As the historian Gil Troy has put it, everyone has their own personal “Herzl moment,” the incident, episode or insight during which they suddenly perceive how serious antisemitism is even in their immediate vicinity. My own came in 2015 when a Facebook post I’d written about Hamas during the earlier 2014 Hamas-Israel war—defending the Israeli blockade on Hamas by an analogy between the internationally proscribed Islamist terrorist group and a rabid dog whose unrelenting violence requires it to be caged for the self-defense of those who would be its victims—led to an international, death-threat-generating cancellation campaign against me defaming me as racist against Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians, and a generally all around bad guy. That was the moment I understood that, in a phrase, antizionism just is antisemitism: My defense of the rights of Jews to defend themselves from genocidal slaughter was violently condemned as “racist.” Antizionism was therefore the position that Jews defending themselves from slaughter is immoral—and you can hardly get more antisemitic than that.
And once you see it you cannot unsee it.
I nearly fell apart from the onslaught, but thanks to remarkable support from my family, my lawyers, and the inspiringly resilient global Jewish community—that same community being sorely tested today—I managed to pull myself together with a new sense of mission. From that moment forward I started writing seriously. I found myself compelled to defend the Jewish people from the hateful slanders coming from every direction, in particular in their collective manifestation in the Jewish state. I began retooling my teaching as well, introducing courses on Jewish thought and Zionism and the relevant political philosophy, to introduce at least those students brave enough to take a course with a pariah—any Zionist on too many campuses is ipso facto a pariah—to the idea that the mass murder of Jewish civilians is not the moral high ground.
Fast forward to Oct. 7, 2023. For a brief, naïve moment as that horrible day unfolded I thought that perhaps many of those who had campaigned against me eight years earlier would finally apologize to me: I was clearly right, after all, that Hamas was rather analogous to a rabid dog which, uncaged, goes for every Jewish throat in its vicinity. But that moment was short and the naïvete rapidly extinguished. For not merely after but even during the largest, most barbaric slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, with their tortures and murders being livestreamed sometimes even on their own social media, campuses across North American and Europe erupted—not in condemnation but in celebration, endorsement, and calls for more of that barbaric violence. By the next day, with Hamas murderers still roaming the southern part of Israel, campuses everywhere were calling to bring the “resistance” (their sanitized way of referring to the murderous violence) to campuses themselves—open calls for violence on campus, against Jews, illustrated with images of homicidal hang gliders in case anything was unclear.
Naïve me, indeed: I had failed to consider how many campus constituents would sympathize not with the victims of the dangerous dog in my analogy but with the dog itself; how many, in fact, despite waving their banners of “human rights” and “social justice,” were actually A-OK with the mass slaughter of innocent people, including children, as long the victims were Jews.
How, oh how, did this come to pass?
Well it didn’t happen overnight. Oct. 7 may have been the “Herzl moment” for many, but the trajectory has been in place for at least two decades and was actually quite clear to those who have been paying attention. Once over the shock of its reality, I realized that the campus response to Oct. 7 was not in the least surprising since it was the clearly predictable next step. My previous writings had documented the years of increasingly virulent antisemitic anti-Israel campus activity. My 2021 novel, “Nevergreen,” a satirical account of campus cancel culture, had suggested that the extreme ideology gripping campuses could produce a “Lord of the Flies” mob scene of ideologues hunting down the targeted offender eager to, yes, actually kill him. That’s how things looked by 2021, which was precisely when the Nazi-era trope of “Jewish supremacy” itself returned and began sprouting everywhere across academia. (For example, thousands of academics signed public statements, during and after the 2021 Hamas-Israel war, condemning Israel, and thus Jews generally, of “Jewish supremacy.”) Well, if the Nazis invoked that antisemitic trope to motivate and justify their eventual mass murder of six million Jews, and now contemporary academics were invoking it themselves—does it not stand to reason that, come Oct. 7, those very same antagonists would come out on the side of the murderers?
Oct. 7 may have been the “Herzl moment” for many, but the trajectory has been in place for at least two decades and was actually quite clear to those who have been paying attention.
Just think about this: On many campuses, including most of the elite campuses, led by many of the professors teaching the next generation of leaders, the dominant ideology is indistinguishable from the ideology that drove the Nazis to extinguish world Jewry. The calendar says it is 2025, but, on too many campuses, it looks an awful lot like 1939 Germany again—with the difference being that, today, lots of families are paying $80-90K a year for the privilege of having their children indoctrinated to endorse the supreme moral value of eliminating the Jews.
It’s been happening before our eyes. Looking back, as my new volumes do, one can discern the specific stages by which it came to pass. The story goes from fringe campus elements presenting “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) resolutions to student governments on a few campuses, to episodes on quite a few campuses of harassing and disrupting anyone who represents the Jewish state or simply supports it, to increasingly frequent graffiti and vandalism directed at Jewish institutions such as Hillels and Chabad Houses, to swastikas appearing nearly everywhere, to those Nazi-like allegations of “Jewish supremacy” and campaigns for “Zionists off campus!” popping up on most major campuses, to physical assaults against and open celebration of the mass slaughter of Jews. Jew-hatred moved slowly, then quickly, then explosively, from the campus fringe into the mainstream, and then into outright dominance, to the point where Jewish students have had to barricade themselves inside libraries or dorms or Hillel Houses to protect themselves from the mobs outside baying for Jewish blood—mobs consisting of their fellow students and often their professors, whose salaries those obscenely bloated tuition fees pay.
It’s either banal or painfully insightful to remark that the Nazi Holocaust also didn’t happen overnight. In retrospect that trajectory, from 19th-century racial antisemitism through the 1930s to the gas chambers, looks crystal clear, to the point where today’s Jews often look back at the Jews in 1930s Germany and just cannot fathom why they didn’t leave, the writing so clearly on the wall.
One wonders if future historians will see the current trajectory as clearly, and wonder the same thing about us.
This piece is adapted from the “Introduction” to the author’s two-volume work “Israel Breathes, World Condemns,” a collection of his writings over the past decade documenting and analyzing the transformation of academia into an antizionist, antisemitic hatefest. More information about him and his work may be found at www.andrewpessin.com
Andrew Pessin is Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College and Campus Bureau Editor for the Algemeiner. In a previous incarnation he portrayed “The Genius” on the old David Letterman show.
