Most Jews are in a state of shock. It’s not the savagery of Hamas that has gobsmacked communities around the world; it’s the outpouring of hatred. 100,000 marched in London carrying antisemitic signs, swastikas, and the like. Flyers bearing the faces of the kidnapped are being torn down all around America by haters who explicitly confirm their antisemitic motives. In France, stars of David are emblazoned on Jewish homes and sites. And at every synagogue, every Jewish school, every community center, there are police. This isn’t the 1930s, but it feels like it.
We reached out to Ruth Wisse, the eminent Harvard expert on antisemitism, and she knocked our socks off. Here are three things we wanted to know:
What are the wellsprings of this antisemitism?
Why is it so prevalent in universities?
How do we fight it?
Please, listen to the podcast, or read the highlights below. It’s some of the best insight you’ll get into the phenomenon of Jew hatred that has infected the world.
And do something else if you can… as we will. Think about what it is you can do to right these wrongs. As someone said so eloquently: Jews do not need you to hide us in your attic. Jews need you to stand up to antisemitism and fight with us, not for us. Support causes, march with good people, and most importantly, don’t be afraid to stand up for what you believe in. This isn’t about Gaza or Palestine. This is about the right of Jews not to be slaughtered in their beds, cooked in ovens, beheaded, raped and kidnapped.
You might think these basic human rights are obvious. Apparently not.
HIGHLIGHTS
What the hell is going on?
RW: I have to tell you that I find myself surprised by the degree of my shock at all of this. I wrote a book about antisemitism, Jews, and power. I've been thinking about this and trying to explain it and understand it for the better part of my life. And I think I can speak cogently on the subject, but I agree with you. I find that what is happening is overwhelming. And, of course, there's no comparison. But I am just as frightened about what is happening to America as I am at this moment about what is happening in Israel. The situation in Israel is much dire because, of course, there the antisemitism comes in this form of a barbarism that, in some ways, exceeds anything that we've seen in our lifetime.
But what's happening here is really frightful because, to get to the point, antisemitism really has nothing to do with the Jews. It points at the Jews, it blames the Jews, it uses the Jews as its vehicle. But antisemitism is about the antisemites, those who need this, those who have formed this ideology, who constitute this movement, who use this movement. And it is one of the most destructive movements that we know of because it destroys every society that actually uses it
And it's a political tool that serves its users very well in the short run. And we can talk about all its functions, and why it becomes so popular and why it becomes so effective. But the more effective it becomes, the more debilitating it is because, of course, what it is is a deflection of real problems in a society. And instead of solving those problems, instead of addressing those problems, those who embrace antisemitism are really using it to blame the wrong party and to gin up violence against the wrong party. In other words, it's a deliberate definition of real problems. And the longer it is allowed to proceed and the more successful in its own sense it becomes, the more horrifically it destroys its society. So really, I would say that America is in very, very bad shape if this can take hold to the degree that it has in such a really short period of time
What is this antisemitism?
RW: Antisemitism, the organization of politics against the Jews, is something very distinctive because this is a political movement, and it is to be taken very seriously because people are trying to get power through this, and they are coming to power through this. And antisemitism has so many great political functions.
That's one of the reasons it's become, in my mind, the most successful ideology of modern times. So if you think of, I know it sounds ridiculous because you're still thinking that it has to do with the Jews. How can this little people generate the most successful ideology of modern times? But if you see the way it was used and you see the way it's being used now and has been used by the Arab and Muslim world since 1945, and certainly since 1948, you see what it does. Look at it, for example, as a coalition builder. Where else do you have a movement that is such a coalition-builder? So in Germany, what it did, when Wilhelm Marr founded this as an anti-liberal movement, he could say, look, you are unemployed. You know why you're unemployed? It's because of the Jews.
The church is failing. You know why the church is failing? It's because of the Jews. Your country is being taken over, the press is being taken over. Yes, the press is being taken over, and the music is being taken over, and culture is being taken, and the legal profession is being taken. They're everywhere. And what he said was that the Jews are conquering Germany from within. And he built around that a movement. Now, this began in the 1870s. Think of how long it took for the first politician to be elected on this platform. The first politician was elected on this platform in Vienna 20 years later. And then 20 years after that, you have Hitler coming to power on this movement because, you see, this is the only ideology, antisemitism, that is entirely anti.
What do you mean, “anti?”
