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The convert to Orthodox Judaism told JNS about his new album, as well as the pressing need for better black and Jewish-American relations.
Dave Gordon
(JNS)
Antisemites projected “Glory to our martyrs” on George Washington University’s Gelman Library, some five blocks from the White House, on Oct. 24. Six weeks later, some worried that a Chabad GW-sponsored, pre-Chanukah Nissim Black concert at Kogan Plaza, adjacent to the library, would be canceled on Dec. 5.
“Not only did we not get shut down, there were so many different black students that came to this show,” Black, an American-Israeli rapper, told JNS. “They are eating latkes and having sufganiyot.” (The Jewish delicacies refer to potato pancakes and jelly doughnuts.)
Chabad GW lit a menorah on the same site where the antisemitic message had been projected, which afforded some 350 attendees a symbol of light overcoming darkness, according to the 37-year-old, a black convert who identifies as Chassidic.
One attendee—a non-Jewish black man with dreadlocks—approached Black at the concert and told him that the rapper’s message inspired him on a rough day. He gave Black a hug, the rapper recalled.
“That is what we are supposed to be doing with our music and what we could do with our music,” Black told JNS.
He thinks that more can be done to improve relations between black and Jewish Americans, especially amid rising Jew-hatred. He told JNS that relations between the two communities started to sour well before Hamas terrorists attacked Israel nearly four months ago and before Kanye West (“Ye”) increasingly issued antisemitic statements.
“A lot of this started to happen with the riots after George Floyd and the world going back to the Dark Ages three years ago,” Black told JNS. (A white Minneapolis police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd, 46, a black man, on May 25, 2000.)
“On Oct. 7, so many light bulbs went off for me. How do we get back to this place of where we were allies?” Black told JNS. He noted that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish lawyer Jack Greenberg and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who spoke immediately before Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, marched with King.
Why, Black asked JNS, isn’t an under-represented voice like his, as a black Jewish artist, so absent from news reports on Israel?
“I’ve seen Fox, CNN, the media, and I have not seen so many black Jews speaking. How come nobody has reached out to me and the community?” he said. “If that’s not an ace card against ‘white colonialism,’ I don’t know what is.”
Academic affectation
When he thinks about the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania who testified in a Dec. 5 House hearing that it would not necessarily violate their policies to call for the genocide of Jews, Black was struck by the double standard.
“If the same thing was being called for towards the genocide of black people, how well would that have gone over with the school?” he said. “There is no doubt about it.”
Not enough is being done to counter the blood libels that are proliferating to smear Jews and Israel, he added.
“To think that we are people who would even support or want the deaths of thousands of innocent people—that doesn’t even compute,” he said of Jews and Israel. “We understand that people die in war. But us as a whole, we are painted to be monsters. This is the opposite of what the Jewish people represent. That’s one of the things that needs to be projected more.”
Straight outta Seattle
Born in 1986 in Seattle, Damian Jamohl Black followed in the footsteps of his parents, who were hip-hop performers.
At the age of 13, he recorded his first song with a producer who went by the name “Vitamin D.” At the time, Black thought being surrounded by drugs, gangs and violence, in addition to police raids, was normal. When he was 19, his mother died from an overdose of pain medication.
Then under the name “D Black,” he released the album “The Cause and Effect” in 2007. Two years later, he released “Ali’yah” and began to receive wider attention both from fans and in the industry. The album performed well and was well-reviewed, and Black started getting invitations to perform at major music festivals.
After a religious journey that took him to other faith traditions, Black had a spiritual awakening and underwent an Orthodox Jewish conversion. He changed his name to Nissim (“miracles” in Hebrew), replacing his earlier musical themes of guns, drugs and violence with faith, identity and perseverance. He and his family live in Jerusalem.
“I started to realize, over the years, my responsibility to the world, and I think it came from understanding the Jewish responsibility to the world,” he told JNS. “As a Jew, we are called to be a light unto the nations.”
