The New Anti-Antisemitism
Pro-Israel counterprotesters hold Israeli flags on the edges of a pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University in Boston, April 26, 2024.
The response to college protests against the war on Gaza exemplifies the darkness of the Trumpocene.
No matter how much I try to ward it off, a certain curse of my career repeats: Every time protest signs bloom, scribes seek my input for “historical parallels” pieces. Isn’t this just like in Nixonland when …?
My initial response is always the same: Maybe—but there will be time to reflect on that later, and wouldn’t it be better to spend energy figuring out what’s going on now?
I’ve never felt more that way than during these past several weeks. Angry kids setting up tents on university quads, taking over administration buildings, cops dragging them away: The more energy we spend on baby boomer games of compare and contrast, the less we can understand how, this time, the response to students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza has taken shape as a pure product of the interlocking derangements of the Trumpocene. I’m trying desperately here to start that conversation, because what we’re witness to now has the potential to make Kent State on May 4, 1970, seem like a spring picnic.
WANT HISTORICAL PARALLELS? Start with one from just two months ago, when a moral witness set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, and an officer of the law sought to subdue him with a gun rather than trying to extinguish the fire.
Yes, there was plenty of terrible state violence again Vietnam War–era campus protesters: Kent State; Jackson State; a military helicopter belching tear gas at students kettled into Sproul Plaza and a cop shooting dead a bystander during the “People’s Park” riot at the University of California, Berkeley; and many more. But escalating to a military response nearly immediately, at barely a provocation or no provocation?—in the 1960s, that would have been inconceivable.
You might have already stomached some of the videos of last week’s most harrowing abuses. At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream “What are you doing?” at cops being taken down with a wrestling move that also left her with an arm wrenched behind her back. Then a second cop arriving to keep her pinned as a third looks on blithely, rifle at the ready. (She was suspended by her university for her trouble.) At Washington University in St. Louis, a 65-year-old professor, a Quaker, was told by his doctor he was “lucky to be alive” after absorbing a flying tackle from a very large officer for the sin of filming cops with his cellphone, then being dragged to a nearby patch of grass, writhing, then to a police van, where he fell limp.
If mainstream news organizations would concentrate their formidable resources at how this exact same script played out at diverse institutions large and small, as if their administrators had all attended the same continuing education seminar, instead of editors assigning “they took over Hamilton Hall then, they took over Hamilton Hall now” pieces, that, in my humble opinion, would be a most welcome development.
THE PROVOCATIONS FOR THESE ASSAULTS are so much milder now than they were in the 1960s that an administrator then who could peer 55 years into the future would probably smirk. Students peacefully chanting slogans on a single, specific issue, backed by easily realizable demands? Pshaw.
At 1960s Cornell, the escalation that culminated in Black militants holding the administration building with rifles began when a student from the African American Society (AAS) stormed the university’s president at a lectern as he pleaded that he couldn’t afford to fully meet the African American Society’s demand to build an entire new college where Black students would do hiring and determine the curriculum themselves. The student lifted the president to his toes by the collar. Another kid stood by with a four-foot length of two-by-four, as audience members banged bongos in menacing rhythm. Then, AAS provocateurs burned a cross on the lawn of a Black sorority to “prove” the university was irremediably racist. At Kent State, the National Guard had been called after students burned down the ROTC building, cutting the hoses of the firefighters who arrived to put out the blaze. That had been preceded, three weeks earlier, by a lecture by Jerry Rubin to 1,500 where he declared, “The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I meant that quite literally, because until you’re prepared to kill your parents, you’re not ready to change this country.”
But to repeat: What is happening now, I believe, might be far more dangerous.
Why?
CONTRASTING SCENES from recent days:
Students at the protest encampment at the University of Chicago enjoyed a gorgeous twilight “Mimouna,” a rite celebrated by the Maghrebi Jews of North Africa during Passover. Some wore kippahs, others keffiyehs, some both. Muslim and Jewish prayer services are a regular feature at this “Popular University for Gaza” where a thousand or so people are reported to be milling about, which features 24-hour food service, lots of art, film screenings—a vibe like a jam band festival camping area, only with more eight-syllable words.
Two thousand miles away in Boston, the administration at Northeastern University said they had no choice but to flood in the campus police to take down an encampment because it “was infiltrated by professional organizers with no affiliation to Northeastern,” and it had descended into “virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews.’” Then, however, the student newspaper reviewed footage demonstrating it was the pro-Israel counter-demonstrators who trollingly chanted that, to the pro-Palestinian side’s angry boos. Similarly, at UCLA, it was pro-Israel ultranationalists who came onto campus one night last week to attack the protesters’ encampment and the protesters themselves, a story that the Los Angeles Times got right, but that the East Coast press managed to garble completely by misstating who attacked whom.
Concerns for the “safety” of Jewish students has become a rhetorical commonplace in elite discussions of campus politics these days: “Jewish students of all political beliefs,” Theo Baker, son of New York Times superstar Peter Baker, tells us in The Atlantic in “The War at Stanford,” “have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets.”
It makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. You know who has good reason to fear for their safety? People, many of them Jews, getting pummeled by cops and fascists. People getting high-powered rifles aimed at them from rooftops by agents of the state who surely have been told by the people giving them orders to be ready to shoot because of all the “dangerous” things that are going on amid those protesters’ tents.
Sure, offensive things have happened to protesters. And that’s awful. But when I told some Chicago neighbors about all the Judaism going on down in Hyde Park, they were frankly shocked to hear it: They watch Morning Joe, from which they got the impression that Jew-hate was the overwhelming leitmotif of this whole protest thing.
It suggests one of those Talmudic puzzlements, or perhaps the setup for a dad joke: How many Jews have to pray peacefully in a pro-peace encampment (or alternatively, to cite a scene witnessed outside the 116th Street gate of Columbia University, how many black-hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews have to chant, “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism”) for them to stop being an antisemitic mob?