When ‘Tikkun Olam’ means defending antisemites, count me out.
If we Jews are too afraid to accept our own government stepping in to enforce our rights, whose violations are incontrovertible, then we learned nothing from our ancestors and our own history.
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This is a guest essay written by Ellen Ginsberg Simon, a Jewish mother, recovering lawyer, and compliance and ethics professional.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?
For the past 18 months, Jews around the world have faced brazen threats to our security and equality. Violating the civil rights of Jews in the West has become so commonplace, particularly in the realm of higher education, that the very notion of institutions being held accountable for their failures appears to gall their leadership.
We have begged for help. We have written to our elected representatives, harangued our alma maters, written articles, marched in the streets, cried in our homes, and prayed in our shuls for help.
For justice.
So, now that justice has arrived, why do so many Jews fear the outstretched hand?
Is it because we worry that Jews will bear the brunt of the blame of angry professors and students impacted by the U.S. federal government’s sanctions for violating our rights?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we already are being blamed for just about everything going wrong in the world right now. Anyone inclined to blame Jews for the U.S. federal government’s investigation into and punishment of institutions violating our rights is probably already draped in a keffiyeh and shouting in the streets for intifada.
If your friend turns on and blames you for the loss of a grant after your university failed to adhere to the Civil Rights Act, she was not your friend. There is no love to be lost there.
My question to these individuals is simply: What would you have the government do? You asked for help, for enforcement of our basic rights, for justice. Now that it has arrived, you fear the consequences of the help will outweigh the value it could render.
Would you prefer we duck our heads and pray this storm of hate passes without carrying us to oblivion? Would you prefer to play nicely with people who have dissembled to our faces for 18 months about their intentions to protect our youth and proceeded to do nothing?
If we have learned anything in the past year, it is that many of our universities and their leaders lack the will, capacity, or courage to take the necessary measures to protect a specific segment of their communities — their Jews.
They do not fear our anger at the mistreatment of our children and the devolution of our beloved schools. They fear those who tear with their teeth at the fabric of American and other Western societies. They do not bend to our rational requests for succor. They bend to the requests of those who despise them for their liberal values as much as they despise us.
We are small in number. We are easily dismissed. We are placated with promises of change that never materialize. And then, as history has taught us too often, we are easily massacred. The slope is slippery, and we are grasping with jagged nails at the landslide of societal indifference.
We need the help. We cannot do this alone. Our ancestors never received that help. We are suddenly on its receiving end after a desperate year, and people want to slap the hand back?
This is our generation’s inflection point. If we do not stand for ourselves, no one will stand for or with us. And someone is actually trying to stand with us.
Our halls of great learning are deeply, deeply troubled. They require the guidance of an external, independent hand not to control what is thought or said, but to ensure that laws are equitably enforced.
Nothing in the demand letters sent thus far by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and General Services Administration is earth-shattering.
The lists of demands to Columbia University and Harvard University represent a combination of common-sense good governance, enforcement of baseline legal obligations, and internal review and amelioration of the root causes of these schools’ violations — deep-seated, foreign funded antisemitism and anti-Americanism couched as pedagogy.
In the end, some of them likely will require consent decrees with monitorships (a la Penn State University in 2012) to ensure they address those root causes with step-by-step mapped out plans.
If we are too afraid to accept our own government stepping in to enforce our rights whose violations are incontrovertible, splashed across the news as they are on a daily basis, then we learned nothing from our ancestors and our own history.
We are not 1930s Germans with no conception of what lies ahead if we attempt to stay quiet and placate those who wish us harm. We know exactly what happens when we try to play ball. We know precisely where the coopting of our universities by ideological antisemites in one decade leads in the next. It was a terrifyingly short road to the camps.
Make no mistake: German universities were among the first institutions infiltrated by Nazism, made inhospitable to Jews, and then outright denied to Jews.
The Nazis of the 1930s used their universities to inculcate their youth in the science of eugenics, racial antisemitism, supremacist ideology, and a host of “academic” pursuits they deemed worthy as they burned our philosophy, science, history, and literature in mountainous conflagrations.