At press time, Black’s 2020 hit “Mothaland Bounce” had more than 5.2 million views on YouTube.
The internationally acclaimed artist is set to release an 18-track album, “Glory,” this spring. He told JNS that the new album will be an ode to God through soulful melodies, captivating lyrics and powerful production. Single titles include “Scream,” “Speed Dial,” “Better” and “Ayeh.”
“It’s really centered around faith and elevation,” he told JNS, describing the new music as “big black soul, black gospel, mixed with some very high energy pop-rock-type feel.”
Shalom Arush, a Breslov Chassidic rabbi in Israel, and other friends have encouraged Black to globalize his message rather than sticking to a Jewish niche. And so, he has heeded the call.
“I didn’t inherit an idea, or space, where I think my goal is to sit only in this quiet place and not influence or inspire the world,” he told JNS. “From the time I was a kid, this is what God has called me to do.”
“I feel like we all have a purpose, a reason why we are here,” he added. “My story, I hope, will show other people that sometimes you have to open yourself up into knowing what you don’t know.”
A 16-year-old alleges that his New Jersey high school retaliated against him after he reported antisemitic threats.
David Swindle
(JNS)
A Jewish student alleges that administrators at his Cherry Hill, N.J. public high school retaliated against him after he reported multiple instances of antisemitic bullying and threats.
Levi Bolotina, 16, and his family have appealed his suspension from Cherry Hill High School East, which U.S. News & World Report ranks No. 1,651 in its national high school rankings, No. 77 in New Jersey and No. 41 in the metropolitan Philadelphia area.
Bolotina told JNS that a group of fellow students, clad in keffiyehs, threatened him on Oct. 12 at around 8:30 a.m. “They planned on attacking me because I had been posting videos of them wearing the garment, and the videos went viral,” he said. “I reported this to the school.”
School administrators put Bolotina in a room for two hours, he told JNS. He further alleges that while he was confined, Dennis Perry and Aaron Edwards—principal and assistant principal, respectively—“antagonized me, saying: ‘You have made yourself a target for people inside the school as well as people outside the district.’” (JNS sought comment from Perry and did not hear back.)
When released, Bolotina says the same group of students that had threatened him followed him to the cafeteria.
“Almost a minute after I sat down, [these] students had cornered me around my lunch table, making sort of an intimidating barrier. They started to threaten me to my face. Honestly, I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying to me because I was now in fight-or-flight mode,” he told JNS, adding that he felt “intimidated and in danger.”
His friends pulled him away while two others placed themselves between him and the other group. “My friends that made the barrier were now receiving jabs from the attackers,” he said. “I was escorted to yet another room … where the principal told me I had brought this upon myself. I was kicked out for the day and later suspended for a week on the grounds of incitement.”
Since those incidents, Bolotina told JNS that he has been threatened in school bathrooms and that he is unaware of any action taken against the menacing students.
‘Make Jewish students feel safe’
Bolotina also shared with JNS a statement he made during a Dec. 19 closed session of the Cherry Hill Public Schools Board of Education.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel, students “showed up wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags” and yelling “free Palestine” at Jewish students at the school, he told the board.
He added that he met with Perry and “implored him to take action, to make Jewish students feel safe.” To date, says the teen, he has seen no action taken.
To prove how his antisemitic classmates had acted, Bolotina filmed two videos of different groups of students and uploaded them to social media, he told the board.
“Senior school officials began to blame me for the growing discord at school, both to my face and publicly [if not by name],” he told the board. “I was being scapegoated by school officials, rather than them taking responsibility for their lack of leadership.”
He further alleged to the board that Edwards, the assistant principal, took him into his office to protect him from physical threats. Perry then “stormed in” and blamed him for the events, Bolotina alleged.
“He said, ‘Levi, if you post any more videos, you’re out of here,’” he told the board.
“So I agreed not to post any more videos,” the teen stated.
He told the board: “Incredibly, my attackers were suspended for less days. The principal told me I had brought this upon myself. I was kicked out for the day and later suspended for a week on the grounds of incitement.” (He didn’t say how long the others were suspended or how he knew what their punishment was.)
