No One Should be Surprised by the Sudden Appearance of Anti-Semitism on Campus

The simple fact is that anti-Semitism was baked into the social justice cake long ago.

Jon Haidt writes at After Babel:

Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on CampusIn the days after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, university campuses immediately distinguished themselves as places set apart from the rest of American society—zones where different moral rules applied. Even before Israel began its military response, the loudest voices on campus were not university leaders condemning the attacks and vowing solidarity with their Jewish and Israeli students. Instead, the world saw faculty members and student organizations celebrating the attacks.Political commentator and Atlantic author David Frum summed up the moral uniqueness of the academy in this tweet, four days after the attack:

Since then, there have been hundreds of antisemitic incidents on campuses including vandalism of Jewish sitesphysical intimidationphysical assault, and death threats against Jewish students, often from other students. The response from university administrators has often been slowweak, or entirely absent.Why is the culture of elite higher education so fertile for antisemitism, and why are our defenses against it so weak? Don’t we have the world’s most advanced academic concepts and bureaucratic innovations for identifying hatred of all kinds, even expressions of hatred so small, veiled, and unconscious that we call them “micro-aggressions” and “implicit biases”?Yes, we do, but it turns out that they don’t apply when Jews are the targets,1 and this was the shocking hypocrisy on display in that Congressional hearing room on December 5. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked the President of the University of Pennsylvania “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” President Magill was unable to say yes. When the question was asked in various ways to all three presidents, none could say yes. All said variations of “it depends on the context.”

Tags: Antisemitism, College Insurrection, Social Justice

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