.
But they cannot be bothered. And you can’t save an institution that doesn’t want to be saved.
Since freezing UNRWA funding in January, after evidence emerged that the agency’s employees participated in the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians in the Oct. 7 massacre, the United States said it will instead send money to other U.N. bodies and nongovernmental organizations in Gaza.
This is premature, ignoring the fact that the serious problems with terror support, incitement and antisemitism at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees are replicated throughout the entire ecosystem of U.N. agencies and NGOs active in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. While freezing funding was a laudable first step, stronger, broader, long-term action is needed before continuing to fund any organizations in Gaza or restoring funding to UNRWA.
At the heart of the problem is that, in addition to providing health care, education and other humanitarian assistance for Palestinians, UNRWA engages in advocacy in response to what it calls “the needs of Palestinian refugees affected by the Israeli occupation.”
This political advocacy work, which is often based on the delegitimization of Israel and questioning the Jewish state’s right to exist, is carried out in partnership with NGOs and other U.N. agencies.
A primary anti-Israel channel is via “clusters” of NGOs and U.N. agencies that work together on various issues. Inevitably, each cluster has an advocacy component.
For example, UNRWA partnered with Palestinian NGOs, including Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, or PCHR, to carry out a project of “advocacy, monitoring and documentation of HR and IHL violations” in Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, UNRWA and the NGOs level accusations of “war crimes” and “violations of human rights” and seek condemnations of Israel from international bodies and governments.
The involvement of these particular NGOs is deeply problematic in two ways. First, they are the leaders of anti-Israel legal warfare, or “lawfare,” seeking to exploit international courts with baseless allegations of Israeli wrongdoing. The biased reports and claims from UNRWA and its NGO partners are often cited among the “evidence” in U.N. investigations of Israel, lawfare cases around the world, and empty accusations of “genocide” and “war crimes.”
The proceedings against Israel at The Hague — in the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court — originate with this type of lobbying.