Campus Antisemitism Problem Did Not Start On October 7, It’s Been Building For 20 Years
My appearance on Morning Joe: “There’s a phrase that collapse happens slowly then suddenly. For Jewish students on campuses at Cornell and elsewhere, we’re in the suddenly phase of things. This has been building for 20 years.”
I appeared on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning to discuss Cornell and campus antisemitism. It was a friendly crowd on this topic.
I’m pretty sure this was my first appearance on MSNBC. You can watch the entire segment here, my piece is below:
Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
Willie Geist (00:00):
So, professor, let’s pick that up with you. You’re a law professor, as we said at Cornell, a prestigious Ivy League University. How is it that schools so many schools over the last decade or so that have taken such great care for the safety in many cases, just protecting them from words or protecting them from arguments they don’t like to hear, cannot take care with the physical safety of Jewish students. How can it be that that young student can walk across Harvard’s campus, and as Jonathan [Greenblatt] said, not just be yelled at, but be physically assaulted and those students not be expelled on the spot? What is happening with the leadership at these schools?
WAJ (00:37):
There’s a phrase that collapse happens slowly then suddenly. For Jewish students on campuses at Cornell and elsewhere, we’re in the suddenly phase of things. This has been building for 20 years. This is not something that started on campuses on October 7th.
You have a combination of 20 years of gross demonization of Israel by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, and by a lot of Professors. Multiple academic associations have endorsed that, holding Israel out as uniquely evil. You have another thing that’s squeezing Jewish students, which is the racialization of the conflict, where it’s portrayed as a racial justice issue to be against Israel, which we all know is not true.
So you have Jewish students being squeezed, and unfortunately the administrations don’t seem to recognize what’s happening. And in some ways, they have aided and abetting it, abetted it, maybe unknowingly by perpetuating this racial stereotypes on campuses through diversity, equity, and inclusion and other racial doctrines. So Jewish students feel squeezed. But this did not start on October 7th. This has been 20 years in the making on campuses.
Joe Scarborough (01:48):
Professor, I’m so glad you said that because, it’s something I know I’ve been talking about on this network for 20 years. Jewish students, sometimes at Ivy League schools, sometimes at USC, sometimes at state run schools in the middle of America. Jewish students have been targeted for decades. And I’ve just got to ask why. I’ve never really understood this. Why is it that college professors, university presidents, sit back and do nothing? And again, not since October 7th, as you have said, but I talked about Columbia, you know, for years, in 2003, 4, 5, 6, 7, what was going on? The antisemitism going on in that campus from college professors? Why don’t university presidents treat bigotry against Jews the same way they treat bigotry against every other group of students?
WAJ (03:00):
They don’t seem to have the moral clarity and strength to stand up to a lot of the activists on campus, particularly the faculty. At Cornell University in just the last decade, there’ve been three boycott resolutions presented to student government, one of which was done over Passover, so the Jewish students wouldn’t be able to be there. And the administrations have been mostly silent about it. Now, Cornell has been good at opposing BDS, but there’s a social justice movement and an activist component of campus, which is not the majority, but Cornell and other universities seem afraid of them. They seem afraid of students showing up at the president’s office, picketing them. And so I think we need leadership at Cornell and elsewhere that recognizes the underlying problem.
Scarborough (03:47):
I just gotta say how Orwellian the term social justice, these same people who proclaim, themselves, to be champions of social justice.
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Comments
I am truly impressed! Our remarkable leader and professor charges onto the set of MSNBC to take on the propagandists. Well done, sir!
My first thought upon reading this story was how close to one of my favorite poems it seems.
The Charge of the Light Brigade
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
https://poets.org/poem/charge-light-brigade
White males in general have been demonized for years.
Jews are discriminated against on campus for the same reason as East Asians – they’re too good at cognitive tests compared to everybody else. A lot of leftist hopes depend on that not being true.
The Islam thing is another matter entirely. They’re another low-IQ group that’s serves as a pet (oppressed poor things) for the left.
Joe Scar
Right there, lying liar
Interesting, if you aren’t all in on with giving the cretin’s credibility
Your comment disappears
They will use you, abuse you and be done with you
Well it looks like we finally found all those Nazis the left has been screaming about for years…. Turns out they ARE the Left and their breeding grounds are American Universities.
Reminds me of an East Berlin tour I took while I was working in Europe. The Commie tour guide that took over inside East Berlin was convinced the wall had sealed all the fascists out—because saying the wall around East Berlin and, in fact, all of East Germany was to seal East Germans in was treason against official state policy. The same wall is around leftist minds nowadays.
I had to sit through a “diversity” seminar for work, and the facilitator said the Berlin Wall was to keep the west out.
My response was “they machine-gunned the people headed west, not east”.
It’s been brewing for a lot longer than 20 years. Ever since the left turned against Israel in the late 1960s, they started pushing this idea that “anti-zionism” is somehow different from antisemitism. Then they started conflating antisemitism with racism, so you can fight antisemitism by fighting racism, even while hating
Jews, oops, I mean “zionists”.The “tikun olam” crowd helped, by legitimizing anti-zionism. You could point to them and say, “How can I be antisemitic if these people say the same thing as me?”
Thank you for standing up to be heard on this issue of campus Jew-hate and Israel vilification, Professor Jacobson. You’re correct that the moral rot has been brewing and festering for twenty years, at least.
The indoctrination of students to turn them into gleeful apologists for and rationalizers of Islamofascism, while simultaneously and unfairly vilifying Israel and Israeli Jews, is pure evil.
