DEI Drives Campus Antisemitism

Gerrymandering Jews into an ‘oppressed’ class won’t save universities from a malevolent ideology.

By Heather Mac Donald. Excerpts: 

"But a university has no capacity to eliminate “hate,” nor should that be its mission. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges built their DEI bureaucracies in the first place and allowed bureaucrats and their faculty sympathizers to put certain facts and ideas off-limits. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges started requiring faculty—even in the hard sciences—to justify their research in the name of “inclusion” and “belonging.” Protected identity categories have constantly expanded while the haters shrank to an ever smaller subset of white males.

The real issue on campuses isn’t antisemitism but the anti-Western ethos that has colonized large swaths of the curriculum. Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization’s very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class—that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence.

The Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine explained that “our classes regularly discuss the inevitability of resistance as part of the struggle for decolonization. We study under renowned scholars who denounce the fact that the media requires oppressed peoples to be ‘perfect victims’ ”—that is, not to commit acts of terrorism—“in order to deserve sympathy.” During a sit-in, a law student at Penn announced: “It was here where I read texts about the history of colonial regimes and the importance of decolonization. . . . I just want the university to try to do part of what it tries to teach us in the classrooms.”

A Harvard student posted on social media: “how have i read frantz fanon in no less than four classes here (writing on the violent algerian decolonial movement!!!) and yet you all side with the colonizer?” Another Harvard student: “what is WRONG with EVERYONE! This is literally a decolonization struggle before our eyes. like all of those places we learn about and have historicized and sympathize with now—algeria, south africa, haiti, more.”

Gerrymandering Jews into an “oppressed” class for DEI purposes wouldn’t do anything to prevent this classroom propaganda—which college leaders are at pains not to address. Since Oct. 7, presidents and faculty have routinely spoken of the “interconnectedness” of antisemitism and Islamophobia. A Nov. 16 lecture at Cornell University by Ross Brann, a professor of Judeo-Islamic studies, was titled “The Intersectionality of Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Racism.”

Who is found at that intersection? White supremacists, former Trump administration officials, evangelical Christians and white opponents of mass immigration from Muslim countries, to judge by Mr. Brann’s PowerPoint slides. None of these supposed oppressors play a significant role in pro-Hamas campus protests. The actual protesters—Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Queers for Palestine, socialist groups and proponents of the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanctions movement—went unmentioned in the lecture. (Mr. Brann did briefly mention Louis Farrakhan as an antisemite.)"

"“The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel,” Mr. Ackman wrote. Harvard also discriminates against Asians and “straight white males.” Harvard’s diversity office “is an important culprit in this discrimination on campus as it sees the world in a framework of oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressor class includes white males, Asians, Jews and other people perceived to be successful and powerful.”"