Alma Gottlieb

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I get why social justice-oriented college students are furious with Israel.  (I am, too.)

I get why they are protesting to support Palestinians’ right to an independent homeland.  (I support that, too, though the boundaries are up for negotiation.)

While I find it a deeply offensive, emotion-based tactic, I even get why these students ignore the atrocities that Hamas terrorists committed on October 7th.  Acknowledging harm committed by their cause would render it problematic, vulnerable.

What I don’t get is how these university students have managed to avoid learning anything from the history, political science, and philosophy courses they have taken.  Or maybe they haven’t taken history, political science, or philosophy courses.  In that case, they should be wary of making arguments reliant on historical, political, or ethical claims.

Case in point: Let’s deconstruct just one of the many offensive taunts recently hurled at Jewish students at Columbia University, one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

“Go back to Poland!”

This directive makes five deeply problematic assumptions.  It’s hard to know which is more historically inaccurate, politically simplistic, or morally outrageous.

The students easily hurling such insults are now paying over $350,000 for four years’ education at our nation’s most elite universities.  Oops, it seems they forgot to attend class.  When they remember why their education is being funded by a lot of hard-earned money (whether by their family, a foundation, or an endowment), here’s a sample emergency reading list they might consult, to encourage them to rethink the easy but devastatingly wrong assumptions implied by their shouted claims:

1. All Jews come from Poland, right?  Nope.  Even for those with “Ashkenazi” backgrounds, America’s Jews hail from most countries across northern, central, and eastern Europe.  A browse through Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman’s edited collection, Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe would quickly correct this nonsense.

2. If they’re all from Poland, all Jews must be White, right?  Assuming that all Jews come from Poland would imply that all Jews are White.  But, nope.  Just skimming, say, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism would give even a lazy student a run for their money.  And let’s not even bring up how “race” is a social construction, making easy classification of racial categories problematic at the theoretical level.  Surely, these “progressive“ students could have learned that, in one of their classes on identity formation.

3. All Jews have “Ashkenazi” backgrounds originating in central or eastern Europe, right?  Nope again.  Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC-1492 AD offers a magisterial but concise overview of the global Jewish diaspora.  Karen Primack’s breezy collection, Jews in Places You Never Thought of, expands that view to far-flung outposts of the Jewish diaspora.  Too busy protesting to read anything but social media posts?  A quick peek at the maps included in Eli Barnavi’s collection, A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, from the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present, doesn’t require engaging with texts.  Surely, the busiest of student protesters can take a break to peek at images, no?

4. Jews don’t have a place in America.  Or so “Go back to Poland!” implies.  This taunt has such chilling echoes of the racist chants urging Black Americans to “return” to Africa heard across too many periods of US history that I can barely wrap my head around the echoes.  We are venturing far beyond anti-Semitism here.  Do we need scholarly references to remind passionately progressive students how historically absurd and ethically offensive it is to categorically police who gets to be “American”?

5. Poland has a strong history of killing Jews, so “returning” to Poland sounds like a death sentence.  In Poland, Nazis murdered three million Jews — half the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.  Once that student chanting “Go back to Poland!” graduates, perhaps his degree will earn him enough money to do some affordable tourism in Poland.  There, he might visit the sites of the two most infamous concentration camps of the Holocaust — Auschwitz and Treblinka.  Had he known about those when he urged a “return” to Poland? Reading Jan T. Gross’s Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz might give him further pause.

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“Stop killing children!”

“All you do is colonize!”

These taunts recently hurled at Columbia University Jewish students offer different problems.  Here, our passionate protester was accusing one person of representing — and being responsible for — all the policies that a government espouses, funds, and enacts.

This is a classic case of the part standing for the whole.  Literary theorists have a fancy name for this trope: synecdoche.  It works well in all manner of everyday expressions we use unthinkingly.  “All hands on deck” is the classic example evoked by English teachers, where “hands” stand for the rest of the human body (while “deck” stands metaphorically for any space of work).  No harm done here.

