According to the FBI records for the past two years, crimes of hate derived from ethnic and religious differences made up about three-quarters of “hate crimes.” Separating the two categories of ethnicity and religion is a bit difficult in the instance of Judaism, since the ethnicity is intimately tied to the religion, whereas, for example, Christians like Catholics have only a superficial tie to ethnicity. That analysis is somewhat incomplete, of course, because Muslims are not just Arabs, as the “national” religions of Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and 220 million Indians attest. Yes, there are Turkish and Indonesian Christians, but Jews? That is on the whole a different story. Practicing or not, every Jew is labeled in the eyes of the antisemite as “Jewish” in both “race” and religion.
The recent rise of antisemitism on college campuses has framed all Jews, even American Jews who have never visited the Middle East, as Israelis or Israeli sympathizers and, thus, complicit in the college mobs’ eyes in the fictional genocide of Palestinians. And that “genocide” is demonstrably fictional. The IDF has struggled to eliminate Hamas operatives because they hide among Palestinians and use them as shields, actions that appear to be of no concern to the rioting college students who, for whatever reason, align themselves with torturers, rapists, and murderers, including those guilty of infanticide.
In fact, there are Jews who empathize with the Palestinians and who argue against the continued actions of the IDF in Gaza. That puts Israel between the rock and hard spot. Defend against terrorists or allow terrorists to wreak havoc on Israel? Continue unabated until Hamas is totally eliminated or by ceasing operations try to elicit favor from people already imbued with antisemitism? For centuries Jews have had to sail between Charybdis and Scylla.
For any American college student protesting either side of the issue I simply ask, “What is your solution in light that you have no skin in the game?
And isn’t that really the issue in all American anti-Israeli protests? As I keep saying in these blog entries, what isn’t personal is virtually meaningless. October Seventh is meaningless to the protesting co-ed in a black-and-white head scarf if she hasn’t been tortured, raped, or imprisoned. No protesting American college woman has been subjected indignities by Hamas. No alphabet person has tried to walk as an openly gay person on the streets of a Muslim city. And probably no American Columbia student has seen loved ones slaughtered or lived under the threat of a random rocket exploding nearby.
Roots of Hate
From what does antisemitism arise? Surely, all those young people on college campuses exhibiting hatred for Jews today have not suffered a personal offense at the hands of a Jew. Surely, the Jews aren’t, as is taught to children in Gaza, the source of the world’s evil and the reason the common Palestinian lives in total dependency on the whims of well-fed Hamas leaders who spend financial aid on weapons and not on infrastructure other than tunnels. In Gaza lies the perfect example of dissimulation not unlike other historic examples, such as in Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain. I’ll add that in mentioning history, I emphasize the influence of the past on today’s antisemitism.
How is it that such a small fraction of the world’s population during any generation should become the scapegoat for so many evils over the course of thousands of years, especially in light (or darkness, depending upon perspective) of all those actual evils perpetrated by gentiles on others during ethnic conflicts or national movements? Does the answer lie in the death of Christ? The Assyrians, Egyptians, Philistines, and Babylonians might have been precursors of modern antisemites, but none of them could ascribe their hatred to the death of Christ, since all lived in BC time and all were acting on territorial imperatives and hegemony.
But when that one mob in Jerusalem chanted about 2,000 years ago: “Crucify Him, Crucify Him,” they set in motion an enculturation that has lasted till today. From that moment on generations of Christians of different denominations held the Jews accountable for Christ’s death and continue to do so today in spite of the absolution of Jews during the Third Session of the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. The Council proclaimed, “The Jewish people should never be presented as one rejected, cursed or guilty of Deicide. What happened to Christ in His passion cannot be attributed to the whole people then alive, much less to those of today.” (Just wondering: Is there a parallel in blaming 21st-century Caucasian Americans for slavery?)
What of Arabs in the vicinity of Israel and Iranians geographically separated from Israel, all of who have no emotional link to the death of Christ? From whence does their hatred arise? With regard to Iranians’ hate, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, writing in the Wall Street Journal, place the roots of Iranian antisemitism in the writings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the guy who took over after the fall of the Shah. * Khomeini wrote in his book Islamic Government, “From the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present.” The thought is now embedded in the minds of Iranians’ current leaders, probably some of them unfamiliar with the exact passage, such is the nature of enculturation and scapegoating.
