It has seemed to me that a vast double standard regarding what constitutes prejudice exists on American college campuses. There is hypersensitivity to prejudice against most minority groups but what might be called hyper-insensitivity to anti-Semitism.
The progressives own the sensitivity issue, which means that it is aligned with the oppressor-oppressed axis. Nowadays, Jews do not qualify as oppressed. End of story.
Passover is coming up in a few weeks. The Passover story is an oppressor-oppressed narrative with the Hebrews as the oppressed group that is redeemed from slavery. I believe that the power that this story holds for Jews is one of the factors accounting for the tendency of Jews to lean left. However, I see a lot of Jews my age experiencing cognitive dissonance between their left-leaning historical inclinations and the fact that nowadays the oppressor-oppressed axis is often invoked against Israel.
Note that Larry Summers has another reason for experiencing cognitive dissonance relative to left-wing college students and their oppressor-oppressed axis. Recall that he lost his Harvard Presidency over his alleged insensitivity to women.
There are two other factors to keep in mind.
1. First, the Holocaust and other historical anti-Semitic crimes and misdemeanors are getting further away in time and gradually losing salience for the younger generation. “Soon there will be no more survivors.”
In America in particular, there hardly ever anything much worse than social exclusion, with a few notable and exceptional cases, and so there is no ‘national guilt’ narrative. Jews have achieved enough upward social mobility in this country that they can no longer effectively leverage these past and mostly minor incidents in a way similar to that evidenced by the story of Emmett Till still being portrayed as fresh and relevant in the NYT despite the passage of 61 years.
2. Second, the most important source of really serious anti-Semitic feeling and the origin of the vast majority of threats and attacks comes from Muslims, which are much higher on the current victim-points totem pole. That generates all kinds of complications, and, I think, forces a more cautious Summers to dance around the key issue. Anti-Semite Muslims dance it around it too, playing open-secret word games and framing their animus in terms of anti-Zionism or anti-occupation.
The issue going forward is whether, unless the security situations improves quite quickly and dramatically, Jews will start to perceive mass Muslim immigration as good or bad for the Jews. Up to now, most progressive Jews (but I repeat myself) saw it as a good thing. I think now many Jews are reconsidering that position, but really have no idea what to do about it that is consistent with their other commitments.
Apart from the Orthodox, the vast majority of American Jews will never reconsider their “other commitments.” In particular, they will never question the importance of unlimited Muslim immigration to the West. Considering the consequences is “hate.”
Critiquing Israel is anti semitism?
No. But a lot of anti-Semites are clever enough to know how to play the game, and that doesn’t mean intelligent people have to play along.
When some city makes a ‘no extra-baggy pants in public’ law, progressives are quick to accuse the council of racism because the likely targets of the law are mostly black. When the city protests and says, “What, dress codes are racist?” the progressives say that the seemingly facially-neutral practice is really a pretext for racial discrimination and disparate impact.
Just like with the Israel-criticism or anti-semitism problem, sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re wrong and it’s not always easy to tell.
It’s tough. On the one hand, one doesn’t want to fall into the trap of lumping the claims of the hateful fakers in with legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and declaring it all as per se anti-Semitism. On the other hand, one doesn’t want to let the anti-Semites get away with the game of fooling people who want to be fooled by pretending they’re just making objective criticism and don’t have a special and obsessive dislike for one particular country and group.
Given the history of these claims, it seems to me to be quite reasonable to be skeptical regarding the motives of anyone making related claims, and one should always take care to scrutinize them carefully or remain agnostic and humble in the absence of strong evidence.
One shouldn’t make presumptions about validity either way, but at the same time it’s reasonable for an informed person today to conclude that most anti-Israel activity or sentiment on campus these days coming out of predominantly Muslim groups is a barely-concealed expression of at least mild, and often quite severe, anti-Semitism.
There is just no substitute for discernment, wise judgment, and doing one’s homework in these matters.
“No” was a good answer.
an·ti-Sem·i·tism
ˌan(t)ēˈseməˌtizəm/
noun
hostility to or prejudice against Jews.
So, technically, we have to wait for Jews to decide whether it is hostile to them or not.
If the “critique” of Israel is that Jews really should not be living in that land at all (on either side of the ’49 armistice line), and that indiscriminately killing the Jews who happen to be there is “justifiable resistance” to their presence – which seems to be the position not only of Hamas but also the Palestinian Authority, though the latter lies about it when talking to the US and EU – that looks a lot like anti-Semitism to me.
What gives Summers’ charge of hypocrisy some real force is that this is precisely what most progressives say in the case of claims of animus or offensiveness directed towards other groups, that the determination at least presumptively lies within the exclusive jurisdiction of members of that group, and its offensive or racist or whatever if they say it is.
