In search of anti-Semitism on Morningside Heights

 By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with
Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

We, like most media outlets, spent an inordinate amount of time and energy covering the trials and tribulations of a well-known university located in the Boston area.  Perhaps too much time.

You'd think that the only great university in our country was located on the banks of the Charles, upstream (not across) from Boston University.

You'd be wrong.

South of here, there's another academic titan ruling over New York City from its perch on Morningside Heights.  It boasts that it owns New York.  Its graduates and faculty have made immense contributions to law, medicine, philosophy, economics, physics, engineering, literature, and Hungarian pastries.  

Of course, like any great university, it has graduated its fair share of a**holes like Roy Cohn and Norman Podhoretz.  But is it fair to judge any university by its worst graduates and faculty?  Asking for Alan Dershowitz and Henry Kissinger.

We speak of course of Columbia University in the City of New York.  There's no problem too difficult, no intellectual task too complex or recondite for its great minds to resolve just by the application of the sheer force of their intellects.

Apparently, not so much:

The victor of D-Day could have handled it. 

A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.

Giving up already fellas?  What would former Columbia President Dwight Eisenhower say?  In the spring of 1944, did he say “I can't decide whether to invade France through Normandy or across the Pas-de-Calais, so let's call the whole thing off?”

Note to those of you who did not study Modern History at Columbia: he did not.

What would Chancellor Kent say?

We actually know the answer to this one.  We were graduated from one of Columbia's brightest lights, its law school.  Early in our first year, we learned one thing we've clung tightly to ever since.  When a student asked for a definition of a vague term (it might have been something like “due process”), the response from the podium was immediate and thunderous:

“Why do you ask?”

The eminent professor didn't mean that the young whippersnapper shouldn't have asked the question.  He meant that the answer to a question depends on the purpose for which it is propounded.  The question of what process is due depends on its context: what may be due process in the context of contesting a parking ticket is unlikely to suffice in a capital case (but thanks to our Republican bent Supreme Court and white power states, it usually does).

We wonder if that isn't true of anti-Semitism.

Was something anti-Semitic?  

Why do you ask?  

Is it to kick someone off campus?  ban their books?  arrest them for yelling at you in the library?  criticize them for something stupid they wrote?  take away their teaching positions for asserting that Israel has no right to exist? monitor broadly online content to determine particular threats? defend the corrupt war criminal currently acting as Israel's Prime Minister?  defend the right of your yeshiva bochers to duck military service in the IDF?

We suspect the answer to each of these questions is different.  

When the question is asked to determine if an extremist group blathering on social media is worthy of closer attention, the definition should be pretty wide, like the IHRA definition which encompasses a number of rhetorical devices used to criticize Israel including applying a “double standard” that the speaker does not use for other countries.  We thought that holding Israel to a standard higher than the Moabites, the Canaanites, and other heathen was almost the whole point of Torah, but no matter.

As Kenneth Stern explained,

the 2016 IHRA definition...was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.

So who cares what this Stern guy thinks anyway? 

Oh. That's different. 

No wonder that Columbia's brightest minds are having difficulty:

“I get letters from parents every single day, just regular people, students,” one of the co-chairs, Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of the journalism school, said in an interview. He said that many of them ask: “‘Why aren’t you listening? Why aren’t you doing anything?’”

The professors argue that their 15-member task force does not need to define antisemitism, because they don’t see it as their task to label things as antisemitic or not. Rather, they want to hear why Jewish students and faculty are upset and see if there are practical solutions that can be found to help them feel more comfortable. 

But don't you need some definition when the question is under what circumstances Jewish members of the Columbia community deserve protection from words or deeds that frighten or disquiet them? (Or, for that matter, members of its Islamic and Palestinian communities.) 

Let's see if we can help Nick, who despite his fine Harvard College education, seems at sea. Can you decide whether the following statements are anti-Semitic?

How about the frequent Palestinian chant of “From the river to the sea,” which carries with it the belief that only the Palestinian people have the exclusive and indisputable right to live in what is now Israel, leaving no place for Israelis or a Jewish homeland?

 That sounds pretty anti-Semitic to us.

Of course, that's the position of the Netanyahu government: 

The Netanyahu government’s guiding principle [is] that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and [to] the one-state reality it is implementing on the ground.

That's different then.  

How about the Palestinian position that all Israelis, even women and children, are legitimate targets for terrorist activity, because “there are no civilians in Israel?"” 

That's certainly repulsive and anti-Semitic by any measure.  Sadly, it happens to correspond to the expressed but later disavowed views of the President of Israel, not to mention other even more charming senior officials in the Netanyahu government:

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history.

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,” said Herzog.

He later claimed that he also said nice things about protecting innocent Gazans, should any be found.  Whether Israel's subsequent treatment of the civilian population of Gaza conforms to his remarks we will leave to the reader.

One last poser: is it anti-Semitic to demand that Israel be ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population?  (Hint: yes.)  See how it sounds the other way around:

Israel’s Minister of Finance and settler leader Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israel’s Channel 12 that he was supportive of what he called “voluntary emigration” of Gazans out of Gaza. “All we need,” he said, “is to find countries willing to take them in.” Or in the words of Smotrich’s ideological forebear, Meir Kahane, “they must go.” 

It doesn't sound too good.

Where does that leave the tender Hebraic flowers cowering in front of Low Library?  Surely every student has a right to be protected from harassment, verbal or otherwise, targeted at them that embodies hate speech based on religion or ethnicity.  And no student should be held as a captive audience for anti-Semitism or Islamaphobia expressed in class or section by someone who is paid by Columbia to teach.

Your Stats sectionman shouldn't lose his job because on their blog they posted comments to the effect that Israel has no right to exist, even though that makes you feel bad.  Be assured that if Columbia fired every faculty member and instructor who said dumb s***, the University would be a ghost town.

And if you're thinking of culling library books that contain ideas that you think are anti-Semitic, just stop.  Burning books never works out for the Jews.  You have to trust us on this.

Jay Michelson in the Forward exposed the error behind calling all speech that causes discomfort to a Jewish supporter of Israel anti-Semitic:

Who said Israel should be held to a higher standard?

This conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is far greater than a few articles. As reported in the Forward, after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria to define a much broader swath of anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic; anti-Zionist protests account for 1,317 of the 3,000-odd “antisemitic” incidents the organization tracked in the three months after Oct. 7. As Forward reporter Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization has focused on in previous years.”

The extremism of some left-wing responses to the war is indeed troubling. I agree...that “a disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not … share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.”

We are disconcerted too.  We think a lot of supposed anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism.  But we don't think our view gives us or anyone else the right to dictate what can be painted on a protest sign along College Walk or expressed out of class by Columbia faculty.  Or Barnard, for that matter.

We hope that helps Nick and his fellow intellectual titans as they grapple with how to protect all members of the Columbia community. 

All of its members have a right to be free of targeted harassment, hate speech, or discrimination.  None have the right to be protected from exposure to ideas that make them feel bad.

And that's why you ask “what is anti-Semitism?”

Of course, this nuanced approach is the one expressed by former Harvard President Claudine Gay before Congress.

It turned out badly for her.  We'd submit that each time a thoughtful fair-minded scholar is forced out of her job for making a nuanced statement, it's not good for the Jews either.