By Ruth R. Wisse
Friday, January 3, 2020
Being silenced or harassed for unpopular speech on a
university campus is by now such a mark of distinction that I may be accused of
exercising bragging rights in describing a recent incident in which I was
involved. The real danger I encountered, however, was different from the one
against which I had been warned. Read on.
In January 2019, I received an invitation from Roger
Berkowitz, founding director of Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and
Humanities, to speak at its annual conference. The topic: “Racism and
Anti-Semitism.” In adopting the name of the German-Jewish philosopher it
describes as “the most taught and arguably most influential political thinker
of the 20th century,” the Center emphasized Arendt’s insistence on the need for
public debate on controversial matters. She had theorized about anti-Semitism
as a form of racism, and because I was among those who found this formulation
unhelpful, the conveners thought I might provide some valuable critical
engagement. For my part, I was readying a second edition of my book on
anti-Semitism, Jews and Power, so writing a talk for the conference was
a way of getting back into a subject that had become much more pressing since I
first published the book 13 years ago. I accepted the invitation and spent many
hours preparing the talk.
All the advance arrangements for the conference were
handled graciously, and the courtesies accorded me from the moment I arrived at
the Bard campus in New York’s Dutchess County went beyond the usual. Though I
am by now among the oldest in any academic gathering, the solicitude of my
greeters actually made me wonder whether I appeared much more fragile than I
felt. Unusually, several members of the administration showed up for my talk.
With the dean, a former fellow professor of literature, I conversed about the
19th-century British novel the way academics used to do when I began teaching
in the late 1960s.
Despite the pleasantness of our colloquy, I
assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that she was there to monitor the
proceedings. The previous evening, an email had arrived telling me that though
students would be protesting the session, “the vast majority” of those
attending the conference would want to hear me, and a “campus policy” had been
designed to guarantee that they could:
1. If students protest silently, we
simply go on. We allow free speech on all sides. So if they put up a poster or
stand in protest, we carry on. I know this can be uncomfortable, but our policy
is that as long as the protest does not interfere with the free speech of the
speaker, we allow it.
2. If students seek to prevent the
talk by chanting or yelling or speaking, we let them speak for a few minutes
and then say that we appreciate their right to speak but we’d like to let the
speakers speak.
3. If they refuse to allow the talk,
we ask the audience what they would prefer, to hear the speaker or the
disruption.
4. If none of that works we will
have security remove those who are disrupting the talk from the auditorium. The
College will not let a few students shut down this conference or your talk.
Rest assured, the talk will go on.
The policy seemed to me ridiculous. I mused to the dean
that if I ran a school of higher learning, I would include with letters of
acceptance a warning to incoming students to consider whether they were ready
for college. Unless they could confront material they considered offensive,
they should defer for a year or until they matured. In the meantime, however, I
intended to present my remarks.
Two panelists had been assigned to my talk, both of whom
were also participating elsewhere at the conference—Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion
editor of the Forward, and Shany Mor, a political philosopher and
research fellow at the Center. They, too, had received the email alerting us to
the anticipated protest and, having arrived before me, had been discussing how
to deal with it. Batya, who was to chair my session, had tried to forestall the
protesters earlier that day by asking them to desist, in return for which she
said she would call on them first in the question period. Shany and I objected
on the grounds that one does not negotiate with thugs who protest the free
exchange of ideas. Shany told us that two years earlier, as he was about to
speak to a small seminar on some aspect of political philosophy, a posse of students—perhaps
some of the same ones gathering now—swarmed around him, one shoving a phone in
his face to record his discomfort. He had refused to proceed then, and he felt
angry and apprehensive now.
Ours was the last session on the opening day of the two-day
conference. The auditorium was about half full as Batya introduced me and my
talk, “Who Needs Anti-Semitism?” I assumed the protest had been abandoned, but
a couple of sentences into my remarks, a phalanx of students carrying placards
marched into the hall and lined up in one of the aisles and in front of the
stage, facing the audience. They positioned themselves between the audience and
me, but they did not yet shout, like infants testing parental limits who
had apparently studied campus policy and disrupted only to the point of
anticipated removal.
