Antisemitism in education … An American problem

By Allen Menkin, MD, Program Coordinator, CAMERA Partnership of Christians and Jews

The responses by presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania to questions about antisemitism on their campuses were disgraceful, but they were honest and accurately represented their institution’s policies. Presidents of Duke, Brown, Princeton, Swarthmore, NYU, Rice, Rutgers, Georgetown and scores of other private and state colleges and universities would have given similar answers.

Many colleges and universities have become leftist monocultures and government contractors, their endowments bloated by federal funds and tax breaks. The race-obsessed, progressive DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) mandates that come with them designate Jews as white oppressors who, by definition, can never be victims. They have also taken tens of billions of dollars from vitriolically antisemitic Middle East regimes.

As a result, they have succumbed to a doctrine of contempt and become breeding grounds for antisemitism. The educational programs they develop and the teachers they train further spread their poison to K-12 public school systems. Our children and grandchildren are the obvious targets, but as we have discovered, “we all live on campus.”

This is not a “Jewish problem,” it’s an “American problem.”

In the words of historian Victor Davis Hansen, “We are witnessing an epidemic of leftist nihilism similar to … the suicidal insanity that Mao Zedong unleashed during his cultural revolution of the 1960s. The old politics of right versus left and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization — or its destroyers.” Our institutions of higher education have chosen the latter.