Contextualization Is the Opposite of Surrender

As we make our way through the weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, we are bidden by Scripture to count each day separately. This mitzvah, called informally “counting the omer,” is not complicated or difficult: you simply say the blessing, then say out loud the day of the omer upon us, then wrap up with a brief prayer. In different years, of course, this custom has a different feel to it. But this year, as things have gone from bad to worse, as the situation on many college campuses has deteriorated to the point almost of no return, as the poisoned tree that is the international effort to delegitimize Israel has born more and more fruit on more and more different branches, as traditional allies have wavered or retreated entirely, and as many members of Congress (a minority, but a sizable one) hesitate to support the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act for a variety of reasons, some bizarrely exaggerated and others darkly ominous—in a year such as this, the practice of counting each day, of marking each day as it passes and turns into the next one, that practice feels ominous and darkly suggestive of worse things to come in a way that I cannot recall ever having felt in years gone by.

And then I came across a video by an Israeli sketch comedy time called Ha-y’hudim Ba’im, literally “The Jews are Coming.” Normally, it’s a very funny broadcast on Israeli television, something along the lines of Saturday Night Live in its heyday.  But this last video clip, released just a week or so ago, is not at all funny. But it is profound and it is, in its own dark way, encouraging.

The video presents a series of Jewish people from ancient to modern times. A woman speaks about her experiences in first-century C.E. Judea as the Romans razed Jerusalem and defeated the rebels who dared seek an independent Jewish state in Israel. A young man follows who speaks to us from eleventh century Cologne and describes his family’s experiences as the Crusaders invaded the city with the specific intent of murdering its Jewish population before setting off to “liberate” the Holy Land. We then shift forward a millennium and find ourselves in Kishenev in 1903 as a resident describes what he saw and what his family experienced during the pogrom I wrote about last fall (click here), an anti-Jewish riot that, in a world that had yet to experience the Shoah, was understood as an almost unimaginable act of violence directed against innocents, including children. And then we skip forward two decades and meet a young person speaking from Hebron in 1929, the year of the anti-Jewish riots there that took the lives of sixty-nine Jews, also including children.

From Hebron, we move back to Germany and meet an older man who lived through Kristallnacht in Berlin. He describes the riots, the destroyed Jewish shops and businesses, the arrests of innocent Jewish men, the intentional destruction of the local synagogues. And then we travel to the east and meet a younger man who speaks from Baghdad and describes the Farhud, the violent anti-Jewish riot that seized the city on the first two days of June in 1941, riots that included gang-rape, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish shops, the murder of more than 180 innocents, and the destruction of upwards of 900 Jewish homes.

And then we move forward to Gaza in 2023. A young woman from Kfar Aza who lived through October 7 faces the camera. Based on what we’ve already seen, we expect her to tell about her experiences, about what she saw, about whom she lost. But she skips that part. We know those stories, she seems to suppose. And instead she speaks about the future. About her intention to remain in place, to live in her home, to rebuild what the vandals destroyed. She speaks calmly, but with integrity and purpose. And then, almost as if to reward her for her courage, she is joined by the others, all of whom step out of history to join her on camera and to say, as one, that together they represent the worst of Jewish history, the low points, the disasters, the pogroms, the nightmares, the true horrors…but that they also represent the spirit of the Jewish people to face down its oppressors and enemies, and to refuse to do anything other than to resist the haters and the bigots and the barbarians, and to thrive.

There’s an interesting riddle embedded in the clip as well. The actors are all Israelis. The clip itself is in Hebrew with English subtitles. Except for the final woman who speaks from Kfar Aza, they are obviously depicting people who lived before the State of Israel existed, some of them long before. Even the woman who speaks first, the one who describes the Roman onslaught against Jerusalem in the first century, and the fellow who speaks from Hebron, even they didn’t live in an independent Jewish state! And the others obviously lived in different places, in Germany and Iraq and Moldova. So that’s fine: actors depict personalities from different centuries and different countries all the time. But then, at the end, when they all come together, they somehow turn into Israelis as they speak in fully unaccented Israeli Hebrew and pledge to rebuild, to thrive, to defend their country, and to prosper in their own land, in their homeland, in their native habitat.