But what of the affluent, coddled students at Columbia, none, my sound guess is, familiar with Khomeini’s writings and many who probably couldn’t find Gaza on a map? Could one ascribe the students’ actions to unfettered immaturity? College students—young people in general—have often rioted over a school’s basketball or football victory, running through the streets and destroying randomly property in college towns. As I think about the sentence I just wrote, I’m not dismissing that unfettered immaturity that is also evident on beaches during spring break. Apparently, any reason is reason to join a mob, any reason is sufficient to scapegoat.
About That Mob Yelling, “Crucify Him”
Imagine having one moment in your life that others might use to pigeonhole your entire life, then transpose that to a moment in the history of a people that others have used and still use to label them. The simulation of Jew as evil through history is a dissimulation that has resulted in deaths, exile, and persecution. The twentieth century’s Holocaust was a culmination of historical antisemitism that included the expulsion of Jews from Spain, for example. After a millennium and a half of coexistence with other “Spaniards” (e.g., Visigoths) on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jewish population was forced out by a decree of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. About one thousand five hundred years of off-and-on violence, but essentially a coexistence marred by infrequent but still lethal waves of antisemitism, such as the 1366 and 1391 pogroms, all that Jewish presence in Spain abruptly ended with the Alhambra Decree in 1492. Under Ferdinand and Isabella Jews who did not convert to Christianity had to leave.
Well, that’s one way to eliminate antisemitism, and the same thinking applies to antisemites who want Israelis to leave Israel. That outcome seems to be what students at Columbia want in the Middle East and by extension applicable to Jews in New York through virtual pogroms (i.e., hate crimes) and exiles of fellow students and esteemed faculty members currently on the campus.
Antisemitism as a Form of Anti-intellectualism
If I were asked what defines an intellectual, I would offer that an intellectual is one who can distinguish between the general and the specific. Intellectuals can deal in generalities as long as they know the flaw in inductive reasoning. A slight or offense by one Jew does not translate into a fault of all Jews. The supposedly bright students who have threatened fellow Jewish students don’t seem to be as bright as they pretend. No act of another, not even the act of calling for a Deicide, is the fault of someone else separated not only by space, but also by time.
The Ostriches on the Quad
Apparently, antisemitism has—hopefully, “had”— its practitioners in Columbia’s administration and faculty. These “adults” feigning intellectual superiority and objectivity seem never to have had anyone confront them for their beliefs and biased characterization or generalizing of Jews. Did no one see a problem existed? Maybe those who had subtle or overt inklings of bias on campus buried their heads rather than speak out. Why upset the proverbial apple cart, especially if one had yet to attain tenure? But maybe antisemitism crept stealthily into Columbia’s society over decades so that few noticed its gradual entrenchment.
Anecdotal Analogy Warning: Dive, Dive, Dive
I am in the midst of cataract surgery, the right eye having been through the process earlier this week, the left eye to be dealt with next week. Why do I mention this? After the right eye’s procedure, I saw a different world than I had seen: Colors were brighter, more intense, especially the blues and yellows. Closing the repaired right eye, I saw a different world through the left eye. A duller world. Next week, I’ll see the same through both eyes, I assume. The point is that over the years I had no way of knowing that my world was becoming duller, less vivid. I wasn’t seeing what you probably see if your eyes are healthy. I wasn’t purposefully ignoring the diminished sight because I didn’t know I had diminished sight. The fading was gradual.
Is that what happened at Columbia? Antisemitism gradually pulled the shade over the window of insight. Faculty members, some of them Jews, worked on committees and performed research with antisemites without seeing their prejudice. If that is the case, then they are analogs of my eyes beclouded by cataracts. And if the Jewish faculty members did recognize the insidious nature of antisemitism on campus, were they ostriches out of cowardice?
History tells me that just as Spanish Jews experienced pogroms and exiles, so future Jews will undergo further persecution at the hands of those who have no full understanding of the origin of their hate. But simple acquiescence isn’t really a good option. The Holocaust teaches us that in modern times real genocidal acts are possible. Jews can’t like Christ on the Cross say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” In these modern times, death is easy and victims of hate can be whole populations. Acts of self defense are not only moral, they are justifiable on the most basic level of survival.
