The ADL expanded their definition of anti-semitism after October 7th to include anti-zionist speech. You can’t draw a trend line from their data.
If anyone needs something to listen to, The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC is covering this topic right now. (10AM-ish, ET)
That’s an excellent example of what I mean.
I work in Ann Arbor and the Gaza protests (both sides) have been going on for a couple months now.
One incident that did not get much press was at the Honors Convocation. Protesters shoutted down Umich President Santa Ono during his intro of the event. He just stopped speaking and moved on with the program.
Later that week there was a Time, Place and Manner student conduct restriction floated around but it has not been finalized and probably will not be implemented. I feel this is an overreaction. It seems like heads have cooled though for now…
Graduation is coming up. It will be much of the same, protestors showing down speakers.
Yes, that’s another factor: after graduation, most of these protestors are going home anyway, and the few that are left will be demonstrating to almost nobody.
Also, it’s April, when people (especially young people) tend to get rowdy. (I’m kidding, but also serious.)
I’d hate to chalk this up to youthful rebellion. It’s a conflict between what young people overwhelmingly believe and the university system’s zero tolerance approach to pro-Palestinian speech. All of that will still be in place after the summer.
I don’t think the tensions on this are going away.
I suspect we’re going to see this anger bloom in the 2028 Dem primaries. These folks are going to be the acitivists of 2028.
Even at the high school level my fiancee has noted real anger among high school students over this.
The ADL has lost its credibility with me. They showed in the end, they only paid lip service to the proper lesson of the Holocaust (never again means never again) and really believed in the wrong one (never again means never to us again by any means necessary)
Yes, to be sure, but the point is that the looming end of semester makes it pretty hard to maintain the idea that the universities must call in the cops now to prevent things getting out of control later.
No disagreement there. The response is not because the universities are worried about things getting out of control, it’s because we’re in a McCarthyist elite hysteria where university administrators are required to overreact or get fired. Both parties are falsely calling these protests dangerous and demanding immediate action.
I’ve had this thought before but every time I’ve tried to articulate it it has ended up reading a lot like “you keep calling me a Nazi so I might as well be a Nazi”, which I don’t think is actually the same. So I always deleted it. Thank you for presenting it in a way I never could manage.
I think outside of a few isolated tankie types, the main core of the protests have been pretty clear in marking a line between anti-Zionist and anti-semitic, and not to step over it. The fact that there’s a good number of Jewish protestors should be a sign that line is not being crossed. The tankie types tend to be the loudest online.
A lot of Jewish families are splitting hard on generational lines, it’s quite possible the Jewish community in America will suffer from some of what is ailing the white evangelicals in terms of youth synagogue attendance. The ideological split in Judaism is going to be a lot harsher and even than it is with white evangelicalism, as it is closer to 50/50.
It’s horribly frustrating and angering. The conflation of Jew = Israel, things like the ADL saying opposition to Zionism (a political movement, primarily, though one invested by many with transpolitical values) equals anti-Semitism, and the inability of so many people to grasp the idea that mass murder by anyone is a bad thing, all of this makes it near impossible to hold any sort of discussion or to move forward.
A big difference here too between student protests now and, say, “classic” protests from the Vietnam era is that for the most part neither the students nor the people hostile to them are directly involved with the issues at hand. By directly, I mean in the same way that students were subjected to being drafted during Vietnam, and other folks faced the prospect of their sons being drafted, or had family members in the combat zone. For the most part, the clashes now center on each side’s idea of what is going on, and the meaning they make of it, without (again, for the most part) having direct connections to the events.
Exactly. The generational split will definitely rewrite the landscape of Jewish communities. No doubt about it.
Much of this is the media the generations grew up with. The older generation grew up with the idea of Plucky Israeli democracy standing up against pro-communist Arab Hordes.
The younger generation grew up with glodal solidairity, the corruption of their own society, and they see Palestianians as the victims and Israelis as Trump-like, Republican-like oppressors.
Lot of selective facts on each side of this, though my sympathy is a lot closer to the youth than the older generation, I grew up closer to the side of the line of the younger folks, and my own precarious status as a potential victim of genocide makes me sympathetic to others in the same situation such as the Palestians, Uighurs, Rohingya, Rojava, etc.
Great point. I grew up in the “plucky Israel” camp. I’d read books about the '67 war and write “Strike Zion!” on things as youth. Education, experience, visiting Israel and Jordan, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jew eventually shifted me well out of that world and into the realm of frustratingly uncertain angst about it all. I too tend more towards the condemnation of Israeli actions and policies side of things, though there is still a deep-seated fondness for the (probably mythologized) image of the liberal, democratic, and humane refugees who established a state while surrounded by foes. I understand that much of that narrative itself is quite questionable, but there is a grain of truth somewhere in there. A truth though that does not justify what Israel has done, nor discount the narratives and truths of the Palestinians.
For me, that illusion was shattered hard by Bibi personally, especially during the Obama administation, where Likud was practically an arm of the Republican party. I have memories of that, and they burned hard.
I sometimes wonder if I’d have such a strong negative reaction if someone else in Israel was in power. I legit consider the current Israeli government to be fascist, and an enemy of the United States that is good, and an ally to the United States that is beyond salvation.
Is worth saving, or is not? I can see logic in both statements :).
I’m not sure this is nearly as clear as you are suggesting here. There have been many cases, some even formalized into actual lawsuits, of students being directly threatened for being jews, not at all related to simply anti-zionist messaging.
I think that perhaps it’s whitewashing the issue, essentially just pretending that no anti-semitism is taking place, so that we can avoid having to address it. It seems like an over-correction in response to the idea that any anti-zionism is antisemitism, when it reality it seems, at least based on the statements of college students at a number of campuses across the country, that there is some mix of anti-israel and anti-jew activity.
I think that, as is the case with many large groups of people, you are going to have some portion who take things further, or in a different direction, than the leadership or majority of the protest intend. That is, in this case, such protests may naturally attract people who hold antisemitic beliefs, because they feel it is a place for them to freely express those beliefs under the guise of the protest against anti-israeli actions, as there is some idelogical overlap.
This doesn’t mean that the protests themselves are a source of the problem, but it likewise doesn’t mean that the antisemitism ceases to be a problem just because it’s occurring under the larger umbrella of anti-israel protests.
How many cases? Examples? And how are they connected to these protests, or the organizers of these protests?
Given that many young Jewish folks are supporting these protests, I don’t think any antisemitism claims hold. (Seeing this trend locally with the local protests, and my part of NC has a pretty large collection of Jewish Democrats, unfortunately we’re represented by the biggest Dem Israel Hawk in Congress, though she’s being gerrymandered out)
If the protests were anti-semitic, I suspect the Jewish students would feel unwelcome, and not be taking part.