Four Questions for Jewish Americans

While Israel is fighting to eradicate Hamas, the shockwaves of the war in Gaza have reverberated thousands of miles away. In a surge of activism, large numbers of students on America’s college campuses have lined up behind the Palestinian terrorist group, waving the Palestinian flag and expressing antisemitism at a level never seen before in America.

The pro-Hamas activism began already days after the October 7th Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel. It has continued since then, and it seems to have taken our academic institutions by surprise. This is especially the case with Jewish-American members of the faculty, who are now struggling to understand the new reality in which they live and work. 

One of them is Bruce Hoffman, a professor and former director of the university Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. According to his university bio, Hoffman “has been studying terrorism and insurgency for nearly five decades”—in other words, he is no stranger to the kind of barbarism that was inflicted on southern Israel on October 7th. He is also a keen observer of the relationships between, on the one hand terrorism, and on the other hand the cultural and political environments with which it interacts.

With this background, one would expect Hoffman to provide a discerning analysis of the eruption on college campuses of antisemitism and support for Palestinian terrorism. Unfortunately, Hoffman falls short: on November 10th, Hoffman published an essay in Time Magazine where he noted that it is “not easy to be a Jew at an American university today.” He expresses astonishment at the weak defense of Jewish students and faculty from university administrators, as if he is entirely unaware of the political and ideological environment in which this disturbing phenomenon has incubated.

Hoffman explains:

Fears of imposing censorship and citing of First Amendment rights have allowed to circulate freely on campus Holocaust denial, the invocation of white privilege to dismiss antisemitism, and the rejection of the Jewish people’s inalienable right to self-determination.

He then asks: “How did it come to this?” and attempts to answer his own question. 

Hoffman begins by anecdotally noting that it took a long time for his own university “to get Kosher food in the dining hall.” As a non-Jew, I acknowledge that I cannot possibly understand the strife that the Jewish community at Georgetown was faced with in absence of religiously appropriate dining-hall food, but I am relieved to learn from Hoffman’s article that the campus rabbi eventually won the fight.

A more self-reflective point comes later in Hoffman’s essay:

[We] Jewish-American academicians deluded ourselves into believing that our respect for Palestinian self-determination was mutual and that our rational arguments for a two-state solution, our opposition to Jewish settlement on the West Bank and East Jerusalem neighborhoods, and our criticism of Israel’s current extreme right government would eventually persuade our more progressive colleagues on the other side to accept and recognize Israel as a bona fide nation-state. 

There is indeed an element of delusion in this line of thought, one that I am glad to see Hoffman recognize. He also acknowledges that “anti-colonialist/anti-Western scholarly and didactic approaches” are pervasively present at American academic institutions, and that this might play a role in the hostilities that over the past month have faced Jews on college campuses across the country.

Hoffman finishes his essay accordingly:

America’s universities have long been envied the world over as exemplars of the highest standards of learning and scholarship. Will they now become better known, and perhaps even emulated, for failing to adequately protect their Jewish communities? Jews know better than most how easily ostracism and intolerance spreads from us to others.

Bruce Hoffman is far from alone in the Jewish-American academic community to reflect on the campus hostilities over the past several weeks, but he is among the most articulate. His background makes his reflection even more interesting: a man with such respectable accomplishments on his resume should be able to produce a deeper, more analytical take on this phenomenon.

As a conservative, I am not at all surprised by the surfacing of virulent radicalism across America’s college campuses. There has been a trend running through faculty lounges for decades, where tenured professors have promoted the hiring of new faculty based increasingly on political leanings and decreasingly on academic merits. When said faculty exercises scholarship—using the term loosely—they are increasingly interested in furthering ideological talking points and decreasingly focused on adding scholarly value. 

This is admittedly harsh and sweeping criticism, but it can be substantiated in many different ways. One of the most compelling is that which Alan Bloom provided in The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster 1987). His account of how “university elites” have shunned intellectual curiosity and embraced institutional careers is an essential component in the understanding of how colleges in America today can be hotbeds of unhinged political radicalism.

In my own experience, the hiring of new faculty is a key component in the gradual deterioration of intellectual curiosity. When political coherence between new and old faculty is allowed to guide new hirings, the overall intellectual environment suffers. Respect for intellectual diversity is replaced with implied like-mindedness; with political leanings taking prominence over scholarship as reason for faculty advancement (after hiring and a few years of tenure track comes the evaluation by the tenure committee) there is a general loss of desire or interest in pursuing scholarship of any significance.

