Don't use censorship to fight antisemitism

I am Jewish, and I am afraid.

On Wednesday night, two young staffers at the Israeli embassy were killed outside of a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. by a man who chanted, "Free, free Palestine!" afterward. That comes on the heels of attacks on Israeli embassies and consulates in Mexico, Serbia, Denmark and Germany.

It's part of a worldwide uptick in antisemitic violence since the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023.

But I'm also afraid of censorship, which is the enemy of democracy in all times and places. On our college campuses, especially, free expression is under fire from the White House and its spineless accomplices in university leadership. And I fear that these horrific murders in Washington will make it yet more difficult for any of us to speak our minds.

Witness recent events at George Washington University and New York University, where graduation speakers were penalized for criticizing Israel's mass killings in Gaza. The offending orator at George Washington was banned from campus. NYU withheld its speaker's diploma.

Ostensibly, the two students were sanctioned for departing from their pre-approved speeches. But everyone knows the real reason: Our universities are cowering before the Trump administration, which has already withheld millions of federal dollars from Columbia and Harvard for allegedly failing to fight antisemitism in their ranks. 

And last week, the administration barred Harvard from enrolling international students on the grounds that it had allowed "anti-American, pro-terrorist" foreigners to "harass and physically assault" other people on campus, as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem charged.

Let's be clear: harassment and assault are illegal. So are all forms of physical violence. Anyone who engages in those acts — on our campuses, or outside of them — should be held criminally responsible.

But it is not illegal, in a democracy, to shout "Free Palestine" or "Globalize the Intifada." I understand why critics regard those chants as hateful; depending on the context, I might find these words hateful myself. 

Yet words are not violence. And once we lose sight of that distinction, free speech will become a dead letter. You can censor anything you don't like, on the grounds that it promotes violent behavior.

Black Lives Matter? In 2016, a Black gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas invoked the phrase. It was also a watchword for protesters who burned down several police stations following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. So we would need to shut down Black Lives Matter, lest it inspire yet more mayhem.

Tucker Carlson? His "replacement theory" — that whites were being pushed out by non-whites — was said to have inspired the white shooter who murdered ten African-Americans in Buffalo in 2022. Shut him down, too?

Salman Rushdie's “The Satanic Verses" sparked riots around the world, and — most recently — a near-fatal assault on Rushdie himself. His attacker believed Rushdie's book maligns Muslims. Shall we censor him, too?

And while you're at it, censor any speech you think is antisemitic. "For those who claim 'globalize the intifada' is peaceful and not antisemitic, the horrifying shooting of two Jewish adults is proof that you are wrong," declared Daniel Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, after the shootings in Washington. "Just because one person pulled the trigger doesn't mean they acted alone."

But just because one person used a phrase in an awful antisemitic act doesn't mean that everyone who uses the same phrase is antisemitic. And it certainly doesn't mean we should muzzle or penalize people for saying it.

Alas, that's where we're heading. And the only way to head that off is to rededicate ourselves to free speech for everyone, even when we think it's hateful.

That doesn't mean we should keep quiet about it. To the contrary, we need to speak out against hate wherever we see or hear it. Antisemitism is real, and it is rising. The only way to stop it is to raise our voices in opposition to it.

"Speak up or let it happen again," the Israeli Foreign Ministry urged, in a video it posted following the fatal shootings in Washington. "Because 'never again' means nothing if we stay silent."

That's exactly right. But free speech means nothing if we can stamp out anything we fear or despise. You can't have a democratic society — or a democratic university — on those grounds. It's a lesson we need to learn, over and over again, until we know it by heart.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.