The October 7 Hamas massacres in southern Israel shook Jewish faith in the Israeli state’s ability to defend its people. Jews in the United States do not face this level of physical threat. But the response at elite universities to the massacres in Israel has shaken some Jews’ faith in the leading institutions of American liberalism.
On some campuses, student groups effectively defended Hamas, while many universities are reluctant to take institutional positions on the attack. The initial shipment by Cornell’s president stated that “the loss of human life is always tragic, whether it is caused by human actions such as terrorism, war, or mass shootings, or by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, or floods.”
Such silence has sparked a political uprising, among donors. Former Utah Governor John Huntsman announced that his family foundation was cessation of donations at the University of Pennsylvania. The president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote letters at Harvard and Stanford calling each institution a “beacon of wisdom” that “has failed us.” Journalist Barry Weiss was arrested a widespread sentiment when he wrote that “campus administrators — so quick to make statements about climate change and the war in Ukraine and Roe v. Wade — offered silence or doubt … in the face of mass murder.”
The outrage in the ivory tower is understandable, but it is important that Jews and supporters of Israel do not learn the wrong lessons from the episode. The organizing ideology of elite American universities today is not free inquiry and liberal neutrality. it’s identity politics. According to identity policies, groups considered marginalized are entitled to confirmation. But Jews have never made a good identity-politics client group. So when Jews demand that universities recognize a cause close to their hearts as readily as they recognize other causes, they are pulling a familiar lever in a broken machine.
Why are Jews not offered a place in the pantheon of favored groups deserving official sympathy and university recognition? First, there is the fact that Jews in the United States—at least the non-Orthodox Jews most likely to be represented on college campuses—are likely to be relatively prosperous. In the progressive context, this places Jews in a different category than other minorities. In 2020, California reviewed a model curriculum for high school ethnic studies (Governor Gavin Newsom finally blocked it) who instructed students to write an essay on “Jewish and Irish Americans Gain Racial Privilege.”
But the real issue is not Jewish demographics, but the ideology of social justice itself. “Despite his laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy,” the academic wrote Pamela Pareski in the Jewish journal Sapir in 2021, critical race theory “rests on narratives of greed, appropriation, dishonorable privilege, and hidden power – themes strikingly reminiscent of well-known anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.” If the driving force of history is the domination of the weak by the strong, into which bucket do the Jews fall? Group-based essentialist thinking on the right or left rarely ends well for Jews.
In their demands that universities recognize Jewish plight after the massacres in Israel, American Jews and their supporters are playing with the rules of identity politics. That’s fair game: They’re asking that Jews be treated like any other victimized group — and maybe universities, under pressure, will temporarily comply with those demands. In the long run, however, this is a fight the Jews cannot win.
Instead of trying to curtail the identity-politics system going bad, Jews would be better served by encouraging universities to remain neutral: Like the University of Chicago Kalven report 1967 he said, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics. he is not the critic himself.’ But this runs counter to the ideology of critical theory, which sees liberal neutrality itself as oppressive. Faithfulness to Kalven’s principle would mean pushing back when universities throw their institutional weight behind all and sundry progressive causes.
The aftermath of the Hamas massacres should lead influential people to take a hard look at what higher education has become. The critical theories of “resistance” and “decolonization” that universities have espoused and given prestige are overwhelmingly and sometimes viciously anti-Israel. But the answer cannot be to let academic identity politics slip away as long as Jews are among the beneficiaries. This will not work, and if universities are seen as instigating and encouraging identity politics except when it targets Jews, this could further fuel anti-Semitism. The problem must be addressed at its source.
In Israel, Jews after the massacre are rebuilding their defenses and, perhaps, bridging some of their political differences. American Jews can most productively commit themselves not to fighting for a place among the victims of critical theory, but to reviving the waning liberal tradition of the United States.