I found their intrusion intolerably rude and scolded
their backs, “You ought to be ashamed!” and then a little more imaginatively
began to sing, “They shall be, they shall be removed / just like a log that’s
floating down the water / They shall be removed!” I assumed they would be
removed, since this was by far the most provocative of the several campus
protests I had ever witnessed and we had been assured that no disruptions would
be allowed. Instead, the dean came on stage and, taking me gently back to the
podium, asked whether I could go on with the talk. I assured her I could do
just about anything, but what about the audience? Could they listen with
interrupters doing everything possible to distract them? There was polite
applause inviting me to proceed.
The video of the event shows only those of us on the
stage, not the demonstrators in front of it. During most of the talk, the
disrupters only muttered and telegraphed their impatience until, either bored
or afraid I was being listened to, one of them began shouting. Only at this
point were they escorted out, having clearly accomplished their purpose. Shany
called it “a way of poisoning a discussion and marking speakers as objects of
hatred.” Batya said they had appropriately attended a talk that was really
about them.
So it proved to be. The point of departure in my talk was
an opinion piece from the New York Times by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that
had been published in 1992. Entitled “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,”
Gates’s article warned that while anti-Semitism in America was generally on the
wane, it was on the rise among black Americans, with blacks twice as likely as
whites to hold anti-Semitic views. Gates cited research showing that anti-Semitism
was most pronounced “among the younger and more educated blacks,” and as he was
then writing as the newly appointed chairman of Harvard’s Department of
Afro-American Studies, he was understandably concerned.
When the piece first appeared, I had just accepted and
was about to begin a tenured teaching position at Harvard. I was paying close
attention to events on campus and knew that earlier that year, Harvard’s Black
Student Association had hosted the black studies professor Leonard Jeffries, of
City College. Jeffries had denounced Jews for running the slave trade and
contrasted the “frigid” whites of the world with the sun-warmed blacks. Also
speaking at Harvard, Conrad Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, had blamed the
Jews for “despoiling the environment and destroying the ozone layer.” Gates
cited these and other “crackpot” theories being peddled in black academic
circles about Jews descending from brutish Neanderthals, and the reemergence of
the 19th-century Protocols of the Elders of Zion that portrayed Jews
plotting to take over the globe. “Make no mistake,” Gates had written, “this is
anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect
to be speaking for a larger resentment.”
The article gave a crisp description of the power
struggle within the black community between those in the tradition of Martin
Luther King who wanted to normalize black politics by making common cause with
fellow Americans and the leaders who were using Jew-blame to gain adherents and
resorting to classic anti-Jewish tactics for a “barricaded withdrawal into
racial authenticity.”
The strategy of these demagogues Gates called ethnic
isolationism—“they know that the more isolated black America becomes, the
greater their power. And what’s the most efficient way to begin to sever black
America from its allies? Bash the Jews.”
American Jews, he wrote, could not understand how their
political commitment to the civil-rights struggle and the historic black-Jewish
alliance could have led to this situation. The brutal truth was that the new
anti-Semitism arose not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance but because of
it. Transracial cooperation—epitomized by the historic partnership between
blacks and Jews—posed the greatest threat to the isolationist movement. The
Jews’ liberal drive for equal opportunity and an end to discrimination stood in
the way of a politics of grievance that wants equal outcome,
restitution, political power. The Jews were accused of wanting tolerance only
so that they should be able to dominate.
What most impressed me about Gates’s analysis was his
grasp of how anti-Semitism works. Avoiding common tropes about hatred and
discrimination, he focused on its methodology and political appeal. I did the
same in trying to explain how this movement had grown to become modernity’s
most successful ideology, tracing its origins in late-19th-century Germany to
an internal struggle like the one Gates describes between proponents of
emancipation and those who feared the advent of liberal democracy.1 Finger-pointing
at the Jews drew together large segments of the population by directing
dissatisfaction toward an already suspect target and blaming a group whose
removal would leave room for others. Similar strategies were adapted by
political parties of the right and left across Europe, and then by anti-Zionist
Arab and Muslim leaders in the Middle East who found that organizing politics
against Jews in Israel proved even more effective than organizing against Jews
in other people’s lands.