And in that merging of past and present, of Jewish history and Israeli reality, of stories from distant centuries and contemporary reality, there is something truly uplifting and satisfying, even encouraging.

I’ve written almost weekly since last October about the situation in Israel. It has consumed us all, of course, and me no less than anyone else. As the situation in Gaza, on the diplomatic front, at the UN, in the halls of Congress, and on our nation’s college campuses has deteriorated, it’s been easy to lose hope and to feel dejected about the future. Yes, it could always be worse. But that’s the punchline to a famous joke, not a rational path into the future! And then I saw this clip and things fell back into place for me. Yes, we’ve dealt with terrible things in our past. Yes, October 7 was beyond horrific. Yes, it will take a long time for Israel to return to its pre-October 7 state, if it ever does. But contextualizing is neither denial nor retreat. And seeing these people on the clip I’ve been writing back stepping out of history to join that young woman from Kfar Aza to remind her that she is not alone, that the ghosts of the past are not only present but fully and really so as Israel—and Jewish people in all the lands of our dispersion—move forward into whatever comes next.

I intentionally didn’t give the link earlier on because I wanted to introduce it to you with my own words, but here’s it is: https://youtu.be/KjwrV0wG9E0?si=Zp2vl0HkWWQzNPCA. Take a look, let these people speak to you as they did to me, and together let us all find comfort in the thought that, since history is run-up and destiny is catch-up, it’s the present we need to negotiate together into the future. We have faced worse than Hamas and survived. And we will survive this as well. 

Who is Opposing the AAA and Why

A few weeks ago, the House passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act by a vote of 320 to 91. Obviously, I’m pleased that 320 members of Congress take anti-Jewish prejudice seriously enough to want to specify in law what constitutes an anti-Semitic act so as to facilitate taking legal action against the perpetrators of such acts. But I’m much more involved emotionally with the fact that 91 members of the House voted against the measure. The naysayers were a bipartisan group too, albeit a lopsided one: 70 of those who voted against the bill are Democrats and the other 21 are Republicans. To condemn them all as haters opposed to opposing anti-Semitism would be wrong. Nor is it so that they came to their opposition from similar vantage points.

The basic concept of the AAA is that the bill requires the U.S. Department of Education to use the definition of anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group based in Sweden that works “to foster education, remembrance, and research about what happened in the past, to build a world without genocide in the future.” (That’s a direct quote from their website; to see more, click here.) To do their work, it became necessary at some point to define anti-Semitism precisely. And so they developed a precise definition, one as brief as it is almost banal: “Anti-Semitism,” they determined, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It’s hard to know what anyone could possibly take issue with in that. But, of course, the devil is always in the details.

The definition comes with quite a big set of elucidatory details, each describing a specific manifestation of anti-Jewish prejudice. They are:

1.       Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

2. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
4. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g., the gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II.
5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
8. Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and
11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

