When he was a 27-year-old rabbi, Abraham Cooper helped Rabbi Marvin Hier establish perhaps the world’s foremost enemy of antisemitism, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
At 75, the associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center travels the world with a vigor that belies his age. When The Journal called, he was in Paris. He would be home just before Shabbat, then fly to Washington, D.C. The New York native was in Paris for a series of meetings. He suggested a Zoom call at midnight– his time – because the next day was jammed with commitments.
Besides Oct. 7, what did Rabbi Cooper think is behind the rise in antisemitic incidents, especially, but not only, on college campuses? “There are multiple reasons, multiple failures,” he said. “These were going on before Oct. 7, but not to the present extent. The cause that many of us continue to feel most directly is the abject failure of the elite universities in the United States to stand by their Jewish students.
“I am not even talking about ideologically. I am talking contractually. Parents pay a ransom, a handsome sum for their children to attend a top school. Yet schools allow mostly outsiders — but not always — to block your way from getting to class, to bully, harass and sometimes attack you, and schools do nothing.”
While granting that such inaction is widespread, how can it be justified? The answer, he said, was best put by Dr. Judea Pearl when he spoke to a group of academics and students from UCLA at the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance. (They did not feel comfortable enough to host the meeting at UCLA.) Prof. Pearl said of the protesters and antisemitic sympathizers: “Don’t kid yourselves. They have been building tunnels underneath our universities for years.” To Cooper, “this means we not only are looking at foreign support or corruption by Qatar and others in the Middle East. “
We are looking at ideologues, he said, “some of whom are holdovers, believe it or not, from the heyday of the Soviet period when I was growing up in the Soviet Jewry movement.” Cooper, who came of age at the start of the 1970s, recalled professors who revered Stalin as God-like, even after the Soviets themselves admitted he was one of history’s top mass murderers. “Unfortunately,” the rabbi added, “Jews were among those true believers.”
That’s not, he said, a total shock. “But the fact is that one of the systems you think would kick in was academics. You’d think they would defend a community that has no input to decisions made by the state of Israel.” Didn’t happen, he noted. What kind of academics, he asked, would give a moral blank check to terrorists who have boasted about their direct hands-on murders of families, including babies?
Next in the guilty line, by Rabbi Cooper’s measure, are journalists. Much of the legacy media, he said, always has rushed to invoke, to rely upon, “dodgy” statistics – as long as they made Israel look bad – even if the numbers come from the mass murderers who did the crimes.
Who will stand up for the Jewish community?
“If you can’t go to your academic institutions to stand up for you,” he said, his voice trailing off. They take “huge amounts of money spent by Jews, including many survivors, to endow Jewish Studies programs across North America for such a moment as this… I just found out that tragically, with a few important exceptions, they were AWOL.”
Who then will advocate for Jews? It may seem logical to tell Jewish students or professors to speak up, but, said Rabbi Cooper, “not every campus has superstars like Dr. Judea Pearl.” He grants that “plenty of other superstars felt — ideologically or otherwise — they were uncomfortable defending Israel, which has been demonized on campuses for decades. Fortunately, though, there were Jewish academics who played opposing roles. Needless to say, many students drinking from that resource were pre-positioned to go out” and defend Israel.
But, the rabbi added, “obviously large sums of money came from Iran and other sources. This enabled Students for Justice in Palestine and all the rest” to stand stoutly against the Jews.
“What we saw was a powerful, coordinated campaign that still is going on. It started in Germany, and a few days later spread across Europe, as in ‘From the river to the sea,’ with threats to Jewish communities. Next, it jumped the pond, over to us, Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago, later on Los Angeles and Australia, where you have the same one-liners being spouted at events.”
Rabbi Cooper said that similar tactics are taken today to try and isolate Jewish students. He spoke of escalating attacks against synagogues. Russian authorities recently thwarted an attack on a Moscow synagogue by someone from Central Asia. So this is global. How are the dots connected? That, said the rabbi, is up to federal authorities — “beyond my pay scale.” Citing recent attacks, Rabbi Cooper suggests looking at the modus operandi, the timing — this was prepackaged with push-button precision.
No question who the guilty parties are. “Media will not push back,” he said. “Academics, far from standing up, will remain silent or say ‘You got what you deserved.’ This brought him to the third point: “What about diplomats? What about the NGO world? What about the United Nations?“
No mystery about responses to those questions. Overwhelmingly, there are two well-traveled responses to attacks on Jews: Either silence — as in the case of the International Red Cross — or, “Yes, it was terrible … but you have to understand …”
As soon as the word “but” comes in, the rabbi explained, “that is the international signal that it was kosher to go whole hog against Israel – despite the fact they had suffered 40 9/11 attacks in one day. Forget about the U.N. Human Rights Council – we never expected anything from them. The people at the top of the U.N. …
“Who would stand up for us at the U.N? The U.S. itself was a little lukewarm in certain circumstances – that obviously is changing now.” But in the diplomatic arena, there is no chance of support.
As for the media, Rabbi Cooper brands them “lazy, and ideologically coming from the same place.” The commonality is explained – justified – by the majority coming from the same schools. All are predisposed to hold Israel accountable the way no other country is. “At the same time they regurgitate the talking points the Hamas mass murderers are spouting,” said Rabbi Cooper.
Jew-hatred, he said, is a political football. This is a case where if it didn’t happen overnight, there is a little blame to go around for everybody. That also goes for “some” Jewish leaders who, “at least until Oct. 7, felt uncomfortable going after” some enemies of the Jewish people. Rabbi Cooper cites the trend to embrace DEI. “This put Jewish folks on the defensive every which way.
“When you have all of these,” he said, “it’s like a runaway train with multiple braking systems to slow down the train, and they were shot to hell.”
