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Anti-Semitism On Campuses
00:04:22
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| Here is the title of the article from October 9, 2005. We're talking over 18 years ago, when young Jews major in anti-Semitism. | |
| That is the title of the book, of the column. | |
| Which is two very important points here. | |
| How old three. | |
| How old this issue is. | |
| The anti-Semitism of the campuses. | |
| Two, how the Los Angeles Times has radically changed. | |
| And three, how long ago I was right. | |
| And you'll say I'm blowing my horn or tooting my own horn. | |
| I don't care. | |
| That's fine. | |
| I have been saying things that are true and never alone. | |
| I've never claimed to be the only one saying these, but one of the only ones. | |
| When I said that the lockdowns were a catastrophe in April 2020, I was almost universally condemned. | |
| I'd like to make a list. | |
| Listen to this. | |
| Again, 18 years ago, American Jewry is experiencing a cognitive dissonance the likes of which it has never known. | |
| To illustrate, consider my recent lecture in Virginia Beach, Virginia, anti-Semitism at the universities. | |
| What can we do about it? | |
| I lectured in Virginia in 2005, anti-Semitism at the universities. | |
| It is very significant that a mainstream, that is, largely secular and liberal, Jewish organization, the Jewish Community Center, would fly a speaker from across the country to speak on anti-Semitism at universities. | |
| To understand how significant, one must appreciate how much Jews revere the university. | |
| First, education has a religion-like status in both religious and secular Jewish life, and the university is romantically thought of as the temple of education. | |
| Second, the university is regarded as the key vehicle to professional success. | |
| Third, the university is the most secular of all major institutions, and many Jews believe in secularism as much as Orthodox Jews believe in Judaism. | |
| Fourth, for many Jews, happiness is largely dependent on deriving pride and joy from their children, and nothing gives them more than being able to tell people that their child attends a prestigious university. | |
| Yet universities have become society's primary breeding ground for hatred of Israel. | |
| This is really important that I wrote it this long ago. | |
| It would be important if anybody did. | |
| Now I'm not the issue. | |
| Universities have become society's primary breeding ground for hatred of Israel. | |
| 2005 This hatred is often so intense that the college campus has become a haven for people who use anti-Zionism to mask their anti-Semitism. | |
| That's my article, by the way, my column, my Tuesday column up today is Yes, Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. | |
| Talk about that in the third hour of the show. | |
| Moreover, anti-Zionism itself is a form of anti-Semitism, even if some Jews share it. | |
| Why? | |
| Because anti-Zionism is not simply criticism of Israel, which is as legitimate as criticism of any country. | |
| Anti-Zionism means that Israel as a Jewish state has no right to exist. | |
| And when a person argues that only one country in the world is unworthy of existence, and that happens to be the one Jewish country in the world, one is engaged in anti-Semitism, whether personally anti-Semitic or not. | |
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Wow. What Changed You, Harvard?
00:02:12
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| And I remember this now. | |
| This anecdote I wrote about in the LA Times in 2005. Not long ago on my radio show, I invited a UCLA student who, on the occasion of Israel's birthday, had written a hate-filled article about the Jewish state in the Bruin, the UCLA school newspaper. | |
| I asked her if she had always been anti-Israel. | |
| She said that as a Jewish girl growing up in Britain, she was actually a Zionist, who had visited Israel a number of times on Jewish student trips there. | |
| What changed you, I asked. | |
| The university, she responded. | |
| Wow. | |
| This I didn't remember either. | |
| Listen to this. | |
| That sort of transformation may be what inspired Harvard University's president, Lawrence Summers, to deliver a speech in which he identified the university as replacing the far right as a center of anti-Semitism. | |
| Wow! | |
| Isn't that something? | |
| He was the only non-leftist president of Harvard almost in at least the last, I don't know, 25 more years. | |
| Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, Summers warned, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. | |
| Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect. | |
| If not their intent. | |
| Okay, just thought I would share that with you. | |
| I have no idea how I discovered it. | |