The Jewish Standard this week interviewed the current CEO of Rutgers Hillel, a Jewish organization located at the center of the university’s College Avenue campus. Lisa Harris-Glass took over the role over the summer, and said that the university — which is acknowledged to have one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country — has become a hot-bed of antisemitism in the wake of Oct. 7.
The situation there “is so much worse than people can imagine,” Ms. Glass reported.
Glass describes a situation that, to outsiders who have never spent time on a college campus, might seem untenable, a situation so unlivable that students hide in fear and Jewish professors hide their identities are refuse to speak.
I teach at Rutgers. I am Jewish. I wear a chai. I have never felt the need to hide any of this. The atmosphere she describes is a caricature and bears no relation to reality.
There have been antisemitic incidents — Hillel has identified 49, though some rely on questionable definitions of antisemitism that assume all criticism of Israel and any defense of Palestinians and their demand for justice are antisemitic.
I don’t accept that definition. And do not believe that definition is consistent with the concepts of academic freedom and free speech and assembly. Antisemitism is real, as I’ve written numerous times. We have witnessed violent acts — in Pittsburgh, in California — in recent years. We watched right-wing thugs march through Charlottesville chanting “Jews with not replace us,” a direct nod to an almost 150-year-old conspiracy theory that has been supported by conservative talk television hosts and alluded to by President Donald Trump.
But attacks on Muslims have been on the rise, as well, and Palestinians and their supporters are facing an environment in which they are actually being silenced. Artists have had exhibitions canceled in Indiana, Scotland, and throughout Europe. Actors have been fired for pro-Palestine comments.
Students and student groups are being silenced (Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended at Rutgers in December for protests that exceeded “university norms”), as well, allegedly because their behavior crosses a line though the kind of non-violent protest for which they are being punished is consistent with the history of protest and its disruptive nature. Protest, of course, is meant to be disruptive. If it is successful, it creates tension, unease, and interrupts the status quo. This was Gandhi’s goal in India. King’s goal in the American South and eventually up north, and Cesar Chavez’s goal in the California farm fields.
The common thread in all of these cases is that the offending individuals and groups were criticizing and protesting the actions of the Israeli government and its repression of Palestinians and a war that has never come close to resembling the defensive action proclaimed by Israel’s leaders. Their speech can be uncomfortable — many Jews hear “from the river to the sea” and Intifada as threats. But their speech does not call for genocide — despite what Congress members like Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, and the disingenuous Elise Stefanik and her Republican congressional colleagues have argued.
Israeli cabinet members and government officials, however, have used genocidal language:
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have called for the dropping of a nuclear bomb on densely-populated Gaza, the total annihilation of the territory as a mark of retribution, and the immiseration of its people to the point that they have no choice but to abandon their homeland.
This week alone, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party went on television and said it was clear to most Israelis that “all the Gazans need to be destroyed.” Then, Israel’s ambassador in Britain told local radio that there was no other solution for her country than to level “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza to degrade Hamas’s military infrastructure.)
What we have been witnessing in Gaza since Oct. 7, the day of the brutal massacre of Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists who also took about 240 Israelis hostage, has been inhumane and borders if not on genocide then at least ethnic cleansing. There were nearly 2.3 million people living in Gaza, the narrow 140-square-mile strip along the Mediterranean. More than 1.7 million of them have been forced from their homes and essentially chased south as the Israeli military played a ruthless game of wack-a-mole, preventing them from settling into any specific location. And now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for preparations for an invasion of Rafah and the evacuation of 1.3 million Palestinians there.
These actions are predicated on a sense of historical victimhood that is being wielded as a weapon by the Israeli government to insulate itself against claims that it is engaging in indiscriminate violence against and slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. It is the same kind of victimhood that Palestinians and their supporters have weaponized to justify Hamas’ violence.
“Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status,” the Russian Jewish writer Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker, “many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.”
Both sides, Gessen writes, refuse to acknowledge the other’s historical traumas, and the “fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.”
The history here is complicated and contradictory, and my own feelings about Israel as a nation, rather than as a government, are difficult to process. I grew up with Israel as a symbol, lacking a historically accurate picture of how it came to exist, the sacrifices made by Jews to create the state, but also the violence and brutality that was imposed by those same Jewish heroes on the native Palestinian population. What has followed has pitted two historically repressed peoples — Jews and Palestinian Arabs — in a zero-sum battle that has obscured a single reality: both have to figure out how to live peacefully with the other, alongside the other, a reality made impossible because of a power imbalance that has only grown more lopsided.
Gessen’s essay, for instance, focuses on Germany’s distorted Holocaust memory culture, in which the Germans bizarrely have taken it on itself to define what constitutes antisemitism, with “dozens of antisemitism commissioners through Germany” whose work “appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic.” Gessen’s essay — which at one point equates Gaza with a Nazi ghetto — ran afoul of these “commissioners,” which led the Heinrick Böll Foundation to pull its support for Gessen’s receipt of the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought.
“I am aware that this type of comparison, especially in Germany, is quickly seen as relativising the Holocaust,” Gessen told a German newspaper. “That’s why it’s so important to me that such a differentiated and intelligent thinker like Arendt didn’t shy away from this comparison.”
Referring to people in Germany being wary of challenging “the logic of German memory policy” for fear of being accused of antisemitism, they added: “The problem is that criticism of Israel is often seen as antisemitic, which I think is the real antisemitic scandal. This overlooks the actual antisemitism.”
The upshot is that institutions like Rutgers and other and private universities are taking a hard line on criticism of Israel, and the attendant protests. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Haaretz reports, “has suspended a pro-Palestinian student group after it held a protest inside a campus building earlier this week without obtaining permission.” Rutgers used the same rationale to suspend SJP, and at Columbia in New York, severe limitations have been placed on protests.
Now, the House and Senate are involved, with House Republicans subpoenaing records from Harvard and Senate Republicans targeting the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights.
These “investigations” are an assault on academic freedom, free expression, and the right to protest that — to quote Paul Reville, a professor of education policy and administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “border on harassment from Congress and other sources who clearly have an agenda to undermine universities like Harvard.”
What’s at stake in these debates is the university’s role as a locus of inquiry and debate, and our culture’s commitment — tenuous as it is — to free inquiry, free speech, and the ultimate health of our democracy.