Now, one can easily disagree with that – as I do – but it is hypocritical to claim that one doesn’t have a double-standard while applying the above logic to some groups but not to others.
I never hear that critique, despite it being somewhat true. They stole a lot of the land. The UN created it in part entirely artificially, etc. And still, that is the crux of noone’s argument, except the Arabs, of course.
Summers is crazy, in my humble opinion.
The progressive critique seems to be that since Israel is privileged they have the responsibility to figure out how to make peace with and help Palestinians. It is silly, and naive. But calling it anti-semitism is disingenuous.
“I never hear that critique” – because you’re not listening.
“despite it being somewhat true” – Like most libertarians, you have a very childish, simplistic, incomplete and inaccurate understanding of the history of the conflict, of the history of the 20th century (in which the Jewish-Arab conflict over Israel was far from unique), and of human history in general.
I wonder whether by the “somewhat true” part of your statement, you meant that you think it “somewhat true” that the murder of Israeli civilians is justified as “resistance” to the great evil of Jews living in Israel. Not that I care, if you’ve already thoroughly discredited yourself.
You are arrogant and churlish.
Dispute it on facts. Sure some Palestinians kill Israelis. Does that have anything to do with Palestinians being expelled? Nah, of course not. I just don’t understand the history is just what Palestinians are doing after Israel defined itself the rightful owners.
What are the respective body counts, by the way?
You define Israel to be civilized and right, justifying their high tech brutality against Palestinians’ crude terroristic methods. That’s all. It’s fine. I didn’t even disagree while you were busy strawmanning again.
You are qualified to be a professor of history at Trump University.
I am utterly devastated that you consider me arrogant and churlish.
It’s quite clear that you’re not interested in the history of the conflict, preferring to stick to your cartoon version in which the Jews – who fall far short of sainthood, like every other people on earth, but treat their enemies with far more decency than vice versa – deserve to be killed for having the temerity to try to carry on their national existence like any other people in the world. There are plenty of places to learn about the history of the conflict; if you were interested you would have informed yourself by now, and wouldn’t be carrying on about the nefarious Zionists like Max Blumenthal.
Does this represent anger at the dominant group on campus, at least at the elite schools? (per Unz)
“In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.51 The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern.
This overrepresentation of Jews is really quite extraordinary, since the group currently constitutes just 2.1 percent of the general population and about 1.8 percent of college-age Americans”
> Nowadays, Jews do not qualify as oppressed. End of story.
What is horrifying to realize is that these oppressed/oppressor narratives spun by the left are purely based on what is a viable strategy to win elections and seize power and have no logic or morality beyond that.
I believe that most individual leftists, even politicans like Obama, geniunely believe in their mission and that it is based on some genuine truth and morality. But as a group, the oppressor/oppressed narratives that drive leftist politics are selected to win elections and nothing more.
I don’t think that the reclassification of Jews from oppressed to generic white oppressor was based on a change of Jewish behavior or a change of morality, it was based on changes in political climate, specifically voting demographics in the US, and which groups could be bought off by simple rob-peter-to-pay-paul government policies.
Similarly, in the old Marxist days, the working class was the noble oppressed victim, and leftist government would buy their support with wealth and programs that take from others. Later, the left needed to buy support from a growing underclass, and needed to seize assets from the working class including not just money but also the nicer neighborhoods, so they reclassified working class from noble victim to villain to accommodate that.
The lack of consistent morality is obvious on issues like slavery. The political left is geared to take from whites and give to blacks and others, so it needs to case whites as villains and hypes historical stories like white on black slavery. But stories of Arab slavery, African black-on-black slavery, for example, that occurred more recently would confuse left political goals so those stories are suppressed.
I suspect that if you gave a BDS activist a list of 20 Jewish names and 20 generic white but non-Jewish names, that activist would probably guess the Jewish names with no better than 50% accuracy. My mom didn’t know Seinfeld was Jewish. Most people can’t identify the four Gospels, and they are no better at identifying whether Goldberg, Click, or Schumer are Jewish. It’s probably easy, as a Jew, to overestimate how many people even know you’re Jewish.
I’d guess that BDS activists at UCLA, say, tend to know exactly who is Jewish. I knew a high school student who went to UCLA and became a top student politician in the recent BDS kerfuffle there. All student politics at UCLA are ethnic identity politics writ small: heck, it was like that when I was there in 1981.
Fighting over access to the social justice defense mob seems like the wrong way to go. For one thing, what happens when they switch sides on you? Can you guilt them back into defending you? Probably not. Welcome to just being another old white guy with free cash flow, Larry.
Summers gives,about a,half of a paragraph to free speech. Then the rest of it is entirely focused how Israel isn’t benefiting from the PC run amok.