The Anti-Semitism Crisis – and What Should Be Done

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Regarding the crisis of rising anti-Semitism here in America, it is time for some blunt truths to be stated.

• Anti-Semitism is flourishing mainly in the Democratic Party. CNN’s polling director Harry Entin noted earlier this week that Democrats have turned hostile to Israel, and favorable to “Palestinians” by a whopping net shift of 50 percent (larger among younger Democrats) in less than 10 years:

• Where did this come from? I have many times written about the prescience of the late Aaron Wildavsky, one of America’s pre-eminent political scientists from the 1960s until his passing in 1994, who outlined in 1972 how anti-Semitism would be revived chiefly on campus, as an offshoot of metastasizing leftism:

[S]ometime in the mid-1960s blacks replaced Jews as the nation’s number one oppressed minority and—second—that, toward the end of that decade, white radicals succeeded in having Jews removed from the parlance of left critics of society as “minority,” despite the fact that they constituted no more than 3 percent of the population and were still undoubtedly subject to minor forms of discrimination in banking, business, social life, politics, and elsewhere. It took Christians 1,000 years to go from oppressed minority to inquisitorial majority; those clever Jews seem to have done it practically overnight. Let us investigate this strange case further.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews—not entirely without reason—were recognized as one of the nation’s oppressed minorities. Quotas aimed to keep them out of college, discrimination out of work, and voter prejudice out of public life. The 1950s, by contrast, was the golden era of American Jewry, which still enjoyed its leading minority status even though it had become, by and large, affluent instead of deprived. .

Yet there was still this consolation [of being displaced as the number one oppressed minority]: Jews were still a minority, weren’t they, even if they could not be number one? But no, it was not to be. This time around it was not blacks, who were too busy for ancient history, but radical whites—including Jews—who administered the coup-de-grace without so much as a by-your-leave. Without the fanfare of a public announcement of the solemn cadence of a decent burial, Jews no longer were spoken of as a minority, deprived, despised, downtrodden, or whatever. Just like that.

Really, it was a case of mistaken identity: Jews were all of a sudden taken for imperialists. Actually, it was more like guilt by association. Jews, you see, were identified with Israel, which was defeating Arabs, who resorted to guerrilla warfare, however inefficacious, which somehow gave them membership in the Third World, so that Israel, ipso facto, became an imperialist oppressor, and domestic Jews ceased being a minority. Acta est fabula.

Behold, Israel became part of the whole “settler colonialism” narrative.

But Wildavsky wasn’t alone in perceiving early where things were headed. The late, great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset foresaw the shape of things to come in the New York Times in 1971. He saw resurgent anti-Semitism as “the socialism of fools.” Worth taking in at some length:

TWENTY‐FIVE years after the end of World War II and the collapse of the most anti-Semitic regime in history, anti‐Semitism appears to be on the rise around the world. But unlike the situation before 1945, when anti‐Jewish politics was largely identified with rightist elements, the current wave is linked to governments, parties, and groups which are conventionally described as leftist. Various New Left activists in different countries, American black militant groups, Arab “socialist” spokesmen, and East European Communist governments have moved on from anti‐Zionist to anti‐Jewish and fully anti‐Semitic statements and acts. . .

To say that increasing numbers of New Leftists, black militants and advocates of the Palestinian cause are not only anti‐Israeli and anti Zionist, but, more, are moving toward—or have already achieved— full‐fledged anti‐Semitism is clearly to use fighting words. Some distinctions are in order. One may oppose Israeli policy, resist Zionism or criti cize worldwide Jewish support of Is rael without being anti‐Semitic. But when one draws on the age‐old hostility to Jews to strengthen a political position, when one gives credence to the charge of a worldwide Jewish plot to rule, when one attacks those with whom one has political and economic differences as Jews, when one implies that Jews are guilty of some primal evil, then one is guilty of anti Semitism, and one is engaged in the same racism that all decent men insist on eliminating. . .

THE most important expression of anti‐Jewish sentiments in the West takes the form of attacks on “Zionists” and the state of Israel by every section of the left… As the war in Vietnam peters out, the various in carnations of the extreme left new and old, anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Black Panthers and Communists — have reoriented their international emotional priorities to identify the heroes as the Arab terrorists and freedom fighters, and the villains as Israel and its American ally…

There’s much more of interest in this long article, and interested readers should follow the link above and read the whole thing.

• What was once limited chiefly to the radical fringe was by degrees mainstreamed on college campuses, in “Middle East studies” departments, often funded from Arab sources like Qatar. And thus the remedy needs to begin there. Entire programs in Middle Eastern studies need to be shuttered and their faculties dismissed. Weed out the “post-colonialist” lunatics. Expel students who set up encampments and intimidate Jewish students. Stop admitting self-professed radical applicants, and halt admission of foreign students who come here with the intent of stoking anti-Semitism further.

More: Democrats in Congress should move forcefully to discipline the overt anti-Semites in their midst. Strip Ilhan Omar, Rashiha Tlaib, and other anti-Semites of their committee assignments, and deny them financial resources for their re-election campaigns.

None of these things will happen, of course. The leadership of our universities, despite their public pronouncements about fighting against anti-Semitism on campus, are too cowardly to contemplate any serious reforms (when they aren’t in fact on the side of anti-Semitism, like Columbia’s Claire Shipman), and Democratic Party leaders in Congress are too terrified of their young progressive base that will exact a high price for any serious moves against anti-Semitism. The leadership of our colleges believe that another committee will be sufficient to stem the tide of hatred. The whole scene calls to mind Leo Strauss’s great remark about the fatal defect of conventional political science: “One may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”