CounterCurrent: Week of 11/18/24
CounterCurrent: anti-Semitism Edition is a monthly newsletter of the National Association of Scholars’ newsletter, which will document, expose, and explain the anti-Semitism on today’s college campuses.
While America was embroiled in the aftermath of a historic election, Europe relived its own history by repeating the past. On November 7, after a European football match in the Netherlands between rival Dutch and Israeli teams, Israelis and Jews alike were attacked by mobs in Amsterdam. This week’s Amsterdam attacks coincided with the anniversary of Kristallnacht (the “Night of Broken Glass”), when Nazi leaders fomented mob attacks on Jews across Germany in 1938. While America demonstrated its magic of diversity and unity, with Muslim and Jewish voters alike shifting to help propel Donald Trump to victory in the 2024 election, Europe repeated its past. Preventing Europe’s past and present from becoming America’s future means rooting anti-Semitism out of our colleges and universities.
The Amsterdam attacks were conspicuously vicious and coordinated. Amid pro-Palestinian protests in the Netherlands, assailants planned a “Jew hunt” on social media prior to descending on Israeli fans. The attackers used scooters to navigate Amsterdam’s streets so they could physically attack Israelis and Jews. Attackers yelled epithets like “cancer Jew,” driving one victim to jump into the city’s canal in order to escape. Some victims were shot with fireworks while others were kicked to the ground and stomped. Good Samaritans from Britain, who tried to save one of the victims, were attacked as well. Both the Dutch prime minister and king condemned the attacks. Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema of the Dutch “GreenLeft” party, has so far refused to resign over how the city’s police responded to the attacks.
The attacks in the Netherlands are as tragic as they are ironic. It was the Netherlands that accepted Sephardic Jews fleeing expulsion from Spain in 1492. Amsterdam became known as a “new Jerusalem” in the seventeenth century, as Sephardic Jews helped build the Netherlands as an economic powerhouse. Once occupied by the Germans in World War II, it was students and professors from Dutch universities that protested Nazi anti-Semitism. By the end of the Holocaust, 75 percent of Dutch Jews had been murdered. After nearly 90 years, Dutch anti-Semitism is alive and well. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7 last year, anti-Semitism in the Netherlands has increased more than 800 percent. Unlike in the past, Dutch universities are now places where Jewish students are likely to keep their Jewish identities secret.
On this side of the Atlantic, colleges and universities have become a primary source of anti-Semitism. Earlier this month, Republicans on the House of Representatives’ Education and Workforce Committee released a 325-page report documenting the extensive anti-Semitism at eleven of America’s top universities. Congress found that universities not only favored anti-Israel encampments, but also declined to condemn the October 7 Hamas attack and failed to discipline anti-Semitism among students. Unlike professors in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, professors in today’s America openly support anti-Semitism.
Congress found that faculty assisted anti-Israel students in pressuring trustees to advance boycott measures against Israel related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. At Northeastern University, provost Kathleen Hagerty supported protestors’ demands. At Harvard, Congress noted that professor Walter Johnson led chants at the university’s campus encampment, while 300 separate faculty signed a letter to Harvard’s administration to urge negotiation and capitulation to the protesting students. At Columbia University, professors from the university senate’s rules committee served as “faculty marshals” at the campus’ anti-Israel encampment. Columbia’s Kayum Ahmed, a professor teaching public health, even integrates anti-Israel activism into his curriculum.
Unsurprisingly, this Congressional report did not go over well in academia. The president of the American Association of University Professors, Todd Wolfson, decried the report as an effort to “delegitimize American higher education in the minds of the public.” As it turns out, Congress did not need to do much to erode academia’s legitimacy. Donors at places like Harvard and Columbia are retreating, and the trust in universities is decreasing among the American public.
Preventing modern American pogroms means attacking anti-Semitism at universities and delegitimizing it before it escapes the campus and becomes normalized in other American institutions. College graduates who are indoctrinated into hating Israel, Jews, and the greater West, will ultimately use their credentials to enter positions of authority in the public and private sector and bring their views with them. Having developed the sense that anti-Semitism is legitimate, today’s elite college graduates can become tomorrow’s storm troopers.
This fear is not unwarranted. Last November, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from the group “Coalition Against Apartheid” (CAA) disrupted classes and harassed Jewish students on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. CAA staged a “blockade” of MIT’s main campus entrance and even offered an $800 “bounty” for identifying a Jewish student who dared to challenge them. After Jewish professors at MIT sought to take action, the administration invited pro-Hamas speakers to campus for a lecture on Islamophobia. According to the pro-Israel group, the MIT Israel Alliance, the administration refused to take action on anti-Semitism for fear of “losing faculty support.” A Congressional investigation found multiple MIT faculty espoused anti-Semitic sentiments, such as stating “Zionism is a mental illness,” and that Jews want to “enslave the world in a global Apartheid system.” MIT’s Women and Gender Studies Program hosted a speaker that stated Zionists have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.” The similarities between the ideas espoused by contemporary university faculty and the blood libel of old are impossible to ignore. Such statements and sentiments would lead to the end of careers in the business world. In academia, these statements are tolerated and lauded.
A toxic combination of cultural self-deprecation and tolerance of the anti-Semitism in Europe’s immigrant population explains what happened in Amsterdam. Here in the United States, the anti-Semitism is largely being produced by the nation’s elite academic institutions. The reason academia’s anti-Semitism is arguably more dangerous is that it is produced with a coating of legitimacy from professors and administrators. Once graduated and in positions of authority, the students tainted by this anti-Semitic indoctrination will be emboldened to act without shame and will have been conditioned to discriminate without a fear of accountability. Preventing an American Kristallnacht means holding colleges and universities accountable before it is too late.
Until next week.
Photo by Tara Evans on Unsplash