*https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-iran-hates-israel-anti-semitism-gaza-4f7ad96e
The recent rise of antisemitism on college campuses has framed all Jews, even American Jews who have never visited the Middle East, as Israelis or Israeli sympathizers and, thus, complicit in the college mobs’ eyes in the fictional genocide of Palestinians. And that “genocide” is demonstrably fictional. The IDF has struggled to eliminate Hamas operatives because they hide among Palestinians and use them as shields, actions that appear to be of no concern to the rioting college students who, for whatever reason, align themselves with torturers, rapists, and murderers, including those guilty of infanticide.
In fact, there are Jews who empathize with the Palestinians and who argue against the continued actions of the IDF in Gaza. That puts Israel between the rock and hard spot. Defend against terrorists or allow terrorists to wreak havoc on Israel? Continue unabated until Hamas is totally eliminated or by ceasing operations try to elicit favor from people already imbued with antisemitism? For centuries Jews have had to sail between Charybdis and Scylla.
For any American college student protesting either side of the issue I simply ask, “What is your solution in light that you have no skin in the game?
And isn’t that really the issue in all American anti-Israeli protests? As I keep saying in these blog entries, what isn’t personal is virtually meaningless. October Seventh is meaningless to the protesting co-ed in a black-and-white head scarf if she hasn’t been tortured, raped, or imprisoned. No protesting American college woman has been subjected indignities by Hamas. No alphabet person has tried to walk as an openly gay person on the streets of a Muslim city. And probably no American Columbia student has seen loved ones slaughtered or lived under the threat of a random rocket exploding nearby.
Roots of Hate
From what does antisemitism arise? Surely, all those young people on college campuses exhibiting hatred for Jews today have not suffered a personal offense at the hands of a Jew. Surely, the Jews aren’t, as is taught to children in Gaza, the source of the world’s evil and the reason the common Palestinian lives in total dependency on the whims of well-fed Hamas leaders who spend financial aid on weapons and not on infrastructure other than tunnels. In Gaza lies the perfect example of dissimulation not unlike other historic examples, such as in Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain. I’ll add that in mentioning history, I emphasize the influence of the past on today’s antisemitism.
How is it that such a small fraction of the world’s population during any generation should become the scapegoat for so many evils over the course of thousands of years, especially in light (or darkness, depending upon perspective) of all those actual evils perpetrated by gentiles on others during ethnic conflicts or national movements? Does the answer lie in the death of Christ? The Assyrians, Egyptians, Philistines, and Babylonians might have been precursors of modern antisemites, but none of them could ascribe their hatred to the death of Christ, since all lived in BC time and all were acting on territorial imperatives and hegemony.
But when that one mob in Jerusalem chanted about 2,000 years ago: “Crucify Him, Crucify Him,” they set in motion an enculturation that has lasted till today. From that moment on generations of Christians of different denominations held the Jews accountable for Christ’s death and continue to do so today in spite of the absolution of Jews during the Third Session of the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. The Council proclaimed, “The Jewish people should never be presented as one rejected, cursed or guilty of Deicide. What happened to Christ in His passion cannot be attributed to the whole people then alive, much less to those of today.” (Just wondering: Is there a parallel in blaming 21st-century Caucasian Americans for slavery?)
What of Arabs in the vicinity of Israel and Iranians geographically separated from Israel, all of who have no emotional link to the death of Christ? From whence does their hatred arise? With regard to Iranians’ hate, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, writing in the Wall Street Journal, place the roots of Iranian antisemitism in the writings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the guy who took over after the fall of the Shah. * Khomeini wrote in his book Islamic Government, “From the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems, and as you can see, this activity continues down to the present.” The thought is now embedded in the minds of Iranians’ current leaders, probably some of them unfamiliar with the exact passage, such is the nature of enculturation and scapegoating.