By now, these same strategies of grievance and blame have
penetrated the United States to such a degree that Henry Louis Gates, a lovely
man, would never again write anything like that opinion piece. The identity
politics that he once deplored had turned respectable, and what he once feared
might discredit his field of Afro-American Studies was now the guiding
philosophy of those studies. If that included anti-Semitism, tant pis,
say the French: tough luck. Advancing well beyond what Gates described, blaming
Israel and its Jewish supporters has since taken over the university, the
media, popular culture, and a large swath of the Democratic Party.
After the talk and questions, I was ready for a glass of
wine at the promised reception. Several people had come on stage to speak with
me, and as I tried to steer them out the auditorium to the reception, two
friendly gentlemen came to escort me instead to the waiting car at the back
door. I told them that the car had been ordered for a half hour later to give
me some time to circulate with the other participants, but they assured me I
would do better to leave with them. It took me a moment to understand, and I
asked, “Do you mean that there are students waiting to provoke me?” Insisting I
had no fear of their gauntlet, I tried heading out in that direction, but they
became a little firmer and courteously—solicitously—led me between them
out the back door into the waiting car. They had been charged with getting me
safely away from any possible confrontation.
If the college hoped to avoid adverse publicity by
protecting me from nastiness, it had focused on the wrong party. The conference
was barely over when Batya Ungar-Sargon used her perch at the Forward to
publish an account of her experience, headed “I Was Protested at Bard College
for Being a Jew.”
It referred to our panel on anti-Semitism as the only one
with “three Jews” on it to discuss the topic. “But we’re not even talking about
Israel,” she had said to the conference organizers. “How does that make sense?”
Inviting the protesters to come the next day instead to her panel on racism and
Zionism, she said, “Come protest my comments on Zionism. I’ll be talking about
the occupation. Bring your signs.” She was trying to maintain the difference so
important to liberals between opposing Israel (kosher, legitimate) and opposing
Jews (treyf, illegitimate), but once she found herself lumped together
with us on that panel, she realized the little storm troop had recognized no
such distinction.
“Didn’t they understand that saying we were responsible
for the behavior of the Israeli Jews just because we shared their ethnicity was
racist?” she wrote. “That making every conversation with Jews about Israel is
racist?” Exactly so: One of the students explained that the conversation about
anti-Semitism “was already inherently about Israel” and therefore logically
racist as well. This was for Batya a bridge too far. Joining her fellow “Jews,”
she then scolded other participants at the conference for applauding the
students rather than supporting the speaker.
I left the conference early—earlier than I had
intended—so my impression of what followed is based on Batya’s account and the
ensuing back-and-forth in the press. She left the dinner that evening and quit
the conference the following day, “shocked” that some of the faculty and
conference speakers encouraged this display of racism against Jews (one even
argued that the discussion hadn’t gone far enough and that Palestinians should
have been invited to speak on anti-Semitism). Although members of the
administration tendered apologies for what was judged after all to be a
disruption, Batya and Shany were both dismayed that none of the others had
defended me. “I’m horrified by your cowardice, by your self-justifications,”
she had said to the audience before leaving. “You, who I called luminaries!
Whose books I’ve read!”
Did she appreciate the irony of her complaint? When I was
told that she had been invited to chair my talk, I had assumed the conveners
hoped that Batya’s prominent leftism and her newspaper’s unceasing attacks on
Israel would serve to offset my reputed “conservative” Zionism. Her (now
online) paper, the Forward, often opens its pages to those who level the
Zionist-racist charge against Israel and its Jewish supporters, pretending that
the war against Israel was not directed at Jews. Her awakened consciousness
under fire was therefore surprising, perhaps even to her.
But I have Batya Ungar-Sargon to thank, for it was only
from her article that I learned the protesters were the Bard chapter of
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and that they were protesting against me.
