US CAMPUS HATE: SPECIAL REPORT
ANYONE OUTSIDE the US reading about Jewish American campus life will have come across a stream of troubling stories of late.
In just the past month, a Stanford University student senator suggested that an investigation into the way Jews control society was a “valid discussion”; the governing body of ultra-liberal Oberlin College condemned one of its professors for suggesting that Israel was behind 9/11; and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo threatened to withhold nearly $500m from the City University of New York until the state was satisfied that it had addressed the problem of antisemitism on campus.
These incidents were no mere flashes in the pan. Recently, antisemitic graffiti was daubed on the Jewish fraternity building at Brown, an Ivy League college. The David Horowitz Freedom Centre, a conservative think tank, released a list that ranked Columbia, Cornell and several University of California colleges among the most antisemitic campuses in the US. Meanwhile, at the University of Connecticut, philosophy professor Andrew Pessin had to take another sabbatical after his remarks about Hamas on Facebook led to a student outcry that, in effect, forced him off campus.
What is happening? Have American universities succumbed to the same anti-Jewish bigotry rife in many other countries’ academic institutions?
The simple answer — and it is a relief — is “no”. The complicated answer is more worrying.
Historically speaking, antisemitism has not been a major issue in the US and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents are currently at an all-time low.
In that context, some of the antisemitism can be put down to ignorant students repeating calumnies without realising that they are tapping into an ancient, viral hatred. The college residents who scrawl swastikas on dorm rooms and the students who play Jews v Nazis beer games are clearly deeply misguided but, probably, stupid rather than racist.
Meanwhile, for sections of America’s left-wing student constituency, Jews are seen as part of the privileged, white establishment, and are therefore to blame for wealth inequality and the oppression of ethnic minority groups.