RW: It declares itself anti. So if you say communism, well, communism promises something. Fascism promises something, democracy promises something. Everything promises, but anti; all you have to do is be against the Jews, and we can organize so many people. So if you think of intersectionality and how this preposterous thing happened, that the "Palestinian movement" became the flagship, the leading star of the whole intersectional movement. You see what I mean by coalition building? There is no other entity that could have united all these disparate movements of grievance and blame.
What is the appeal of antisemitism?
RW: What they have in common is that they are all movements of grievance and blame, and they all coalesce. [P]art of the African-American movement that is Black Lives Matter, or the violent or the extreme part of that movement, the extreme part of the feminist movement, the extreme part of the LGBT movement, the extreme part of all the movements you see, what they're really against are parts of America. And what this movement is really about is really the left, or whatever you're going to say, but what unites them is all parts of America. What unites them all? What could unite them all? And oddly enough, here you have this entity; they all unite against the negative image of Israel.
And antisemitism vs anti-Zionism, what’s the difference?
RW: Now, one of the questions people are always asking, what's the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? Well, antisemitism was the organization of politics against the Jews in dispersion among all the countries. Anti-Zionism is the organization of politics against the Jews in their homeland, in their country. So it's exactly the same phenomenon and the tragic thing for the Jews, and this is truly a tragedy, that Herzl and the whole Zionist movement conceived of Zionism, partly, not entirely, but partly as a response to antisemitism.
They said, You see why all these countries are against us? It's because we don't have our own homeland. It's because we're dispersed among all the nations. They all think that we're hanging out in their territories. They don't want us. There will never be a liberal Europe, he thought, unless we take the Jews out. And he was worried about European liberalism because how did liberalism become illiberal? How did it become antisemitic? He thought one of the answers would be, if you take Jews out of the equation, then you would never have this monstrous political movement again. Well, lo and behold, that wasn't true at all. What happened is it simply morphed into anti-Zionism.
And by the way, anti-Zionism is the only thing that unites the left and the right, which are absolutely polarized otherwise. But this was the great thing, Hitler could say the Jews are capitalists and the Jews are communists. He said both and laugh we may, but he united both the communists and the fascists on this one common thing that they had, you see? So it's been a frustration to me why political science, for example, has never taken this seriously. It has never studied this most serious phenomenon in modern politics, this most corrupting element in modern politics. And let's just say how corrupting it is, you can see
Why have universities been such centers of Jew-hatred?
RW: I think that's a very powerful question, and I think that that's a question that these elite institutions are the ones that should be asking themselves. Unfortunately, they're not. So one of the answers to that is quite simple. I was at Harvard and I watched this develop. And Harvard, and I'm just using Harvard here, as you say, as one of the schools because it was happening everywhere. So this didn't happen by accident. Look, in 1975 at the United Nations. See, the Arab and Muslim leaders are basically responsible for this phase of anti-Zionism. They own it, because in 1948 when the state of Israel was created as a member of the United Nations, the United Nations exists on the premise that it is for all nations large and small. But from the moment that Israel was created, the Arab League was founded on one, again, one unifying principle alone.
And what was that? What could unite 21 Arab countries? What could unite the Shiites and the Sunnis and all their factions? Only one thing united them all those years, and that was organization against Israel, against the Jewish people in its country. And it was a fantastic organizing principle.
Now, here's where you get your left wing. The coalition in 1975 passed at the United Nations, it passed a resolution saying that Zionism is racism. Now wrap your head around that. Zionism is racism. In other words, it was anti-Zionism that was racism. Anti-Zionism refused to allow the Jews to have their homeland. The Arabs and Muslims have 640 times more land than the Jews. There are a billion people, as opposed to what? 13 million Jews at this point in all the world, or 14 million. I mean, it's preposterous. The asymmetry between these two sides is monstrous, you see, it's unbelievable
So they come to the United States, they come to these colleges. Some of them teach in these colleges, teach in Middle Eastern institutes, and they promote these ideas and they promote this coalition, a left-wing coalition of Zionism is racism. Now, isn't that a neat inversion? Everyone's talking about racism and the university is against racism, and you have indoctrination that you should not be a racist. And here you have someone telling you, "Hey, Zionism is racism." Well, it fits, you see? And so it becomes adopted by the universities, and it's taught in the Middle East programs. It is actually taught, it begins to be taught in social science programs. I hate to say it because it is adopted by large parts of African-American studies.
