Ruth R. Wisse

Being silenced or harassed for unpopular speech on a university campus is by now such a mark of distinction that I may be accused of exercising bragging rights in describing a recent incident in which I was involved. The real danger I encountered, however, was different from the one against which I had been warned. Read on.

In January 2019, I received an invitation from Roger Berkowitz, founding director of Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, to speak at its annual conference. The topic: “Racism and Anti-Semitism.” In adopting the name of the German-Jewish philosopher it describes as “the most taught and arguably most influential political thinker of the 20th century,” the Center emphasized Arendt’s insistence on the need for public debate on controversial matters. She had theorized about anti-Semitism as a form of racism, and because I was among those who found this formulation unhelpful, the conveners thought I might provide some valuable critical engagement. For my part, I was readying a second edition of my book on anti-Semitism, Jews and Power, so writing a talk for the conference was a way of getting back into a subject that had become much more pressing since I first published the book 13 years ago. I accepted the invitation and spent many hours preparing the talk.

All the advance arrangements for the conference were handled graciously, and the courtesies accorded me from the moment I arrived at the Bard campus in New York’s Dutchess County went beyond the usual. Though I am by now among the oldest in any academic gathering, the solicitude of my greeters actually made me wonder whether I appeared much more fragile than I felt. Unusually, several members of the administration showed up for my talk. With the dean, a former fellow professor of literature, I conversed about the 19th-century British novel the way academics used to do when I began teaching in the late 1960s.

Despite the pleasantness of our colloquy, I assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that she was there to monitor the proceedings. The previous evening, an email had arrived telling me that though students would be protesting the session, “the vast majority” of those attending the conference would want to hear me, and a “campus policy” had been designed to guarantee that they could:

1. If students protest silently, we simply go on. We allow free speech on all sides. So if they put up a poster or stand in protest, we carry on. I know this can be uncomfortable, but our policy is that as long as the protest does not interfere with the free speech of the speaker, we allow it. 2. If students seek to prevent the talk by chanting or yelling or speaking, we let them speak for a few minutes and then say that we appreciate their right to speak but we’d like to let the speakers speak. 3. If they refuse to allow the talk, we ask the audience what they would prefer, to hear the speaker or the disruption. 4. If none of that works we will have security remove those who are disrupting the talk from the auditorium. The College will not let a few students shut down this conference or your talk. Rest assured, the talk will go on.

The policy seemed to me ridiculous. I mused to the dean that if I ran a school of higher learning, I would include with letters of acceptance a warning to incoming students to consider whether they were ready for college. Unless they could confront material they considered offensive, they should defer for a year or until they matured. In the meantime, however, I intended to present my remarks.

Two panelists had been assigned to my talk, both of whom were also participating elsewhere at the conference—Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor of the Forward, and Shany Mor, a political philosopher and research fellow at the Center. They, too, had received the email alerting us to the anticipated protest and, having arrived before me, had been discussing how to deal with it. Batya, who was to chair my session, had tried to forestall the protesters earlier that day by asking them to desist, in return for which she said she would call on them first in the question period. Shany and I objected on the grounds that one does not negotiate with thugs who protest the free exchange of ideas. Shany told us that two years earlier, as he was about to speak to a small seminar on some aspect of political philosophy, a posse of students—perhaps some of the same ones gathering now—swarmed around him, one shoving a phone in his face to record his discomfort. He had refused to proceed then, and he felt angry and apprehensive now.

Ours was the last session on the opening day of the two-day conference. The auditorium was about half full as Batya introduced me and my talk, “Who Needs Anti-Semitism?” I assumed the protest had been abandoned, but a couple of sentences into my remarks, a phalanx of students carrying placards marched into the hall and lined up in one of the aisles and in front of the stage, facing the audience. They positioned themselves between the audience and me, but they did not yet shout, like infants testing parental limits who had apparently studied campus policy and disrupted only to the point of anticipated removal.

I found their intrusion intolerably rude and scolded their backs, “You ought to be ashamed!” and then a little more imaginatively began to sing, “They shall be, they shall be removed / just like a log that’s floating down the water / They shall be removed!” I assumed they would be removed, since this was by far the most provocative of the several campus protests I had ever witnessed and we had been assured that no disruptions would be allowed. Instead, the dean came on stage and, taking me gently back to the podium, asked whether I could go on with the talk. I assured her I could do just about anything, but what about the audience? Could they listen with interrupters doing everything possible to distract them? There was polite applause inviting me to proceed.

The video of the event shows only those of us on the stage, not the demonstrators in front of it. During most of the talk, the disrupters only muttered and telegraphed their impatience until, either bored or afraid I was being listened to, one of them began shouting. Only at this point were they escorted out, having clearly accomplished their purpose. Shany called it “a way of poisoning a discussion and marking speakers as objects of hatred.” Batya said they had appropriately attended a talk that was really about them.

So it proved to be. The point of departure in my talk was an opinion piece from the New York Times by Henry Louis Gates Jr. that had been published in 1992. Entitled “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” Gates’s article warned that while anti-Semitism in America was generally on the wane, it was on the rise among black Americans, with blacks twice as likely as whites to hold anti-Semitic views. Gates cited research showing that anti-Semitism was most pronounced “among the younger and more educated blacks,” and as he was then writing as the newly appointed chairman of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies, he was understandably concerned.