The Nazis of the 2020s are using our universities to inculcate our youth in Islamist, Marxist ideology, race wars, reverse discrimination, and illiberal, extremist philosophies as part of a concerted, decades-long effort to undermine our society through infiltration of our higher education system.
Our government is stepping in to prevent a recurrence of the worst episode in Jewish history.
Perhaps the reason you are upset is because you feel the measures are too extreme, disproportionately impact the sciences over the liberal arts, or will harm Jewish students who also have grants.
Withholding grants is a blunt instrument, I grant you, but fines are the basic means by which governments regulate industries. When large institutions are culturally sick, as these universities are, they often require a reboot.
One bad actor in a corporation violating anti-corruption laws can cost everyone at that company dearly. In this case, hundreds of students and faculty brazenly engaged in discrimination, harassment, disparate treatment, physical violence, destruction of property, and countless other legal violations that we all watched with our own eyes. They pose a very real threat to those around them, as well as to our society as a whole. The institutions that house this threat must be held to account.
Yes, the instrument is blunt, but it is not unforgiving. If universities acknowledge the wrongdoing that has occurred in plain sight of the entire world, and if they make good-faith efforts to implement required changes, the heavy hand will be lifted. The freezes are temporary, pending the appropriate response.
Do you fear that, if the government interferes with the activities of the very many rejectionist and antisemitic Middle East Studies departments, it constitutes infringement of free speech or sets a precedent for interference in academic freedom that will rebound to the detriment of Jews?
Entire academic departments at our universities refuse to acknowledge the existence of a whole country or even speak its name. They hold Jewish students accountable for anything they claim emanates from that country. They seek to demonize students and faculty from that country. They persecute Jewish students for merely believing that country and its roughly 10 million inhabitants have a right to exist.
The name of Israel is a sin on their lips. They are not just “anti-Zionist,” whatever that term means to them. They are anti Israeli existence. They are anti the existence of half the world’s Jewish population and anti any portion of the rest of the world’s Jews who refuse to align with them. They are anti Jews who attempt to exercise their academic freedom and study Israel or recognize its right to be.
Let us call their version of academic freedom what it truly is: academic supremacy. They are not open-minded, nor do the “anti-Zionist” academic crowd seek the freedom to express their opinions. They seek to shut down anyone else’s opinions that differ and to avoid any attendant consequences.
What they seek is not “freedom of speech,” but freedom for their speech alone. What they clamor for is not “academic freedom,” but the ability to continue to freely persecute the Jew in the academic setting who has the nerve to believe in his own right to exist. Academic freedom is an entirely one-way street in the overwhelming majority of Middle East Studies departments the world over.
In short, you are reading the situation backwards. Freedom of speech and academic freedom are very much at risk, but not from the government attorneys seeking to enforce the law. They are at risk from those who wield them as both a sword and a shield in one breath in order to undermine our institutions from within. They invert our values in a pernicious, twisted line of argument, trying to use them against us as they violate the very rights they claim to espouse.
My friends, we have never been so united as in the past year for the sake of our children. Link arms once more in face of the maelstrom, clutch each other tightly, and do not let those who seek to divide and conquer from within succeed. The enemy is not the party seeking to enforce our rights; it is the party rebelling against enforcement.
Stand for yourself and with those who would help you.
 | A guest post by
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This has to do more with hating Trump than caring about free speech or academic freedom. When both the Biden and Obama administrations came out with guidelines on how to handle cases of possible sexual assault, which obliterated due process, these same groups denouncing Trump as infringing on constitutional rights applauded. That they are willing to commit suicide because they don't like who is fighting antisemitism is repugnant. I am so tired of how stupid these groups are and how society thinks they represent me or any Jewish person with a thinking brain.
🤮 That’s what I have to say about the words anti-semite and Tikkun Olam being used in the same sentence. As my brilliant Zayde/ADL director, Nathan Perlmutter once said, “People who expect us to not defend ourselves, are asking us to commit suicide”. Of course, he said it a little more eloquently, with a Brooklyn accent and with a slight grin.