By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — They’re still trying to play catch-up. And still failing. The recent announcement of a framework of recommendations for how to battle “persistent campus antisemitism,” endorsed by the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel International, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Federations of North America is an attempt on the part of these establishment groups to re-establish their bona fides on an issue of crucial importance to American Jewry on the eve of a new school year.
Rather than taking a stand that would put them behind a critical push to address the root causes of the surge in antisemitism that followed the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they have instead opted for the worst sort of politicized compromise. While there is much in their statement about measures to be undertaken by colleges and universities that is good, by refusing to endorse an effort that would actually ensure that the disaster on campuses would not recur, they have failed again.
They deliberately left out any mention of the need to rid academia of indoctrination in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which is the reason why so many in the system have fallen for Hamas propaganda, believing the blood libels thrown at Israel and the Jews. It is that fashionable ideology that has helped to convince a generation of younger Americans that Jews and Israel are “white” oppressors who are always in the wrong, and that the Palestinian Arabs who seek the Jewish state’s destruction and genocide of its population are “people of color” always in the right.
Without DEI and the raft of toxic left-wing ideologies that go with it, the encampments that turned parts of campuses into “no-go” zones for Jews and the mobs chanting for Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”) are simply unimaginable.
Yet in their “To Do” list for American education to deal with the problem of antisemitism, the four major groups completely ignored this essential element.
Why would they do that?
The answer is simple. Many in the Jewish establishment simply refuse to understand what’s at stake in the debate about DEI. And the reason for that can be described in one word: politics.
One of President Donald Trump’s domestic priorities has been the push to force elite institutions to drop the DEI policies that have led to their tolerating and encouraging antisemitism. Yet rather than align themselves with the president, these four major Jewish groups prefer silence on this crucial issue rather than get behind the most important and potentially successful effort to end Jew-hatred on college campuses.
The post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism caught the American Jewish establishment by surprise and largely unprepared to deal with a crisis of unprecedented dimensions. That was particularly true with respect to what was happening on college campuses. Pro-Hamas mobs of students, faculty and staff — often aided by outside agitators — turned many academic institutions into places where Jews were targeted, intimidated and even subjected to violence.
The initial response from much of the organized Jewish world to this situation was a mix of confusion and outrage.
Though angered — as well as astonished — by the way academia had become hostile territory for Jews and Israel supporters, it was difficult for most of those at the head of these mainstream groups to comprehend why all this was happening. Unaccustomed to seeing schools where Jews had felt at home for most of the last century as places where they were now viewed as outside of the consensus, they were reluctant to draw conclusions about the way left-wing ideologies had captured the Western educational system.
Groups like the ADL had been solely focused on the threat from right-wing antisemitism, which played no role in the post-Oct. 7 meltdown of academia, as well as in trying to link Trump to Jew-hatred. What’s more, they had endorsed left-wing extremists like the Black Lives Matter movement, who were linked to Jew-hatred and even incorporated woke ideas like intersectionality. As a result, they were unprepared to view their erstwhile allies on the left as the primary threat to Jewish safety, as well as the engine driving the demonization of Israel. And as a result, their desultory efforts to cope with this problem were predictably ineffective.
Yet in contrast to the groups that are supposed to be the first line of defense against antisemitism, it has been the Trump administration, despised by Jewish liberals, that has stepped into the breach.
Trump has gone on the offensive on the issue, targeting elite institutions like Columbia, Harvard and Brown universities, some in the California state system, as well as a host of other schools as they have sought to force their administrators to ditch DEI.
The woke mindset that has become the new orthodoxy in academia is aimed at tearing down the canon of Western civilization and indoctrinating young people — K-12 up to the college level — into believing that America is an irredeemably racist nation. But in the DEI hierarchy of minorities who deserve protection, despite millennia of persecution and a rising tide of hate directed against them, the Jews don’t count. More to the point, the leftist orthodoxy seeks to deny and erase Jewish history, ignoring the fact that Jews are the indigenous people of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, to falsely label them as foreign colonial invaders of their own ancient homeland.
For the liberals who ran most of the organized Jewish world, critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism, were just culture-war slogans thrown about by conservatives. Instead of understanding that these Marxist ideas were inextricably linked to the demonization of Jews and Israel, they ignored the implications of the progressives’ long march through the institutions of higher education. They simply didn’t realize that the national obsession with race that reached its peak during the BLM summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, was not a cause that all good liberals needed to get behind. It was, instead, a turning point for American Jews, in which those unwilling to disavow support for Israel suddenly found themselves abandoned by former allies and largely ostracized in places like academia, where the left predominates.
As the third academic year since Oct. 7 begins, as a result of Trump’s credible threats to defund all institutions of higher education that won’t adopt far tougher policies against antisemitism than those proposed by the four major Jewish groups, the situation for Jews on campuses might be improving. Most college administrators have gotten the message. They know that a continuation of policies in which they treat those advocating for violence against Jews differently from the way they treat those who similarly target other minorities, like African-Americans and Hispanics, will get them into a world of trouble with the federal government and cost them funding they can ill afford to lose.
The notion that campus antisemitism can be stopped without taking on DEI and defunding those schools that refuse to comply isn’t just misguided. It’s a sign that liberal Jewish groups do not comprehend the nature of the threat to Jewish kids and are willing to leave in place the factor that has done most to put them at risk.
Not everyone in the Jewish world agrees with this wrong-headed approach.
Two groups that are part of the Conference disagreed with its concurrence with the ADL, Hillel and the Jewish Federation.
Kurt Schwartz, CEO of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), said: “We welcome the joint statement calling attention to the growing problem of campus antisemitism. But the truth is that antisemitism on campus is not only a matter of ignorance. It is being legitimized and institutionalized through certain DEI frameworks.”
In the coming months, with a growing chorus of corporate media outlets, Democratic politicians and leftist ideologues mainstreaming blood libels about Israel committing genocide and deliberately causing starvation in Gaza, Jewish students may find themselves again under siege, despite the administration’s efforts. This is a time when the Jewish establishment should be doing everything it can to influence those running colleges and universities to heed Trump’s warnings. They should be cheering on efforts to force them to end DEI-based hiring, admissions and indoctrination policies that inevitably lead to the kind of antisemitism we’ve seen on campus. Instead, they are giving aid and comfort to those who think Trump’s efforts can be defeated, and that the woke ideologues will be left in place to continue to target Jews and indoctrinate even more Americans to hate Israel.