Will Anti-Semitism Spread From American Universities to American Culture?

At the end of her sweeping probe into the normalization of anti-Semitism on American campuses, Ruth Wisse lays down a double challenge. Can the United States, the world’s pre-eminent liberal democracy and the one most exceptionally hospitable to its Jewish minority, retain that exceptional status “by recognizing the threat [posed by contemporary anti-Semitism] and fighting it off?” For their part, can American Jews, by gathering their mettle, help this country’s universities “heal themselves of this most deadly pathology?”

In fact, the challenge is not just national but global. What happens in America will determine whether the Jewish people can maintain a center of power and influence in the Diaspora as well as in the sovereign state of Israel. At this critical juncture, as Wisse acknowledges, American Jewish political power, if it is to be effective, needs to be not just nursed but projected. The turmoil of recent years has been bruising: alongside the campus crisis and BDS, we have seen America’s bilateral relations with Israel collapse, in tandem with an assault of unprecedented scale against the “Israel Lobby,” a hydra-headed creature whose efforts to derail American foreign policy were menacingly portrayed in a 2007 book of that name by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

As Wisse shows, anti-Semitism in American universities is channeled through the demonization of the state of Israel, which concretely gets expressed through the intimidation, rhetorical and sometimes physical, of Jewish students. Much of the blame for allowing this state of affairs to fester lies with university administrators who, decking themselves in the garb of free speech, “tolerate, however squeamishly,” campaigns “to undo the Jewish homeland and to demonize the already most mythified people on earth.”