In theory, it should be possible to oppose the Israeli military actions in Gaza, and defend the rights of campus protesters, without descending into anti-Jewish tropes. In reality, not so much. Even otherwise responsible university professors have seemed unable to resist embellishing their arguments with conspiracy overtones.
Consider an essay recently posted on the American Association of University Professors’ “Academe Blog.” Written by Professor Rebecca Karl, president of the New York University AAUP chapter, the essay is a scathing response to NYU’s newly issued Guidance and Expectations on Student Conduct, adopted in reaction to the Gaza war protest encampments set up at NYU and elsewhere.
According to Karl, the NYU administration has lied about the effect of its revised policy, which, she says potentially criminalizes “speech acts, inside and outside the classroom, that critically examine Zionism as a twentieth-century European political ideology.”
And she knows just whom to blame.
NYU has “dense entanglements” with the “Israeli state propaganda machine,” Karl says, including the Academic Engagement Network, which she calls “an Israeli state front.”
The latter accusation, of nefarious foreign control of an American organization, is redolent of McCarthyism at best, and perhaps worse.
In fact, the Academic Engagement Network does not solicit or receive funding from any government entity, in the U.S. or Israel. It is primarily supported by philanthropies and foundations. It is neither Israeli nor a “state front.”
Rather, AEN is a membership organization of university faculty and administrators on over 300 campuses, whose stated mission is to “counter antisemitism, oppose the denigration of Jewish and Zionist identities, promote academic freedom, and advance education about Israel.” (Disclosure: I am a member of both AEN and the AAUP.)
The “Communist front” charge, of course, was wielded by Sen. Joe McCarthy to discredit, without evidence, any group that opposed him politically, often accompanied by anti-Jewish slurs. As a professor of intellectual history and social theory, Karl was surely aware of the term’s venomous origin and its vindictive deployment – as with denunciations of “fellow travelers” and “willing handmaidens” – in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee. Her substitution of “Israeli state” for “Communist” leaves the innuendo intact, reviving the intended smear.
But it is worse than that. The accusation of “dual loyalty” – allegiance to a foreign country, a sinister ideology, or a hidden cabal – has been a worldwide staple of antisemitic literature for centuries. The infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” for example, a forgery concocted in Tsarist Russia in 1903, described the “secret plans” of Jews, disloyal to the nations where they lived, to control the world through, among other ploys, manipulation of the media.
In this country, the charge was leveled in Henry Ford’s pamphlet “The International Jew,” describing Jews as infiltrators, “dispersed among the nations, but never merging themselves.” These days, David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, and even some more mainstream figures, routinely accuse disloyal Jews of putting “Israel first,” as did Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s.
Karl’s essay is more temperate, but the implication is familiar. Americans who support Israel, especially certain NYU trustees, are so “entangled” with its political, “economic, and cultural interests” as to be virtual fronts for a foreign government.
Reasonable minds can no doubt differ on the merits of NYU’s new guidance for student demonstrations. Perhaps it is as bad and oppressive as Karl contends. If so, that is an argument that must stand or fall on its own, without the gratuitous assault on individual trustees and charges of compromised loyalty.
The so-called Israeli state fronts on campus are as fictional as the Communists whom McCarthy imagined under every bed.
Karl made sure to point out that she is Jewish, but that is no defense for false accusations. McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn was also Jewish, which was no excuse for him, either.
