The shedding of pre-Oct. 7 thinking on the part of many American Jews has occasioned a backlash from the revanchists who seek to undo any progress or advancement the Jewish community has made since that horrific day.
One example of revanchist thinking: the reversion to “keep your head down” Judaism out of fear that if we advocate for our own rights we will be blamed, fairly or unfairly, for the consequences.
This conceit is being increasingly deployed to argue against punishing universities and those affiliated with them for violating Jewish students’ civil rights. The Trump administration has penalized, sometimes harshly, schools that are in breach of federal law. The main fight is over the gobs of taxpayer cash these universities receive while seemingly violating the terms of that government funding.
Those who receive that money (or benefit directly from it) do not want to lose it. One such person is Yale medical professor Naftali Kaminski, who repeats a popular argument: The Jews will regret this.
Kaminski is not wholly representative of his fellow Keep Your Head Downers: he defends the pro-Hamas protests and pretends they are the only affront to Jewish civil rights on campus, which is of course nonsense. He even calls them—and I kid you not—“mostly peaceful.” In contrast, there are plenty of American Jews who don’t want the universities punished for their anti-Semitism but who are willing at least to admit that violent anti-Semitism and institutionalized religious-discrimination policies are bad.
But both end up at the same place: They worry that people will be angry at the Jews.
To which any sentient person would respond: “will be”?
It’s true, the Jews will be scapegoated. That’s how we got here, in fact. Goosestepping campus Hamasniks are scapegoating Jews. A key lesson of Jewish history is that whether or not Jews assert their dignity, they will be blamed for anything that goes wrong. The least we can do in the meantime is stand up straight and demonstrate a little self-respect.
There is another element to this argument that is worth addressing. I’ll preface this with the obvious: No American minority group’s battle for integration, equal civil rights, and protection from professional or educational discrimination is exactly the same. Yet there’s a particular argument that only seems to ever be made about Jews. Normally, when a social- or political-rights movement is seen as overstepping what the mainstream is comfortable with, the backlash is political. We do not say: “Women should stop dressing in Handmaid’s Tale costumes outside the Supreme Court or society will hate women, blame them for all our problems, and possibly put them in camps.”
Instead, Bill Maher’s panel that week will all be in agreement that Democrats have no idea how to talk to the average American. The panel will be correct. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will insist otherwise, loudly, but the backlash will be political: Democrats will be told they are risking the midterm elections, not internment camps for women.
Black Lives Matter earned plenty of backlash—for the public disorder that seemed to be politically sanctioned byproducts of the demonstrations, and also for the movement leadership’s corruption that was revealed later. The primary target of the backlash was the “defund the police” slogan embraced by Democrats. De-policing was unpopular in the wake of the George Floyd riots just as it was unpopular in past attempts to weaken public safety by political extremists.
Although Joe Biden may have warned that Mitt Romney wanted to “put y’all back in chains,” in fact the reversal of de-policing was all the public wanted. Most in the political arena did not accept, say, “stop or racists will be more racist” as a legitimate critique of the underlying policy.
In fact, we never accept that type of argument, what we might call the racist’s veto. The public outcry against the tiki-torch Charlottesville march did not make the movement stronger; to the contrary, the following year’s march saw more journalists than participants.
When you punish bad behavior you tend to get less of it, not more. Only with regard to the Jews do we accept the argument that punishing institutional racism is inherently a poor response. Instead, we are told to accept whatever level of anti-Semitism is currently floating around because we can only slow its rise. If we keep absolutely still, the anti-Semitism won’t see us, just like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.
Except that after that movie came out, we learned that the T-Rex’s eyesight wasn’t movement-based after all, and that he would’ve seen them—and presumably eaten them—anyway.
Many of us also learned similar lessons from Oct. 7. Let’s hope the rest catch up soon.
