A study by professors Jay P. Greene, Albert Cheng, and Ian Kingsbury, found that the more education a person has, the more anti-Semitic he is likely to be

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nti-Semitism has long been thought to be primarily a function of ignorance. Events since October 7, however, have disabused us of that view, as America’s most prestigious educational institutions have become the centers of virulent anti-Semitism.

Jewish students at Harvard have sued under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, charging Harvard with having become “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” And Harvard is not alone among elite universities in facing similar suits. Tenured faculty members at Columbia, Yale, and George Washington exalted over the slaughter of 1,200 Jews on October 7 and the taking of over 200 hostages, without any response from their universities.

Novelist and essayist Dara Horn, a Harvard alumna, was appointed by Harvard’s recently resigned president Claudine Gay to a campus commission on anti-Semitism. In that role, she was immediately deluged with material from current Jewish students at Harvard, where the Jewish population has declined from between 25% and 30% at the end of the ’60s to under 10% today. She learned quickly that the title of her highly acclaimed collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews, is obsolete. As John Podhoretz notes, the largest scale killing of Jews since the Holocaust, instead of winning sympathy for Jews, has “become a wellspring of a new and unprecedented series of assaults on Jews in the United States.”

In a recent Atlantic essay, “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies,” Horn details some of the avalanche of documentation that she received. Jewish students, she makes clear, are not trying to censor speech, no matter how offensive to Jews — like a recent cartoon circulated by pro-Palestinian student groups, depicting a hand with a Jewish star and a dollar sign holding nooses around the necks of an Arab and a black man.

Rather, they have been subjected to conduct that not only violates the Harvard student code but moves far beyond speech into the realm of action: mezuzos torn from door frames; posters defaced with pictures of Hitler, yemach shemo; being forced to run a gauntlet of students with bullhorns celebrating the slaughter of Jews in university libraries, classrooms, and dining halls; professors singling out Jewish students in class for humiliation; dorms rooms defaced with (unprintable) anti-Semitic epithets, threats of physical violence and death; and being spat at.

Students at other leading universities have faced even worse. Last week at UC–Berkeley, the crown jewel of the University of California system, Jewish students had to be escorted by campus security through underground tunnels, after a group called “Bears for Palestine” (after the UC mascot), which had vowed to prevent an Israeli lawyer and IDF reservist from speaking, broke the glass to the room in which the event was taking place and tried to enter. And a few months ago, Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York had to barricade themselves in the library for hours, as a mob howled for Jewish blood outside.

 IT TURNS OUT that the apparent paradox suggested in the title of Horn’s Atlantic essay is based on a false premise: Anti-Semitism is not exclusively a disease of dummies (though it will certainly turn people stupid). Nor is it confined to those without college or graduate degrees. Indeed, a study by professors Jay P. Greene, Albert Cheng, and Ian Kingsbury, found that the more education a person has, the more anti-Semitic he is likely to be.

Though earlier studies had suggested a correlation between low education levels and anti-Semitism, Greene et al suspected that those with higher education were too sophisticated to give “wrong” answers when asked straight up how they felt about Jews or whether they agreed with blatantly anti-Semitic stereotypes. So instead, the researchers used a test based on double standards by asking about comparable cases involving a Jewish example and a non-Jewish example. And they found that “more highly educated people were more likely to apply principles more harshly to Jewish examples.”

In the test, no subject was asked both about the Jewish case and the non-Jewish case to prevent them from discerning the nature of the test. When asked, for instance, whether “attachment to a foreign country creates a conflict of interest,” respondents with four-year degrees were 7 percent more likely, and those with advanced degrees 13 percent more likely, to express concern when the country was Israel than when it was Mexico. Those with advanced degrees were 12 percent more likely to support the military in prohibiting Jewish yarmulkes than in prohibiting Sikh turbans. While a majority of respondents supported a ban on public gatherings during Covid, those with advanced degrees were 11 percent more likely to do so with respect to Orthodox funerals than BLM protests.

The authors conclude their Tablet article (“Are Educated People More Anti-Semitic?” March 30, 2021), by quoting Harvard professor emerita Ruth Wisse, who argues that anti-Semitism flourishes when “it forms part of a political movement and serves a political purpose.” And such political causes are increasingly those favored by the well-educated in the US.

Horn herself provides a fascinating real-life example of differential treatment involving Jews. She wrote a piece on anti-Semitism for the New York Times. During the editorial process, she was relentlessly fact-checked on her assertion that violation of Jewish women had been widespread in the 1918–1921 Russian civil war and in the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad. Yet that same paper rushed to print a highly inflammatory (an ancient Tunisian synagogue was burned down in response) and false Hamas claim that Israel had bombed a Gaza hospital and inflicted 500 casualties, with no apparent fact-checking.

