“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...”
Protestors at a college campus one year after the October 7th massacre (ADL)
Although I am not particularly fond of quoting the words of
an antisemite, these words from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities,
published in 1859 pretty much describe how I sometimes feel these days.
In just about every sphere of human experience, I can say
with a fair degree of confidence that we, the Jewish people, live in an
unprecedented time of freedom and prosperity. There are so many indications of
that fact that I probably could not do them justice by trying to enumerate them
all. I will therefore discuss one area of particular importance to us: how the
Jewish people are treated in this country.
Never have the Jewish people enjoyed a freer or more
prosperous existence during the more than 2,000 years of the Diaspora than we
have in America. This is still true today, regardless of which party is in
power. And yet antisemitism has not been this prevalent since pre-Holocaust
times. A situation derived, at least in part, from the respect accorded to
academia.
It is from those circles that antisemitism has been flowing
profusely, often under the guise of anti-Zionism. That has not gone unnoticed
by people of lesser education who may have always harbored such feelings but
kept them buried because of America’s increasing intolerance for racism and
bigotry of any kind. But now that academia has unofficially given its
imprimatur to antisemitism as it pertains to Israel, it has opened a much
broader landscape for it. One that people outside academia can easily latch onto.
The floodgates have now been opened. Both the left and the right can justify
their hatred by pointing to academia’s hostility toward Israel.
The strange thing about all this is that much of academia’s
antisemitism is rooted in the good intentions that is the hallmark of
liberalism. In fact, many liberals fought for us during the Holocaust. Many
liberals helped create an environment that enabled Jews to emigrate from
antisemitic regimes that had persecuted us for centuries. Many liberals
advocated American opposition to Nazism and later supported the establishment
of a Jewish state.
Liberalism is, in many ways, what defines the character of
this country. It is why the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s prevailed. A
liberal sees injustice and is determined to fight it, determined to defend
individuals or groups perceived as being persecuted for no reason other than
prejudice, whether religious, ethnic, or racial. Today, there is no greater
bastion of liberalism than academia.
This was not always the case…
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