From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page
By ANDRU VOLINSKY
As a Jew, I dislike the current focus on anti-Semitism. For me, it is like being pinned with the yellow star of David that signaled the horrors of the Holocaust. I am uncomfortable being singled out because of my religion regardless of whether it is for harm or for extra protection. In part, this is because I do not trust the motivation of those supposedly coming to my aid.
The motives to elevate concerns about anti-Semitism are political and self-serving. When the political winds change, extra protection will easily turn to targeting.
US Representative Elise Stefanik epitomizes the political leaders who use anti-Semitism as a cudgel to achieve and consolidate political power and who may readily turn against those she claims to protect when the political mood changes.
I don’t idly call out Ms. Stefanik. And, she is not alone. US House Speaker Mike Johnson used claims of anti-Semitism to attack higher education, likening protestors who question Israel’s use of force to Nazis who expelled Jewish academics from German universities. A bill to protect against anti-Semitism on college campuses would make it easier to defund colleges that don’t tow the Republican line. However, Stefanik deserves special attention.
Stefanik, a five term Republican member of Congress from the Saratoga Springs area of New York, is the leading inquisitor of elite college presidents who, she claims, do not protect Jewish students on campus. It’s not surprising that these presidents don’t stand up well in the lion’s den of Congressional hearings. (See that, two religious references in a row.). The presidents are often just highly-degreed fundraisers and bureaucrats. Some, like Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, learn the lessons and bow to the pressure resisted by previous presidents, who now have gone back to teaching. Shafik, in response to Congressional pressure, vowed to immediately get tough on protestors. Shafik called in the NYPD the day after her Congressional appearance and more than 100 pro-Palestinian protestors were arrested. More have been arrested since and there are concerns that the NYPD have mistreated protestors in custody.
Would it surprise you to learn that Stefanik is a Harvard graduate?
Ever since her first election to Congress, Stefanik has been on a straight-line descent from an elected official known initially for her bipartisanship to a Trump acolyte pursuing a bid for vice president. She has been called out by her local newspaper, the Albany Times Union, for stoking the “the hate [of] alarmist anti-immigrant rhetoric that’s become standard fare for the party of Donald Trump.” In December 2020, Stefanik joined 100 House Republicans in an amicus brief that asked the US Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election. She’s not a moderate, currently.
According to the Times Union, Stefanik “alleges that Democrats are looking to grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants in order to gain a permanent liberal majority, or, as she calls it, a ‘permanent election insurrection.’”
“The Harvard-educated Ms. Stefanik surely knows the sordid history and context… stoking racial, ethnic, and religious tribalism among voters dates back to this country’s earliest days…[P]oliticians have warned that Catholics, Jews, or Muslims were out to change the ‘culture,’ or that Irish, Italian, Asian or eastern European immigrants would take their jobs — to ’replace’ white, Protestant Americans. Mr. Trump made attacking Mexicans and Muslims a hallmark of his 2016 campaign, his presidency, and his current rants from the political sidelines.”
Trump, who now professes a love for Jews, “has a long personal history of rhetoric that invokes the language of Nazi Germany and plays on stereotypes of Jews in politics.”
As Stefanik makes clear in a press release posted on her web site, anti-Semitism is nothing more than a political pivot point used to attack Democrats. “[T]his is a crisis in higher education…But our university presidents, whether it’s Columbia…Harvard, Penn…UCLA, Michigan, Yale… have failed to protect Jewish students. They have also failed to condemn antisemitism. And let’s be honest, these pro-Hamas riots, this is Joe Biden’s Democrat Party….
Being honest, I don’t trust the Elise Stefaniks of the world to defend me. I worry it may not always be expedient to do so.
Also, to be honest again, Stefanik and Speaker Johnson are aligned with and dependent upon the support of wingnuts, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are protesting the Antisemitism Awareness Act now being considered by Congress because, in Greene’s words, it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews,” which is one of the grounds that foment anti-Semitism in the first place, and one that Pope Benedict, and others, rejected as not supported by Scripture. This is also the bill that will allow a politically motivated Department of Education to withhold funding to all but the Hillsdale Colleges and Liberty Universities in this country.
As I write this post, President Biden is preparing to deliver a speech to remember the Holocaust and honor those who died at the hands of Nazi Germany. “’Mr. Biden will reaffirm the administration’s commitment to “respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech,’” Ms. Jean-Pierre said, but emphasize that “’there is no place on any campus, or anywhere, for antisemitism.’”
It is wrong to equate pro-Palestinian protests with anti-Semitism as leading politicians do.
NH Governor Chris Sununu announced his simplistic conclusion when he proclaimed his disgust at pro-Palestinian protests that he considers “pure anti-Semitism.” The First Amendment right to express dissent is acknowledged by Sununu, and by Biden, as a begrudged afterthought.
What are the protests really about? Let’s not gild the lily.
Robert Reich in his May 3rd Substack post put it well. After talking with students and faculty at a number of universities, Reich concluded, “While protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people — most of them women and children — in Gaza.
To interpret these protests as anything else — as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian — is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.”
Senator Bernie Sanders voiced a similar conclusion when he said that it is not anti-Semitic to challenge the conduct of the state of Israel when it has “killed…33,000 Palestinians, wounded 77,000 — two-thirds of whom are women and children…destroyed over 60% of the housing…destroyed the health care system…the infrastructure, no electricity, very little water. And right now, we are looking at the possibility of mass starvation and famine in Gaza.” It’s not anti-Semitism, “it is a reality.”
None of this is to say that anti-Semitism is not real.
The founders of my former law firm, for example, tell of how they developed a nationally respected reputation in bankruptcy law. It was because they were boxed out of representing large, traditional corporate clients as the “Jewish law firm” in Portland, Maine. Some of the founders also had to overcome quotas for Jews to attend schools like Harvard.
The hatred of others does not just impact Jews.
Professor Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that on May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusionary Act that banned Chinese workers from immigrating to the US. My friend, Paul T., often reminds me of the discrimination suffered by Irish Catholics in America. The Korematsu decision allowing the internment of Japanese Americans and Plessy v. Ferguson that enshrined “separate but equal” as the law of the land, are among the most embarrassing decisions of the US Supreme Court but both reflected the prevailing public opinion at the time.
As a colleague who teaches at Columbia has noted, Jewish donors withdrawing financial support for universities because of perceived tolerance for pro-Palestinian opinions do Jews no favors. Their pressure campaigns, and those of AIPAC, would be better aimed at the Israeli government to stop committing war crimes through the targeting of civilian populations, destruction of civilian infrastructure and the use of famine as a weapon of war.
“Immigration” has become the prevailing political issue of the day. Not the “I was once a stranger and you welcomed me” kind of immigration, but a nasty, punitive approach to immigration. How does this approach, and the continued ascendence of an ex-president who separated immigrant families, jibe with a heartfelt desire to protect Jewish values?
I worry that it’s only a matter of time before the worm turns and the political opportunity changes. Then, we’d better watch out.
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