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Natan Sharansky
Tablet, Oct. 31, 2023
“The struggle for campuses is a struggle for America and its values—for an America that is liberal, that supports free speech and human rights, and that protects all of its citizens, regardless of race or creed, from vicious, lawless assault.”
Twenty years ago, upon returning to Israel from a trip to American university campuses as the minister in charge of combating antisemitism, I reported my opinion to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that U.S. colleges had become the beachhead of the battle for the next generation of American Jewry. For the first time, in an atmosphere of growing political opposition to the state of Israel, more and more Jewish students at leading universities—Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and others—told me in private conversations that they were afraid to voice their sympathy with the Jewish state, out of concern that doing so would damage their academic success and future careers.
At the time, I was startled and deeply concerned to see such self-censorship—not in the Moscow of my youth, but in the most powerful country in the free world. I was also surprised then that few Jewish organizations felt a responsibility to get involved in the life of students on campuses.
Much has changed since then. Today, practically every serious American Jewish organization runs programs designed to prepare Jewish students for campus life, including giving them the tools to fight against antisemitism, and to strengthen their connection to Jewish identity and Israel while they are there. In addition, Israeli shlichim, or fellows, have been added to strengthen Hillel teams at almost a hundred universities across the country.
Nevertheless, anti-Zionism—the new antisemitism—is a permanent feature of daily life at American colleges. What is more, Israel’s opponents are equipped with new intellectual weapons: postcolonialist and other “critical” theories, wokeness, microaggressions, and various other ways of conveying the simplistic neo-Marxist idea of a permanent struggle between oppressors and oppressed, in which the oppressed are always right and oppressors wrong, and should be silenced and attacked by any means possible. In this narrative, “white colonial” Israel is always the oppressor, while the Palestinians are always oppressed.