The production of peer-reviewed journal articles becomes a chore, not a primary activity.

Younger faculty, including but not limited to those who are hired in interdisciplinary ‘studies’ programs, find themselves implicitly encouraged to take their radicalism from their department offices into the classrooms. This in turn fosters the delusional idea among students that political radicalism—and activism—is akin to acquiring an academic education. 

It only takes a couple of small steps from here to the fostering of pro-terrorist activism, and even antisemitism, of the kind now plaguing many colleges and universities in America.

Since Jews in American academia generally seem to have been surprised by this new, ugly movement, I would like to ask them and other American Jews four questions. I put them forward in good faith—I support Israel and I hope they succeed in eradicating Hamas. I am also deeply opposed to any form of political extremism, especially on college campuses.

Question #1: Academic radicalism

Jews have made formidable contributions to America’s thriving academic institutions. All across America, Jewish scholars have been remarkably successful, winning many Nobel prizes and other prestigious awards. At the same time, among the Jewish academic community—just like faculty in general—there are political radicals who embrace and expound radical ideological thought, both in their published work and in their teaching. 

To take one example, Noam Chomsky is a preeminent Jewish academic radical. Chomsky is a philosopher who has made no secret of his radical political views. A respectable scholar, Chomsky has well earned his academic achievements, but through his political activism he has also inspired the kind of ideological radicalism that, over the decades, has set deep roots on American college campuses.

Chomsky, of course, is far from alone in being a Jewish multiplier of political radicalism. How many Jews in American college faculty lounges have embraced and proliferated the same political radicalism that is now the buoyancy of the pro-Hamas campus movements?

Question #2: College sponsorship

One of the many ways that Jewish Americans have contributed to making this country great is through entrepreneurship and investments. There is something to be said about the way that Jewish faith inspires work ethic, ingenuity, resiliency, and productivity. 

Thanks in good part to their unrelenting focus on adding value to society and the economy, Jews often end up in a position where they can be generous sponsors of charitable causes. Among their beneficiaries are America’s academic institutions; the tradition of alma mater donations is one of many forms of such sponsorship.

Generally speaking, donations to colleges and universities are of the kind that the receiving institution can use pretty much as it pleases. There is also a tradition of more targeted donations for specific study programs, centers, and institutes. Some of those targeted recipients have helped plant the seeds of the current radical wave across academia.

How many Jews have sponsored America’s colleges and universities in full knowledge that the money could, or would, be used to foster various forms of radical political thought, propaganda, and activism?

Question #3: College faculty and conservatism

American academia, strong as it is in many ways, is not a tolerant environment when it comes to conservatism. I experienced this personally as a college professor 20 years ago; countless conservatives, both faculty members and students, have had similar and far more invasive encounters with anti-conservatism. 

I gained insight into what was, at the time, a relatively quiet form of persecution of conservatives, when I discovered how faculty hiring committees used more or less devious tactics to weed out conservatives among job candidates. Since then, the sorting-out of conservatives has apparently taken more overt forms and can now also be traced in how academic, peer-review journals are being run. 

The increasing politicization of the scholarly workforce at America’s college campuses is a pervasive phenomenon. In its wake, job candidates with openly non-conservative or even anti-conservative political leanings have come to heavily dominate college faculty rosters. 

To what degree have Jewish members of college faculty around America contributed to the marginalization of conservatism among their colleagues?

Question #4: Conservatism and free speech on campus

There are countless examples of conservative speakers being canceled and not allowed to speak on college campuses around the country. To the extent that they make it onto a campus, they are often shouted down and forced to rely on security measures. Put simply: there is unhinged hostility toward conservatives among students, faculty, and administrators, at America’s academic institutions.

When it comes to fighting for their First Amendment rights on college campuses, conservatives are forced to stand on their own, without much support from other groups, marginalized or not. Now, Jewish students feel threatened and fear for their personal safety when they attend class or otherwise move about on campus. 

The harsh antisemitic rhetoric that is frequently seen in colleges and universities today has no place in an academic environment that espouses respect, individual freedom, and—yes—tolerance. 

Given all this, how many Jews in American academia, including both faculty and donors, have stood up in the past decade to defend the right of conservatives to speak their mind at colleges and university, and to do so freely and without harassment of any kind?