So you can already see where this is going. The Democratic opponents of the bill, including several Jewish member of Congress, were afraid that adopting the IHRA definition would criminalize criticism of the State of Israel under points 7 and 8 above. To me, that seems almost bizarrely exaggerated: the points listed above do not seem even remotely to me to mean that criticizing this or that decision or policy of the State of Israel ipso facto makes someone an anti-Semite in the way that questioning the right of Israel to exist would. Our own Jerry Nadler (D-NY) voted against the bill. So did Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont). That hardly surprised me, but what did me was a comment by yet another Jewish member of Congress, Sara Jacobs (D-California), who observed that although she personally feels that Israel has a right to exist, she knows many people who don’t feel that way at all despite the fact, and I quote, that they are “deeply connected to their Judaism.” I’m sure there are people out there whose understanding of Judaism is so unconnected to classical Jewish thought that they really imagine it possible to be “deeply connected” to Judaism without feeling any emotional connection to the State of Israel. We see such people, thankfully in tiny numbers, when they show up annually at the Israel Day Parade. But was it those people that Representative Jacobs had in mind? I doubt it. Whom she really had in mind, I obviously have no way to know. But to speak of such a position as though it were a valid, reasonable approach for a Jewish person to take—is it even possible for someone educated enough to be elected to Congress to know so little about her own faith? Apparently, the answer is yes. But weirder and creepier still are the reason at least some of the 21 Republicans who voted against the measure chose to do so, of which the one that made the headlines was the one put forward by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) who opposed the bill not for any reason that had to do with Israel, but because she perceived the bill to threaten her right to hold Jewish people responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus in the 1^st century C.E. Oy.

It would be easy—and more than easy—to write off a comment like that. This is, after all, the same woman who speculated, apparently seriously, that the 2018 wildfires in California may well have been ignited by secret lasers orbiting in space that were put in place by the Rothschilds as part of a larger plan to control the world by controlling the weather. But Greene was not without her own supporters. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, took things one step further by observing that, in his opinion, the adoption of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would basically outlaw the entire New Testament, an opinion promulgated on X by Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). That sounds even loonier than the idea of Jewish space lasers, but students of Jewish history have long since learned not to wave away anti-Semitic tropes or remarks just because they sound crazy. And so should we not pass lightly by this kind of statement, especially when used to justify opposing a bill that would criminalize the use of extremist religious rhetoric to justify harming or killing Jewish people.

Unlike most rabbis, I know the New Testament well. (I spent years of Graduate School working on my knowledge of New Testament Greek, and took courses in New Testament theology at the Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary, both Christian institutions of higher learning in Manhattan.) So I feel entitled to an opinion. All four of the Gospels are set in first-century Israel. The Romans are in charge; Judea is a province (or, in the very beginning of the story, a client kingdom) of the Roman Empire. Other than the Roman overlords, pretty much every person in the story is Jewish: Jesus himself, all his disciples, all of his relatives, all (or almost all) of his followers, the Temple priests, the High Priest, the citizens of Jerusalem. It was a fully Jewish place, Roman Judea in the first century CE. And leaving that detail out of the mix more or less guarantees that the resultant sense of what life was life in that time and place will be basically false.

The authors of the Gospels wrote decades after Jesus’s death and for Gentile audiences. As a result, “the Jews” were depicted—I’m generalizing here, but not to the extent of giving a false impression—the “Jews” were depicted as the non-Christians and the followers of Jesus as the Christians, without it being over-emphasized (or emphasized at all) that those followers were themselves Jewish as well and that the sharp division between Jews and Christians that later became basic to the Christian self-conception did not apply really at all in the days that Jesus himself walked the earth. And so, somehow, starting with the earliest extant Christian literature, the followers of Jesus were de-Judaized and depicted as proto-Christians, while the Jews who chose not to follow Jesus ended up depicted as “the” Jews. As a result, a casual perusal of the Gospel literature suggests a struggle between proto-Christians and Jews, thereby missing the point that Christianity doesn’t exist in Jesus’s day and that all the players in the story other than the land’s Roman overlords were Jews.

The bottom line, though, is that many Christian denominations have moved past the anti-Jewish tropes of the Gentile authors of the Gospels. (To give just one example, the papal encyclical called “Nostra Aetate,” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, specifically renounces that belief, saying explicitly that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”) But for a member of Congress to oppose a bill criminalizing anti-Semitic behavior because she perceives it possibly to be denying her the right to hold Jews responsible for the execution of Jesus—that is precisely the kind of statement of extreme prejudice that Jews know far better than to wave away as “just” silliness. When I ask myself what the future could possibly hold for the Jews of the United States, I find it impossible to consider an answer without hearing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment ringing in my ears. I suppose there are many people who feel the same way. I’m sure there are, actually. And that is precisely why the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act should become the law of the land.

