My campus wasn’t as bad as many others. Though we’re a pretty typical liberal arts college, the October 7 massacres did not generate major rallies celebrating the slaughter, nor an encampment. There was an anemic student protest or two, a flutter of a divestment campaign (the trustees rejected it), and the annual campaign to have me stripped of tenure and fired for, I would say, being a proud Jew. (They would say it’s because I’m a genocidal genocide-denier. That’s funny because I would say that that phrase actually describes them.) Our small, but vibrant, Hillel put on a “Solidarity Shabbat.” No one came. That pretty much captured how many Jews felt after October 7, and continue to feel to this day. But no, it wasn’t as bad as many others.
In a way, it was worse.
It was the professors.
Four days in, after explicit images of the slaughter had been blasting around the internet for days, my faculty colleagues were still silent. In contrast, when a single Black man was killed by a police officer far away a few years earlier, the place had exploded for days.
But when 1,200 people, mostly Jews, were brutally slaughtered, live on camera, there was…silence.
Actually worse: business as usual. Chatter about upcoming events, department business, announcements of meetings. Nothing to talk about, folks, it’s just Jews being slaughtered (on livestream, no less) on the largest scale since the Holocaust.
Four days in, after explicit images of the slaughter had been blasting around the internet for days, my faculty colleagues were still silent.
I finally couldn’t take it. I put up a blistering note: of shock, horror, and hurt. Of the handful who replied, one explained their silence by saying, “I am still learning about this conflict from multiple perspectives. It is extremely complicated.”
Really?
What exactly were they imagining could possibly justify such barbaric cruelty? To babies, children, disabled people, or grandmothers?
When the Nazis forced all the Jews to strip and walk miles into the woods and dig their own graves only to be shot, mothers holding their babies, would you stop and say, “Wait a minute, I need to hear the Nazis’ perspective before I reach a judgment”?
Who watches a little girl being dismembered (yes) and says, “Well, I need to learn more before making a judgment”?
Who watches a mother and a father and their three small children tied up together and then burned alive (yes) and says, “Well, I need to hear the other side before I make up my mind”?
Another colleague weighed in by endorsing the view that we needn’t play the “Oppression Olympics,” that “we must oppose all oppression, have empathy for every suffering person,” and so on.
Of course. But when certain people responded to the Black Lives Matter campaign by pointing out that, in fact, “all lives matter,” and that “unarmed white people are also shot by police,” we know how that was received. Yet when 1,200 people, mostly Jews, were slaughtered in the most brutal manner possible, this staunchly anti-racist person literally just “all lives mattered” to every Jewish person on this globe.
And then it really got bad.
Within a few weeks of the massacre, several professors launched an “educational series” for “understanding Israel/Palestine.” I personally would call it a long infomercial for Hamas, considering that nearly every one of its many speakers in the now three years since Hamas raped, tortured, dismembered, and massacred 1,200 mostly unarmed civilians spent their time defending the massacre. As we approach the three-year point, this ongoing “educational” series has now featured, I think, 18 speakers, because apparently 17 speakers one after another explaining why those naughty children, elderly, pregnant, and disabled people had it coming was not enough. That conflict over there, which I call the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict, is precisely as complicated as that name, and more. Yet this series “educates” our community with an onslaught of speakers speaking in a single voice that also happens to support the Islamist jihadi groups targeting Jewish non-combatants for mass slaughter. Educational? There are other words for when you present only one side of a complicated issue, and do so repeatedly, through eighteen speakers and counting: propaganda? Brainwashing?
Perhaps incitement?
Or, more simply: hate.
Of nearly 200 faculty, I am the only one who says anything. The ideological capture, along with its totalitarian coercion, leaves only one person brave enough, or foolish enough, to dissent. Perhaps it helps that I have already been canceled, so there isn’t a whole lot more that can be done to me, other than physically harm me—threats of which I also get on a regular basis.
Voltaire famously said: “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” In the grip of an ideology, all too many professors embrace a literal inversion of reality. “Genocide” is applied to Gaza where the population only increased during the war. “Apartheid” applies to the one country where Jews and Arabs actually live and work together, but not to the many Arab countries that ethnically cleansed all their Jews, have policies incentivizing the murder of Jews, and/or legally discriminate against their own Palestinians. Islamist jihadis are transformed into progressive freedom fighters fighting for pluralism. The head spins from the language abuse, so one would hope that an “educational” series at a reputable college would help navigate the obfuscations. Alas, the word “educational” has been colonized, too, and chucked into the linguistic abyss.
In the grip of absurdities, these people—the faculty—embrace atrocities. These are atrocities against the Jews, but not only against the Jews. They are an attack on the academy, on America, and on the fundamental principles of Western Civilization, nothing less.
The pursuit of knowledge, and truth. (No: ideology and activism.) Free and open inquiry. (Totalitarian coercion.) Genuine toleration, pluralism, diversity. (Our way or the highway.) Institutional neutrality. (Transform the institution into their political weapon.) Civic awareness and responsibility. (Death to Amerikkka!)
In the grip of absurdities, these people—the faculty—embrace atrocities.
It is shocking. It is disgusting. It portends (or is?) the end of Western Civilization as we know it.
And the faculty are all in, driving the movement.
“The fight against antisemitism is not solely a fight of one minority group against prejudice. It’s a fight for democracy,” correctly says antisemitism scholar Deborah Lipstadt.
I have launched the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism (ICSA) to go after this ideology that has done so much damage to the Jews, Israel, the Academy itself, America, and Western Civilization. Please join or follow us at icsa.substack.com.
Andrew Pessin is Founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism
Editor’s note: The editors thank Jewish Alumni Strong for its support in bringing this article to publication.