When Professors Go Full Frontal Antisemite

The Continuing Decline of the Academy

On May 2, 2024, a large group of Connecticut College faculty and staff published a “Statement of Solidarity With Student Protestors,” supporting the campus-rule-breaking and often illegal pro-Hamas encampments swallowing up well over 100 campuses that had recently (and finally) begun getting cleared. The statement was shocking in numerous respects, not least in its casually accusing Israel, and Jews by association, of being guilty of “Jewish supremacy.” I pleaded with the faculty beforehand, as they were circulating it for signatures, to desist, for several reasons, but they chose to move forward. They acquired some 90 signatures, mostly faculty, constituting close to half of the faculty at the college. Once it was posted I was the only faculty member to openly voice my objection, in an open letter to Connecticut College students published in the school newspaper. I share that letter here. There were several follow up incidents that I will document over the next week or so.

[Those following this substack may note that there’s still one more part of my “Jew-washing” piece to share; I’ll return to that after the current interlude.]

Dear Conn College students,

It is a sad day when some 90 Conn College faculty members can publicly sign a statement accusing Jews of “Jewish supremacy”; Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels would be proud to see his trope so widely adopted. What’s next? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all in pursuing the Holocaust?

Never mind that the one sliver of a Jewish state (32 of which would fit inside Texas!) and its 7 million Jews is massively dwarfed by the 460 million Arabs in 20-plus Arab states and the 2 billion Muslims in the 50-plus Muslim states, most of which actively seek to destroy the one tiny Jewish state in the name of Muslim Arab supremacy (read Hamas’s (never renounced) charter!); and that this tiny state is currently under active attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and of course nuclear-approaching Iran. And lest you think that those actors attack Israel in the name of “human rights,” consider that not one of them provides human rights even to its own citizens. As protestors cheered the recent Houthi attacks, the Houthis announced they were crucifying gay men; at least Iran only publicly hangs their gays. Yet somehow the Jews and their little state are the problem.

It is also sad, even tragic, that such educated people can proffer such absolutely terrible advice. But happily we do have some dissenting opinions here, if only as small a minority as the Jews themselves are, perhaps to help you figure out, of course, your own thoughts on the matter.

In general I believe it is inappropriate for a mob of faculty to promote their opinions to you this way. There is a bullying process that goes into acquiring signatures that is inconducive to free and open inquiry. This document may also make some of you uncomfortable, and feel unsafe in the classrooms of those who signed it. Are these professors looking at their Jewish students, thinking about those Jews and their evil Jewish supremacy? How could you object to or protest this statement, and expect to prosper in that professor’s class, under the threat of the professor’s grade? For that reason alone I register my objection to it. (I only share my opinion here in response, having failed to persuade my colleagues to desist from their disgraceful action and unable to let it go uncontested.)

The encampments the statement endorses are not a matter of “free speech.” There are many permissible venues and manners of expression, which many of these same people have been taking voluminous advantage of for the past seven months. These encampments violate numerous campus regulations and sometimes local laws, and create enormously unsafe environments for all parties, not to mention significant destruction of lawns and other property. They also massively infringe upon the rights of other members of the community. Your right to free speech is not a right to commandeer a space, destroy property and occupy buildings, threaten and intimidate others, and inflict your opinions upon people who don’t wish to hear them. Nor does it entitle you to disrupt the activities of others, block their access to campus spaces including libraries, and prevent them from obtaining the education they are paying enormous amounts of money for. These are not activities protected by the First Amendment. These are crimes punishable by law.

Perhaps you support the cause. But just because you think your cause is just doesn’t warrant your breaking the rules, rules you agreed to follow when you matriculated and which actually protect everybody including you. Those who endorse this statement apparently think the rules don’t apply to them and their cause. Well, if they don’t apply to them and their cause then they won’t apply to anyone else and their cause, and we descend into anarchy. We are seeing literally out of control situations on numerous campuses, including many incidents of physical violence. Just this week at UCLA a Jewish woman was beaten unconscious and a Jewish man was chased down and tased. These encampments are anything but peaceful, in manner or in content. We shouldn’t want that here, or anywhere, if we believe in genuine free speech and actual education. You wouldn’t accept the Proud Boys behaving on a campus this way, or the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist Church, and you shouldn’t accept anyone behaving this way, much less behave that way yourself.

For those reasons alone you should distance yourself from this statement.

But there are also the deeper concerns.

In my view the statement depends on, and propagates, repulsive antisemitic lies. The Elders-of-Zion-style antisemitic accusation of “Jewish supremacy” is only the most blatant. The inflammatory lie that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide,” much less an “ongoing” one, is in fact equally vile. “Genocide” is what Hamas explicitly seeks (read their charter!) and repeatedly attempts to perpetrate. In contrast, in an act of anti-genocide, Israel is attempting to remove the relentless genocidal threat on its borders and rescue its hostages, fighting a just war using just means. The massive measures the IDF takes to minimize civilian casualties while targeting militants—far more than any other army in the world—are widely documented, as is the massive quantity of humanitarian aid provided. (It is literally unprecedented for a state to provide such aid to its enemy during a war.) This statement revoltingly takes Israel’s efforts to defend Jews from genocide and converts it into a Jewish effort to perpetrate genocide—thus dehumanizing Israelis and legitimizing those actually pursuing the genocide against the Jews. Here both Orwell and Goebbels would be proud.

There’s more, and I can document and defend everything above in detail, but you get the point. For those interested I have produced a much longer, more detailed response to the Statement, available on request.

Happy to engage in good-faith conversation with anyone so interested.

Andrew Pessin

Professor of Philosophy

apessin@conncoll.edu