It certainly is adopted by large parts of the women's movement, which is also against patriarchy. Well, what represents patriarchy more than Jewish men and so forth. So as staggering as this is, it really becomes like a true snowballing effect.
And what happens at Harvard?
RW: It grows from the time I came to Harvard in 1993 to the time I left in 2014. I mean, it was already, and I went, by the way, personally, to every single dean that came in, every principal, new president that came, it's only Lawrence Summers that took it on at Harvard, and he himself made his first speech. He said, "This anti-Israel, this petition to boycott Israel is antisemitic in effect, if not in intent." The minute he said that he was a dead man, and the coalition to get rid of him formed right then and there. And within five years they had all coalesced. The women's movement coalesced to get him out. African-American studies and everyone else who didn't like him on campus coalesced. But it was all that first speech that announced it. He wanted to protect the school from antisemitism. Well, they weren't having any of that. So it's filthy. I mean, one hates to... There's a Polish expression that I once pinned up on my wall. It says, "It is a terrible thing to swim upstream in a filthy river." And this is what one feels one is doing with this subject.
Why is antisemitism so viral?
RW: It's a love fest of hate. And that's something that one should not discount, the fun of sadism, the fun that they're able to have in the name of some political ideology, like let's cleanse the world of Jews, or let's cleanse the world of Israel. This is not madness. There's a tremendous ... Something that's very comprehensible about it when you see people whose own polities are so dysfunctional. Now, let me just say one thing though. The number of people whom this affects should not be exaggerated. This is a minority in America. The problem is that in order to destroy it, you would have to have a large majority getting rid of it.
What do we do?
RW: So it's the universities that have allowed this to happen, and increasingly the boardrooms, and increasingly even the halls of government. And even though it's very ... as I say, it's still ... I'm not sure it has reached the tipping point, but it is about to. And what has happened in Israel is just the tipping point, for sure. Because if people can look at those horrors ... You see, the Nazis did not advertise their horrors when they committed them. It was only after the war that people were shocked. "We did not know. We did not know." Right? They did not advertise what they were doing, these experiments on bodies and so forth.
But these kids, they're ... That's what they're selling. And they're selling it to American kids too. Look what we can do with those Jewish bodies. Look, we can take babies and take a little pile of Jewish babies and burn them. We can just take these Jewish women and we can just not only rape them, but then we can cut them all up so that you can't even recognize whose body it is. That's what they're advertising. It is monstrous. And I really think that perhaps of all professions, I think that at least in the university, it's the profession of political science and of social science that is most to be really questioned. What the hell have you been doing if you have not been investigating this?
Is it the students, or the professors?
RW: My teacher, Max Weinreich, took time off during the war to write a very important book called Hitler's Professors. He had gotten his PhD in a German university. And he wrote this book about Hitler's professors to answer your question. You see, that's where fascism began. You think of it as some movement that began in the sewers with some lame brain. Hitler not being perhaps the smartest person in the world. Though, certainly not the stupidest. But he shows that this was a movement fueled by professors, Nobel Prize winners. They loved it. They loved the inversion of it.
What’s at the heart of the antisemitism movement?
RW: I think that there's a lot of anti-Americanism in this. This is basically an anti-American movement. But I can't go out there and be anti-American because America's huge, and I'm going to get smashed by some people if I say that I'm anti-American. But anti-Jewish, the Jews themselves are not going to come at me because we know the nature of the Jews. They have no incentive for counter-aggression because Jews are a minority by choice.
And their strategy has always been to integrate themselves into other people's territories. Israel is the tiniest country that always understood that it would live among the nations. Jews have no problem living among the nations. Coexistence is in the DNA of Jews, but it's not in the DNA of other peoples, you see. And so this metastasizes and it grows and it becomes ... The uglier it becomes, the more attractive it becomes in many ways. People have a lot of aggression, and when you give them an outlet for it …
What about the Jewish community?
RW: I think American Jews also have to undertake some responsibility for this. Because we have tried to say, as we used to say as kids, "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Jews have been ... A lot of Jews have been very willing to just say, "Well, this is going to go away." Not stand up and be counted. But I think that now you see on campuses younger Jews are really beginning to mobilize. You're seeing what is most important, law firms saying, "I want the names of those students. I am not going to hire them." You need every single CEO in this country doing exactly that, saying, "I want the names of those people who want to destroy Israel and who are getting their jollies in these movements. I want the names of those people. I will never hire them. If I see that person on Twitter and on X, and I see them posting these things, and I know this about them, forget about it. You think the Me Too movement called people out. Well, wait till you see us calling people out. We are going to call people out."
And I think that that's the muscle. That's what I mean by the muscle. You really have to have now, at this point, a very serious counter movement to say, "We are not going to tolerate this anymore." No one can call the legitimacy of Israel into question and no one can use the phrase of, "Free Palestine," as a Orwellian formulation for, "Kill the Jews of Israel." We won't allow it. And I think that's our challenge at this point, to see whether we can stop a movement that still can be stopped before it gets even more out of control.
What worries you?
RW: But I have to say to you that I worry about America. This is an illness in America. This is poisoning this country. It is a vehicle for poison. Antisemitism is the carrier of a very anti, a very negative, a very destructive ideology. And its real object is to gain power for itself against the polity within which it finds itself. And so, I would take note.
What about antisemitism’s place in the Black Lives Matter movement?
RW: I started [at Harvard] in the winter of '93. Well, in the summer before I came, Skip Gates, Henry Louis Gates, who is now very famous on PBS television, he was then in the African American studies at Harvard, and he published an op-ed in the New York Times that I commend to you, really. It is the best analysis of Black antisemitism that you could read anywhere. And he wrote it and the New York Times gave him a full page, a full page, the whole op-ed page devoted to his analysis. You read that analysis and you see how keenly he understood the function of antisemitism in the Black movement at that time, at that moment when it was organizing.
And he warned against it because he knew that it was a cheap out. That that wasn't what was going to solve the problem of African American society. He knew that one would have to begin with a self-analysis, with a reform from the inside. He knew how difficult that would be, and he knew what a shortcut it was to try to blame others and then to try to externalize the blame rather than really solving the critical problems, which could only be done through the much more difficult and real process of self-liberation, really, of self reform.
So there you had it, 1992, nobody can do it better than he did it in that article, let me just say. So, that's a long time ago. The analysis was already there. It was there in the university, but I might say that within two years he never acted on it. When antisemitism began to really manifest itself, including in parts of his department, quiet, [we] never heard from him on the subject again.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Anti-Zionism Is a More Malevolent Form of Anti-Semitism (Ruth Wisse, Wall Street Journal, October 16 2023)
The Biden Administration's Anti-Semitism Blindspot (Mosaic, July 20 2023)
Ruth Wisse Reflects on Anti-Semitism, the University, and American Society (Mosaic, Feb 6 2023), Free as a Jew Documentary
Young Jews Brace for ‘A Day of Global Jihad’ (The Free Press, October 13 2023)
The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism (Wall Street Journal, October 13 2023)
I was a DEI director — DEI drives campus antisemitism (Tabia Lee, New York Post, October 18 2023)
Jewish college students say they're scared to go to class, blame universities for silence on antisemitism (Fox News, October 17 2023)
War in Mideast inflames college campuses and raises fears of antisemitism (Washington Post, October 18 2023)
On Elite Campuses, a New Protest Demand: Unwavering Support (October 20 2023)
Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students (Wall Street Journal, October 15 2023)
AMCHA Anti-semitic Incident Report Tracker
· New York Post: The NYPD was been ordered to be out in force and in uniform all day last Friday, amid fears of violence. Religious centers have been told to ensure all their doors are locked and guards remain on high alert. Jewish day schools across the city are ratcheting up security.
· Per Twitter: In Toronto, three men were arrested for making threats to the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto.
· Per France 24: After Macron banned pro-Palestinian rally for safety concerns, police had to break up the several hundred who still showed up to chant “Israel murderer”
· Per TOI: In Sydney, protestors chanted “gas the Jews.” Police are also investigating a separate incident in Melbourne where a group of men said they were ‘on the hunt to kill Jews’
· Per Twitter: In London, women were ripping down “missing” posters of Israelis
· Per Twitter: In San Francisco, graffiti appeared this weekend reading threats such as “death to Israel” “kill a settler” and so on
The Shame of Academe (National Review, October 13 2023)
Senator Tim Scott Introduces Legislation to Defund Colleges and Universities that Promote Antisemitism (Scott Senate Website, October 19 2023)
Hamas Attack Draws Cheers from Extremists, Spurs Antisemitism and Conspiracies Online(ADL, October 7 2023)
WTH Is Going On with the Spike in Antisemitism? Walter Russell Mead on the Myth of Jewish Power and His New History of the US-Israel Relationship (December 14, 2022)