“Would the district tolerate such hate against any other minority?” he asked the board.
After Bolotina’s suspension, Muslim students told him in a school bathroom that “it’s not safe for Jews here,” Bolotina told the board.
“We can only conclude that Jew-hatred is tolerated by Cherry Hill Schools,” Bolotina said to them. “That Jews are second-class citizens here.”
He added that the students who threatened him weren’t suspended and that witnesses to the threats in the bathroom, whose names he provided to the Cherry Hill Police Department, reported that police officers never questioned them. (Thomas Leone, a lieutenant and investigative unit commander, said that the department cannot comment on juvenile investigations and referred questions to the school and education board.)
Bolotina added that Perry turned down an opinion article he wrote for his journalism class about the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. The principal told him that he would have to include both sides of the issue in an op-ed, Bolotina alleged.
The Cherry Hill area includes a population of about 11,000 Jews with seven synagogues and 11 kosher restaurants.
The Breakthrough Climate Solutions Prize is said to be the largest incentive prize in the history of the Jewish state.
(JNS)
During a ceremony in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, JNF-Canada, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund and Startup Nation Central awarded their $1 million Breakthrough Climate Solutions Prize (CSP) to three Israeli projects seeking to solve the issue of global warming.
The award, said to be the largest incentive prize in the history of the Jewish state, is an initiative designed to “encourage and support groundbreaking research and development for climate solutions which will minimize greenhouse gas emissions,” the organizations said.
The award winners included Profs. Shanny Barath and Yechezkel Kashin from the Technion–Israel Institute for their CyanoCementation project, Prof. Brian Rosen from Tel Aviv University for his research into green ammonia as a clean fuel source, and Prof. Menny Shalom from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who developed rechargeable Zinc Air Batteries.
Dr. Doron Markel, KKL-JNF’s chief scientist, oversaw the award’s selection process, which was led by top academic experts in relevant fields.
The winners “have the potential to significantly impact the reduction of carbon concentration in the atmosphere, either by enhancing the shift to renewable energies—hence reducing greenhouse gas emissions—or by carbon fixation, either through natural process or artificial one,” Markel said.
“Over the past few months, we received tens of submissions from Israel’s top research institutions that vied to be recognized by The Breakthrough Climate Solutions Prize presented by JNF-Canada in collaboration with our partners – KKL-JNF and Start-Up Nation Central,” stated Jeff Hart, the executive chair of the Climate Solutions Prize.
“Once again, we have been inspired by the vision and ingenuity of the Israeli scientific community and the remarkable innovations in various Climate Tech fields, and we congratulate our three winners for their exceptional vision,” Hart added.
According to Startup Nation Central, there are more than 850 climate change startups in Israel, allowing the nation to contribute to the global conversation on climate action.
Image: Climate-change partnership. Credit: Pixabay.
Professor Avinoam Patt said this is “a critical moment in history where serious scholarship and education can make a difference.”
(JNS)
New York University launched a brand-new Center for the Study of Antisemitism in November after receiving two $1 million gifts, the most recent one anonymously. Now it has named professor Avinoam Patt as its director.
He has also been named the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies in NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
Patt said that he was grateful for the opportunity and “humbled by the trust President Mills and NYU have placed in me to serve as inaugural director. I look forward to working with colleagues at NYU and beyond to begin this vital project in order to expand the impact that we can make locally, nationally, and indeed, globally.”
He has written or edited multiple books on antisemitism and the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust; We Are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany; and Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust.
NYU has seen its share of antisemitic activities and rhetoric.
Just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, Ryna Workman issued a statement as president of the Student Bar Association at New York University School of Law expressing “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination.”
“Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,” wrote Workman. “This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary.”
If a school’s leadership cannot bring themselves to genuinely condemn terrorism without context, then they lack a basic requirement for their jobs.
