A Class for Our Times

It’s a classroom, much like the thousands of other classrooms across America. The teacher is at the lectern, double-checking that the audiovisual materials are cued up and ready. Students shuffle in. But this class is different. It’s “The Globalization of Antisemitism: A Survey of Transnational Trends,” taught by Dr. Sharon Nazarian, the former senior vice president of international affairs (and current board member) of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And across the road from the building where the class is held, there is a Students for Justice in Palestine demonstration. Which means the 20-odd students attending her class at UCLA (approximately an even split between Jews and non-Jews) get to experience the subject first-hand.

When Nazarian’s class began on October 4, she had no idea how topical her subject would soon become. Just days later, after Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7, the campus became a hotbed of antisemitism. Jewish professor of piano Inna Faliks told the Journal she heard hundreds of students chanting “Slaughter the Jews”; students were captured on video screaming, “Beating that f–ing Jew” over a megaphone as they pummeled a piňata of Benjamin Netanyahu with a stick. As in many colleges across the U.S., the campus now echoes with the cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”— a slogan popularized by Hamas for the elimination of Israel.

None of this surprises Nazarian. “Everything’s very intertwined,” she told the Journal. In one lecture, she likened it to “a perfect storm.” That occurs, she said, when the extremes on the left and the right converge, “and they converge upon Jews.” By way of example, she pointed to recent laws in Europe banning circumcisions. There, the far right and the left join forces in arguing that circumcision harms babies, is inhumane and should be banned. This sends the message that “freedom of religion and protection of minority rights don’t matter.”

“The Islamists have their own bucket, and you have the far left coming from its own anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective. And yet the rhetoric winds up being the same.”

If you think this sounds like Jews have to fight a two-front war against the neo-Nazis and the far left, you’re being optimistic. Actually, she said, there’s a third front. “The Islamists have their own bucket, and you have the far left coming from its own anti-colonial, anti-capitalist perspective. And yet the rhetoric winds up being the same.”

“Antisemitism can manifest in many different ways,” she said in a recent class. “And in Europe today, it could be in the form of verbal assault, it could be in the form of physical assault, it could be to the form of threats, harassment, discrimination, unequal treatment in the workplace or other places, property damage and graffiti.”

She added that in some cultures, graffiti is “a kind of public art. But there is a difference when you put even a swastika on a tunnel or a bridge or some public building versus when you put a swastika on a Jewish institution. When you spray a swastika on a synagogue, on a Jewish day school, on the Jewish frat house here at UCLA, that is considered antisemitic because the intention behind it is antisemitic.”

Standing before the class, Nazarian is a formidable yet approachable presence. Her soft voice still carries a hint of her Iranian childhood: a musical quality that draws you in and pulls you along. She’s calm and unflappable; when she wants to make a point she doesn’t raise her voice; her words become clipped. Antisemitism, she insisted, is not only about Jews and Israel, even though Jews, alone among races and religions, are blamed for the hatred against them. After World War II, she said, the international community recognized that “governments have to be held responsible for the protection of their religious minorities, and it’s not up to the minorities to protect themselves. That’s not their job. It’s their government’s job because they’re citizens of those countries.”

The United Nations and European Union, she said, came to consider that hate crimes violate the fundamental rights of their citizens, specifically, the right of human dignity. It is “a threat to human dignity, to the right of equality of treatment and to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This is why the Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Parliament collects data on antisemitism: Member states of the European Union “have come together and said we deem antisemitism as going against those very values that we have set on our mission.”

Nazarian said the aim of her class is to provide students with the tools and data to understand antisemitism; everything she shares in the class reflects her experience as “someone whose work has been on the frontlines around the world of seeing how antisemitism shows up. What are the drivers behind it, and what do we do about it?” It has been the focus of her world for seven years. The theoretical and ideological material she assigns the class include books ranging from Walter Laqueur’s “The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism” to “The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism” to the virulently antisemitic “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which helps the students understand “the symptoms and manifestations” of antisemitism. The final classes of the fall quarter will help the students fight antisemitism using the tools she’s shown them. 

