Newsletter (April 28, 2024)
Vandalism on campus continues
“Due to a disturbance, the University Park Campus is temporarily closed except for residents.” —USC Trojans Alert, Saturday, April 27, 8:20 pm.
Tommy Trojan being vandalized by the protesters (Saturday, April 27, 2024). Where is DPS?
On Saturday, USC campus was closed until further notice due to “disturbances”—i.e., vandalism and hooliganism. As per USC Annenberg Media live updates:
Earlier Saturday, campus property—including the Tommy Trojan statue and a fountain in Alumni Park—was vandalized by individuals who are part of the group that has continued to illegally camp on our campus.
Campus was reopened on Sunday morning, according to a USC Trojans Alert message sent at 10:15 a.m. on Sunday. How many “disturbances” will the university tolerate? Time to call LAPD? Or the National Guard?
What’s it like to be a Jewish college student this week?
Watch a video of USC sophomore Coby Russo bravely sharing his distressing experience as a Jewish student on campus.
Read more student accounts in the JTA article “After USC Cancels Graduation Amid Israel Protests, Some Jewish Students Question Their Place on Campus.”
In the Jewish Journal, David Suissa writes about campus protesters. In “Campus Rioters Are Not Just Dangerous and Antisemitic. They’re Also Phony” he writes, “These are not justice warriors who want peace in Gaza. They are blowhards and conformists pretending to be rebels and picking on the world’s easiest target.”
These are not warriors of free speech. Actions that violate university codes of conduct, or harass and bully those with whom you disagree, are assaults on the free speech of others.
As we confront this frenzy of hate, let’s not overlook the hypocrisy and the phoniness.
There’s nothing noble about these rioters. They are phony rebels. If they really cared about the plight of Palestinians, they wouldn’t have remained silent for decades while Palestinians suffered (and continue to suffer) their worst oppression in places like Jordan and Lebanon. Those “other” Palestinians never mattered, just as the millions of refugees around the world don’t matter, because they have no connection to the world’s ultimate oppressors—white Jews.
He concludes:
Anxious Jewish students need not be fooled by the optics of protest. They can gain strength from knowing the true colors of those trying to intimidate them.
The hysterical rioters in their midst are not social justice warriors who want peace in Gaza. They are blowhards pretending to be rebels and picking on the world’s easiest target.
And here is a satirical piece from the Babylon Bee, “Clever College Students Figure Out It’s Not Racist To Call For The Murder Of All Jews If You Just Call Them ‘Zionists’”:
Many American Jews say they're glad at least the protestors are trying to make a distinction but that wanting their homeland destroyed and everyone in it murdered seems awfully close to blatant antisemitism, but what do they know.
At least we think it’s satire. It’s hard to tell nowadays.
We are joining forces with the UCLA Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFrg). They define their mission as:
To mobilize to effectively identify and counter antisemitism at UCLA.
To support the health, wellbeing, and safety of Jewish faculty, staff, students, and allies on campus, and Jewish people around the world, including the State of Israel.
To champion authentic representations of Jewish history, culture, and religion, including that Jews constitute a diverse, multi-racial, ethnoreligious people indigenous to the land of Israel.
To promote Zionism, defined as the Jewish people's national self-determination movement that advocates for their right to a sovereign country located in their ancestral homeland, the State of Israel.
To recommend constructive solutions to the UC leadership to help them make UCLA a welcoming and safe space to live, work, and learn for everyone, including Jews.
To take necessary and appropriate follow-up steps when campus antisemitism has not been taken seriously.
They published a report documenting public expressions of antisemitism on their campus. Creating such a report for USC sounds like a good idea for our group.
USC in the news:
Aaron Bandler, USC Cancels Main Commencement Ceremony, Jewish Journal (April 26).
USC Cancels Main Graduation Ceremony as Arrests at Universities Pile Up, WSJ (April 26).
Protests at USC stay peaceful; LAPD calls off tactical alert, LA Times (April 28, 2024). “Peaceful”—they keep using this word. I do not think it means what they think it does.
Other reads worth your time:
Jerry Coyne, “Screams Before Silence”: Sheryl Sandberg’s gripping film on the sexual violence of October 7, Why Evolution Is True (April 28, 2024).
The College Protests Sweeping Across the U.S.: See Where They Are Happening, WSJ (April 26, 2024).
Scratch the surface of “anti-Zionism” and you find antisemitism, Elder of Ziyon (April 28, 2024).
Natan Sharansky, The Fight for Freedom, From Exodus to Gaza, WSJ (April 25, 2024).