Moshe Phillips
(JNS)
The fact that Ivy League administrators have allowed anti-Israel extremism to infest their campuses has been widely condemned. There have also been news reports of anti-Semitic violence committed by pro-Hamas radicals at college campuses, and even in public schools. However, at the same time, very little information is being revealed about the lies being told about Israel at America’s elite private primary and secondary schools.
A prime example of the types of issues Jewish students at private schools are facing would have to include the William Penn Charter School (PC) in Philadelphia. PC is not just any elite school. In many ways, it is the elite school. Founded in 1689, it is the world’s oldest Quaker school and the nation’s fifth-oldest elementary school. Despite being Quaker, it has a large Jewish student body.
From its very first communication three days after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel to their school community, PC engaged in blatant obfuscation and both-sides-ism. “War is never justified” and moral equivalency messages received an immediate backlash and condemnation from many Jewish students and parents. The result was that the very next day, on Oct. 11, PC followed up their first, failed memo with an attempt to acknowledge their wrongheaded approach. “We are writing to acknowledge that the message we sent yesterday related to the terrorist attacks in Israel this weekend did not articulate Penn Charter’s position … we heard that our Jewish families feel unheard and unseen; we heard that our message failed to condemn evil and suggested a moral equivalency … Penn Charter unequivocally condemns all terrorism. The heinous acts committed by the terrorist group Hamas … are an outrage, and we are personally heartbroken … .” It was quickly apparent that the apology was simply an attempt to stifle criticism and not a sign that real care would be taken to call out anti-Zionism and terrorism for the evils that they are.
More than a month after the failed apology and lack of personal response from the administration to Jewish parents, Penn Charter’s administration realized that due to the rising tension on campus, it had to turn to outside assistance to help educate staff and students. And so it selected a highly partisan organization called Interfaith Philadelphia.
Interfaith has a history of employing radicals, as well as closely partnering with organizations with long anti-Israel records. One of its top staffers was previously a leader of the Philadelphia chapter of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations). Critics of CAIR have long accused it of maintaining close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Another Interfaith Philadelphia staffer received her education at the Women’s Islamic Theological Seminary (Jami’at al-Zahra) in Qum, Iran.
It is also worth noting that notorious Israel-hater Marc Lamont Hill has had a close relationship with PC.
Immediately preceding the start of Chanukah, Interfaith Philadelphia sent two presenters to PC to speak: one said he “identified” as a Muslim, who spoke about Islamophobia; and the other said she “identified” as a Jew.
The assembly with Interfaith Philadelphia at PC was a mandatory program for Upper School students. Similar to the lack of morality displayed by University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill in front of Congress on Dec. 5, the Interfaith Philadelphia presenters reportedly refused to condemn the Hamas attackers and their atrocities. The presenters also reportedly stated that the widely condemned protests in front of a kosher-certified restaurant in Philadelphia called Goldie was deserved because the owner is Israeli and contributes financially to the Israel Defense Forces.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, visited the restaurant in the immediate aftermath of the protest and stated: “People have a right to peacefully protest a difference of policy in the Middle East or in Israel. They don’t have a right to come and protest a restaurant simply because it’s owned by a Jew and hold that Jew responsible for Israeli policy. That is the definition of antisemitism.” Both of Pennsylvania’s senators—Bob Casey and John Fetterman—also condemned the protests.
About the chant “From the River to the Sea: Palestine will be Free,” the Interfaith Philadelphia presenters told the students and staff that the rallying cry is actually simply a call for freedom. Marc Lamont Hill has similarly defended his use of the chant.
What makes all of this worse is that the PC administration in an official communication after the shameful program congratulated themselves for working to “educate” students and staff.
We know that PC learned nothing because of a memo issued by school administrators after the Interfaith Philadelphia-led assembly. The memo claimed that the presenters—the ones who refused to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks—“modeled how to engage in respectful, honest and constructive discourse on complex and challenging topics despite having different perspectives.”
