For years, Marianne Hirsch, a prominent genocide scholar at Columbia University, has used Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial of a Nazi war criminal, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” to spark discussion among her students about the Holocaust and its lingering traumas.
But after Columbia’s recent adoption of a new definition of antisemitism, which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech, Hirsch fears she may face official sanction for even mentioning the landmark text by Arendt, a philosopher who criticized Israel’s founding.
For the first time since she started teaching five decades ago, Hirsch, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom altogether.
Columbia has decided to adopt the Hitlerian definition of antisemitism, one that embraces despicable ancient tropes of Jews being forever foreigners in whatever land they occupy.
Think about the actual philosophy behind this. The only way that criticism of Israel can be considered identical to antisemitism is if you believe that all Jews, regardless of nationality, beliefs, and personal character, have some innate tie to Israel. You can be a Jewish person, only a citizen of the US, with no interest whatsoever in the Israeli state, but it doesn’t matter. Simply due to your ethnicity and religion, you are forever tied to the state of Israel.
Columbia has fully embraced the antisemitic belief of the perpetual foreigner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner
Columbia admins believe that no Jewish person can ever be a true full American. From birth, every Jewish person has innate ties to Israel. They cannot escape this tie. Thus any criticism of Israel is innately an antisemitic attack on Jewish Americans. To be a Jew is to be an Israeli, and to be an Israeli is to be a Jew. They are one and the same to the antisemites running Columbia University.
Notably, this was the belief also shared by the Nazis during WW2. Jews were considered perpetual foreigners in Nazi Germany. It mattered not how they lived their lives. They could never truly be fully German. They could have lived in Germany down ten generation and personally served Germany in WW1. It didn’t matter. Jews were always foreigners, and thus it was justified treating them differently from other Germans.
This was the logic of the American Japanese internment camps. Japanese were considered forever foreigners. They were interned regardless of their actual personal beliefs and loyalties. Their own character mattered for naught. If you were ethnically Japanese, you had innate loyalty to the Japanese emperor, and thus even Japanese American citizens were treated as suspect foreigners.
There is a reason the white nationalists currently running the White House have embraced this definition of antisemitism. If it is normalized that being Jewish and being Israeli are truly interchangeable, then why can’t American Jews be forcibly deported to Israel? If all Jewish people are essentially Israeli from birth, then an antisemitic administration can justify deporting any and all Jewish citizens “back to their homeland.” After all, they can be treated as suspect foreigners with dubious loyalty to the US. And this is ultimately why the right wing is so fond of this Hitlerian definition of antisemitism. Currently it’s being used as a cudgel to attack Palestinian rights protesters, but it can just as easily be wielded against Jewish Americans to justify their involuntary deportation to the state of Israel.
I found myself nodding along to most of your write up, but the idea that the Trump administration is planning on deporting all the Jews from the US is the wildest idea I’ve heard all day.
There is a reason white supremacists like Steven Miller love this definition of antisemitism. There’s a reason most white nationalists are also Zionists. They fully support the idea of a Jewish homeland…so they can have somewhere to export all of America’s Jews to. They dream of a white ethnostate, and Jewish people do not fit anywhere into their vision.
I don’t think the current White House is going to go this far, but it’s absolutely part of their long term plan.
There might be something to that. I am probably pretty ignorant to the scope of the white supremacist issue that is going on. I’m generally more class, economic, and foreign policy focused.