Can't deny that Jew hatred found a home in citadels of high culture

For anyone who cared to listen, our young people were telling us that something is seriously wrong with American universities.

Last December, Adina Pinsker, told the Wall Street Journal she has been forced to take indirect walking paths to her classes at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. to avoid harassment from students who hate her.

She was also forced to hide her religion, to tuck her Star of David necklace beneath her shirt. This on a campus grown hostile to Jewish people.

“We have basically been shunned,” she said.

During four months in the spring of 2021, 16 American college students said they had been spit on for being Jewish, revealed a survey of more than 1,000 Jewish students on 160 campuses by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

Incidents of campus vandalism, threats and slurs against Jewish students tripled to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

During an online discussion in December at Baruch College in New York City, a student wrote: “Death to Israel,” “Heil Hitler” and “You will be with God soon,” the ADL reported.

Terror strike on Israel provokes an American awakening 

Then came October 7.

Hamas rained down more than 5,000 missiles on Israel. They broke through the border fence in the southern part of the country and slaughtered Jewish civilians and others nearby. In all, they murdered more than 1,300 people and injured another 3,300, according to the Jerusalem Post.

This was not a legitimate military action. It was genocide, the worst bloodletting against the historically persecuted Jewish people since the Holocaust.

One would have expected an outpouring of grief and sympathy from American universities at the atrocities – the work of monsters who murder children in front of their horror-stricken parents or who took women and children hostage.

There was some of that.

But more pronounced was an indifference and even hostility to the suffering of the Jewish people.

Student activists and groups were condemning Israel while academics went to social media to draw attention to Israel’s past wrongs.

By so doing, they implied Israel deserved the horrors inflicted on its innocents.

Some university student groups used the moment to celebrate the terrorism depicting Hamas paragliders used by the men who killed 260 young adults at an outdoor music festival.

Let that sink in.

They celebrated the work of armed thugs who had just committed an atrocity of historic dimensions.

Activists on US campuses ignore Israeli Jews' suffering

From Harvard to Columbia, from Northwestern to Michigan, from George Washington University to Georgetown, from the University of Virginia to Cal Berkely came the statements from student organizations – dozens upon dozens of them – aligning themselves with the Palestinians.

At the University of Wisconsin, they gathered with the Palestinian diaspora and its Palestinian flags and chanted, “Glory to the martyrs!” 

That’s “Martyrs” as in the Hamas animals who lobbed hand grenades into a bomb shelter where huddled young Israelis.

Yale professor Zareena Grewal went online and wrote, “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.”

She later tweeted “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.”

Correct. This is not hard at all. This is a simple way of saying Jewish mothers and babies deserved to be raked with bullets.

At Harvard more than 30 “Palestinian Solidarity Groups” issued a statement saying, “We, the undersigned student organizations hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

This statement so revolted J.J. Kimche, a Jewish doctoral student at Harvard, he went to the Wall Street Journal to respond:

“The authors and signatories of this statement, men and women with whom we share dormitories and libraries, have exposed themselves as worse than common anti-Semites. They are enthusiastic proponents of our slaughter, a vanguard of apologists for those who seek the extermination of the Jewish people.”

The disillusionment in America's Jewish communities

When the university did not push back against the student activists, Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote, “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.”

“The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups' statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel.”

None of this is lost on the Jewish people in North America.

“I’ve always struggled to understand how the Holocaust could happen,” tweeted Claudia Mendoza, co-chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council. “In 2023, I finally understand."

“Let’s be clear. If Hamas had the capability to murder 6 million Jews, it would. And there would be people turning a blind eye, justifying it, and supporting it. I am lost.”

Emmy-winning producer Daniella Greenbaum Davis tweeted, “I used to not understand how it was possible that the world sat by and watched as Jews were murdered and gassed. I get it now.”

Harvard student Kimche added, “As a grandson of an Auschwitz survivor and a student of German-Jewish history, I was always incredulous that highly cultured Germans, the people of Goethe and Beethoven, could have displayed sympathy and even enthusiasm for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. Now I believe it. I have seen it happen here.”

Academia needs to take a hard look at itself

It has happened here in our citadels of high culture. They have become the fever swamps of an old plague – Jew hatred – a disease that has long been the portent of civilizations in decline.

David Frum, a center-left public intellectual and Jew who served in the George W. Bush administration, remarked on the social media site X, “You don't find a lot of murderous antisemites in senior business jobs. You don't find many in the military or national security agencies. Maybe somebody in academia should ponder why their one sector of public life is so very susceptible to a plague so rare everywhere else.”

The college community consumes a lot of airtime and a lot of ink decrying global and national threats, from climate change to systemic racism.

Oct. 7 is their mirror.

If and when they finally look into it, they will see their own house is on fire.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Activists on U.S. university campuses ignore Jewish suffering