There are no “perspectives” when it comes to facts, just like with Magill’s congressional testimony that there is no “context” when it comes to calling for the genocide of Jews. It is a cornerstone of American education that facts matter. But PC’s administrators seem to think that there is something “complex” about the Hamas attacks. There is nothing “challenging” about teaching American youth about terrorism: It is wrong, always. The Hamas attacks were evil, unprovoked and wrong. When one confronts evil, not only is there no need to be “respectful”; what is needed is truth and morality. If a school’s leadership cannot bring themselves to genuinely condemn terrorism without context, then they lack a basic and mandatory requirement for their jobs. If the school cannot bring itself to replace leadership like this, it has no reason to run.
In its war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is engaged in self-defense for its very existence. Israel has both the moral right and the duty to engage in self-defense. America’s Founding Fathers always considered self-defense a virtue. Right in Philadelphia, where PC is located, the Constitution was written with the words “provide for the common defense” in its very first sentence. Would the leadership of PC have Israel lay down its guns and allow Hamas to commit worse attacks in the future? On Nov. 30, Yahya Sinwar, a senior leader of Hamas, said that “the leaders of the occupation should know, Oct. 7 was just a rehearsal.”
For American educators, the choice is clear: Support one side or the other. In 2023, far too many educators earned failing grades. This year, they will have the opportunity to get back on the right track and course-correct. Let’s hope that they do just that.
Image: The William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Allegations that the battle against campus antisemitism at Harvard was “hijacked” by right-wingers or racists are false. Advocates of woke ideology are the real racists.
Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)
Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University but as she conceded defeat in her battle to hold onto her post, she further poisoned public discourse about the controversy that undid her. In a New York Times op-ed, Gay refused to take full responsibility for her failure to combat antisemitism at Harvard and ensure that Jewish students feel safe on campus. Add to that her hypocrisy about free speech and flat-out lying concerning plagiarism charges, which did more than anything to end her short tenure in the school’s top job. Worse, she also tried to smear her opponents, including those who brought the scholarly fraud that pervaded her meager writings to light, as racists.
But she was right about one thing. This story “is bigger” than her.
Critical to understanding this controversy or even the justified concerns about the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism is the way leftist ideologies like intersectionality, critical race theory (CRT) and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have played in all of this. The obsession with race above and beyond every other possible consideration pushed morally corrupt figures like Gay to a position of pre-eminence in academia. But it also acts as a standing defense or rationale for her misdeeds, as well as her blind spot about antisemitism.
And that is why, before moving on, it’s worth debunking her self-serving swan song, in addition to the growing effort on the left to dismiss the controversy as nothing more than an example of a conservative “culture war” talking point or to second her bogus claim that she is a victim of racism. Equally important is the need to debunk the notion that there can be some middle ground about the role that woke ideology plays in stoking the post-Oct. 7 surge in Jew-hatred.
Lying about her record
Gay’s broadside in the Times is not so much clueless as it is a compendium of brazen falsehoods and specious attacks on those who discovered her numerous instances of plagiarism.
Contrary to her assertion, she did not “promptly request corrections” in journals where she had failed to attribute work lifted from other scholars. In fact, she flatly refused to acknowledge what she had done and Harvard threatened the New York Post with legal action if they published reports about her plagiarism. She only corrected some of her thefts under duress. And she has not admitted her guilt even when it came to lifting entire paragraphs from another person’s work.
While she acknowledged that it was a “mistake” for her not to condemn Hamas terrorists in Gaza after Oct. 7, she didn’t own up to the fact that she treated anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations on her campus in the same way she had silenced those who disagreed with her beliefs. Nor was her disastrous congressional testimony, in which she said it would depend on the “context” if calls for the genocide of Jews would be judged as violating Harvard’s rules, a “trap.” While she later backtracked, she was quite defiant in the moment, clearly demonstrating that she was more worried about being seen as taking sides against antisemites and Israel-haters than labeled as someone willing to defend Jewish students being attacked in the same way she would other minorities.
