Indifferent to Anti-Semitism
Jay Bergman, Central Connecticut State University

Late this January, former president Jimmy Carter spoke in Waltham, Massachusetts at my alma mater, Brandeis University, for which there will always be a warm place in my heart.

The four years I spent there were the most intellectually stimulating of my life. Faculty and students took ideas seriously, and expressed them irrespective of how others received them. Those who took offense at what people wrote and said responded with arguments of their own, and no one claimed a constitutional right never to be offended in the course of obtaining a college education.

But the response of its president, Jehuda Reinharz, to Carter's talk shows that the institution has lost its way. Carter came to Brandeis to speak on Israel, about which he has written a book with a title Palestine Peace Not Apartheid that is as inaccurate as it is gratuitously incendiary; analogizing Israel's policies on the West Bank to South African apartheid is absurd, and numerous reviewers of the book, liberals as well as conservatives, non-Jews as well as Jews, have called attention to its many misstatements, distortions of the historical record, and half-truths.

Still, as long as Brandeis students and faculty wanted to hear what Carter had to say about his book, and about the Arab-Israel conflict generally, nothing should have been done to stop them. Universities, more than any other institution in society, are places where all views, no matter how repugnant they may seem to some, should be heard. Censorship is the one thing on college campuses that should be expressly forbidden.

But censoring speakers and condemning them are different. Speech that offends should be condemned, and persons are not relieved of their obligation to do so, when they themselves are the ones who are offended, just because they happen to hold positions of authority.

This is where President Reinharz showed an abysmal lack of leadership. At no time before or after Carter's speech did he express publicly a single word of condemnation of the flagrantly anti-semitic smears the former President, in recent statements of his, has leveled against American Jews -- that they control the media and intimidate politicians, and that their principal political allegiance is to a foreign country, Israel, instead of to their own country.

I'd wager that if a member of the Ku Klux Klan were speaking at Brandeis, Reinharz would defer to no one in denouncing the speaker's racism and hatred of African-Americans. As well he should. But when someone trafficking in the hoariest anti-semitic allegations comes to Brandeis -- which describes itself as "the only non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored college or university in the United States" -- he is mute.

By slyly insinuating that American Jews are disloyal, Carter is effectively denying them their rightful place in the glorious mosaic of ethnic, religious, and racial heterogeneity that is America; indeed his charge is comparable in the harm it will do to claiming that African-Americans are lazy and shiftless, Irish-Americans are drunks, and Polish-Americans are stupid.

But malicious absurdities such as these gain currency only when persons holding high positions in American society, such as Jehuda Reinharz, fail to condemn them. By his silence on Carter's views, the president of Brandeis University implicitly legitimizes the very worst of these views, and in doing so contributes to the fissuring of America, to the lazy and wholly unfounded assumption that hyphenated-Americans are not genuine Americans, and maybe not even Americans at all.

Were he alive today, Louis Brandeis, an American Jew who was a Zionist but also served his country loyally as a justice of the United States Supreme Court, would undoubtedly be appalled by this whole sorry episode at the university that bears his distinguished name.

NAS11:21 AM