The second half of each class has been given over to recorded interviews with visiting scholars. These have included Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief; Katharina Von Schnurbein, European Commission Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life; and Lord John Mann, Advisor to the Government on Antisemitism in the United Kingdom. One of the things that makes the class unique is the quality of these guest lecturers. As Nazarian said, “I want to show our community that we have resources and we have really high dignitaries from around the world wanting to come to our classroom at UCLA and to bring their knowledge.”

The other thing that sets her class apart, Nazarian said, is that it’s not offered through the Middle Eastern or Jewish Studies programs, but by the Global Studies department. It’s something she insisted on. She wanted to reach beyond the Jewish community and Middle Eastern or Jewish Studies majors to students “who have a global lens that, as they look at the various issues they’re interested in, whether it’s global health or environmental issues or all kinds of political, economic, developmental issues, if they don’t have this additional variable — which is antisemitism — they are missing a huge lens through which our societies today, especially liberal democracies, have to be understood.” Adding that lens, she said, is “the hypothesis of this class.” It’s about “showing the trends we’ve witnessed and how these ideologies converge. What is the effect on societies, and how they manifest in current-day countries and capitals.”

Within her class, Nazarian trains her student to “look at the data.” But outside, among those Students for Justice in Palestine demonstrators, is something very different. It is, she said, “a display of a subsegment of our society, especially the elite, more justice-leaning young adults and students who have somehow internalized the idea of Palestinian justice, conflated it with social justice and racial justice in America, I would say in a very misguided way because the two are not comparable.”

The shift has been decades in the making. As Nazarian said, American Jews have come to be no longer viewed or labeled or treated as a minority, but rather as a part of the privileged white majority.

The shift has been decades in the making. As Nazarian said, American Jews have come to be no longer viewed or labeled or treated as a minority, but rather as a part of the privileged white majority. There has also been the reframing of Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967. That new narrative, recasting Jews as oppressors, she said, has spread not just in the Middle East, but through Europe and America. 

So when the October 7 massacre happened in Israel, “A lot of young social justice activists say, ‘That is resistance and resistance will involve violence, and that’s what it takes – by any means necessary.’” 

This didn’t happen by accident.  As Nazarian sees it, this was fomented by “extremists, Islamist radicals who have come into the heart of liberal democracies in Europe and, now, in America, bringing their intolerant, undemocratic, illiberal values with the very singular mission of dominating those societies with their own extremist ideology … And so that’s the pendulum that now has to be recognized by all democratic liberal democracies around the world [who must] say, ‘OK, this cancer cell is now in our body, in our own corpus, and we cannot close our eyes to it.’”

The result of this surge of antisemitism “is that for the first time, American Jewry is having this real strong sense of insecurity.” Emotional and physical insecurity has long been the experience of European, Middle Eastern and Latin American Jews and even South African and Australian Jews. “We were privileged in that we didn’t have that sense of insecurity. Today for the first time, we feel what diaspora Jewry around the world have always felt. And so we are no longer different.”  American Jews “were really unprepared and taken aback.”

Students are especially feeling intimidated and afraid. Nazarian has seen it with her own children. “They’re telling me that most Jewish students are just really afraid. They’re really afraid to talk about any of this. If they wear a kippah, they’re hiding it. They’re even hiding their feelings and thoughts and fears, and they’re not discussing it with their non-Jewish friends because they don’t know what reaction they’ll get. The rug has been pulled out from under them.”

Her solution, not surprisingly, is education, which she sees as “the most powerful tool of breaking down some of this societal lack of understanding and ignorance.” The Nazarian family is a well-known name in Jewish philanthropy, with an emphasis on education. Her parents are the namesake of UCLA Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, which Dr. Nazarian founded in 2010. She’s especially proud of this accomplishment. She views her class in the same light, “exposing students to the depth, nuance and complexity of Israel.” 

It’s an idea she believes is scalable. “I would love to see every university have a class within its Global Studies department looking at the threats of global antisemitism and what does that present to the whole array of global challenges that we face as an international community and economics, politics, environmental, global health.”

“Globalize the Intifada,” the protestors chant outside. Dr. Sharon Nazarian could teach them a thing or two, but for now, they are heeding other voices.