Then came her attempt to claim the status of a martyr to racism. Her critics, who pointed out that there was something fishy about Harvard choosing someone with such an astonishingly thin record of scholarly achievement to be its president, were not engaging in racism. They were just stating the obvious about Harvard’s hiring process. There is no other rational explanation for Gay’s appointment other than the fact of her race, gender and leftist politics. Diversity and inclusion mean favoring the unqualified, provided they punch the right identity and ideological tickets.
The efforts of racial hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and the Rev. Al Sharpton to bolster her image as a racial martyr is a flashing neon sign warning fair-minded persons what’s at stake here.
Just as bad are the arguments of those who seconded her belief that her downfall was attributed to a political plot.
The most egregious example of this was an AP article whose conceit was that the plagiarism charges were merely a “weapon” to discredit her that was utilized by ill-intentioned conservatives. In this account, the idea that she actually committed plagiarism was secondary to the fact that she was a black woman and that her opponents were opposed to woke ideology. The frame of reference was that if plagiarism could be used to undermine faith in institutions that have been taken over by progressives, then perhaps the longstanding belief that it is a serious offense should be rethought.
What going woke meant for Jews
This goes hand in hand with arguments that seek to distract us from what the progressive takeover of academia has meant for Jews.
Many liberals and moderates are rightly expressing concern about the way Jew-hatred has not just been tolerated but enabled and encouraged by college administrations, cultural and educational institutions, and the mainstream media since the Hamas attack on Israel. But our bifurcated political culture in which Americans are more divided than ever has influenced the debate about not just Gay, but the reasons why brazen antisemitism has become so prevalent on college campuses.
It was conservative political activists like author Christofer Rufo and others like him who have been leading the charge against the leftist ideas that people like Gay championed. And it was Rep. Elisa Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump and a possible running mate for him in the 2024 election, who exposed Gay to the world as a hypocrite when it comes to free speech who considered attacks on Jews unimportant. That has discredited their efforts in the eyes of those who identify as liberals or Democrats, or at the very least, caused them to try to separate the plague of woke leftist antisemitism from the factors that are fueling it.
Intersectionality, CRT and the DEI mantra have over the last several years been transformed from controversial left-wing ideas into an unchallengeable orthodoxy about race. Most liberals and Democrats acquiesced to the way traditional beliefs about equal opportunity have been discarded in favor of equity—a concept that is the opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream about a nation where individuals would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—because they feared being called a racist. That became especially true after the moral panic about race set off by the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, in which a heretofore deeply divisive and marginal force like the Black Lives Matter movement went mainstream in the summer of 2020. It even led liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to endorse BLM and DEI for fear of being out of sync with their allies on the left.
This was and remains a fatal mistake not just for Jews but for other Americans who remain blind to the consequences of empowering radical ideologues and their toxic ideas. The premise that the world is divided into two immutable groups—white oppressors and people of color, who are always the victims—is a recipe for endless racial conflict and threatens to undermine the progress Americans have made towards a more just society since the triumph of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. While the DEI mantra has the sound of a philosophy of equality, it is nothing of the kind.
But it is particularly foolish for Jews since in this Manichean worldview, the woke falsely label them and the Jewish state as “white” oppressors. In doing so, they have granted a permission slip for antisemitism. While some of us have been pointing this out for years, most Americans didn’t realize it until a few months ago. It was only after Oct. 7—when progressives indoctrinated in the DEI faith demonstrated a knee-jerk willingness to condemn Jews who had suffered mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping as oppressors and treat the Palestinian terrorists as victims—that evidence that the Jews were the canaries in the coal mine when it came to the perils of DEI became too obvious to ignore.
A choice is necessary
Yet too many moderates and liberals are still trying to argue that outrage about the mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel can be separated from the genocide of Jews. It is this warped view that has sent such “progressives” into the streets and onto campuses to vent their rage.
