Are The Kids Alright?

What has created the conditions that support the widespread praise of terrorism and anti-Semitism on campus? It’s deeply disturbing. And it’s anything but liberal.

Note: This essay is adapted from a piece I wrote ten years ago, with additional commentary on today’s campus protests against the State of Israel, in support of Palestinian rights and - unfortunately in some cases - in support of Hamas, the terrorist group that sent a wave of death squads into Israel on October 7, killing 1,400 people (often in gruesome fashion) and taking more than 200 hostages.

Also, if you like this work, please consider subscribing and supporting this publication with a paid subscription. Readership is growing, and I welcome all the new-comers. 

On a rainy night in 1983, I raced around the corner of Hamilton Hall toward College Walk and the gate on Amsterdam Avenue. I'd drawn the dorm suite assignment of meeting the delivery man from Hunan Balcony. The campus was partly closed, heavily circled with police and campus security because of a series of large-scale protests organized by students to protest Columbia University's continued investment in funds that did business with the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. It wasn't exactly 1968, Vietnam and Mark Rudd, but the crowds had been sufficiently boisterous - and University officials talked vaguely of trouble-making "outsiders." 

It was dark and chilly, and I jogged around Hamilton and ran directly into one of those feared outside agitators, who I immediately recognized. "Hey, hold up," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was carrying a megaphone at the head of a dripping contingent of perhaps a hundred protesters. The weather had clearly held down attendance. There seemed to be more cops than activists. The crowd moved toward Amsterdam Avenue and I moved with it. The signs demanded that Columbia divest itself of all South African investments, in order to stem the flow of capital to the white ruled country and pressure the Apartheid regime to give up its racist hold on power.

Divestment began as a liberal strategy to pressure South Africa as far back as 1962, but it came of age in the early 1980s and Columbia became the first hotbed of university action (which was ironic, given its paltry endowment at the time). Divestment extended the Sullivan Principles, developed by a minister who was also a board member of General Motors, which demanded racial fairness in corporate dealings. The pressure point was institutional investors, particularly universities, municipal bond issuers, and public pension funds. At Columbia, the Committee Against Investment in South Africa grew rapidly, and included the great student leaders of my time, Danny Armstrong and Stuart Garcia, as well as a young Hawaiian transfer student named Barry Obama. 

There is no ex post facto case for my own activism in the divestment cause (I was no leader), but I did attend several rallies after that night and I did walk around campus a few times with signs, mainly because I liked the people who were involved. For example: Stuart Garcia had been my partner in the lab section of a behavioral psychology course taught by Eugene Galanter, who was a protege of B.F. Skinner, and we had a gas locking each other up in the Skinner boxes and tallying reactions to stimuli the experiments demanded. I met Stuart in 1980 at freshman orientation, and introduced the young Texan and a few other out-of-towners to the wonders of Max's Kansas City, Danceteria, and the Peppermint Lounge. He was a natural politician, had the common touch. Short, friendly, with a shock of thick straight hair that levitated when he walked. There is no doubt in my mind that he'd be a figure in American politics had he lived, either in his native Texas or somewhere else. He was open, not shy, a friend to all - my opposite, in those years, really. Stuart was only 23 when he died, one of the earliest losses of the tragic AIDS epidemic. But in 1983 he was gloriously alive and marching, and some of those he marched with carried signs with pictures of Nelson Mandela on them. He was my friend - and you followed your friends.

To those of us who frequented New York's musical clubs in that era, Mandela came to us in song as well as image. The Specials were a great British ska band with a sound that moved, they played all the clubs in New York when they were in town, and ska ran second only to over-driven punk rock (and vintage Motown, if truth be told) on the big jukebox downstairs at Max's. As Columbia students marched, the Specials released a protest song with a hook so damned big you couldn't help but sing Nelson Mandela's name all day long. Free-ee-ee-ee Nelson Mandela. At the time, of course, Mandela was still in prison for this efforts to overthrow Apartheid; he'd serve another six years for a total of more than 27 years. His body abused, but his mind is still free. You're so blind that you cannot see. The song was everywhere. And the Specials were cool.

Years later, I found myself chatting briefly with Illinois Senator Barack Obama in the receiving line at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Dressed uncomfortably in rented white tie and tails - required get-up for the dais at the 2008 Al Smith Dinner - Obama stood next to Cardinal Egan, who in turn stood next to Senator John McCain and his wife Cindy, in the traditional show of bi-partisanship and Catholic elan that defines the famous occasion during Presidential election years. Obama looked tired and not entirely comfortable, but I waded in anyway. We talked a little bit about Columbia days and sitting on the steps in front of Low Library in warm weather. And then I told him I knew he'd been in the divestment marches, part of that movement. "It was formative," he said, in that professorial tone we've all come to know, with the clipped mid-western "r" he uses. We shook hands and I moved on, somewhat concerned that I'd left the impression that I was a college rabble-rouser.

