Can we fix campus antisemitism?

(RNS) — “Of course, you know that Hitler negotiated with Herzl.”

I heard those words in a university classroom as a sophomore in college in 1974, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.

I raised my hand, and I said: “How is that even possible? When Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, died in 1904, Hitler was 15 years old. What did they possibly have to negotiate about?”

That happened more than 50 years ago, but I will never forget it. It was a clear attempt to link Zionism with Nazism.

The ignorance and malice we see on college campuses is not new.

Which brings me to how I spent this past Sunday afternoon (May 18) — at a conference titled “The End of an Era? Jews and Elite Universities” at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

We pondered serious questions that plague the American Jewish community: Why has antisemitism grown on college campuses? Is it only the result of Oct. 7, 2023? Why has the intellectual culture gotten so chilly for Jews? And, what can we do?

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The list of presenters was impressive: among them, Rabbi David Wolpe; Ambassador and professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; author Steven Pinker; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman (whose presence at the conference was controversial); scholar Pamela Nadell; and Leon Wieseltier, editor of Liberties journal. The chairman of the symposium was Martin Peretz, former publisher of The New Republic. The crowd was diverse in its political leanings and, refreshingly, mostly polite to those with whom they disagreed.

Some interesting takeaways:

• We heard stories of students avoiding Hillel for fear of being identified as Jewish; of an older student refusing to mentor a younger student who was taking modern Hebrew, and other tales of academic woe. (Read the report on antisemitism at Harvard University — it is huge and powerful).
• We heard history. In the first decades of the 20th century, Columbia University, Harvard and other universities instituted quotas and other ways of limiting the number of Jewish students. Harvard saw itself as a training ground for American leadership, and Jews did not fit with the idea of the well-rounded “Harvard man,” we learned.
• The more you pay, the more uncomfortable it gets. Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, showed us a graph indicating that the more expensive the college, the more likely there will be anti-Israel activism.
• Why this is happening is bigger than the Jews. There is a perceived binary: the powerful and the powerless, and Jews are imagined as powerful on campuses.
• There is such a thing as free speech, even and especially for those with reprehensible views — but of course when those views become actions against students and others, that’s a different story. So, too, even people with violent ideologies have the right to due process. Because, there are greater dangers here … .
• The way the current administration is weaponizing Jewish fears of antisemitism. Most presenters (Ackman was a notable exception) saw the Trump administration’s efforts as being overkill and misguided, and assaults on the intellectual class itself. Let’s not become like the Jews who thought the czars would protect them and were wrong — what professor Susie Linfield of New York University called “a Faustian bargain.”

All of this got me thinking back to my Herzl/Hitler story.

How did I know this little historical tidbit that Hitler was born in 1889, and Herzl died in 1904?

Because my Jewish education lasted into my high school years, and somewhere in that experience, I learned it.

Could today’s young Jews answer that accusation?

Most likely not.

According to Nancy Berman’s research (I quote her in my recent book):

“Presently, the majority of families consider b’nai mitzvah to be … a finish line and a time when children and families leave synagogue life altogether. The demands of the secular world, including academics and social concerns, take precedence over the development of Jewish identity. Out of 24 communities surveyed between 1993 and 2010, over half reported less than 50% of their children continued beyond bar or bat mitzvah education.”

And as Wieseltier said:

“Jewish parents forgot to pack a knowledge of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy in the duffel bags when they sent the kids off to college. We have been sending off to college generations of Jewish kids who are not ready for what has become one of the most important battles of ideas of our time. Israel is a just cause. The survival of Israel is a just cause. Zionism is not that hard to argue for, but almost no one in the American Jewish community remembers how to make the argument. Young Jews must understand the rightness of their cause. They must understand their own history. They must know how to argue unafraid.”

Do Jewish kids need to memorize the history of Israel? No. But, at the very least they can learn how to define Zionism, which is, according to Amanda Berman of Zioness, the liberation of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. And they can learn how to defend that idea.

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Was there any good news from the conference? Yes, it came from Rubenstein, the Harvard Hillel director.

He said, yes, these situations on campuses are bad. But, Jewish students are stepping up. They are exhibiting a kind of moral heroism that is actually admirable. 

So, how do we fight what is happening on college campuses? Yes, through legal channels, if necessary. Through moral persuasion, if possible.

But, most of all, we need to work on ourselves. We need students with Jewish brains and Jewish muscles.

Let’s create those kids.

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