A useful educational article from the American Jewish Council, 7 Ways Hamas Has Conned Americans and Spread Hatred of Jews, explains the meaning and origin of common tropes and slogans deployed by pro-Hamas/anti-Israeli agitators and explains why they are false. It should be required reading in the genocide studies program.
History corner
The above is a slide from the Hans Hellmann Lecture I [Anna] gave at the University of Marburg in December, 2023. Hans Hellmann was a pioneer in quantum chemistry. Married to a Jewish woman, he fled Germany in 1934 to avoid Nazi oppression. Here is how his son describes his father’s situation in Germany:
My parents faced hard times. With the Habilitation application, my father must declare the “racial origins” of his wife [who was from a Jewish family in Ukraine], but he refused to submit the requested information. My father was never a member of any political party, but he had political beliefs and never concealed his negative attitude towards National Socialism. In contrast, most students at the University of Veterinary Medicine welcomed the “new order” with enthusiasm. They would greet my father at his lectures with disruptive and hostile noise.
The Hellmanns fled to the USSR. After a brief period of happiness and professional success, Hellmann was arrested and murdered without a trial as a German spy. He was only 35 years old. His wife was arrested too, and their son was taken to an orphanage. Hans Hellmann Jr. wrote a searing account of their family fate (you can read the English translation here). I also recommend Mikhail Shifman’s Between Two Evils.
Here is what I said in my lecture:
Hellmann’s life was cut short—only 35 years, caught in between the two biggest evils of 20th century—Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
It is a tragic story, which I believe can teach us an important lesson. Here are three messages that I want to emphasize.
One. Bad ideas are deceptive. They fly under false flags: Equality, Liberation of the masses. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and so on. This is how these ideas take hold. Look at these two pictures—demonstration in Berlin in 1935 and in Moscow at about the same time [see above]. They have a lot in common, both in appearance and in the ideology that fueled them. It is not an accident that both were inspired by socialism. I selected these two pictures to show young people—Hitler Youth and Soviet Komsomol—fervently celebrating their respective ideologies and leaders—Hitler on the right, Stalin on the left.
Do you think these young people were inherently evil? That they were sadistic psychopaths? I do not think so. They were naive kids fooled by bad ideas. And then they went out and did bad things.
Two. Bad ideas are dangerous. They can kill millions, devastate entire countries, and cause unimaginable suffering. We know this from history. And older people, like me, have actually experienced their consequences.
Three. Bad ideas never die; they return under new guise. Today we are seeing the return of slightly repackaged bad ideas from the 20th century: the idea of treating people based on immutable characteristics, such as race, sex, or sexual orientation. Identity politics. The idea of “equity”—equal outcomes and proportional representation—as an ultimate goal. The idea that the word is a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. And that we need to turn the tables around and destroy the oppressors and give unlimited power to the oppressed. The idea of “Critical Social Justice.”
We need to learn to recognize bad ideas and fight back. Now is the time.
Young people can be deceived by bad ideas. Some come to universities already indoctrinated and miseducated. Some follow the crowds and repeat the slogans without critically thinking about their meaning. It is our duty as educators to tell them when they are wrong. To explain why some ideas are abhorrent. And if the misbehave—it is our duty to discipline them in proportion to their misconduct.
In his piece published in The Free Press, Niall Ferguson reminds us of La Trahison des Clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals,” an essay published in 1927 by the French philosopher Julien Benda. Benda condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism.
Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.
Ferguson writes: “Non-Jewish German academia did not just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way.” Examples abound.
German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology. As early as 1920, the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one “idiot” “the massive capital. . . being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes.”
SS Oberführer Konrad Meyer, a professor of agronomy at the University of Berlin, was one of the experts who helped devise Heinrich Himmler’s “General Plan East” (Generalplan Ost) which, in the expectation of victory over the Soviet Union, was supposed to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south. Meyer’s version proposed establishing three vast “marcher settlements” with around five million German settlers. The fate of the peoples currently living there would be either annihilation or ethnic cleansing.
In 1940 a graduate student named Victor Scholz submitted a PhD thesis at the University of Breslau with the title “On the Possibilities of Recycling Gold from the Mouths of the Dead.” He had carried out his research under the supervision of Professor Herman Euler, dean of the Breslau Medical Faculty.
At Auschwitz, SS Gruppenführer Carl Clauberg, a professor of gynecology at Königsberg, sought to find the most efficient way to sterilize women. Among the techniques he experimented with was the injection, without anesthesia, of caustic substances into the uteruses of prisoners.
Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.
Meanwhile, our intellectuals at USC are cancelling finals and inciting students to join illegal protests:
Are we reliving history now?
That email from Sarah Rebecca Kessler is unbelievable. Things are bad. They’ve been bad for a while. “I don’t care about grades anyway.”