The email sent out last month by Laurie Zoloth, director of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University,was chilling on its face.
"I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of theMiddle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood anddead babies, labeled 'canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under Americanlicense,' past poster after poster calling out Zionism=racism, and Jews=Nazis," she wrote -- and thedetails only became more shattering from then on.
I read Zoloth's words with horror but not, alas, complete amazement, Eleven years ago, during the Gulf War,across San Francisco Bay, the head of a student splinter group at Berkeley addressed a room full of facultyand students opposed to the war, spitting out venomously, "You Jews, I know your names, I know where youlive."
The faculty and students in attendance sat stiffly and said nothing. Embarrassed? Frightened? Or worse --thinking that it wasn't time to tackle this issue, that it was off the agenda, an inconvenience.
Far more recently, two students of mine at NYU wondered aloud whether it was actually true, as they hadheard, that 4,000 Jews didn't show up for work at the World Trade Center on September 11. They clearly thoughtthis astoundingly crazy charge was plausible enough to warrant careful investigation, but it didn't occur tothem to look at the names of the dead.
Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East arealso roaming around America, and if that wasn't bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! Asif the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has decided to junk any pretense ofstandards.
A student movement is not just a student movement. It's a student movement. Students, whether they areprogressive or not, have the responsibility of knowing things, of thinking and discerning, of studying. Astudent movement should maintain the highest of standards, not ape the formulas of its elders or outdo them invirulence.
It should therefore trouble progressives everywhere that the students at San Francisco State are neithercurious nor revolted by the anti-Semitic drivel they are regurgitating. The simple fact that a studentmovement -- even a small one -- has been reduced to reflecting the hatred spewed by others should profoundlytrouble anyone whose moral principles aim higher than simple nationalism -- as should be the case for anyoneon the left.
It isn't hard to discover the sources of the drivel being parroted by the students at San Francisco State.In the blood-soaked Middle East of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, in the increasingly polarized Europe ofJean-Marie le Pen raw anti-Semitism has increasingly taken the place of intelligent criticism of Israel andits policies.
Even as Laurie Zoloth's message flew around the world, even as several prominent European papers publishedscathing but warranted attacks on Israel's stonewalling of an inquiry into the Jenin fighting, the greatPortuguese novelist Jose Saramago was describing Israel's invasion of Ramallah as "a crime comparable toAuschwitz."
In one of his long, lapping sentences, Saramago wrote in Madrid's El Pais (as translated by PaulBerman in The Forward, May 24):
"Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve theexpansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that inthis catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actionsof an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained inthe idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyoneelse, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in theHolocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they showit to the world as if it were a banner."
Note well: the deliciously deferred subject of this sentence is: "the Jews." Not the right-wingJews, the militarist Israelis, but "the Jews." Suddenly the Jews are reduced to a singlestick-figure (or shall we say hook-nosed?) caricature and we are plunged into the brainless, ruinous, abysmaliconography that should make every last reasonable person shudder.
The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism was "the socialism of fools." Whatwe witness now is the progressivism of fools. It is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left itsmoral edge. And, appallingly, it is this contemptible message the anti-Semitic students at San Francisco Statechose to parrot.
We are not on the brink of "another Auschwitz," and to think so, in fact, falsifies the danger.The danger is clear and present, though not apocalyptic. It's no remote nightmare that synagogues are bombed,including the one on the Tunisian island of Djerba, famous for tolerance, an apparent al-Qaeda truck bombattack. This happened. It is no remote nightmare that hundreds of Palestinian civilians died during Israeliincursions into the West Bank. This, too, happened. The nightmare is that the second is being allowed toexcuse and justify the first.
Laurie Zoloth wrote: "Let me remind you that ours is arguably one of the Jewish Studies programs inthe country most devoted to peace, justice and diversity since our inception."
But anti-Semitism doesn't care. Like every other lunacy that diminished human brains are capable of,anti-Semitism already knows what it hates.
This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for the rights of humanity cannotcavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of any people -- whatever you think of Israel's or any othercountry's foreign policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly history that long madeanti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and break from it.
If fighting it unremittingly is not a "progressive" cause, then what kind of progress doesprogressivism have in mind?
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism, culture, and sociology at New York University and theauthor of many books on media and society, including the forthcoming "Media Unlimited".This piece first appeared on MotherJones under the title, " The Rough Beast Returns ".
