Dead Wild Roses

  Looking at everything through the oppressor/oppressed lens is dangerous.

“On these facts, it can be difficult to tell whether universities have been acting with willful indifference or just willfully. Time—and discovery—will tell. But every now and then we get a bracing glimpse of what the administrators who are responsible for implementing campus antidiscrimination policies really think about Jews. At Columbia, text messages exchanged by a group of deans during a panel discussion about the crisis of campus antisemitism offered some honest insight. While a Jewish panelist was speaking, one of the deans remarked that it was “hard to hear the woe is me” because it was coming “from such a place of privilege.” A second accused a Jewish speaker of “tak[ing] full advantage” of the crisis on campus for its “[h]uge fundraising potential.” A third was more concise, if less articulate. She reacted to the panel with a vomiting emoji. 

The texts are bad, but the reality they reflect is even worse. They illustrate the moral and intellectual rot that has been gnawing away at our institutions of higher learning for decades. Our universities have long nurtured—and have by now been largely captured by—an ideology that divides the world into victim classes and oppressor classes, and views our legal and judicial institutions as systems of subordination masquerading as neutral arbiters of justice. Under this worldview, Jews occupy a position of unique “privilege” as the apex oppressors on a social pyramid of power and subordination. They cannot—by definition—be victims because they are oppressors. As such, they are unworthy of the same protections afforded to groups at the bottom of the pyramid of social oppression. 

If you buy into this worldview, hatred against Jews is justifiable and violence against them is defensible as a legitimate act of resistance—or, at the very least, not worthy of sympathy. That is why it was “hard” for a Columbia dean to hear what she derided as “the woe is me” from a Jewish speaker. It’s why another was quick to accuse a Jewish speaker of using his power to exploit the moment for its “fundraising potential.” 

The current crisis of campus antisemitism has laid bare for all Americans just how dangerous a cultural moment we are living in. The same ideological forces that have unleashed virulent antisemitism on our campuses have also unleashed some of the worst atrocities in modern history. They are antithetical to our nation’s core values. Individual liberty and individual responsibility have no home in a system obsessed with allocating collective guilt. And when the rule of law is seen as a racialized system of subordination, equality under the law is a delusion. We’ve seen this revolution before. It doesn’t end well.”