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Why Universities Have Ignored the New Anti-Semitism

Taking as his point of departure the late Robert Wistrich’s 2013 essay “The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism,” Charles Small examines the long history of the hatred of Jews and the causes of its durability. He also elucidates the connections between old-fashioned European anti-Semitism—manifested as religious or racial prejudice—and its newer incarnations in radical Islam and in the anti-Zionism of the far left. Most troublingly, Small points to, and explains, Western academia’s unwillingness to confront these manifestations of anti-Semitism even as it produces much scholarship on its older forms, as well as on the anti-Semitism of today’s far right. (Interview by Jonathan Silver. Audio, 46 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

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More about: Academia, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, History & Ideas

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic