Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Antisemitic Lies

At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds

by Dara Horn

This 20-page clearly-written, comprehensive and compelling article provides a detailed historical and modern context to the current antisemitic sentiment promoted by academics/activists (as well as Islamic fundamentalist terrorists). As a leading member of Harvard’s first antisemitic task force, Horn also has insights and specifics to share about Harvard University’s staff, administration, and student experiences. Written with an unparalleled depth of knowledge (23 centuries of examples), a sense of humor, and powerful precision.

Excerpts:

BY NOW, DECEMBER’S congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the
presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the
genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is
already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train
wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand
op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has
extravagantly missed the point.

The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free
speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people
vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’
windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors.
They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in
class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows
plastered with FUCK JEWS. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them
with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges
and universities, all of this happened and more.

…

Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious
sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own
demonization, in “debates” with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea.

The many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many
legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants
and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them,
or the open assaults on Jews. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first
emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens,
but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity
against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of
infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of
Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.

…

Besides, American Jews had nothing to whine about: Had any of them actually died in the
United States from all this exhilaration? That question was answered in November, when a
Jewish man died in California after an anti-Israel protester allegedly clubbed him over the head
with a bullhorn, the kind used to chant entirely non-anti-Semitic slogans—and of course that
question had already been answered repeatedly with other anti-Semitic murders in recent years,
some more publicized than others. (One murder even happened on campus: In 2022, an expelled
University of Arizona student who repeatedly ranted about Jews and Zionists shot and killed his
professor—who wasn’t Jewish, though the student thought he was.) But now the goalposts move
again: Those actual murders, along with many other physical attacks against American Jews, are
all just one-offs, lone wolves, mental-illness cases, entirely unrelated to the anti-Semitic rhetoric
swirling through American life.

It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many
unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening
outside whiny Jews’ heads. A realistic estimate might be 6 million. Even then, Jews have had to
spend the past 80 years collecting documentation to prove it.