And what actually are the bill’s chances in the Senate? We shall find out soon enough!

 

The President's Warren-Harding-Moment

Warren G. Harding, the 29^th president of the United States, came to the presidency on the heels of a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox. (He was also the first of our three presidents to move director from the Senate to the White House, the other two being JFK and Barack Obama.) And there truly was a new age dawning as Harding took the oath of office on March 4, 1921. The Great War was over, the Treaty of Versailles in effect for more than a year, our troops all back home. It was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, les années folles in our nation and across the Atlantic in Europe. The future felt bright, our national potential for growth almost limitless.

And then, just a couple of months after Harding came to office, America experienced a race-based pogrom on a scale that had never been seen before. Called the Tulsa Race Massacre (or, sometimes, the Black Wall Street Massacre), the event featured mobs of white citizens rampaging through the Greenwood district of Tulsa, a Black neighborhood, eventually destroying 35 square blocks of homes and businesses. The precise number of people killed during those days, May 31 and June 1 of 1921, is not known, but the estimates range from 75 to 300. About 10,000 people were left homeless. It was, even by the standards of the day, a shocking event that seized the attention of the nation. To learn more, I recommend Tim Madigan’s book, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which I read a decade ago when it first came out.

The riot presented President Harding with a remarkable challenge because he was scheduled just two days later to deliver the commencement address at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, the nation’s first degree-granting Historically Black College. He could surely have given some sort of color-by-number speech about graduating college and moving into the future and been forgiven for his blandness. But he saw an opportunity, a great one, and he took it. He only spoke for ten minutes. But in those ten minutes, he identified himself with his Black listeners (a remarkable thing for a white man in his office to do, and especially for the President who followed Woodrow Wilson, a known racist and segregationist). He wondered aloud how government, lacking a magic wand that could somehow alter attitude and stance, could lead Black Americans forward to a position of equality by working to offer Black Americans a chance to go to school, to become educated, and to enter society on an equal footing with their white co-citizens. And he spoke about Tulsa, calling the riot “an unhappy and distressing spectacle” of the kind that the nation should not and cannot tolerate. And then, in a gesture that will seem ordinary to most today but which at the time was considered astonishing, the white President of the United States shook the hand of every single Black member of the graduating class, which was all of them.

That fall, Harding went south to Birmingham, Alabama, to speak at the celebration of the city’s semicentennial. The Black third of the audience was separated from the white two-thirds by a chain-link fence. The President began his remarks, as everybody expected, by praising the city and commenting on its beauty. But then he reverted to Tulsa and, without mentioning the massacre, addressed its aftermath clearly and precisely. Black Americans fought in the Great War just as patriotically as white citizens, he began by noting. And then he went on to say clearly that Black people should not only not be prevented from voting, but should be encouraged to vote. Educational opportunities should be extended equally to all, he said, and without reference to race. And white Americans should be encouraging their Black neighbors to find their own leaders and to participate in the effort to advance humanity morally and politically. For the time and place, it was a remarkable statement. The white listeners greeted his speech with stony silence. The Black listeners responded with “uproarious applause,” to quote a journalist who was present. There was no question where Harding stood. It was his moment and he neither flinched nor equivocated. He is remembered today as, at best, a mediocre president. But he was a brave man as well. And delivering that speech in the heart of segregationist Alabama was a message as loud and clear as any President could have delivered. In many ways, the Birmingham speech was Warren Harding’s finest hour.

