Charles Lipson
Sapir Journal, Autumn 2024
“How can Jews be hated and harassed in the name of social justice?”
The open, virulent, and sometimes violent eruption of antisemitism at elite universities may be the most daunting social challenge faced by American Jews since the Ku Klux Klan’s antisemitic campaign in the 1960s. The Klan had always hated Jews, but its threats — and actions — intensified after Jews emerged as a force in the civil rights movement. Three students, two of them Jewish, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer in 1964. In 1967, Temple Beth Israel in Jackson, Mississippi, was bombed, along with the home of its rabbi.
American Jews would overcome the intimidation of the Klan. And the civil rights movement would succeed in drawing the United States closer to its founding promise of equality. But today’s surge of antisemitism at universities is an outgrowth of a related set of changes that began during the same period in American life.
In the 1960s, elite universities were pressured to do away with long-standing discrimination in admissions and hiring. To diversify their student bodies and faculties, they opened their gates widely to those from different backgrounds. Initially, this opening stressed merit and equal standards, without invidious discrimination. This transformation helped make American universities the best in the world, and it helped make our nation more perfect.
But on its coattails came pockets of far-Left radicalism. The strength of this movement of campus radicals grew over decades as it infiltrated and overhauled university administrations and power centers, emerging as the dominant social force on elite campuses. Today, many universities have morphed into hotbeds of illiberalism and antisemitism. …SOURCE