But when a person is used to stand for a nation, it’s hard to imagine not being offended. Let’s call this, the synecdochal fallacy.  Sound too abstract?  Here’s how it played out at Columbia University.

The Jewish students targeted by protesters were treated as if they were citizens of Israel, hence blamed for that government’s current policies.  But, wait.  Are Columbia University’s Jewish students who were being targeted all Israeli citizens?  Unlikely.  Now we are venturing even deeper into the land of the absurd.

Assuming that any Jew is automatically a citizen of Israel — and therefore a defender of all Israeli policies, up to and including “killing children” — smacks of just the sort of essentializing that anti-racists, feminists, and other progressives have rightfully decried for decades. Suddenly, essentializing is de rigueur among the progressive left?

Using this logic, the recipients of these offensive chants could have assumed with equal absurdity that their critics were citizens of the US, hence descendants of the original White settler colonialists who conquered the Native peoples who inhabited the territory that is now the US, hence supportive of all US political evils.  How would it have sounded if the Jewish students had yelled back:

“Go back to England!”

“Stop driving polluting cars!”

“All you do is enrich corporations and oppress people of color!”

You see the problem here?

It doesn’t make sense to blame individuals for the ills of a nation.

At best, students targeting fellow (Jewish) students for the horrendous policies of another nation (Israel) is an ill-thought-out tactic that has no rational goal, hence unbecoming of our most elite universities’ admissions choices. At worst, since these (Jewish) students are being inappropriately and offensively targeted, it smacks of anti-Semitism.

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Taking issue with national policy is a contemporary luxury offered in the modern world. Respecting this luxury requires paying attention to how to enjoy it.  Those who decry national policies have every right to protest outside embassies or consulates that represent the nation.  Protesting against national policies by railing against random people with a particular religious affiliation who may or may not endorse those policies would seem silly, even laughable — if it weren’t so serious.  No, odious.

Moreover, branding Israel itself a “settler colonialist” nation has its own historical fallacies, as historian Simon Sebag Montefiore argued brilliantly last October.

Then, we have the moral quagmire of progressives supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization whose charter endorses killing Jews.  For students who haven’t read the Hamas charter, the Charter describes its armed Islamic Resistance Movement this way (Article 8):

“Jihad [commonly taken as “armed struggle”] is its path[,] and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”

Do our elite students recognize that they are repeating talking points articulated by a terrorist organization that is largely funded by Iran? (As of 2021, Iran supported Hamas to the tune of $100,000,000.)

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And what about their professors?

Teachers: Let’s remember why we chose our profession.  Isn’t our job to teach facts?  And, as long as those facts involve humans, don’t facts require appropriate interpretation to recognize nuance?

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The current crisis in the Middle East is nothing if complex.  Attending to history doesn’t mean renouncing the quest for justice.  But it does require looking into all the vexing places where injustices lie – in this case, not only at the heart of Israel’s current government, and among the Jewish settlers still maddeningly expanding into internationally accepted Palestinian territories, but also in the terrorist organization currently speaking for—and brutally using as human shields—Palestinians.  If today’s university students are incapable of understanding nuance and complexity that defy easy binary judgments, it’s our job to teach them.

As for university presidents: How about requiring a course on “Evaluating Evidence and Arguments” for all students, no matter their major?  And another one on “Binary Thinking: Seductions, Fallacies, Dangers,” for students who graft simple good guy/bad guy models onto multi-leveled geopolitical quagmires.

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In short, let’s start equipping our students with the tools they need to think critically and assess complexity.  Surely, a $350K education ought to offer that.

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P.S. Fascinating op ed piece just up in Newsweek by a Palestinian peace activist from Gaza begging US students to rethink their protests. He urges: “You know what would help the Palestinians in Gaza? Condemning Hamas‘ atrocities.” 

P.P.S. A comment by a historian friend, Harry Liebersohn: “One book I would strongly recommend: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust.  By going back to a moment before the Holocaust it allows you to see the patterns of violence against Jews going back to the late nineteenth-century pogroms in the Russian Empire and how October 7th was a continuation of those patterns.”