Last week, I wrote about the upcoming Palestine Writes Literature Festival, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania from September 22 to 24. Featuring as speakers noted antisemites, running the gamut from Marc Lamont Hill to Roger Waters, the festival promises to be a veritable cornucopia of hatred of Jews: calls for ethnic cleansing of Jews from the land of Israel, accusations of Jews being subhuman, insinuations that a Jewish cabal controls American media, you name it. If it’s a form of antisemitism, it’s sure to be found on Penn’s campus this weekend. I hope it’s a coincidence that the festival’s last day coincides with Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism.
There’s an update to this story, and for those familiar with the rising tide of antisemitism on college campuses across the country, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Since the festival began drawing attention over the past week or so, there have been strident responses from the university’s Jewish alumni and supporters. More than 2,000 such concerned individuals signed an open letter sent to the university’s president, Liz Magill, urging her to issue a statement — without equivocating or falling into both-sides-ism, as higher-education administrators often do when they lack the courage to condemn antisemitism — “specifically denouncing the event’s platforming of known antisemitic speakers.” The letter’s authors noted that, had a university department sponsored a festival promoting anti-black or anti-Asian racism, homophobia, or any other kind of bigotry, there’s no question that Penn would immediately distance itself from and condemn the event. Of course, within the academy and progressive intelligentsia more broadly, Jews are themselves oppressors, and antisemitism isn’t a legitimate form of hatred deserving of attention.
Though the University of Pennsylvania does and should aim to foster an environment of free expression, the letter notes, “neither academic freedom nor freedom-of-speech principles prevent the university from using its own voice to speak out against antisemitism wherever and whenever it occurs, especially on campus.” The Palestine Writes organizers have a right to voice their opinions, but they do not have the right to do so on Penn’s land.
It turns out that’s too much to ask of Magill. In a statement obtained by Jewish Insider, she made perfunctory comments about how the university opposes all forms of hate including antisemitism, how Waters has been roundly condemned for his past words and actions, and how she is “personally committed more than ever to addressing antisemitism in all forms.” You’d think part of that commitment might entail disallowing such vile displays from taking place on the campus she runs. Apparently, at least in Magill’s eyes, it doesn’t. She invoked the university’s “responsibility to foster open dialogue and cultural diversity on campus.” But there’s a massive difference between open dialogue and cultural diversity and tacitly endorsing speakers who traffic in this kind of antisemitism.
And then, Thursday morning, something at once entirely predictable and yet bone-chilling for Penn’s Jewish students happened: A student at the university vandalized the school’s Hillel building. As the Daily Pennsylvanian reported, “a regular attendee” opened the building’s doors for a morning service, and the culprit entered:
“When I walked into Hillel, I noticed that the lobby was completely trashed — one of the podiums was smashed, one of the tables was smashed. There was stuff everywhere,” [University of Pennsylvania student Marc] Fishkind said. . . . “He immediately started smashing things, yelling ‘F**k the Jews’ and ‘They killed JC,’” Fishkind recounted from what he was told by someone who was there, adding that eventually, the perpetrator ran out of Hillel as the police arrived.
Make no mistake: As university president, Magill bears responsibility. By allowing the Palestine Writes Literature Festival to take place on her campus, and by allowing multiple academic departments to co-sponsor the event, she has helped foster an environment of antisemitism at Penn that empowers people like the student who vandalized the Hillel building. Magill doesn’t seem to understand that her inaction has consequences and that by building a permission structure for antisemitism, she has allowed antisemitic acts to occur.
It’s insane that we have to keep writing about events such as these. From my May 2022 piece in National Review:
Last month, several student groups signed a statement written by NYU School of Law’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter defending terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and accusing Zionists of controlling the media, a well-worn antisemitic canard.
On April 26, Georgetown Law School’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter hosted Mohammed El-Kurd, an activist who has accused Israelis of harvesting the organs of dead Palestinians and of having “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood & land.”
In recent weeks, the Rutgers chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi — a historically Jewish fraternity — faced multiple incidents of antisemitic harassment. First, activists waving Palestinian flags yelled antisemitic slurs and spat at fraternity brothers. A few days later, vandals threw eggs at AEPi’s house during the fraternity’s Holocaust Remembrance Day proceedings — the second year in a row the house was egged during Yom HaShoah.
On Saturday, April 23, at Northwestern, where I am an undergraduate, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter organized a candlelight vigil and painted messages across Northwestern’s “Rock,” a boulder on campus that student organizations paint for various promotional purposes.
By Tuesday morning, alongside the SJP chapter’s Instagram username, the rock bore the slogan “From the River to the Sea.”
Hatred of Jews on campus, of course, didn’t end in May 2022. Antisemitic attacks at American universities have nearly doubled in 2023, and almost 60 percent of Jewish college students in the United States have either experienced or witnessed antisemitism at their places of learning, according to an Ipsos poll. Another Ivy League school, Princeton University, has included on a humanities course syllabus the book The Right to Maim, which claims that Israelis harvest Palestinians’ organs, a variant on the time-worn “blood libel” canard.
The longer academic institutions take to actually address antisemitism on their campuses, the longer they’re allowing it to flourish. By hiding behind rote affirmations of a school’s commitment to diversity, to equity, to whatever progressive buzzwords they like to emblazon on their overpaid and underworked administrators’ doors — and by refusing to act when the time comes, like right now — university presidents like Liz Magill create the conditions in which, for instance, Hillel buildings are vandalized. I’m left with only one question: What did she think was going to happen?