May 1, 2024

I spent the last several months as a teaching fellow at the University of Southern California and its Center for the Political Future. I had a great group of students – interested in helping shape a better political and civic future. Yet with what we all see exploding on campuses nationwide, I’m more concerned than ever about our political future – as Jews and as Americans. The hatred of Israel and of Jews is now on full display – some of it coming from our own people. As I have watched and listened to what has been brewing at Columbia University, I can’t help but recall the cautionary history of another Columbia — in the 1930s: the Columbia prison/concentration camp (also known as Columbia-Haus). That Columbia was a Nazi concentration camp situated in the Tempelhof area of Berlin – and one of the first such camps established by the regime.

Alas, our people have always had our very own antisemites – or what we might more accurately call Jew-haters.

Adding to the tragic story of the Nazi Columbia camp is the fact that some of its very first prisoners were Jews who had actually supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Alas, our people have always had our very own antisemites – or what we might more accurately call Jew-haters. Exhibit A: Max Naumann, a Jew born in Berlin and educated as a lawyer. In 1921, he founded the Verband Nationaldeutscher Juden (alternately referred to as the League — or Association — of National German Jews).  The Association’s stated goals were the total assimilation of Jews into the German volk, eradication of Jewish identity and expulsion of Eastern European Jewish immigrants from Germany. He was also an ardent opponent of Zionism. He published a magazine that in 1927 had 6,000 subscribers. 

Naumann’s organization supported both Hitler and the Nazi party – and for a brief while served as a useful pawn for the party. Naumann even issued a manifesto claiming Jews were being “fairly treated” by the Nazis. Having outlived its propaganda value for the Nazis, however, the Gestapo outlawed the League/Association in 1935. Max Naumann was sent by the Gestapo, along with others of his ilk, to Columbia. He was later released and managed to live until 1939, but unfortunately for many of Jews who supported the Verband, their support did not spare them from the deadly fate of much of the rest of European Jewry. In fact, members of the Verband were among the very first to get rounded up.

What’s happening on our campuses is tragic, enraging, sad, disheartening and, frankly, scary. Not every criticism of Israel is de facto antisemitic or anti-Jewish. If that was the case, about half of Israel might be labeled as such. But much of the hatred against Israel and the Jewish people that has exploded on campuses – and elsewhere – is textbook antisemitism. Terms such as colonialist, genocidal, racist and apartheid have been coopted to label Israel as a pariah. Moreover, the oft-chanted “from the river to the sea” is a clear call for the elimination of the State of Israel and its Jews. Shouts at Columbia University to burn down Tel Aviv are a clear call to genocide – if only people would really listen.

Most painful and upsetting is seeing members of our own Jewish community chanting this call to genocide, calling for boycotts, divestments and sanctions and calling for an end to the Jewish state. As a Jew, I’m mortified and horrified.

But most painful and upsetting is seeing members of our own Jewish community chanting this call to genocide, calling for boycotts, divestments and sanctions and calling for an end to the Jewish state. As a Jew, I’m mortified and horrified. And as a member of the LGBTQ community, I’m also dumbfounded by groups like Queers for Palestine. Just trying being a queer in Palestine: It’s often a death sentence in Gaza, the West Bank and, of course, Iran.

Much has been written and discussed recently trying to understand the antipathy that a certain number of vocal Jews have developed to Israel. Not to mention that they are cover for a growing chorus of antisemites and pawns of those who would gladly eradicate us if they had the chance. Free speech is a bedrock of our American democracy and social and political activism is very much a part of the university experience – but we have a generation of young Jews who don’t know the history of our people – people like my father of blessed memory, who escaped Romania during the Holocaust and survived thanks to his migration to Israel. Or my mother, also of blessed memory, whose parents escaped pogroms in Russia and Ukraine and lived to raise a family only because they found refuge in Eretz Yisrael.

History is replete with Jews, and persons of Jewish ancestry, being our own worst enemies. Jewish members of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace or Not in Our Name will emphatically deny that they represent even a whiff of antisemitism. For them, opposing Israel is often even an expression of their Judaism. But make no mistake, they are serving as foils for terrorists, misogynists, homophobes and those who would perpetrate a real genocide that would inevitably ensue if the perverted dream of “from the river to the sea” was, heaven forbid, to be realized.

In 1905, the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 1948, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill repeated Santayana’s message. How right they were. As we witness what burst into view at schools such as Columbia University, we would all do well to remember the Columbia of 1934 – and the anti-Jew Jews who came to painfully learn that nothing good can come of aiding, abetting, and supporting those who would seek to destroy us.

Ron Galperin served as the Los Angeles City Controller from 2013 to 2022.

During the cold month of January 1944, Arthur Koestler wrote about a dream he kept having. “It is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or brushwood,” he wrote. “There is a busy road at no more than 10 yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing and chatting.” 

Koestler noted that he and others had been at it for about 10 years, beginning in 1933 when the German Reichstag was set on fire. “We said, if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.”

We are not living in Nazi Germany; Oct. 7, for all its horror, was not the Holocaust. But there’s a sense of being in the thicket again, screaming while an indifferent — or worse — crowd walks on. My X/Twitter feed contains scenes eerily reminiscent of the past. A Jewish professor is denied access to his own campus. Students form a human chain to drive Jews out of their encampment. A student protest leader calmly explains to an interviewer that Jews (“Zionists”) don’t deserve to live. A Jewish student is jabbed in the eye with a flagpole. A rabbi at one of the country’s leading universities advises Jews to stay away from campus for their safety. 

Above all, there’s the atrocities of Oct. 7 and the world’s response to them. “I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness,” Koestler continued. “People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, white books, newspapers, magazines and whatnot. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine of out of 10 average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it!”

Koestler was writing in the New York Times to people whose attention he sometimes grabbed for a moment, so that “a certain dumb wonder” appeared on their faces, before they shook themselves “like puppies who have got their fur wet” and resumed walking, “protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound.” They were, in short, bystanders, disbelieving the atrocity reports but all too disinterested.

Today I’m haunted by people who are not disinterested, but are all too intent on denying the atrocity reports in defense of those committing them. 

Today I’m haunted by people who are not disinterested, but all too intent on denying the atrocity reports in defense of those committing them. People like Susan Sarandon, dressed in a jaunty “Simpsons” jacket, continuing to walk briskly while a young Jewish Iranian woman tries talking to her about Oct. 7. “All those myths about babies in ovens and the rapes…” the actress says, her beautiful face contorted. “You are not up to speed.” 

Or there’s The Intercept, founded by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, which last month published a lengthy piece under the headline “Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times Oct. 7 Expose: ‘They Were Not Sexually Abused.’” The article is cited by “pro-Palestinian” supporters such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which published its own lengthy version “debunking” the accounts of mass rape. The socialists concluded: “To this movement, ‘believe women’ means believing the women of Palestine.” 

Or there’s Electronic Intifada, which has issued a series of “exposes.” During last month’s installment — “NY Times found no Oct. 7 rape victims, reporter admits” — Ali Abunimah smoothly asserts that “there is no physical or forensic evidence” of rape, only “dubious and noncredible eyewitness accounts.” His interviewer, Nora Barrows-Friedman, shakes her head. “Incredible,” she says.

There’s an oddly perverse kind of depravity at work here. It’s actually more disturbing than extreme callousness. After all, you have to confront the evidence in order to dismiss it. You have to read about the young man at the music festival who left a final voicemail telling his brother he loved him and asking him to look after his kids; read about the kibbutz strewn with corpses; read about the little boys asking their grandmother how their mother died; read about the phone call with the 80-year-old who told his daughter the fingers on his left hand had been removed and who died as she begged him to stay with her — and wave it away like so much noise. Your only interest is finding something, anything, to tear apart. Inevitably you find it — a reporter’s unseemly social media “like,” a trivial inaccuracy — and declare that the overwhelming evidence that Hamas committed atrocities is a lie. You howl that 40 babies were not beheaded but say nothing about those who were burned alive. You pounce on a tiny discrepancy to cast doubt on whether two teenage sisters were raped and ignore the undeniable fact they were murdered. You reassure your tribe that there is nothing to be troubled over, provide endless hyperlinks from sources agreeing with you, and confidently assume that no one will investigate what the enemy has to say.

It isn’t suffering that makes the Jews unique, but the clear signs that so many people — our college peers, work colleagues, former friends — think we deserve it. 

“A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; a million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness,” Koestler wrote. Countless millions of people today are experiencing horrors in our troubled planet, and they barely prick the attention — assuming they’re known at all — by today’s “bien pensants.” It isn’t suffering that makes the Jews unique, but the clear signs that so many people — our college peers, work colleagues, former friends — think we deserve it.  