Take a look at some of the literature that came from the 1930s/1940s and you will read about “Jewish quotas” imposed by the Ivies (primarily Hahvahd) on student admissions. Contemporaneous movies, like “Gentleman’s Agreement” speak in more veiled terms of the same anti-Semitic themes. FDR, though he was hailed as such a hero, Documented by an LA Times piece (which ironically is quite well sourced) by Rafael Medoff (at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2013-apr-07-la-oe-medoff-roosevelt-holocaust-20130407-story.html), it gives a more accurate picture of FDR’s actions—and not just his lip service to anti-Semitism. In essence, he did nothing. The article paints a bad picture of others, including Nixon, but that is unavoidable—history is what it is, but the piece also confirms Harvard’s anti-Semitism as far back as the 1930s at least. So any claims that Harvard was never anti-Semitic are baseless. That piece by Medoff, well not directly about Hahvahd, does mention it specifically as well as one of its most well known graduates in particular.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again; Professor J. you’ve really become smooth and polished in your media appearances. You don’t get tongue tied or lose your train of thought. We don’t know the behind-the-scenes constraints they put on you (probably mostly time constraints), but you say your piece articulately and fluently and it all flows very smoothly. Bravo! Hope to see you on more and more networks.
IMO there is a market for cool, concise, factually accurate, and non-political.
Great job, as usual, from Professor J.
If you are a young Jew, if you have young Jewish children, if you have young Jewish grandchildren, it is time to leave the US and time to make Aliyah. http://Www.Nbn.org.il
If you can get a seat on a plane
https://twitter.com/BenBergquam/status/1720184599035429277
Call a televised conference with the University presidents and ask them basic questions about expelling students who express vile threats against Jews (or any other group).
Also have the major employers attend. Some law firms are beginning to awaken.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/top-law-firms-call-for-universities-to-tamp-down-on-antisemitism-942a6609?st=oq4wivvyo6khu7o&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink
Kudos especially for making the case about anti Semitism on MSNBC-which is hardly supportive of Israel
Oberlin college in the news again! https://www.cleveland.com/education/2023/11/oberlin-college-under-federal-investigation-over-allegations-of-antisemitism.html
Oberlin has the most inept administration ever. They must not even bother reading the temperature in the room—they just forge ahead whatever the cost to them, financially or otherwise. And their Board just rubber-stamps everything the administration puts in front of them. Wow….
At least 30 years. I heard the same “pro-Palestinian” BS in college in the early ’90s.
In my own experiences teaching at UC Irvine, I fully agree that this crap has been going on for two decades at least. The campuses have been the focal point for the resurgence in anti-Semitism in this country, thanks mostly to the pro-Palestinian movement and its marriage with the Woke left. Now it has metastasized into society at large. So it is no surprise that we are seeing the worst outbreaks of Jew hatred on our university campuses. It is time to slash public funding for these schools that cannot or will not protest Jewish students. That applies to individual donors and foundations as well.
As for Cornell, they should not be surprised that one of their students would post these horrific threats. For years Cornell has experienced anti-Semitic expressions of hate. Where did this young man learn these ideas, before he arrived at Cornell or at Cornell? I would bet on the latter.
In my own experiences teaching at UC Irvine, I fully agree that this crap has been going on for two decades at least. The campuses have been the focal point for the resurgence in anti-Semitism in this country, thanks mostly to the pro-Palestinian movement and its marriage with the Woke left. Now it has metastasized into society at large. So it is no surprise that we are seeing the worst outbreaks of Jew hatred on our university campuses. It is time to slash public funding for these schools that cannot or will not protect Jewish students. That applies to individual donors and foundations as well.
As for Cornell, they should not be surprised that one of their students would post these horrific threats. For years Cornell has experienced anti-Semitic expressions of hate. Where did this young man learn these ideas, before he arrived at Cornell or at Cornell? I would bet on the latter.
The great part about the internet is that is truly is forever. I’m not sure Legalinsurrection has ever linked to Zombietime in the past, but it provides picture proof of what was happening at protests, literally 20 years ago. I don’t want the post to get banned, but just Google “zombietime”, it’s the first result, scroll to the bottom, and you will find documentation of what protests (of anything really) looked like in San Francisco in 2003 and before.
The blog’s heyday was leading up to the 2008 election and a few years after it, and it hasn’t been updated regularly for several years. There is probably some nudity, because it’s protests in San Francisco. But it is an easily accessible source of protest life in San Francisco with some pretty fun commentary. Living history really.
“You have a combination of 20 years of gross demonization of Israel by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, and by a lot of Professors.”
Actually you have 20 years of gross demonization of White people and Western Civilization by Democrats.
As a result of Teacher’s Union/University privileged professors and bureaucrats dumbing down students, they believe savagery by savages who have contributed Nothing to human existence is superior to Civilization.
Let’s pattern our social justice, penal systems, and education systems on those of Iran, Hamas, and Hizbollah – see how African Americans, the Rainbow coalition, and Christians, atheists other and non-believers fare.
Why would any qualified person go to Cornell? (Substantive responses, please).
I am happy my sons were educated before all the left wing/woke BS got completely out of hand. If they had to do it today, I would tell them to take up a trade because I am not wasting one thin dime to get them indoctrinated.
I also think all federal funding should be stopped to these bastions of anti-American indoctrination. Furthermore, consumers should withhold spending any money in the businesses of college trustees until they agree to stop funding these institutions or, get their policies changed.
I think 9/11 is another inflection point. The response to 9/11 was championed by a Republican therefore the Left’s kneejerk reaction was to oppose it and turn Muslims into victims, which automatically turned Jews into victimizers.