In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Indulging the Antisemitism of Woke
  • Doron S. Ben-Atar (bio)

I neither favor nor oppose the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019. I have no illusions that its passage will alter the campus scene. The act is indeed, as Professor Pamela Nadell writes, the product of the "politics of gesture." But the opposition to the act is even more so, as evidenced by Nadell's performance according to her own account.

Over the last two decades, anti-Israel activities on American campuses have targeted Jewish and Zionist students and faculty and sought to silence voices that don't toe the line of anti-Zionist orthodoxy. All too often, as Andrew Pessin and I documented in Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS, these attacks escalated into bullying and real persecution.1 Inside and outside the classroom, the orthodoxy of what Cary Nelson has aptly called "Israel Denial," has fostered an intimidating antisemitic culture.2 The failure of university administrations and faculty to safeguard the basic rights of pro-Israel voices has led some Jewish individuals and organizations, as diaspora communities have done for centuries, to appeal to the authorities for protection. The bullies and silencers, in turn, have rebranded themselves as champions of free speech. Because they would have been laughed at if they appeared as such in Congress, they took a page from the old antisemitic playbook, and turned to Jewish allies to carry their water. This is how Professor Nadell found herself an expert witness in front of Congress. Kenneth Stern of Bard College, who recently invoked the Jewish alibi "some of the protesters are themselves Jewish," to cover a controversial antisemitic incident at Bard's Hannah Arendt Center, chose [End Page 225] her as his mouthpiece, walked her "through the bill's legislative tangle," and she went on to do his bidding.3

Professor Nadell told Congress that when "revolting racist incidents occur, the response from university leaders is immediate and multilayered. We hold town halls proclaiming, 'enough is enough'; we issue statements of condemnation; we offer distraught students opportunities for healing and counseling." But who decides what is a "revolting" incident? What if the "revolting' incident is standing up for Israel and the healing and counseling reinforce anti-Jewish prejudice? Consider, for example, the case of philosophy professor Andrew Pessin and Connecticut College. In 2014, during Tzuk Eitan, the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, Pessin described Hamas on his Facebook page as "a rabid pit bull chained in a cage." Some seven months later the student newspaper, College Voice, ran three editorials comprising the entirety of the first three pages of the issue, accusing Pessin of racism and hate speech. Lamiya Khandaker, an activist in Students for Justice in Palestine who led the anti-Pessin campaign, suddenly discovered that Pessin's Facebook post of the previous July made her "feel unsafe." Two others charged that Pessin advocated genocide of the Palestinians. The paper's editor-in-chief sponsored a petition targeting Pessin individually, and the readers' comments section filled with nakedly antisemitic statements about Jewish money lending, control of media and banks, etc. The university administrators that Nadell places so much trust in joined in on the action. Connecticut College President Katherine Bergeron suspended classes and held campus wide mandatory workshops on racism and hatred, where anyone who dared to suggest Israel was not the ultimate representative of global evil earned the label of a "racist." The faculty, spurred on by the "Office of the Dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion," eagerly joined the piling on. A colleague told Pessin to "stop making life difficult for other Jews still on campus by fighting back." While Pessin went on medical leave, nearly every department in the college issued a public statement condemning hate speech and referring specifically to "the Facebook post of a certain faculty member." Only [End Page 226] one of the 200 members of Connecticut College faculty emailed Pessin to ask for his side of the story. And to make sure that no one doubted where the college stood, later that year Connecticut College conferred on Lamiya Khandaker, who invented and orchestrated the attacks, the "scholar activist" award of the college...

pdf

Share