Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?

The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

Regarding the first question, some argue that the furor over the campus protests is much ado about not much. The demonstrators, they say, represent only a small fraction of students. The ugliest antisemitic expressions occasionally seen at these events are mainly the work of outside provocateurs. And the student protesters (some of whom are Jewish) are acting out of youthful idealism, not age-old antisemitism. As they see it, they aim only to save Palestinian lives and oppose the involvement of their universities in the abuses of a racist Israeli state.

There’s something to these points. With notable exceptions, campus life at these schools is somewhat less roiled by protest than the media makes it seem. Outside groups, as more than one university president has told me, have played an outsize role in setting up encampments and radicalizing students. And few student demonstrators, I’d wager, consciously think they harbor an anti-Jewish prejudice.

But this lets the kids off the hook too easily.

Students who police words like “blacklist” or “whitewash” and see “microaggressions” in everyday life ignore the entreaties of their Jewish peers to avoid chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Students who claim they’re horribly pained by scenes of Palestinian suffering were largely silent on Oct. 7 — when they weren’t openly cheering the attacks. And students who team up with outside groups that are in overt sympathy with Islamist terrorists aren’t innocents. They’re collaborators.

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.