Often times the differential attention focused on Jews reflects an obsession with us. Since 1948, the number of casualties in the Arab-Israeli conflict ranks somewhere around 50th in world conflicts. Yet it has sucked up almost all the attention. Over half a million people were killed in the Syrian civil war, including some with poison gas, and millions displaced from their homes. Black Darfurian tribesman have been slaughtered by Sudanese Arabs in even greater numbers. Can anyone remember one mass demonstration protesting those slaughters? Or against Russia’s deliberate targeting of hospitals, apartment buildings, and other civilian sites in Ukraine? Or against Chinese concentration camps for two million imprisoned Uighurs? Compare that silence to dozens of anti-Israel demonstrations every day in cities and on campuses around the world.

Israel is constantly accused of genocide against Palestinians, even though under Israeli rule, Palestinians life expectancies increased 50 percent and infant mortality declined by three-quarters. Yet it is Hamas whose charter explicitly calls for the extermination of Jews around the globe — i.e., genocide. This is inversion of the worst sort. The accusation of genocide against Israel is a form of erasure of the Holocaust; alleged Jewish guilt an expiation of gentile sins of many greater times magnitude.

ONE OF THE PILLARS of Horn’s long essay is Professor David Nirenberg’s 2013 work Anti-Judaism, which argues that Western culture from early Christianity to the present has defined itself in opposition to Judaism. Judaism is, in the eyes of many of the main figures in the development of Western culture, seen as the embodiment of evil, however defined by that particular culture. Thus for the Marxists, Jews are the worshippers of Mammon; for the capitalists, they are all Bolsheviks. For the ardent nationalists, Jews are the rootless cosmopolitans; for the post-nationalist, they are ardent nationalists.

Whatever a particular group of people consider the worst feature of the social order, writes Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, is how they define the Jews. And Feldman adds, in a long Time essay, “the most perniciously creative currents in contemporary anti-Semitic thought are more likely to come from the left.”

Jews have run afoul of all the shibboleths of fashionable leftist theories. The prime example of an indigenous people returning to their ancient homeland, they are labeled “colonialists.” Over half of Israelis stem from non-European lands, but they are now white supremacists. Oppressed and degraded over the millennia, Jews are now the epitome of the white-adjacent oppressor class.

Defining the culture is the work of intellectuals, not of rubes. Niall Ferguson, late of Oxford and Harvard, reminds us that the most enthusiastic Nazi party members came from the professorate and the judiciary. (See “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Free Press, December 11, 2023.)

Intellectuals traffic in theory and abstractions, and seek to give theoretical and intellectual consistency to their anti-Semitism. Paul Berman wrote a long piece over 20 years ago on the youthful radicalism of then German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. Among Fischer’s friends from that period of his life was a mechanic named Joachim Klein, who became a member of the notorious Baader-Meinhof Gang. At some point, Klein found himself in an anti-Zionist training camp in an Arab country, surrounded by European radicals on the one side and neo-Nazis on the other.

Unable to make sense of that apparent contradiction, Klein left behind his radical colleagues. But poor Joachim was, alas, just a mechanic. Had he been an intellectual, he would have developed a higher synthesis making sense of neo-Nazi and far-left unity. Isn’t that, for instance, what those who parade in support of Hamas butchers, yet would be quickly thrown from the roof if they dared to turn up in Hamas territory, do in the name of intersectionality?

Those living in the realm of abstraction are particularly subject to the utopian allure of perfect societies, products of the imagination, and thus particularly lethal. The more glorious the dreamed-of utopia, the easier it is to justify the murder of millions of human beings. Nearly two centuries ago, the German radical Karl Heinzen declared, “The greatest benefactor of mankind will be he who makes it possible for a few men to wipe out thousands.... Even if we have to blow up continents or spill a sea of blood in order to finish off the barbarian party, we should have no scruples about doing it.” Not by accident was Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge caused the deaths of over two million fellow Cambodians in order to “restart civilization,” a teacher of French literature, and Abimael Guzman, leader of the brutal Shining Path guerillas in Peru, a college philosophy professor.

Utopians from Paul to Marx seem to bear a particular animus to Jews, whom they view as the great impediment to the realization of their perfect society.

So rather than being surprised that the situation at Harvard and Berkeley is as bad as it is, perhaps we should be glad it is not worse. When Harvard’s new interim president created a second task on anti-Semitism, he chose as its co-chair Derek Penslar (wouldn’t you know it, the director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies), who has affixed his signature to a letter characterizing Israel as an apartheid state and described the problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard as overblown. Penslar’s co-chairman resigned, as did Conservative rabbi David Wolpe of the Harvard Divinity School, from the original task force of which Dara Horn was a member, on the grounds that they believed little or nothing would come from their efforts.

But at least no one on the anti-Semitism task force openly viewed the solution to anti-Semitism at Harvard as expelling all the Jews.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1002. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)