Horn: The Return of the Big Lie: Antisemitism is winning

Long read with concluding thoughts applicable to all groups on what universities and other institutions need to do:

It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.

Harvard has already begun signaling change in this direction: The university recently reiterated and clarified rules regarding the time, place, and manner of student protests. For Harvard to take more of these steps would be huge, but I have struggled to understand why all of them still feel so small. Perhaps it’s because the problem is a multi-thousand-year fatal flaw in the ways our societies conceive of good and evil—and also because somewhere deep within me, I know what has been lost. There was a time, not so very long ago, when we didn’t have to prove our right to exist.

Among the mountains of evidence that Jewish students sent me, one image has stayed in my mind. There are videos of crowds chanting “Long live the intifada!” inside Harvard’s Science Center, and “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” in Harvard Yard, along with other places equally familiar from my student days. But I keep coming back to the crowds marching and screaming in front of Harvard Law School’s Langdell library, because Langdell is a sacred place for me. On my 22nd birthday, in 1999, when I was a senior at Harvard, a law student I’d met at Hillel took me up through Langdell’s maintenance passageways to the library’s rooftop, where he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

I watched the video of the students marching and screaming in front of Langdell, and in an instant I remembered everything: studying in campus libraries for my Hebrew- and Yiddish-literature courses, talking for hours with Muslim and Christian and progressive and conservative classmates, inviting friends of all backgrounds to join me at Hillel, scrupulously following the Jewish tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” in even the most heated debates, gathering for Shabbat dinners crowded with hundreds of students—and over those long and beautiful dinners, falling in love. My classmates and I often disagreed about the most important things. But no one screamed in our faces when we wore Hebrew T-shirts on campus. No one shunned us when we talked about our friends and family in Israel, or spat on us on our way to class. No crowds gathered to chant for our deaths. No one told us that there should be no more Jews. That night, my future husband and I worried only about getting in trouble for sneaking up to the library roof.

Source: THE RETURN OF THE BIG LIE: ANTI-SEMITISM IS WINNING