Last spring, American college campuses were roiled by anti-Israel protesters who disrupted commencement ceremonies, vandalized university buildings, and shut several universities down.
Apologists for these hoodlums argue that the protesters are outraged by Israel’s actions in Gaza, where thousands of civilians have been killed in the fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas. Protesters have charged Israel with genocide, and they’ve called for universities to divest from all companies doing business with the Jewish state.
These protests died down at the end of last year’s spring semester, but the anti-Israel movement reared its ugly head again on college campuses this fall. Students at the University of Michigan elected a slate of student officers who vow to stop all funding for university student groups until the university divests itself from Israel. At Columbia, vandals threw red paint on a campus statue–symbolizing Palestinian blood.
Make no mistake. Antisemitism runs rampant at many American universities, and our most elite schools now harbor students and professors who are racists and bigots. We can expect antisemitism to become more virulent and violent during the upcoming academic year.
Antisemitism is not a fringe movement on college campuses. Anti-Jewish bigotry has become embedded in American higher education and threatens to infect our entire society.
During the 1920s and 1930s, antisemitism flourished in the universities of Eastern Europe even before Hitler gained power in Germany. As scholar Ezra Mendelsohn observed, “universities all over East Central Europe were centers of anti-Semitism.” Some Romanian universities were shut down in 1922 due to anti-Jewish violence.
Mendelsohn offered two explanations for antisemitism at European universities prior to the Second World War. In some Eastern European countries, he wrote, “young and impressionable students were attracted to the new militant, anti-pluralist nationalist movements, which combined xenophobia, anti-communism, and antisemitism with an idealistic campaign directed against the compromise-prone, venal political and economic establishment.”
In addition, he observed that universities were turning out graduates who could not find decent jobs. Thus, the “new intellectuals” of pre-war Eastern Europe were driven to antisemitism by economic insecurity.
America’s college leaders need to face the fact that growing antisemitism among college students and professors will infect all American society if it is not checked. In my view, professors who promote antisemitism should be fired. Students who openly support genocide against Jews and Israel should be expelled, and anyone who uses violence and vandalism to advance racism and bigotry should go to jail.
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| Columbia’s alma mater statue was vandalized |
