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.
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.