Jews are as worthy of criticism as anyone else. If they can dish it - and they do that as well as anyone - then they should be able to take it too.
First, let me say that there’s something deeply ironic about what is going on at the top American universities: A purge by the government to ‘cleanse’ the institutions of their antisemitism. It's being done against the administrations by threatening to cancel billions of dollars in federal research grants. Cowering in fear, the faculties appear to be caving one by one to the pressure. It's also being done against individual student activists being accosted by federal goons sometimes wearing ski masks to hide their identities. The students, who are legally in the country, get hauled off for detention, usually to other states, without due process. This purge is using antisemitism as a hammer against free speech and the rule of law, as the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley puts it. The irony of course is that it wasn’t too long ago that many of these same universities practiced discrimination against Jews in a variety of ways, including admission quotas and practices designed to ensure that Jewish students could not participate fully in campus life and organizations. For more on this I recommend a podcast called Gatecrashers.
Stanley, a child of Holocaust survivors, who has taught at Yale for twelve years and written books on fascism, has publicly announced that he has taken a position to teach next semester at the University of Toronto. He says he will be leaving his home country because life has become untenable for him and his two Jewish African-American children. His move is clearly intended as a political statement as much as a career decision. As an academician, Stanley is appalled at the attack on free speech he is witnessing on campus as well as the craven capitulation of the administrations. But even more, he is angry as a Jew. I suspect he feels a lot like I do.
Here’s what I find so hard to swallow: Jews have always been sort of experts in the field of self-examination, analysis and criticism. It’s a tradition, part of the Jewish cultural DNA. Which is why witnessing Jews who can dish it out but can’t seem to take it, turns my stomach. I'm talking about the Jews who are cheering on the trump regime's DEI kapos as they go after the universities in the name of protecting Jews on campus. The idea that Jews would support a blatant threat to freedom of speech and the rule of law because of name-calling, or offensive chants, is one obvious point. But also, to side with the likes of trump, who famously dined at Mar-a-lago with neo-Nazi leaders and called them very fine people after they chanted "Jews will not replace us" at their Charlottesville rally, makes it even worse. How thin-skinned do you have to be to seek the protection of an unconstitutional, immoral, anti-democratic, felon extortionist because you feel threatened by a bunch of ill-informed, nose-ringed, flag-waving, social-justice warrior kids chanting slogans they barely understand?
Unwise as well. Are we not supposed to think that there won't be an antisemitic backlash against the Jews for getting into bed with the autocrat? In what world are we not expecting that it won't take long before the Jews are blamed for controlling these authoritarian goons? It's the oldest and most enduring antisemitic trope there is.
I'm not naive. This week my youngest daughter who is a first year student at McGill was unable to attend classes on two occasions because she was blockaded from entering the classroom by pro-Palestine protesters. She spoke to her teacher who was standing passively outside the classroom, asking her what she was going to do. The teacher responded by simply saying class was cancelled. My daughter said her impression was that the teacher was sympathetic to the blockade and that's why she didn't demand the protesters be removed by campus security. The McGill administration seems to have learned very little from the debacle of last summer's disruptive and destructive protests, so there's a good chance it'll get worse.
But that isn't a reason to side with the fascist goons trying to quell a basic constitutional right. There's a steep price to pay for cowardice for the sake of expediency. This week another example was the disgraceful settlement with the trump regime announced by the prestigious New York law firm Paul Weiss. The blue chip partnership caved, fearing that if they didn't, their mergers and acquisitions business would suffer because their deals would be refused government regulatory approval. In announcing the settlement, Weiss Chairman Brad Karp invoked the name of the firm's co-founder Simon Rifkind, a revered legal figure. Two of Judge Rifkind's granddaughters, lawyers themselves, took him to task for it in a letter made public. It's really worth reading. Paul Weiss and other 'Jewish' law firms were established at a time when it was not easy for Jews to find work in the legal profession, so they had to strike out on their own. The letter is a reminder that when you bend the knee, you know where you stand.