You don’t have to like Stefanik or Rufo, or plan to vote for the Republicans, to understand that so long as woke commissars like Claudine Gay—and her counterparts elsewhere—are dominating America’s college campuses, the virus of antisemitism will continue to grow. Democrats must understand that unless DEI rules are thrown out of academia, the corporate world, the media and the government (where an executive order by President Joe Biden put them in place throughout the federal apparatus), their party will be completely taken over by leftists who hate Israel and are indifferent at best to the spread of antisemitism.
The aftermath of Oct. 7 and the fall of Claudine Gay ought to be a turning point in this debate. But it won’t be if those who acknowledge that antisemitism is on the rise don’t draw the appropriate conclusions about why this has happened.
Gay’s fate or that of any other college administrator is secondary to whether their toxic ideas will be allowed to continue to be the official new secular religion of American civic life. On this question, there is no middle ground. There’s no way to make DEI less antisemitic since it is designed to divide and target some for opprobrium in this manner. Treating the impact of woke ideas as nothing more than a conservative culture war controversy won’t work anymore.
Americans have to choose and traditional political loyalties are no longer relevant. They can either join those seeking to roll back the woke tide and restore basic American values of equality and fairness, or they can stand by and watch as a neo-Marxist faith destroys American liberty piece by piece with the Jews just being the first victims.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
Image: From left: Claudine Gay (Harvard University president), Elizabeth Magill (University of Pennsylvania president), American University professor Pamela Nadell and Sally Kornbluth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology president) testify during a House committee hearing about antisemitism on campus on Dec. 5, 2023. Credit: House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Hillel International found fear, sadness among surveyed undergraduates.
(JNS)
New research shows the extent to which the war provoked by Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack has spilled over to university campuses.
Hillel International commissioned the Benenson Strategy Group (BSG) to poll 300 Jewish college students between Nov. 14-15.
They found that a broad majority—84%—said the war was affecting them, with 68% describing themselves as sad and 54% as scared.
Statistics on Jewish students feeling a need to hide their identity (37%) correlate closely with those saying they know about acts of hate or violence on their campus (35%).
“The hate that fueled Hamas’s attack on Israel has rapidly spread to college campuses, leaving Jewish students feeling both unsupported and unsafe,” said Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International. “The data show that it’s getting worse.”
Lehman noted that “when Jewish students need to feel safe, supported and protected by university presidents and administrations more than they ever have before, Hillel International is working day and night to ensure universities are taking concrete actions to protect Jewish communities on campuses.”
Image: A pro-Palestinian rally in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 10, 2023. Credit: Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.
More than 100 academics across disciplines worry that efforts to counter Jew-hatred may threaten a core scholarly principle.
David Swindle
(JNS)
Recent efforts by administrators to push back against overt displays of antisemitism at the leading Ivy League institute have inspired pushback of its own.
A letter to Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, co-signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty described feeling “astonished” that donors and alumni had allegedly tried to “silence faculty, students and staff critical of the actions of the State of Israel.”
The professors called themselves “profoundly dismayed” at Gay’s Nov. 9 “Combating Antisemitism” letter, fearing that Harvard’s “commitment to intellectual freedom and open dialogue seems to be giving way to something else entirely.”
“The antisemitism we are seeing targets Jews only because of the particular input entered into the woke script set by professors like these,” Max Eden, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told JNS. “They don’t want to see any harm come to students for following their deranged ideology, nor do they believe that pushback against their ideology is valid in the first place.”
While the group acknowledged limits to campus speech, such as Holocaust denial or insulting others based on racist, nationality, gender and LGBTQ orientations, it said that there must “be room on a university campus for debate about the actions of states, including of the State of Israel.”
The letter wrote that it “cannot be ruled as ipso facto antisemitic to question the actions of this particular ethno-nationalist government,” before comparing the Jewish state to Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.
The professors further insisted that accusations labeling Israel as an “apartheid” state, or engaged in “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide,” should not be labeled as “automatically antisemitic.” The group accused Harvard administrations of the “delineation of the limits of acceptable expression on our campus is dangerously one-sided” and also defended the use of “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.”