I never saw the flyers they circulated, and their signs carrying allegations
against me at my session were facing the audience, so I was unable to read
them; nor did anyone else make me aware that I was their target. (To this day,
I have not been able to obtain a copy of their pamphlet.) I was insulated as
carefully as a Zika patient.
That changed once a debate over the events opened in the
Jewish press. Apologists for the protesters denounced my “history of bigoted
remarks toward Palestinians and Muslims” and my “horrifyingly racist anti-Palestinian,
Islamophobic as well as anti-black views,” omitting only the wells I had
poisoned and the blood I had drawn from murdered Arab children. Nonetheless,
though the aggression against me was ugly and the cosseting tender, once I
learned what had happened, it was depressingly clear to me that I had more to
fear from my protectors than my attackers.
Case in point: In a response to Batya’s article,
political studies professor Samantha Hill reported that while attending
services on the Bard campus on Yom Kippur, the day before the conference, she
had been told by students that they were planning to oppose my presence. They
were all Jewish, some of them members of SJP. One of the students pulled out
her computer and read a statement attributed to me on Wikipedia: “Palestinian
Arabs [are] people who bleed and breed and advertise their misery.” Hill wrote:
I told them that personally and
politically, I did not agree with everything Wisse had said, but she had a
right to speak. I made my case as the assistant director of the Arendt Center.
I said professor Wisse is 83. She’s a survivor. She has dedicated her life to
the Yiddish language. It is not responsible to protest her. I told them this is
a panel about anti-Semitism and the protest will be seen as anti-Semitic.
The students proceeded with their
mostly nonverbal protest and were removed when they verbally interrupted
Professor Wisse’s talk…
Where to begin? First of all, I am a survivor of Harvard,
not the Nazis, and neither my age, my experience, nor my lifetime in Jewish
Studies was relevant to what the students were thinking or planning. If any
student in my orbit had ever offered an opinion on the basis of an excerpted
“gotcha!” quotation on a Wikipedia page—on a computer on Yom Kippur no less—I
would have asked for an essay several thousand words in length based on its
source for the purpose of demonstrating why no such reference is ever to be
trusted. I dismiss as a Googling ignoramus anyone who cites that
misrepresentation of what I had written, but students don’t need facts or
arguments when they have institutions to coddle them.
“It is our job as professors to teach students how to
think, not what to think.” “Rather than building walls, we are proud to create
an open forum where people with different opinions can come together to stop
and think.” These are some of the conclusions that the kindly Professor Hill
draws from the Bard incident, perhaps intending to extend even greater
protection to “protesters” than the college already has in place. Had she shown
more faith in their ability to think, she might have set up a meeting between
me and the protesters, insisting that so-called students have the courage to
face me with their arguments. Showing me their backsides merely proved what
they are substituting for brains.
The indulgence of this anti-intellectualism was the first
of Bard’s mistakes. Honest students and teachers will always find their way to
one another, but colleges that replace the teachings of our civilization with
academic tasting stations are no longer engaged in higher education. Moreover,
the students were almost certainly steered to SJP and sicced on me by faculty
ideologues who look for converts rather than truth. They and the parrots they
train fear no demotion for their ignorance or censure for their boorishness,
knowing they will never be required to learn anything about the subject.
“Openness” is an excuse for moral and intellectual indifference that replaced
the cultivation of good citizenship.
The conveners deserve credit for addressing anti-Semitism
in the current academic climate, but the disrupters, in their way,
inadvertently exposed problems with the conference that might otherwise have
gone unnoticed. The program notes quoted Hannah Arendt’s idea that “political
anti-Semitism is more than ‘Jew-hatred’; rather, it is a pseudoscientific
ideology seeking to prove that Jews are responsible for all the evils of the
world.” Arendt called anti-Semitism a form of racism, and anti-black racism an
ideology like anti-Semitism. But the Zionism-is-racism Resolution, passed at
the United Nations a month before Arendt’s death in 1975, had turned her
equation upside down. It accused Jews of the racism to which they were
themselves subject. In leading the U.S. effort to prevent this inversion, New
York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called the Resolution’s passing “a day of
infamy,” deliberately echoing the phrase President Roosevelt had used for the
attack on Pearl Harbor. It took American diplomats 16 years before they could
muster the votes to repeal it. But this righted wrong had so little effect that
Bard students felt free to tout Zionism=Racism signs.
