Borrowing a nifty lyric from the Beastie Boys (those white-hot, hip-hop Jewish sensations): “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Hate Jews!).”
Yes, the original rap song focused on an altogether different “Right”: the one to “Party!”—once an eager rallying cry at college. But those were different collegiate days—before social justice and self-importance transformed mirthful campuses into humorless hotbeds of antisemitism.
Keggers officially traded for keffiyehs.
Faculty and student priorities took an extreme hard-left and Islamist turn on October 8, 2023—the day after 1,200 Israelis were murdered, butchered, beheaded and gangraped. In a world more sane than antisemitic, there would have been global solidarity with the Jewish state and a singular determination to rid the world of Palestinian terrorism—once and for all.
Instead, as the Palestinians of Gaza braced themselves for Israel’s just and undeniably deserved retaliation, the Western world, which is looking more and more like one big call to prayer these days, and brainless (often Jewish) pink-haired useful idiots on campuses, acting on cue, decided this was the time to mount a global campaign to end the Jewish state.
Posters of Israeli and American hostages were ripped down and defaced. Anyone with a sympathetic word about Israel was shouted down. Jewish students were hounded on campus, vilified on social media, denied access to buildings and walkways by the Hamas Youth, who decided that Jews must repent before receiving a hall pass.
Antisemitically intoxicated students renounced prosaic goals like grades and graduation. There was now a much higher calling than classroom attendance. Why study Plato and Shakespeare if one could openly scream at Jewish classmates, “I am Hamas!” “Rape is Resistance!” and the genocidal ditty that topped the charts, “Globalize the Intifada!”
Harvard, America’s oldest and arguably “best” university (now third and dropping fast) went on a Jew-hating holiday. When the orgiastic celebration over dead Jews commenced on October 8, 31 student groups blamed Israel as being “entirely responsible” for the crimson carnage the day before.
Not to be outdone, Columbia (ranked 13th, and slipping even faster) took advantage of its proximity to the media capital of the world and wholly redefined the university’s mission. Students and faculty hijacked the campus and declared every day to be Halloween. Masked militants introduced a primal, Neanderthal bloodlust to the Core Curriculum.
Suddenly, hating Jews became fashionably woke and collegiately sanctioned. Harvard and Columbia raised the bar on what an elitist antisemitic institution of lower learning could look like.
But best of all, they insisted on being paid for the privilege with taxpayer dollars.
A day of reckoning arrived in the form of Executive Orders by the Trump administration, demanding that these institutions comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Discriminating against Jewish students and faculty who identify their ethnic and national ancestry with the state of Israel is against the law.
Federal funding, and their tax-exempt status, were now in jeopardy. Trump froze $2.3 billion in aid and another $2.7 million in grants to Harvard, and $400 million in grants to Columbia with billions more under review. He even threatened to revoke student visas for incoming Harvard students.
The universities have thus far balked. Harvard filed a lawsuit, claiming, among other things, infringement on its free speech.
Question his motives if you must, but when it came to protecting the civil rights of Jews and defending a democratic ally, Trump meant business. Given the size of their endowments, these schools actually are big businesses. Why should the federal government underwrite what are essentially trade schools in malicious anti-American, anti-Zionist propaganda?
Question his motives if you must, but when it came to protecting the civil rights of Jews and defending a democratic ally, Trump meant business.
Typical of Trump, he acted impulsively. Before being stripped of funding, Title VI requires a hearing. But do these universities really believe they will prevail when the evidence against them is so self-condemning?
There are scant college courses that deign to permit a pro-Zionist reading on the syllabus. Hardly anyone—surely no one who wants tenure—teaches the legitimacy of the Jewish state. No one dares acknowledge that Zionism is, in actuality, the original, and most successful, post-colonial movement of self-determination. No one admits the biblically obvious: Jews are indigenous to the Holy Land.
No Ivy League official condemned the massacre on October 7. No one called for the return of the hostages. Most shocking of all, Hamas was treated like a campus mascot. No one highlighted that Hamas is a genocidal death cult that is as much an enemy to Palestinians—most especially women and homosexuals—as it is to Jews.
Universities demand free speech and academic freedom—but only if it is approved speech and the freedom to spread lies and distort history. To this day, each of these institutions believes that threatening Jews is justifiable so long as it is ancillary to supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel. Talk about shapeshifting, disingenuous nonsense.
Really? You mean if I happen to oppose racial equity, I can shove an African-American on campus and shout, “Lynch Blacks!”? Does academic freedom mean that the Harvard History Department, if it so chooses, can teach only one perspective on the Civil War—the one espoused by the Confederate Army and plantation owners—with each course concluding that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was presidential overreach?
Universities have surrendered critical thinking to groupthink, replaced free speech with selective censorship, and categorically forbidden viewpoint diversity, especially if it involves seeing Israel as anything other than a settler-colonial, apartheid regime.
Universities have surrendered critical thinking to groupthink, replaced free speech with selective censorship, and categorically forbidden viewpoint diversity, especially if it involves seeing Israel as anything other than a settler-colonial, apartheid regime.
Punitive measures were necessary and most definitely deserved. They had well over a year and a half to properly respond to the antisemitism that had overtaken their campuses. Instead: academic jargon and lip service.
At the first, infamous congressional hearing, three presidents of elite schools refused to concede that calling for the genocide of Jews violates their Codes of Conduct. (It’s not protected under the First Amendment, either.) They dissembled, appearing contemptuous, all the while fearing how their testimony would play at home.
The natives on campus were restless, after all. The joke was on Congress. The gods of DEI were running these elite, out-of-touch, self-indulgent academies. Neither the safety of Jews nor the obligations of open inquiry were going to get in the way. Is it any wonder Jewish enrollment at these schools has been declining?
Some things, of course, never change. Many of the Jewish legacy organizations, and the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements, signed a letter opposing the deportation of pro-Hamas foreign students and the denial of federal funds to these universities.
Black Lives Matter déjà vu, anyone? Jews are always pumping their fists at the front of the line, loudly proclaiming their tikkun olam bona fides, only to end up standing alone in other lines, destinations unknown, wondering what went wrong.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself,” and his forthcoming book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”