I reminded myself all about these two speeches as a way of preparing to hear President Biden speak Tuesday morning about the surge of anti-Semitism in America. I was especially curious to see if he would offer concrete steps forward or merely condemn prejudice, if he would address the haters in the manner of Warren Harding standing in front of a segregated audience in the heart of the South and daring to insist on equality for Black Americans. Would Biden merely announce that he is opposed to anti-Semitism in the way that people are opposed to bad weather, i.e., without anyone supposing that he could actually do something about it? Or would we hear concrete proposals about how our nation should move forward? I was especially interested in hearing what he would say about our nation’s college campuses. Would he call for the expulsion of students who openly call for the murder of their Jewish classmates? Would he announce that guest-students in our nation who openly espouse genocide directed against Jews (or anyone) be deported? Would he say clearly that college professors, including tenured ones, who espouse hatred of Jews should, at the very least, be fired? That was what I was waiting to hear.

In the end, the President didn’t call for any of the measures mentioned just above in so many words, but, almost despite myself, I was impressed, even moved, by his words. The man is not a great orator, but his words were clearly heartfelt and personal. And what he had to say was beyond resonant with me because he artfully made the single point over and over that I personally find it the most exasperating when our elected officials seem not to understand.

To my relief and slight amazement, the President seemed fully aware that it is not possible for Jewish Americans with any sense of their own history to consider the events of October 7 other than in the context of the Shoah. Yes, I understand that Hamas-governed Gaza is not Nazi Germany. But I am incapable of hearing stories about children being murdered, women being sexually abused and then killed, elderly people dragged from their homes and shipped off to unknown destinations to meet whatever fate awaited them there—I am just not able to hear any of that without being transported back to the dark days of the 1940s. Nor, I think, should anyone be able to be. And then the President tied the two together unambiguously: “Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven-and-a-half months later and people are already forgetting, are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. That it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you, and we will not forget.”  That is the precise point for Jewish Americans: that to talk about Hamas without reference to murder, rape, and barbarism towards babies is exactly the same as discussing the Nazis without reference to Auschwitz.

And then the President made that point even more clear, stressing that he understood fully that the Israeli response to the Simchat Torah pogrom was rooted in the history of the Jewish people and that those memories are, for better or worse, ineradicable: Too many people [are] denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas' appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It's absolutely despicable and it must stop…Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous they cannot be…buried, no matter how hard people try.

I recommend reading the whole speech, which you can do by clicking here. And I recommend comparing it to a document published on the White House’s own website, a fact sheet detailing the Biden-Harris administration’s national strategy to combat anti-Semitism. It’s a remarkable document in its own right, something very worth your time to consider. (To see a copy, click here.) You will find there more than 100 specific steps the administration is taking or wishes to take to fight anti-Jewish prejudice in these United States. Some of them seem a bit odd (will things really change if enough NBA players visit Yad Vashem?), but other initiatives seem solid and potentially very effective. But what struck me, aside from the details, was the larger image here of the President offering not one or two, but dozens upon dozens of initiatives to make Jewish people in our nation feel and be safe and secure.

But that document was from last year, published in May 2023. It still reads well. But this is now, not then. In May of 2023, our nation’s college campuses hadn’t turned into battlegrounds onto which Jewish students barely dare to wander and our nation’s high schools hadn’t become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. We hadn’t yet had the surge in anti-Semitic incidents that the President himself characterized as “ferocious.” So the efforts outlined in last year’s policy paper, for all they were surely well-meaning and even potentially game-changing, need to be revised and revamped in light of the new normal. The President did address the situation on campus. And what he said was spot on (“In America we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech, to debate and disagree, to protest peacefully and make our voices heard. But there is no place on any campus in America … for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”) But I was disappointed that the President didn’t call for the three-pronged approach to the situation on our nation’s campuses I recommended above. And I do believe that things will not change until it becomes clear that calling for more October 7’s, the equivalent of calling for the murder of Jewish children and the rape of Jewish women and the wholesale slaughter of Jewish families, will result in expulsion for students, dismissal for faculty, and deportation for visitors from foreign lands who received visas to come to these shores to study and not to call for the murder of our citizens. That was what I wanted to hear and didn’t.