When the piece first appeared, I had just accepted and was about to begin a tenured teaching position at Harvard. I was paying close attention to events on campus and knew that earlier that year, Harvard’s Black Student Association had hosted the black studies professor Leonard Jeffries, of City College. Jeffries had denounced Jews for running the slave trade and contrasted the “frigid” whites of the world with the sun-warmed blacks. Also speaking at Harvard, Conrad Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, had blamed the Jews for “despoiling the environment and destroying the ozone layer.” Gates cited these and other “crackpot” theories being peddled in black academic circles about Jews descending from brutish Neanderthals, and the reemergence of the 19th-century Protocols of the Elders of Zion that portrayed Jews plotting to take over the globe. “Make no mistake,” Gates had written, “this is anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger resentment.”

The article gave a crisp description of the power struggle within the black community between those in the tradition of Martin Luther King who wanted to normalize black politics by making common cause with fellow Americans and the leaders who were using Jew-blame to gain adherents and resorting to classic anti-Jewish tactics for a “barricaded withdrawal into racial authenticity.”

The strategy of these demagogues Gates called ethnic isolationism—“they know that the more isolated black America becomes, the greater their power. And what’s the most efficient way to begin to sever black America from its allies? Bash the Jews.”

American Jews, he wrote, could not understand how their political commitment to the civil-rights struggle and the historic black-Jewish alliance could have led to this situation. The brutal truth was that the new anti-Semitism arose not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance but because of it. Transracial cooperation—epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks and Jews—posed the greatest threat to the isolationist movement. The Jews’ liberal drive for equal opportunity and an end to discrimination stood in the way of a politics of grievance that wants equal outcome, restitution, political power. The Jews were accused of wanting tolerance only so that they should be able to dominate.

What most impressed me about Gates’s analysis was his grasp of how anti-Semitism works. Avoiding common tropes about hatred and discrimination, he focused on its methodology and political appeal. I did the same in trying to explain how this movement had grown to become modernity’s most successful ideology, tracing its origins in late-19th-century Germany to an internal struggle like the one Gates describes between proponents of emancipation and those who feared the advent of liberal democracy.¹ Finger-pointing at the Jews drew together large segments of the population by directing dissatisfaction toward an already suspect target and blaming a group whose removal would leave room for others. Similar strategies were adapted by political parties of the right and left across Europe, and then by anti-Zionist Arab and Muslim leaders in the Middle East who found that organizing politics against Jews in Israel proved even more effective than organizing against Jews in other people’s lands.

By now, these same strategies of grievance and blame have penetrated the United States to such a degree that Henry Louis Gates, a lovely man, would never again write anything like that opinion piece. The identity politics that he once deplored had turned respectable, and what he once feared might discredit his field of Afro-American Studies was now the guiding philosophy of those studies. If that included anti-Semitism, tant pis, say the French: tough luck. Advancing well beyond what Gates described, blaming Israel and its Jewish supporters has since taken over the university, the media, popular culture, and a large swath of the Democratic Party.

After the talk and questions, I was ready for a glass of wine at the promised reception. Several people had come on stage to speak with me, and as I tried to steer them out the auditorium to the reception, two friendly gentlemen came to escort me instead to the waiting car at the back door. I told them that the car had been ordered for a half hour later to give me some time to circulate with the other participants, but they assured me I would do better to leave with them. It took me a moment to understand, and I asked, “Do you mean that there are students waiting to provoke me?” Insisting I had no fear of their gauntlet, I tried heading out in that direction, but they became a little firmer and courteously—solicitously—led me between them out the back door into the waiting car. They had been charged with getting me safely away from any possible confrontation.

If the college hoped to avoid adverse publicity by protecting me from nastiness, it had focused on the wrong party. The conference was barely over when Batya Ungar-Sargon used her perch at the Forward to publish an account of her experience, headed “I Was Protested at Bard College for Being a Jew.”

It referred to our panel on anti-Semitism as the only one with “three Jews” on it to discuss the topic. “But we’re not even talking about Israel,” she had said to the conference organizers. “How does that make sense?” Inviting the protesters to come the next day instead to her panel on racism and Zionism, she said, “Come protest my comments on Zionism. I’ll be talking about the occupation. Bring your signs.” She was trying to maintain the difference so important to liberals between opposing Israel (kosher, legitimate) and opposing Jews (treyf, illegitimate), but once she found herself lumped together with us on that panel, she realized the little storm troop had recognized no such distinction.

“Didn’t they understand that saying we were responsible for the behavior of the Israeli Jews just because we shared their ethnicity was racist?” she wrote. “That making every conversation with Jews about Israel is racist?” Exactly so: One of the students explained that the conversation about anti-Semitism “was already inherently about Israel” and therefore logically racist as well. This was for Batya a bridge too far. Joining her fellow “Jews,” she then scolded other participants at the conference for applauding the students rather than supporting the speaker.

I left the conference early—earlier than I had intended—so my impression of what followed is based on Batya’s account and the ensuing back-and-forth in the press. She left the dinner that evening and quit the conference the following day, “shocked” that some of the faculty and conference speakers encouraged this display of racism against Jews (one even argued that the discussion hadn’t gone far enough and that Palestinians should have been invited to speak on anti-Semitism). Although members of the administration tendered apologies for what was judged after all to be a disruption, Batya and Shany were both dismayed that none of the others had defended me. “I’m horrified by your cowardice, by your self-justifications,” she had said to the audience before leaving. “You, who I called luminaries! Whose books I’ve read!”