But what of the affluent, coddled students at Columbia, none, my sound guess is, familiar with Khomeini’s writings and many who probably couldn’t find Gaza on a map? Could one ascribe the students’ actions to unfettered immaturity? College students—young people in general—have often rioted over a school’s basketball or football victory, running through the streets and destroying randomly property in college towns. As I think about the sentence I just wrote, I’m not dismissing that unfettered immaturity that is also evident on beaches during spring break. Apparently, any reason is reason to join a mob, any reason is sufficient to scapegoat.
About That Mob Yelling, “Crucify Him”
Imagine having one moment in your life that others might use to pigeonhole your entire life, then transpose that to a moment in the history of a people that others have used and still use to label them. The simulation of Jew as evil through history is a dissimulation that has resulted in deaths, exile, and persecution. The twentieth century’s Holocaust was a culmination of historical antisemitism that included the expulsion of Jews from Spain, for example. After a millennium and a half of coexistence with other “Spaniards” (e.g., Visigoths) on the Iberian Peninsula, the Jewish population was forced out by a decree of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. About one thousand five hundred years of off-and-on violence, but essentially a coexistence marred by infrequent but still lethal waves of antisemitism, such as the 1366 and 1391 pogroms, all that Jewish presence in Spain abruptly ended with the Alhambra Decree in 1492. Under Ferdinand and Isabella Jews who did not convert to Christianity had to leave.
Well, that’s one way to eliminate antisemitism, and the same thinking applies to antisemites who want Israelis to leave Israel. That outcome seems to be what students at Columbia want in the Middle East and by extension applicable to Jews in New York through virtual pogroms (i.e., hate crimes) and exiles of fellow students and esteemed faculty members currently on the campus.
Antisemitism as a Form of Anti-intellectualism
If I were asked what defines an intellectual, I would offer that an intellectual is one who can distinguish between the general and the specific. Intellectuals can deal in generalities as long as they know the flaw in inductive reasoning. A slight or offense by one Jew does not translate into a fault of all Jews. The supposedly bright students who have threatened fellow Jewish students don’t seem to be as bright as they pretend. No act of another, not even the act of calling for a Deicide, is the fault of someone else separated not only by space, but also by time.
The Ostriches on the Quad
Apparently, antisemitism has—hopefully, “had”— its practitioners in Columbia’s administration and faculty. These “adults” feigning intellectual superiority and objectivity seem never to have had anyone confront them for their beliefs and biased characterization or generalizing of Jews. Did no one see a problem existed? Maybe those who had subtle or overt inklings of bias on campus buried their heads rather than speak out. Why upset the proverbial apple cart, especially if one had yet to attain tenure? But maybe antisemitism crept stealthily into Columbia’s society over decades so that few noticed its gradual entrenchment.
Anecdotal Analogy Warning: Dive, Dive, Dive
I am in the midst of cataract surgery, the right eye having been through the process earlier this week, the left eye to be dealt with next week. Why do I mention this? After the right eye’s procedure, I saw a different world than I had seen: Colors were brighter, more intense, especially the blues and yellows. Closing the repaired right eye, I saw a different world through the left eye. A duller world. Next week, I’ll see the same through both eyes, I assume. The point is that over the years I had no way of knowing that my world was becoming duller, less vivid. I wasn’t seeing what you probably see if your eyes are healthy. I wasn’t purposefully ignoring the diminished sight because I didn’t know I had diminished sight. The fading was gradual.
Is that what happened at Columbia? Antisemitism gradually pulled the shade over the window of insight. Faculty members, some of them Jews, worked on committees and performed research with antisemites without seeing their prejudice. If that is the case, then they are analogs of my eyes beclouded by cataracts. And if the Jewish faculty members did recognize the insidious nature of antisemitism on campus, were they ostriches out of cowardice?
History tells me that just as Spanish Jews experienced pogroms and exiles, so future Jews will undergo further persecution at the hands of those who have no full understanding of the origin of their hate. But simple acquiescence isn’t really a good option. The Holocaust teaches us that in modern times real genocidal acts are possible. Jews can’t like Christ on the Cross say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” In these modern times, death is easy and victims of hate can be whole populations. Acts of self defense are not only moral, they are justifiable on the most basic level of survival.
*https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-iran-hates-israel-anti-semitism-gaza-4f7ad96e
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