President Harding’s Birmingham speech was a grand moment for the man and for the nation. But that was in 1921 and it took more than forty years for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to become the law of the land. We can’t wait forty years for focused, effective action on anti-Semitism. Nor should we have to.

 

  

The Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card

I get a lot of mail, especially e-mail. Some of it, I always read. Some of it, I read sometimes or just partially. A fair amount, there just being so many hours in the day, I delete without reading. But I got, unsolicited, something in my inbox this week that was so eye-opening that I resolved not only to read it all (which I did, and without getting up from my chair even once), but also to share it with you all this week. It is the first annual ADL Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card, available to all by clicking here. It was not pleasant reading.

Like all eye-opening surveys built on careful research, it is filled with little details and tiny facts that, considered entirely on their own, would sound banal or even petty. You could say the same, I suppose, of a single brick from the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon: it’s only just a brick if you consider it entirely on its own, but nothing like that when considered in the larger context of the structure of which it has survived as a single, tiny part. Obviously, not every college and university in the nation was included in the study. (That would have been too gargantuan an undertaking even for an organization as well equipped to undertake such things as the ADL.) So, instead, a sampling of eight-five of the nation’s schools were chosen for study, some because they have an especially large number of Jews in their student body and others because they are widely considered—or at least up to now have traditionally  been considered—to be our nation’s finest, most desirable institutions of higher learning. When considered against the fact that there are just shy of 4000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning in the United States (click here for corroboration of that number), the number sounds low. But when the actual roster of schools included in the study is considered, that number sounds reasonable: if I had been challenged personally to make up a list of the schools that are the best-known and most popular in the Jewish community, more or less every single school that would have been on my list appears in the survey, as do also the college I myself attended and those from which two of my children got their degrees. So waving the survey away as not broad enough in scope would be, in my opinion, a huge error of judgment. As noted, you won’t enjoy your time spent reading. No normal person would. But this is something every American should read—and not just every Jewish American either. This is the social fabric of our country we’re analyzing here, the institutions that train our young people to take their place as productive citizens. To put it another way, what percentage of members of Congress in twenty-five years will be people who are in or who soon will be in college in the United States? Surely not 100%, but I’m guessing that a serious majority of our nation’s leaders in a quarter-century will be people enrolled as undergraduates in our nation’s colleges and universities in the 2020s. If they are poisoned as undergraduates with prejudice and bigotry, and if they are trained to see nothing abnormal in hating Jews or Judaism, then we are in, I fear, for a very rough ride. And be “we,” I don’t mean just we Jews. I mean we Americans, we who imagine ourselves to live in the world’s most enlightened democracy, in a nation where the civil rights of the citizenry are not only universally respected, but understood to serve, each in its own way, as the foundational principles upon which the republic rests.

Like all complex documents, this one gives up its secrets slowly. But there are also shortcuts to be taken: the ADL has actually awarded letter grades to the surveyed institutions based on their efforts to create a safe environment for Jewish students and to combat anti-Semitism on campus. A quick survey yields some surprising results and some expected ones. Some of our most prestigious institutions were awarded D’s: Cornell, Columbia, Barnard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Northwestern, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. So were many others. But the list of schools awarded F’s is also interesting: some obvious institutions (Harvard, Tufts, Stanford, Swarthmore, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago) and some that came as a surprise to me (SUNY Purchase, for example, or the University of Virginia at Charlottesville).

Of course, these letters grades—both the high one and the failing ones—have to be approached with caution. The ADL site itself offers the following advice: “Just because a school has received a letter grade A or B…does not mean that the school does not have an antisemitism problem. It also does not mean that the school is in compliance with existing legal frameworks, including but not limited to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Similarly, just because a school has received a C or D does not mean that the school is failing to support its Jewish students. For example, some schools received lower grades relative to others due to the severity and prevalence of incidents on campus, administrative policies notwithstanding.) In other words, the grade is meant to address two simple questions that are merely two sides of the same coin: how safe would a young Jewish person be as an undergraduate or graduate student in the college in question and how rational a choice would that institution be for high school seniors having to decide now where to attend university.

