Anti-Semitism has become all too common in higher education. It’s really sad.
David Bernstein writes at the Volokh Conspiracy at Reason:
“Antisemitic Invective” at the University of Michigan Law School[Author’s note: I published a significantly longer version of this post at the Times of Israel.]I recently posted an article about the increasingly hostile environment Jewish students face at elite law schools. Within hours, I heard from Michigan Law students upset and concerned about what one called “antisemitic invective” on a student email listserv called LawOpen, a listserv used almost entirely for student-group events and to resell tickets.Students representing the Jewish Law Students Association sent out two separate emails, each advertising an event. The first announced an anti-bias event sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the prominent (and very liberal) Jewish civil rights organization. The second announced that students could apply for a trip to Israel.The ADL email was met with unhinged invective. One student wrote, among other things, that ADL is a “hateful group” that, among other things, supports “racist, militarized policing.” Moreover, the student claimed that ADL’s anti-bias work “centers the experience of white Jewish people” and therefore “is not true anti-bias work.”A second student accused ADL of being a “pro-racism organization” and supporting this accusation with a laundry list of charges ranging from the grossly exaggerated to the inventively imaginative. As a rather clear example of the latter, the student claimed that ADL tried to squash medical and social recognition of AIDS. Right-wing hate groups and the Nation of Islam have made wild charges against the ADL in the past, but even after consulting Dr. Google and inquiring with antisemitism experts, I couldn’t find a source for that one.More disheartening to me than the nutty conspiratorial emails about the ADL is the reaction of the rest of the students, which was that no one objected to this absurd calumny. One student raised the question of why this particular event attracted so much vitriol: “We don’t have a whole public discourse on every event that FedSoc [the conservative Federalist Society] puts on, in fact any discourse at all, and they’re FedSoc.”The second mail, about the trip to Israel, was met with the response, “Enjoy the apartheid with your falafel!”
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