Linking racism and anti-Semitism in the conference title
made it impossible to address the way the claim of “racism” was being
weaponized by Arab-Muslim groups and the post-Soviet left to promote
anti-Jewish aggression. To subsume anti-Jewish politics under another category
such as racism was to prevent action against it. The conference made no attempt
to identify, much less investigate, the ideological warfare that Arab
propagandists, Islamists, Middle East scholars, radical leftists,
intersectionality activists, and other aggressors were waging against Israel
and the Western democracies for which it is a stand-in. In fact, if the
conveners thought they might get away with treating anti-Semitism in today’s
college climate by combining it with racism, the grievance groups had seen
right through the ruse and organized their protest against the only session
devoted to exposing them.
Unlike racial prejudice, which is straightforward,
anti-Semitism works through inversion: It holds Jews responsible for the aggression
against them. Among the general framing questions of the conference—which
included “What is racism?” “Is anti-Semitism a form of racism?” and “Is
equality possible in a world where prejudice exists?”—there was only one with
built-in bias: “Is it anti-Semitism to criticize the state of Israel?” The
question is fraudulent because Israel is not being “criticized” but blamed
for the Arab-engineered plight of the Palestinians. Arab countries covering
more land than the United States deny Jews their single homeland and blame Jews
for denying Arabs theirs. Anti-Semitism is about its owners, not its foils. The
conference ought to have asked whether Arab and Muslim leaders could ever
accept the principle of coexistence.
That others repeat some of the same mistaken language of
the conference merely proves that bad ideas drive out the good—to the very
depths of evil. The war against the Jewish state is not a generic cause like
climate change, or women’s right to abortion, or part of a general attempt to
impose political correctness on matters of gender, race, and class. It is a
genocidal assault against a particular people. Blaming Israel for Arab plight
is an article of theological and political faith to much of the Arab and Muslim
world. Rather than educate to reform and ameliorate that misdirected political
charge, universities have welcomed it as just another point of view. Schools
that forbid other forms of hatred and pass speech codes monitoring slights to
all other minorities are only too happy to allow all those other repressed
forms of antagonism to emerge in this acceptable form. They know that unlike
other threatening groups, Jews—and Jewish professors—are more likely to join
their accusers. Who needs anti-Semitism? The grievance brigades and their liberal
college protectors.
As for the revelation that most of Bard’s SJP are
themselves Jewish, there has always been a correlation between the level of
anti-Jewish hostility and the number of Jews who defect or join their
antagonists. Whereas many groups typically threaten others, Jews under attack
often turn against their own. Anti-Semitism in Europe generated thousands of
converts to Christianity and an even larger number of socialists and
Communists, some of whom used their claims of political supersession to attack
their fellow Jews. The growth of anti-Zionist Jews in America and of Jews who
ascribe to anti-Jewish causes is the most reliable measure of how successfully
the war against the Jews is currently being waged. In a grotesque cycle of
causality, Jewish habits of accommodation inspire the anti-Jewish politics that
then destroy Jewish moral self-confidence. Jewish apologists in Eastern Europe
were called mayofes yidn for the song their Polish overlords made them
perform for their amusement; today’s mayofes choirs sing out on every
major American campus.
I am grateful for the protection given and the courtesy
shown by members of the Bard faculty and administration, but it is intolerable
that my security should come at the expense of the infinitely more endangered
people of Israel. And not only Israel. No one can say “we did not know” what
anti-Israel forces intend because anyone with access to a computer or library
can locate the platforms and sponsors of groups such as BDS National Committee,
National Students for Justice in Palestine, Electronic Intifada, Palestine
Right to Return Coalition, and their ties with neo-Nazi movements in Germany,
all of which aim to take down Israel and the civilization it represents. We
know the attraction, especially to academics and would-be intellectuals, of
inversions like “Zionism-racism” and the harm they intend. Free speech comes
with the responsibility to crush the criminality that spreads under its
protection.
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