Looking more carefully at the survey leads to some interesting results. Let’s consider Princeton, for example, which has always been considered one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning. When you consider Jewish life on campus, every box is checked off: active Hillel, active Chabad, kosher dining hall, Jewish studies courses, pro-Israel activities permitted, Jewish religious services held on campus, etc. Then, when you consider the school’s policies, it also sounds wonderful: Princeton publicly condemns anti-Semitic incidents when they occur, has a clear process for reporting anti-Semitic incidents, maintains an advisory council specifically charged with monitoring anti-Semitism on campus, etc. So that sounds ideal too. So how could such an ideal institution end up with a D? Well, that’s a different column, the one that takes note of the fact that the school has tolerated severe anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents, has permitted hostile anti-Israel student government activity, has not censured anti-Zionist student groups, and tolerates anti-Semitic guest speakers on campus. In other words, Princeton seems to have all the right councils and advisory boards in place, plus they seem not to tolerate but to foster Jewish student life. But when it comes to protecting those Jews from predatory groups whose rhetoric is clearly meant to intimidate Jewish students and to humiliate those who dare speak out as Jews or as pro-Israel advocates, the school seems to fall seriously short of its own theoretical agenda. Yet it also bears noting that things are improving: the school originally got an F, but was upgraded to a D just a few weeks ago.

The other schools I investigated were similar in many ways: all had formal policies in place decrying anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic bullying and all tolerated overt Jewish activity on campus under the aegis of the local Hillel or Chabad House. But again and again they fell down on the actual application of those policies when such decisions might anger the extreme leftist students bent on denouncing Israel and condemning any who disagree as murderers and torturers.  The University of Chicago, for example, earned its F not by not formally condemning anti-Semitism or by not permitting kosher dining or on-campus religious services, but by tolerating extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric on campus—rhetoric that is threatening, intimidating, and insulting to Jewish students—and not feeling obligated to deal with the matter forcefully or conclusively. To make believe that Jewish students can walk past signs condemning IDF soldiers as terrorists or see “bring home the hostage” posters vandalized but left in place by the university without feeling—to say the very least—unwelcome is just the kind of fantastical thinking that seems to be the norm in the nation’s colleges. When the president of Harvard couldn’t quite bring herself to say that calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people (i.e., the murder of every single Jewish person alive, which was Hitler’s goal as well) was not quite severe enough to warrant intervention by the Harvard administration, that weakness of moral character cost her her job. That certainly worked for me. But applying that standard to tuition-paying undergraduates seems to be the problem here: we will not see real progress until the nation’s schools can bring themselves to understand that bullying and threatening the safety of Jewish students who are not willing to condemn Israel and, in effect, join their own enemies in calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, should result, if not in the offending student being arrested, then at least with that student’s expulsion from the school. That would certainly happen if violent rhetoric were to be levelled against Black students or Latino ones, or against gay students or against Asians. But somehow violent anti-Jewish rhetoric gets a pass in the groves of academe that no other kind of prejudicial language ever would.

I strongly recommend my readers to visit the ADL site and spend time with the Anti-Semitism Report Card. (The link is above in the first paragraph.) You won’t enjoy your time there, that I can promise you. But it will remind you, as it did me, that all is not lost, that we have allies and friends, that there remains the possibility of the nation’s schools taking strong, meaningful action on behalf of Jewish students. We’re nowhere near there now, regretfully. But we could get there—I truly do believe that. And perusing the ADL’s Report Card, in addition to horrifying me, also made me feel (even I can’t explain this) slightly hopeful. What has been ruined by inattention, moral laziness, and political ineptitude, is surely fixable if the will is there to do right and to do good. Why wouldn’t it be?