May 9, 2024 | OPINION | By Doug Edlin
On April 28, a group of CC faculty sent a signed letter to the outgoing and incoming presidents of the college, which contains a number of assertions and demands (the “Letter”). Among other things, the Letter refers to the decision by the college to create a support space for Jewish students during the library protest on March 3 (and possibly at other times). The Letter states that the space was created out of concern that Jewish students might be upset by the protest, presumably because some Jewish students might be likely to care about Israel, which of course does not preclude the possibility that other Jewish students might not be upset by the protest. The Letter demands, among other things, “a full and sincere public apology to the non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews on the faculty, staff, among the student body, parents and alumni.” If I understand the Letter’s reasoning, this apology is demanded because creating the support space for Jewish students implies that only authentically Jewish students would be upset, and that determination “is antisemitic” either because it seeks to define authentic Jewishness or because it denies the Jewishness of non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews (or both). I understand the view that anti-Semitism is whatever anyone who identifies as Jewish says it is. As I will explain here, that view is difficult to maintain when it leads to the conclusion that it’s anti-Semitic to act out of concern for the feelings of Jewish students by giving them a space to avoid a protest that they might understandably find threatening.
The view that Jewish people are likely to care about Israel is not prejudice; it is a political fact. For example, in a Pew poll from 2021, 71% of Jewish Americans aged 18-29 said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them.1 To say that it’s anti-Semitic to recognize this fact about Jewish Americans is like saying that it’s racist to recognize that Black voters in the US are likely to identify as Democrats,2 or that it’s misogynistic to recognize that women are likely to be pro-choice.3 Should we be careful about generalizing? Always. Groups of people don’t all think the same thing. There are Black Republicans, and anti-choice women, and Jews who don’t see caring about Israel as an important part of their Jewish identity. But it is hardly anti-Semitic for someone at CC to believe that Jewish students who were confronted by a protest that involved certain chants (more on that soon) might wish to avoid the protest – due in part to their likely feelings about Israel and its relationship to their identity – and to create a space for them to do that.
One reason that Jewish students might have felt upset or threatened by the library protest was the protesters’ chanting of the phrase “from the river to the sea.” To be clear, I don’t know if the protesters used that phrase, but the Letter refers to that language. The Letter notes that a variation of this phrase was used in the 1977 Likud Party platform statement. That is true, so far as it goes. But Jewish students would probably not have felt threatened, and a support space would not have been created, if the library protest took the form of a Likud Party meeting. What the Letter neglects to mention, however, is that the specific phrase “from the river to the sea” appears in the 2017 Hamas General Principles and Policies Document: “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”4 For obvious reasons, the invocation at the protest of a phrase from Hamas’s own charter document might reasonably be perceived as threatening to Jewish students. And it is difficult, truly, to locate the anti-Semitism in the response of someone at CC who was concerned about the well-being of these students, appreciated how they might likely feel when confronted with this phrase being chanted in the library, and created a space where these students could go to avoid it.
Do all Jews feel the same way about Israel? Of course not. Was it anti-Semitic for the college to act out of concern for Jewish students who might feel threatened in the library? Of course not. CC is an institution that takes particular pride and care in addressing people as they wish to be to addressed, for instance when people prefer to be addressed with certain pronouns. It is well understood by anyone who is paying attention that many Jewish people feel particularly threatened by the phrase “from the river to the sea.” A Jewish student (at another school) described the effect of hearing that phrase in this way: “calls for ‘from the river to the sea’… although they can be construed as calling for things other than Jewish genocide, touch a certain nerve in the Jewish conscience of existential threat.”5 When a protester understands that another person feels threatened by a particular phrase, and then deliberately uses that phrase anyway, the protester has chosen to threaten the other person. We tend to focus our attention, as the Letter does, on whether the protester has a right to use the phrase. And that matters. But we also could ask ourselves whether this is the best way to exercise that right.
I am left wondering if the signers of the Letter object to the creation of a support space for Jewish students. If they do, I wonder how they reconcile that view with their own demand that the college set up support spaces for students. I hope they are not attempting to determine which students’ reactions are worthy of consideration and which are not. If the signers of the Letter do not object to the creation of a support space for Jewish students, I wonder how they believe that should have been accomplished without an effort to anticipate and respect how those students might have been feeling when they were trying to use the library and were unexpectedly confronted with a protest.
I continue to hope that we can try to reach out to each other with our hearts, to see that all of us need all of us right now. Compassion is not a scarce resource. Consideration is not a zero-sum game.
Douglas Edlin
- https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/
↩︎ - https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-race-ethnicity-and-education/
↩︎ - https://news.gallup.com/poll/506759/broader-support-abortion-rights-continues-post-dobbs.aspx
↩︎ - The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas,” A Document of General Principles and Policies (May 2017), at 6. The full document is available at: https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf
↩︎ - https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/04/us/us-students-impacted-by-israel-hamas-war/index.html
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