Shut It Down

By Judson Berger

Friday, November 03, 2023

 

Nearly 150,000 Holocaust survivors are estimated to live in Israel today. That might sound like a lot. Then you read, per the Times of Israel, that their average age is 85.

 

Their stories, at a not-too-distant time, will come to exist only in museums and in the texts of that period, and will compete forever with the efforts of those who aim to dilute or deny Nazi atrocities. This is a heavy burden to put on the dead.

 

The living have work yet to do.

 

It goes beyond determining which books about that era are or aren’t in school curriculums. It involves, more fundamentally, guarding against the conditions that allow the most ancient and infamous of bigotries to explode in the streets. Right now, we’re doing a piss-poor job.

 

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks, the West is witnessing outbursts of antisemitic hostility to a degree unseen in decades. FBI director Christopher Wray testified this week that the threat is “reaching historic levels” in the United States. The possibility of this tipping into something more than isolated violence, all tied up in and presumably rationalized by Israel’s war with Hamas, is real and immediate. It can happen here.

 

Aside from their intensity, what distinguishes these incidents is that the hostility is coming not from right-wing, neo-Nazi torchbearers but activists of the political Left. Rich Lowry explains why it matters:

 

There’s no doubt that there are neo-Nazis and right-wing Jew-haters, who deserve to be ostracized and are, in some cases, truly dangerous.

 

But they are marginalized. They don’t have tenured positions at prestigious universities. They aren’t capable of mustering sizeable crowds on campuses and in cities across America. They aren’t organizing morally repugnant statements that engender wide-ranging debate in the political mainstream.

 

Richard Spencer does not operate from a position of prestige. The academics and students at $60,000-a-year schools who have cheered on Hamas the past four weeks do. They benefit, further, from a pervasive campus Newspeak that has rendered the anodyne “unsafe” and the insidious “just”; antisemitism can travel easily in this environment by other names. This makes it all the more important for those institutions — and politicians, no matter which party — to plainly condemn the mobs, the graffiti, the callous statements targeting Jews. As Noah Rothman writes, “The time for Democrats to pull the support structure out from underneath the pro-Hamas Left is now. Tomorrow will be too late.”

 

Examples of this bigotry spiraling out of control are mounting already. Cornell University had to dispatch guards outside the campus Jewish center in response to online threats that left nothing to the imagination (“if you see a jewish ‘person’ on campus follow them home and slit their throats”). Jewish students were forced to seek refuge in a locked library at Cooper Union while classmates banged on the doors and shouted at them. At Tulane, a pro-Israel student was hit with a flagpole after snatching an Israeli flag from a protester trying to ignite it.

 

The response from many university administrations has been, to put it charitably, ineffectual. As National Review’s editorial points out, the response from Democratic officials also has been more muted than it would be if this threat were emanating from the far right.

 

It isn’t so much that antisemitism is being excused because it has the wrong victims, but the current wave of Jew hatred has the wrong perpetrators. . . . The makeup of those behind the incidents is politically inconvenient.

 

In just the last few days, some institutions have taken welcome action. Harvard, after dragging its feet, launched an advisory board meant to “disrupt and dismantle” antisemitism. Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, offered an “expedited transfer process for Jewish students in danger of antisemitic discrimination” at U.S. campuses. A University of California regent tore into the system’s Ethnic Studies Faculty Council for acting as “surrogates and supporters for Hamas’ destructive action.” Law firms issued a stern warning to schools they recruit from that they need to take an “unequivocal stance” against the discrimination and harassment. And New York police have made an arrest in connection with the online threats at Cornell, which canceled classes Friday.

 

In exercising vigilance, it will be important to distinguish between legitimate protest and actual threats; between understandable compassion for ordinary Gazans, including the civilians caught and dying in this hell, and unforgivable support for Hamas butchers who killed civilians as their primary objective. And while “Islamophobia” in recent weeks has served as a convenient deflection for some officials, terrible acts of violence have been committed against Muslims in the U.S. since October 7, including the fatal stabbing of a  Palestinian-American six-year-old in Illinois.

 

These horrors, all generating more victims and grief, do not negate each other. Nor do they make the case for Israel to forget those its people suffered a month ago, or its need to eliminate the terror organization that chose to inflict them and vows to return “again and again” until Israel is erased. (Philip Klein and Jim Geraghty explain here why “cease-fire” isn’t actually a call for peace.) Meanwhile, the West’s challenge is to resist the forces that would pile new horrors atop recent ones, by allowing latent antisemitism to boil over; last weekend’s Jew-hunting riot at a Dagestan airport is a glimpse at its uniquely destructive potential.

 

Elie Wiesel, a decade before he died, wrote of the “careless and patronizing indifference” toward the Holocaust among adults of a certain age during the ’50s and ’60s. He marveled at how this changed over time, attributing the interest to perhaps a collective understanding that the window was closing to hear from true witnesses. Yet his son, Elisha, told National Review’s Zach Kessel this week that he sees such indifference, even denial, returning, this time in response to Hamas’s savagery. He is not losing hope:

 

I think that every time somebody stands up on social media and corrects misinformation, reminding a community of what happened on October 7, of what exactly Hamas did, the more that comes out. . . . I genuinely believe that there is still an American center, which is decent and spans both parties, and when they see more clearly what has happened here, we’ll have a lot less tolerance for the anti-Israel antisemitism that we’ve been living with for far too long.