that America’s elite universities were exposed as indifferent to overt hatred of Jews and harassment on their campuses, and clearly applied one set of speech codes to those who libeled Jews and quite another for all other groups. The message of the last three months of anti-Semitic fury is that it has now become so deeply embedded within the American left that it is no longer controversial, if not embraced. But how did this ancient hatred find a rebirth among supposedly progres- sive Americans? The diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) and woke recalibration of the Demo- cratic Party, particularly as it accel- erated after the death of George Floyd and furor at Donald Trump, increasingly fixated on “white supremacy,” “white rage,” and “white privilege” in unapologetic collective disparagement. Jews were included in this new campus cultural Marxist binaries of oppressed/oppressor and victim- ized/victimizer — especially given the demonization of Israel by its some 500 million Islamic Arab neighbors. One of the tenets of DEI ideology is that those collectively deemed oppressed cannot themselves be racists or prejudiced against other groups. And when they prove to be just that, they claim exemption from accountability as perpetual victims themselves. Thus, Jews in particu- lar became targets of a new round of prejudice, the recipients of an emerging trifecta of hatred: renewed envy and hatred of Jews, the new woke mainstream demonization of
whites, and the increasingly accepted campus orthodoxy of smearing Israel as a white, colonial interloper. New reparatory university admis- sions saw SAT scores dropped, and high-school grade point averages diminished in importance as race
and professors from illiberal Middle East regimes now enjoy visiting billets on American campuses. As a result, the fusion of left-wing DEI ideology with the so-called radi- cal, anti-Israel Palestinian cause became campus orthodoxy. And this
THE MESSAGE OF THE LAST THREE MONTHS OF ANTI-SEMITIC FURY IS THAT IT HAS NOW BECOME SO DEEPLY EMBEDDED WITHIN THE AMERICAN LEFT THAT IT IS NO LONGER CONTROVERSIAL, IF NOT EMBRACED.
and gender identity became para- mount. Consequently, meritocracy disappeared. The result was that so-called “white” populations on campuses have dropped to 20–40 percent of admis- sions, despite constituting 65–70 percent of the American demo- graphic. And the number of Jewish students, who once comprised 20-30 percent of Ivy League enrollments has fallen to 10-15 percent. At the same time, universities recruited hundreds of thousands of students from the Middle East, who enrolled on oil-fed scholarships and paid the full tuition costs of American universities. Moreover, the oil-rich Gulf states during the last quarter-century have lavishly funded Middle East university programs, richly endowing professor- ships in Arabic and Islamic studies. Hundreds of scholars, intellectuals,
marriage was enhanced by a much greater number of foreign students and faculty from the Middle East and an increasingly diminishing number of Jewish students. The result is a campus orthodoxy that mainstreams anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism — and inculcates millions of American youth in such hatred. And the American left, and increasingly the Democratic Party, echo that venom. Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian, classicist, political commen- tator, and farmer. He is Senior Fellow in Residence at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Hanson is the author of hundreds of articles, scholarly papers, and newspa- per editorials on matters ranging from ancient Greek, agrarian and military history to foreign affairs, domestic politics, and contemporary culture. He has written or edited 26 books.
Volume 18 Issue 1 • 9
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