The New Anti-Antisemitism
These snatches of Prophetic Vision sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with each other, sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with The Shalom Center. For not even prophetic vision can adequately express the Infinite ways to seek deep healing and justice inherent in the Breath of life.
The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene.
Rick Perlstein is an historian and journalist who has written chronicles of the post-1960s American conservative movement. The first of those books was, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. He has become a weekly columnist for The American Prospect on media criticism, history and the 2024 United States 2024 US elections. We are reprinting excerpts from his article called “The New Anti-antisemitism” on the pro-Palestinian campus encampments supporting a ceasefire and peace in the war between Israeli and Palestinian regimes. For the whole article see https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-08-new-anti-antisemitism-college-protests-gaza/.
— AW, ed.
The New Anti-Antisemitism
[Colleges Invite Police to Pro-Palestinian Camps]
By Rick Perlstein
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You might have already stomached some of the videos of last week’s most harrowing abuses. At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream “What are you doing?” at cops being taken down with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended by her university for her trouble.) At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old professor, a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was “lucky to be alive” after absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp.
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Why?
Contrasting scenes from recent days:
Students at the protest encampment at the University of Chicago enjoyed a gorgeous twilight “Mimouna,” a rite celebrated by the Maghrebi Jews of North Africa during Passover. Some wore kippahs, others keffiyehs, some both. Muslim and Jewish prayer services are a regular feature at this “Popular University for Gaza” where a thousand or so people are reported to be milling about, which features 24-hour food service, lots of art, film screenings—a vibe like a jam band festival camping area, only with more eight-syllable words.
Two thousand miles away in Boston, the administration at Northeastern University said they had no choice but to flood in the campus police to take down an encampment because it “was infiltrated by professional organizers with no affiliation to Northeastern,” and it had descended into “virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews.’” Then, however, the student newspaper reviewed footage demonstrating it was the pro-Israel counter-demonstrators who trollingly chanted that, to the pro-Palestinian side’s angry boos. Similarly, at UCLA, it was pro-Israel ultranationalists who came onto campus one night last week to attack the protesters’ encampment and the protesters themselves, a story that the Los Angeles Timesgot right, but that the East Coast press managed to garble completely by misstating who attacked whom.
Concerns for the “safety” of Jewish students has become a rhetorical commonplace in elite discussions of campus politics these days: “Jewish students of all political beliefs,” Theo Baker, son of New York Times superstar Peter Baker, tells us in The Atlantic in “The War at Stanford,” “have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets.”
It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. You know who has good reason to fear for their safety? People, many of them Jews, getting pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting high-powered rifles aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state who surely have been told by the people giving them orders to be ready to shoot because of all the “dangerous” things that are going on amid those protesters’ tents.
Sure, offensive things have happened to protesters. And that’s awful. But when I told some Chicago neighbors about all the Judaism going on down in Hyde Park, they were frankly shocked to hear it: They watch Morning Joe, from which they got the impression that Jew-hate was the overwhelming leitmotif of this whole protest thing.
It suggests one of those Talmudic puzzlements, or perhaps the setup for a dad joke: How many Jews have to pray peacefully in a pro-peace encampment (or alternatively, to cite a scene witnessed outside the 116th Street gate of Columbia University, how many black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews have to chant, “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”) for them to stop being an antisemitic mob?
It might have been one of the GOP’s most shameless political bunco artists who set this particular jank into motion. But by now it’s one of those allegedly noble “bipartisan” convergences, like the Iraq War authorization in 2002, or the writing of checks to criminal investment banks in 2008-2009. “President Biden has stood against repugnant, antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life … protests must be peaceful and lawful,” ran a White House statement; it is “unacceptable when Jewish students are targeted for being Jewish,” said Chuck Schumer. “For many of Jewish descent, they do not feel safe, and that is a real issue,” contributed the third-most powerful House Democrat Pete Aguilar. And here is Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: “Thank you @uwchancellor for doing the right thing by enforcing campus policies and standing up to the unruly mob.”
In Madison, of course, the unruliest mob was the cops tackling senior-citizen scholars. That is another of the oh-so-of-the-moment qualities of this whole business: how easy it is to inject truth-dissolving poison into public rhetoric, or get away with plain old gaslighting—without which all this state violence could never have maintained its political sanction.
Gaslighting like New York Mayor Eric Adams saying, “It is despicable that schools would allow another country’s flag to fly in our country,” referring to the Palestinian one. (Apparently, it happens all the time at his City Hall.)
Gaslighting like Sen. Mitt Romney intoning that if “some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok,” just “look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestine relative to other social media sites.” (Relative to other social media platforms—platforms, Senator, we call them platforms—TikTok is used by young people, who are far less likely to be IDF fans.)
Gaslighting like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s. The thuggish response of riot police to the protesters at the University of Texas was supposedly because of all the rocks and guns they confiscated—except that, according to one student, the rocks were there to hold down the posters, and, well, no surprise: UT is a “concealed-carry campus, so we were within our legal rights.” Then, after that came Abbott’s executive order revising Texas public universities’ “free speech codes”—naming specific words and phrases speakers would not be allowed to say.
Not to slight, amid this Orwellian catalog, those who are just plain lying. As press critic and higher-education historian Will Bunch points out, on the campus of Ohio State in Columbus, one of several schools that let snipers aim rifles at students, the administration first said there weren’t any snipers. “When presented with evidence, they admitted the truth.”
Any historical account of how this madness presently comes to pass might start, not in the 1960s, but with a pattern so ancient it’s practically more archaeological than historical: the claim of outside agitators.
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The actual examples of alleged Jew-hatred that have been adduced are so threadbare. A protest leader arrays the bodies of protesters as a human shield against those who’ve shown up to oppose their protest. One cries—at a protest leader who, for all we know, just as well might be Jewish—“We didn’t say a word! My friend had a Jewish star necklace! All the sudden we’re surrounded, they’ve been circling us, they’re threatening us.”
I mean, think about it: Do we complain when strikers who put up a picket don’t let anti-union activists join the line of march?
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Photo: Police prepare to confront protesters at University of Texas at Austin, April 24, 2024. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Cropped from original.