So we go back to screaming, thinking that this time around, surely, people will hear. But they keep walking and chatting, or insisting there’s nothing in the thicket at all.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”

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

Last week, as we have witnessed at so many universities like Columbia, Harvard, Yale and USC, anti-Israel protesters descended onto UCLA’s campus, set up “encampments” and posted their demands to the University’s leadership. Among them, they demanded UCLA “sever all UC-wide connections to Israeli universities, including study abroad programs, fellowships, seminars and research collaborations, and UCLA’s Nazarian Center.” This was a reference to the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies which our Family Foundation named and endowed in 2010 and where I serve as Chair of its Community Advisory Board. 

These protesters were demanding, essentially, the censorship of knowledge they don’t like.

Our Foundation’s primary mission is “the promotion of education as the most important catalyst for societal change.” To us, this means for students to achieve life success, there is a fundamental need to develop critical thinking skills, to learn with depth, to grapple with complexity and to put facts at the center of their learning.

Our support for UCLA, a most revered public institution, and the endowment of the Nazarian Center for Israel studies, is one of our greatest expressions of that commitment. We understood then, and are today more convinced than ever, that only through a serious scholarly and holistic study of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state can we fully understand and appreciate the nation and its people. Academically rigorous study of the complexities the state faces with regards to its domestic, regional, and international challenges equips UCLA students with the knowledge and understanding of what the contemporary state of Israel truly represents.

We are a proud Jewish Iranian-American family, who have been warmly welcomed and embraced by two great nations in our lifetime. My father was forced to uproot our family from Iran in 1979 in order to flee the fanaticism, extremism, and antisemitism of the Iranian Revolution. The kind of hatred and extremism we are now witnessing on US campuses. We fled first to Israel and eventually to the United States, seeking refuge in a democratic country that welcomed and protected Jews.

My parents were able to rebuild our lives and instilled in us a love of our new homeland and an understanding that America, its democratic institutions, and its generosity toward us and all immigrants seeking refuge was something that we should cherish. Our family has tried to find impactful ways to give back to the country that has given us so much through the work of our Foundation.

Because we as a family so highly valued the two countries which have embraced us, and two countries that share fundamental democratic values, we knew that the Center for Israel Studies had to be built on a foundation committed to rigorous independent scholarship about America’s strongest and only democratic ally in the Middle East. Through in-depth, holistic, and multidisciplinary curricula about Israel in the classroom, diverse and rich public programming, by inviting Israeli visiting scholars in the fields of law, sociology, history, the arts and economics, the Center offers UCLA students from diverse backgrounds a lens onto the only Jewish and democratic state in the world. And by being housed within the International Institute, Israel is taught just as Mexico and Japan and Germany are taught, as a country with its own complexities, its own rich history, and its own socio-political dynamics. The Center’s students — Jewish and Christian, Muslim and Buddhist and atheist, Latino, Black, Asian, and White, Israeli, Chinese and French and all others — are welcomed into the Center’s classrooms and invited to engage, question and learn from a diverse array of perspectives.

Our family and our Nazarian Center Advisory Board unequivocally and stridently reject any calls for boycotting academic centers of learning and research of any country, and specifically of Israel.

So today, our family and our Nazarian Center Advisory Board unequivocally and stridently reject any calls for boycotting academic centers of learning and research of any country, and specifically of Israel. Impeding access to knowledge is a medieval and anti-democratic tactic that has never led to any positive societal change. Those targeting such scholarship—in many cases animated by antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred—aim only to vilify Israel and those who study and teach about it. Boycotting academic institutions is blatant censorship, just as book burning is.

We proudly stand with Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA and across the country who are facing intimidation and threats during this deeply frightening and unprecedented time.

We condemn these groups’ attempts to denigrate the Center’s core mission of free academic inquiry, just as we most stridently condemn violent words and actions that we are unfortunately witnessing from some of the anti-Israel protesters toward their fellow Jewish and Israeli students. We proudly stand with Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA and across the country who are facing intimidation and threats during this deeply frightening and unprecedented time.

That is simply not what democracy is about nor what academia is about and certainly not what my parents brought us to America for.

Dr. Sharon S. Nazarian is President, Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation and Chair of Community Advisory Board, UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.