Jewish Students Need to Promote Inquiry, Not Censorship

Being a community that thrives on arguments and ideas is central to the Jewish experience. This critical value, however, is lost on many Jewish college students who are leading the charge on campuses nationwide to silence debate rather than promote a healthy exchange of ideas.

Rabbi Irwin Huberman deftly notes that for Jews, “arguing is the national pastime” and that, “If there is one characteristic which has kept the Jewish people alive for more than three thousand years, it is our love of debate, discussion, and disagreement.” A thoughtful exchange of ideas is so central to Jewish culture, Huberman argues, because Jewish tradition actually restricts young people from isolating themselves when studying, believing that “young people who study texts on their own are more prone to drift towards zealotry and fundamentalism.” Judaism holds that a person’s beliefs must be challenged and exposed to the truths of others and as such, “we welcome questions, debates and, yes, even arguments, believing that this is the best way for a child to develop into a well-rounded human being.”

New data from the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) latest survey on expressionreveals that the ability to speak freely and maintain an environment of open inquiry remains deeply problematic on many campuses from small liberal arts colleges to large, state universities. Cancel culture remains rampant and, regrettably, Jewish students are becoming increasingly supportive of measures and actions that shut down expression and dialogue.

Specifically, the FIRE data, which surveyed over 55,000 students from 254 colleges and universities of all types, documented beyond simple headlines that cancel culture continues to thrive on campus. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of students believe that there are acceptable reasons for shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus. While non-violent, shout-downs can be profoundly destructive and chill speech. Even more disturbing is that almost half (45 percent) of the undergraduates surveyed believe that blocking other students from attending a speech is acceptable to some degree. Plus, over a quarter of students (27 percent) said that using violence and physical force to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree. The number of students who support using violence to stop a campus speech has increased by seven percentage points from 2022. That is a concerning jump.

Jewish students, however, are more likely than their peers to be open to trying to disrupt speech. Seventy one percent report that shouting down a speaker is acceptable in particular cases. Fifty percent of Jewish students are open to blocking a speaker that is offensive or objectionable and 31 percent are open to using violence to stop a speech. These levels are all higher than the national figures. While Jewish students have not changed significantly from prior years, their openness to violence has increased by 10 points in the last year alone.

Jewish students, however, are more likely than their peers to be open to trying to disrupt speech.

Making sense of these facts is a challenge but one could argue that because so many Jewish students today are liberal and have ideologically sorted—67 percent are on the left or left-leaning compared to 53 percent of the national sample—they have adopted the dominant view among those on the left compared to the right that cancel culture is an acceptable norm when ideas or speech makes some communities uncomfortable. Accepting this leftist approach is irrational, irresponsible and dangerous for Jewish students who cannot escape their own history of being outliers and targets for centuries, and shutting down dissent historically promotes extremism that has targeted Jews as we see again happening around the nation.

One could also argue that because students are facing record levels of antisemitism and have expressed feeling scared on our campuses today, Jewish students are again engaging in “Jewish defensive assimilation” where, like in pre-war Europe, many Jews felt intense disdain and pressure against them; rather than speak up and push back, many took an appeasement approach thinking that by looking like they are part of an illiberal and dangerous group or ideas, the antisemitism could be held in check. This is foolish since appeasement does not work in the long run and groups often turn inward and on their own members.

While there is no one explanation for Jewish students’ significant involvement in cancel culture, it is clear that Jewish students are actively undermining the central values of not only higher education but also Judaism itself with this behavior. With the High Holy Day season upon us and so many of the Jewish community gathering en masse, it would be valuable to remind ourselves that as a community we value debate and are aware of the extremism that comes from echo chambers and the silencing of dissent.  And then, we need to support our students in promoting more debate. This is a daunting task and a real challenge, but as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks remarked at AEI, Jews must promote free speech on campus “because we believe that the only safe space there is, is one in which we give a respectful hearing to views unlike our own. That is what a safe space actually is.” The future of the Jewish community depends on a real marketplace of ideas to keep extremism in check, and Jewish students and the Jewish community should be leading the charge toward open inquiry as opposed to activity working toward silencing others and their ideas.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.