Obama was right. It was a formative time, and the figure of Nelson Mandela and twenty-three million countrymen denied basic human rights did tend to stick. The divestment battle and the rallies to push the United States to do the right thing in South Africa made a serious difference. Winning victories, said my late friend Al Giordano, a brilliant organizer with a Vince Lombardi mindset, is what drives real citizens movements: "Mandela will always be one of history’s great role models in the art of building public opinion to win victory, instead of suffering defeat after defeat."

On that rainy night on Morningside Heights, I did finally find the delivery man on Amsterdam Avenue. But I think I found something more as well, and it was linked to man in a jail cell thousands of miles away. I had no role in that struggle at all, but I saw the art of building public first hand, the power of the story in the cause. And the protest songs had big hooks, besides.

But it was more than that - the divestment strategy worked because it leveraged strong institutions to make crucial decisions. Divestment spread from the college campus (where I now teach as a part-time instructor in the masters program for nonprofit management) to the halls of power in New York. Comptroller Jay Goldin made the bold decision that New York City’s powerful investment funds would no longer invest in companies doing business in South Africa. The pattern was repeated around the country. Wall Street and corporate America were constantly reminded where they stood on Apartheid. And the relatively small financial penalties involved were both a lever for change, and the focus on activism.

That’s because successful movements need both growing consensus and specific goals. It also helps to hold a strong moral core that can’t be either polluted or diluted.

This past week or so on American campuses has yielded a bleak landscape, in the wake of October 7th and the subsequent Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. The praise of terrorism, the anti-Semitic phrases, the fervent hysteria and damaging messages - these are all in opposition to successful protest. Indeed, it’s barely protest at all. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, captured what sadly appears to be the prevailing campus opinion.

I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks. I have heard antisemitic things from time to time through my life. I remember as a child being called a “dirty Jew,” and my friends and I being called “Christ killers” as we walked to Hebrew school. I recall a college girlfriend’s parents telling her that she should not go out with me because “Jews are different.” I had an incident in a class I was teaching about the ethics of negotiations, where a student matter of factly said, “the other side will try to Jew you down,” without the slightest sense of how that was a slur.

But none of this prepared me for the last few weeks. On Friday, someone in my school posted on Instagram a picture of me with the caption, “Erwin Chemerinsky has taken an indefinite sabbatical from Berkeley Law to join the I.D.F.” Two weeks ago, at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be “to get rid of the Zionists.” I have heard several times that I have been called “part of a Zionist conspiracy,” which echoes of antisemitic tropes that have been expressed for centuries.

I was stunned when students across the country, including mine, immediately celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7. Students for Justice in Palestine called the terror attack a “historic win” for the “Palestinian resistance.” A Columbia professor called the Hamas massacre “awesome” and a “stunning victory.” A Yale professor tweeted, “It’s been such an extraordinary day!” while calling Israel a “murderous, genocidal settler state.” A Chicago art professor posted a note reading, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement…. May they all rot in hell.” A UC Davis professor tweeted, “Zionist journalists … have houses w addresses, kids in school,” adding “they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” There are, sadly, countless other examples.

Yes there are, including the Cornell professor who said he was “exhilarated” by the murderous Hamas pogrom. And it was at Cornell, where “Fuck Israel” appear on a college walkway and where, on Sunday night, the Cornell police had to lock down the kosher section of the school dining hall and alert the FBI after specific and exceedingly violent anti-Semitic threats were founded on a message board. 

Last week, students at George Washington University projected anti-Semitic messages on campus buildings - “Glory To Our Martyrs,” “Divestment From Zionist Genocide Now,” and “Free Palestine From The River To The Sea.” This is a grotesque disfigurement of the divestment principles that we marched for in 1983: it’s done in the name of violence, bigotry and blind hatred.

I work part-time on a college campus that I love - the same place where I marched with Obama and Stuart Garcia and Jesse Jackson and Danny Armstrong. I was deeply dismayed to see an open letter from some Columbia faculty ostensibly in support of student protests (which, in principle, are part of the university fabric, especially at Columbia) that claimed the October 7th attacks were a “military action.” And so I tweeted this:

I will not sign a letter that describes the barbarous Hamas pogrom - live streamed by the death squads as they hacked, dismembered, burned and shot civilians at close range - as a "military action." 

No one can deny the right to protest, especially on university campuses - and especially in this country. The cause of a free and vibrant Palestinian state is a just one, as is speaking up against Israel’s human rights abuses and its current disastrous regime.

But what has created the conditions that support the widespread praise of terrorism and anti-Semitism on campus? It’s deeply disturbing. And it’s anything but liberal.

UPDATE: The White House will announce new actions today “aimed at combating a dangerous scourge of antisemitic incidents on college campuses across the country in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel,” according to CNN.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who has made fighting antisemitism a top priority in his role, will be joining Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona Monday afternoon for a discussion with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Cardona will join White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden later this week for a roundtable with Jewish students at an unnamed university, the White House said.

According to the story, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is stepping up the intake process for discrimination complaints under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “to specifically state that certain forms of Antisemitism and Islamophobia are prohibited by this law.”