Campus Jews: Let’s start making ‘good trouble’
American Jews are beginning to respond to systemic antisemitism in higher education by “voting with their feet.”
The New York Post reported this week that, for the first time, no graduate of the Ramaz School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side will be attending Columbia University’s liberal arts college this fall.
Ramaz told the Post that it has warned students about the extent of antisemitism on various campuses and Rory Lancman — an activist, academic, former politician and Columbia graduate — is quoted saying: “Jewish families are voting with their feet and choosing colleges and universities that take antisemitism seriously. I would not recommend my daughters to apply to Columbia or other colleges that aren’t committed to protect them as Jews.”
This informal boycott is entirely understandable. Indeed, Columbia may be the most institutionally antisemitic major institution in the United States, hosting a “Center for Palestine Studies” that is, essentially, a shrine to Edward Said, an alleged scholar who dedicated his entire intellectual life to demonizing Israel and its supporters.
It should have been no surprise, then, that when mobs of genocidal racists took over the Columbia campus earlier this year and harassed, intimidated and assaulted Jews, the university leadership refused to take early and decisive action. Instead, it threw its Jewish students to the wolves. The mobs were only ejected at the end of the semester after they smashed a campus building.
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Recently, Columbia president Minouche Shafik thankfully resigned, but there is little doubt that, as soon as the new school year begins, antisemitism’s conquest and colonization of the university will resume. There is, after all, no one willing to stop it.
Given this, it is not surprising that Jewish students have decided not to waste their talents and money on Columbia University. Indeed, it would have been surprising if they even considered doing so.
But it is worth asking whether “voting with their feet” is the correct route for American Jews to take.
It may not be, because it is the avowed purpose of today’s antisemites, led by the Red-Green Alliance of progressive leftists and Muslim supremacists, to ghettoize American Jews. That is, they seek to strip American Jews of whatever power, influence and prosperity they have achieved and relegate them to the margins of American life, where they can be easily preyed upon whenever the mood strikes.
It is horrible for Jews to stay in an antisemitic environment but, by departing, they unwittingly risk ghettoizing themselves. This is what segregation looks like and Jews should not submit to it.
While voting with their feet will at times be necessary, other measures can be taken as well.
For example, if Jewish students at Columbia were properly organized, they could engage with the campus Nazis on their own terms and disperse them. They could sue the university not just for redress but for its entire endowment, threatening the institution’s very existence. They could go about the campus in groups and publicly confront those attempting to harass and assault them. They could make it clear that if the Jews have no peace on campus, no one will have peace on campus.
None of this involves breaking the law, but it does require a decision of the will. In many ways, it would be superior to the decision to simply leave. But it cannot be made without a new radicalization, a more aggressive stance that is willing to make what the late civil-rights leader and congressman John Lewis called “good trouble” — trouble that upends an unjust order. As Lewis put it: “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”
Jews at Columbia and other institutions have suffered a tremendous injustice, but there is no need for them to flee. For a year now, antisemites have been permitted to make bad trouble on campus and indeed everywhere. It’s time for Jews to make some good trouble before the walls of the ghetto close in.
