William Kolbrener teaches English at Bar Ilan University in Israel.
He writes at Forward:
The Israeli-Palestinian discourse on campus is even more terrifying than the Hamas attackFor Israeli Jews like me, Oct. 7 was the worst day since the Holocaust. For Americans like me, the days after are even more terrifying.Professors and students at major research universities and small liberal arts colleges alike celebrate atrocities we thought would never again be repeated. Now they have been perpetuated, recorded, heralded and, often in the same breath, denied.The academy, particularly the humanities, once provided a firewall against religious and political fundamentalism. But the woke enlightenment on campuses has turned English departments into activist dens of political orthodoxy, a regression into fundamentalism.Puritanism has always gripped the right in the United States, but messianic piety has now taken over the left. And it happened long before Oct. 7, especially in the humanities. Coercive orthodoxy reigns where jobs, promotion, and tenure depend on keeping the party line. Curiosity has been replaced by closed-mindedness; creativity stifled by uniformity.I got my doctorate in English at Columbia University in the 1980s. I have since lived in Haredi neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Today, I see the true fundamentalists are the leftists who glorify Islamic martyrdom; who make shrines to Hamas murderers; who chase Jewish students at Carnegie Mellon into underground tunnels.This has not come out of nowhere. Anti-Zionism has always been the tell for the woke left. Don’t bother trying to qualify for woke credentials unless you are a fervent believer in Palestine. I see it firsthand as an English professor based in Israel.
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