The Fear Trap: What’s Missing From the Current Campus Antisemitism Debate

An underappreciated but crucial dimension of the campus antisemitism wars is how much of the discussion turns on the idea...

The post The Fear Trap: What’s Missing From the Current Campus Antisemitism Debate first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Pro-Hamas students rallying at Harvard University. Photo: Reuters/Brian Snyder

An underappreciated but crucial dimension of the campus antisemitism wars is how much of the discussion turns on the idea of fear by Jewish students. It’s crowding out some other arguments that might be more successful.

“Jewish students, faculty, and others are fearful for their own safety,” William Ackman wrote in his Dec. 10 letter to members of the Harvard governing boards.

“Students were terrified by this protest and the violence it endorsed,” said a Nov. 30 statement by Harvard Hillel in response to an anti-Zionist demonstration in which activists stormed the campus calling for the destruction of Israel.

US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) spoke about the issue recently on Fox News, referring to a recent hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce where US college presidents testified on campus antisemitism: “What was probably the most tragic aspect of the hearing to me was there were a number of Jewish students from those schools in the audience sitting behind them, and to watch, just the fear, as they’re listening to the presidents of these universities fail to answer a basic question of moral clarity, it was abysmal.”

The president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, recently pointed to a 1990 law, the Clery Act, describing the hate crime of “intimidation” — literally, to render someone timid, or easily frightened. Berman wrote that “the definition of intimidation for Clery purposes is the one used by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program: ‘placing another person in reasonable fear of bodily harm through the use of threatening words and/or other conduct,’ even ‘without displaying a weapon or subjecting the victim to actual physical attack.'” There’s that “fear” word again.

Fear is a totally reasonable human reaction to recent events. When significant numbers of students and faculty react to the rape, beheading, and burning of Israelis on Oct. 7 by blaming Israel, by cheering on the attacks, or even by physically attacking Jewish people and property in America, “fear” from the minority of visibly Jewish or pro-Israel students and faculty makes sense, alongside horror, anger, and disgust.

This is the case even though the students and faculty, at a baseline level, are not cowards. I know some of the Jewish students at Harvard and at other universities; they are brave. Many universities, Harvard in particular, are indeed swamps of antisemitism. As a legal matter, Berman is doubtless correct about the legal definition of intimidation as something that elicits, as a reasonable reaction, the emotion of fear.

Yet emotion is a key word. That’s a practical problem on several levels.

From the point of view of educating future Jewish leaders or even just getting through the days ahead, the community needs to be cultivating the heroic virtues of courage and strength, not fixating on fear.

From a religious point of view, the Bible and the liturgy are full of messages from God and Moses to fear God, but not to fear people or enemies, because God is with the Jewish people. The emphasis is on the individual overcoming fear by placing faith in God, not on summoning university administrators to remove the fear-inspiring conditions.

Not that such demands on the administrators shouldn’t be made. But there are a range of ways to frame language around fear. On one end, there is, “I’m afraid that if one of these extreme anti-Israel students gets carried away, this could end in violence.” Or, “I’m afraid that if you don’t do something about these radical, mediocre professors, they are going to indoctrinate another generation of anti-Israel extremists, and ruin this university’s reputation.” On the other end, there is, “I’m afraid to go to class because I might be in the same lecture hall with the student I saw last week enthusiastically chanting ‘intifada, intifada, globalize the intifida.'”

From a legal point of view, the “reasonable fear” standard is subjective. As the college presidents told Congress last week, it depends on the context. What may make someone afraid after Oct. 7 might differ from what might have made someone afraid before Oct. 7. People may have different levels of fear response depending on their physical size, their level of self-defense training, their understanding of Arabic, whether they are alone or with a group, in daylight or in the dark, in the presence of police or without police, or even whether they themselves are visibly Jewish or not. As a result, it’s an imprecise yardstick to use to police campus speech. What about the Arab student who feels “reasonable fear” because of the presence of a Jewish student in an Israel Defense Forces t-shirt? The more fearful students claim to be, the more power they have to shut down the speech of the other side.

My own view of it is that for positive change to come on American college campuses, Jewish students and parents and their allies will need to accompany the “fear” argument with an array of other arguments.

There’s an educational argument that reasoned conversation rather than shouting slogans is more conducive to teaching and learning, and that narrow ideological conformity is educationally stifling of independent thought.

There’s a moral argument that Israel is superior to the Hamas terrorist organization, that antisemitic discrimination is wrong, and that part of a university’s job is teaching students to make such moral distinctions.

There’s an excellence versus mediocrity argument that the faculty leading the charge against Israel are mediocre and that adopting their policy recommendations, such as boycotting Israel, will damage the missions of teaching and research.

Relatedly, there’s a competition argument, that if a particular institution fails to navigate these issues successfully, then talent and resources will flee to competing institutions that do a better job.

If those other arguments fail to prevail, then fear — not only for bodily harm of individual students, but for the future of America — will indeed be warranted.

Until then, though, the focus on fear may be impeding progress for Jews and Israel on American college campuses.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

The post The Fear Trap: What’s Missing From the Current Campus Antisemitism Debate first appeared on Algemeiner.com.