The Ideological Obsessions at the Heart of Campus Madness

Soon enough, students will return to college campuses and in all likelihood, student activists will renew their efforts to vilify Israel and ostracize Jews. Searching for the roots of the protests, Paul Berman embarks on an intellectual journey that includes the political evolution of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, the works of the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, and much else. He concludes by detecting a certain “climate of opinion that hovers over the university humanities departments and maybe a few other places, and over the art world and the literary world, and seeps at times into the mainstream press.”