In the name of “intellectual freedom at Harvard,” the letter concluded with four demands of administration.
First, insisting not to suspend the Palestine Solidarity Committee or “prematurely sanction” students and staff engaging in protests. Second, demanding that the President’s Advisory Group on Antisemitism explain its definition before recommending any policies. Third, articulating a commitment to “freedom of thought” for “critics of the State of Israel and advocates of the Palestinian people.”
Finally, the letter called for an advisory group on Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Arab racism.
Firsthand accounts by official witnesses make it more difficult to deny facts on the ground.
Jerome M. Marcus
(JNS)
Israel stands on the brink of controlling Shifa Hospital and other medical centers in the Gaza Strip. In categorical violation of the law of war, Hamas has used these buildings as command centers, ammunition dumps, safe havens for its fighters and entrances to its tunnel system.
When Israel takes control of these buildings, it must immediately demand that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres come and inspect them.
Why is this necessary?
First, the secretary-general, continuing a long U.N. tradition, has blamed Israel for deaths and destruction in Gaza, and has said that “U.N. premises, hospitals, schools and clinics must never be targeted” by Israel’s military.
This demand is itself a clear contradiction of international law. Article 19 of the Fourth Geneva convention provides that “the protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled” is lost when such facilities “are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” Hamas has for years done exactly this. The same is true of the schools, clinics and mosques throughout Gaza that are used as launching sites for rockets and missiles, as weapons and ammunition storehouses, and as entrances to Hamas’s web of tunnels, built with resources provided to Gaza for civilian and humanitarian purposes.
Second, while Holocaust denial after World War II did not erupt on a wide scale while the grounds of the camps were still wet with Jewish blood, in this war, the denial is already being shouted from rooftops. Basem Naim, for example, the so-called Head of International Relations for Hamas, told Sky News: “We [Hamas] didn’t kill any civilians” on Oct. 7, calling it “Israeli propaganda.”
Hamas has denied abuse of Gaza hospitals and other civilian facilities in the Strip. There is every reason to expect that Palestinian defenders of Hamas and enemies of Israel will continue these lies in an effort to delegitimize Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas. A public record of Hamas’s abuse of these facilities is thus essential.
As the Second World War was ending, Gens. Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton and Omar Bradley toured Ohrdruf, one of the just-liberated Nazi concentration camps. Following the visit, Eisenhower ordered all American units in the area and not engaged in frontline battle to be sent to see the camp. He cabled Gen. George C. Marshall, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C., requesting that members of Congress and journalists be sent to liberated camps to witness and document the horrific scenes U.S. troops were uncovering.
Eisenhower understood that it was important for the world to understand what the Germans had done both because the guilty had to be called to account and because it would explain the need for the actions of Allied Forces fighting the German army. The result was a library of film footage and accounts by impartial official witnesses that has made it difficult, though not impossible, for people to deny that Germany committed the Holocaust’s atrocities.
Hamas’s systematic abuse of humanitarian and civilian situses is of a piece with its larger strategy of taking the entire population of Gaza as hostages and human shields. Documenting these practices not only defends Israel; it defends the Arab population that has itself been abused and whose deaths have themselves been used as weapons in Hamas’s effort to destroy Israel. One of Hamas’s leaders has forthrightly proclaimed that the terror organization intends to repeat the slaughter of Oct. 7 over and over again until Israel is no more.
The abuse of the civilian population of Gaza is an essential part of Hamas’s scheme. If Israel is ever to be able to live side by side in peace with its Arab neighbors, Islamist abuse of Arab civilians must end. Revealing the truth—and forcing the world to see this truth—is the only way this can happen.
Image: On an inspection tour of the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp, U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and a party of high-ranking U.S. Army officers, including Gens. Omar Bradley, George S. Patton and Manton S. Eddy, view the charred remains of prisoners burned upon a section of railroad track during the evacuation of the camp, April 12, 1945. Credit: Courtesy of Harold Royall/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons.