Not My Father’s Antisemitism

When my father went to USC Law School in the 1950s, he was one of three Jews in his class at a time in American post-war history where successful assimilation came at the sacrifice of open Jewish observance in the public sphere. Our last name, Ansellevich, was stripped of a traditional Jewish suffix and Yiddish was relegated to my grandmother’s kitchen never to be spoken outside of the confines of the home or the sanctity of the synagogue. In the simplest terms, the American academy was a place where historically one’s pedigree, legacy and breeding determined one’s place in present and future society and that usually came with checking off “white Christian male” on the application. 

Behind the covert and often overt antisemitism that colored the American higher education landscape was a belief in the supremacy of the white Christian in defining what it meant to be a patriot. Before the 1960s, there was little appetite for admission of the “other,” which often meant female, students of color, and of course Jews. How did Jews like my father cope with this white Christian domination of higher education that came interlaced with antisemitism? They flew under the radar. They excelled in their studies, graduated, and then went on to have distinguished careers compartmentalizing their Judaism to the home rather than risk their economic prospects given the prevailing climate of antisemitism that drove many establishments to hang signs that read “dogs and Jews not welcome.” 

Today, what we are witnessing on college campuses across the nation is an entirely new breed of the old antisemitic tropes that have waxed and waned on the battlefield of the American academy. The WASPy halls of yesterday from USC where I work to Harvard, my graduate alma mater, now serve as venues for students of all ethnicities donning keffiyas to disrupt classes and block Jewish student movement while marching to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” We see tenured faculty members participating in the encampments preaching warped revisionist history to highly impressionable young minds who grew up in a generation where society’s failures are always seen through the DEI lens. We witness firsthand the damage of accepting billions of dollars from Middle East nations who house and fund Hamas leadership and by default the ingrained biases and antisemitic rhetoric that these academic chairholders espouse.  Finally, we see the gross underperformance of university presidents across the nation hiding behind the cloak of free speech to avoid dismantling these encampments ultimately acting upon the threat of losing donations from wealthy Jewish owners yet refusing to strongly condemn messages of hate that color the sanctity of the university mission.

From the perspective of working in higher education for the past 15 years, it appears that Israel has become the sacrificial lamb of a post-colonial world where any white presence in a country that should be brown, is deemed genocidal. 

Yet what is behind these cascading protests and encampments that are sweeping the nation? It can’t be historical accuracy, nor can it be any common thread of patriotism when “Death to Israel, Death to America” are chanted in the same mindless mantra. From the perspective of working in higher education for the past 15 years, it appears that Israel has become the sacrificial lamb of a post-colonial world where any white presence in a country that should be brown, is deemed genocidal. Notwithstanding the fact that Jews have lived in Israel for over three millennia and that many  of Israel’s Jewish citizens have Middle Eastern origins, the image of a white Jew in Tel Aviv juxtaposed with a Palestinian living in a tent has come to visually represent the economic and social inequality that has been at the center of post-colonialist theory.

 What is lost in the discourse of the start-up nation of Israel vs Palestinians living below the poverty line in Gaza and in the West Bank, is the nuance of the impact of their respective elected governments and how resources are deliberately withheld from their citizens in order to create and sustain an unlimited economy of terror. Never mind the fact that no other country would go to the extent that Israel does in order to warn Palestinians to evacuate specific areas that will be targeted. Never mind the fact that those terrorists responsible for the October 7 massacre are treated humanely, fed three times a day, and as of last week, will be granted visitation rights by their families. Are the hostages stolen from their families on October 7 accorded the same humane treatment?  As we have seen throughout our history, people need a scapegoat to pit their grievances on and yet again, the Jews are blamed for all that is seemingly wrong with the world.

The past decade has seen deliberate moves on behalf of universities such as USC to right the wrongs of the misguided sense of patriotism by renaming buildings and removing statues of university presidents past who had known affiliations with the Nazi party and even Hitler himself. These efforts come from a sense of acknowledgement of the role that the academy has played in facilitating both local and global antisemitism resulting in the marginalization and abuse of Jewish students. It is of paramount importance that the level of response at the highest levels of the university today meet the moment by adopting a zero-tolerance policy of antisemitism and hate masquerading as free speech across the nation. Yes, free speech is a fundamental component of what it means to be American. Yet, setting up firm boundaries between free speech and hate speech is what it means to be a patriot.

Lisa Ansell is the Associate Director of the USC Casden Institute and Lecturer of Hebrew Language at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles