After skimming it, my first reaction to this essay was negative. It seemed to gaslight many of the observations serious scholars have made recently on the excesses of social justice ideology and Critical Theory in academia.
After a careful reading, I changed my mind. This is a well- reasoned and accurate description of current opinion on "anti-semitism" and Israel in America, and none of it is in conflict with the also accurate insights of Mounk, Haidt, Tuxiera, etc.
My disappointment in the article stems largely from the data analysis cited to underpin many of the arguments. There’s a fairly well established generational divide, but there’s not much actual analysis of the under 25 cohort’s opinions.
Of that slice of America, what does the data tell us? I don’t carry about Party ID at the total population level. It’s not interesting. It was never part of the hypothesis.
This would likely require additional research that I frankly think has not been done to this point. Until then, I feel comfortable understanding the knowns and just waiting.
This was an excellent piece, and I'm a bit surprised it is so controversial.
It seems like most of the objections are based on a definition of antisemitism that includes "vehement disagreement with a portion of the Jewish citizens of a country very far away, who support their government's structure, policies, and practices."
It's fine to define antisemitism that way I suppose, but that word already had a broadly accepted definition meaning something like "bigotry or hatred against Jewish people on the basis of their ancestry or religion." Merriam-Webster says "hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group" which is basically the same.
This feels a bit like the recent redefining of racism as "anything that results in inequality of outcome for a nonwhite person" rather than "bigotry or hated against people of a different ethnicity or skin color." It's a little confusing, and we still need a word for that other thing!
Well, if I demanded black Americans answer for Darfur, or held African countries to completely different standards than European ones, I think that would reveal latent racism, even if I didn’t say black Americans were inferior to white ones.
If I recall correctly, you have the aggressors/ victims in Darfur backwards, but nevertheless, using your formulation:
What if I demanded the Sudanese government and its supporters answer for Darfur? And then a bunch of Americans, some of whom were black, got real mad at me about that because of some sense of solidarity with or admiration for the Sudanese government. And then I reiterated that the goings on in Darfur were bad, and supporters of the Sudanese government were deeply misguided at best ? Would that be racist?
Nice try. But the Jews you polled hate themselves. And you did not speak about the very fact that Israel/Gaza has gotten the amount of coverage that it has. I feel the author is being either slightly willfully ignorant or he’s another one inside his academic bubble.
I don’t think it’s fair to say those Jews hate themselves, but it’s certainly interesting that this conflict gets much more international attention than objectively bloodier ones, even when Muslims are being victimized.
That's partly because the world's greatest power very consciously chooses to heavily and obsessively involve itself with Israeli affairs. We don't send several billion in aid annually to very many countries; the US Secretary of State doesn't conduct shuttle diplomacy when two obscure(ish) countries in Africa goes to war. And so on.
I personally think we should substantially disengage from the Middle East. I don't see the vital national interest that requires the level of US attention, money and energy we give this region. (I said "Middle East" — not singling Israel out here). Our relationship with Israel should be like our relationship with Paraguay or Madagascar: cordial, correct and unexceptional. Washington's obsession with Israel makes Americans slightly poorer and slightly less safe. It might even make Israelis less safe, by buying that country's politicians space to oppose the eventual two-state deal they need for a secure future.
This article would’ve been much less controversial with the SB commentariat if it had been written in reverse order. Starting with acknowledgement and explanation of the issues people discuss here as a means of showing that they are understood, and then then moving on to [this is not usefully representative of the broader trend], would’ve been an easier pull. But it was a great article!
It still failed to address some of the responses a critic might come back with, e.g. that the polling data cited doesn’t address the claim that October 7th created a unique turn of left-leaning counter-polarization, which will become larger from here (I’m personally skeptical of that one, but it’s plausible!). But not all essays can cover all things, and it offered a useful perspective as well as valuable research. Looking forward to more guest posts like this!
There are some good points here, but it doesn't actually address the core concerns about the prevailing ideology in higher eduction. The current approach of applying critical theory to everything puts people into groups based on immutable characteristics and then makes judgments and hierarchies on the basis of those characteristics. This seems vile and prejudiced to me, and that was put on display when Hamas murdered thousands of civilians and many on college campuses reacted by saying "well my ideology puts these people into a group of oppressors so it's ok". It's not that it's specifically antisemitic, it's that I'm concerned about an ideology that can used to justify murder (or, you know, genocide).
Pointing out how technically "deprioritizing the challenges" of Jews is not the same as "actually wishing misfortune"--like sure yeah ok but there are a bunch who are wishing misfortune. My problem is with the people justifying murder, and it seems that engaging in this type of ideology allows people to slip right past "deprioritization" into murder celebrating, so maybe the ideology is total crap?
Really appreciated this essay. And it's nice to see my position as a Jewish American who is openly critical of Israeli policy AND Palestinian policy represented.
I file a lot of these types of issues under "A-holes get people mad, especially when they're supported by other A-holes."
Well-done, thanks. As an elderly Jew, I'm very unhappy with the trend you identify of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. I believe this confusion is amplified by several ideologically-driven groups, especially subgroups of Israeli right-wingers, fundamentalist Christians, and Republican Zionist Jews.
I broadly agree with the numerical findings, but I think there's a missing component of interpretation. Insofar as the "Great Awokening" has meant anything, it has meant disciplining such demographics as highly-educated white liberals into not only tolerating but accepting and advancing the views of such demographics as non-college Democrat-aligned conservatives of color. The truth being revealed in these numbers is that the "Bernie Bro" narrative was basically backwards: the real "left-wing Trumpists" are the self-declared conservatives, largely voting for centrist Democrats like Clinton and Biden, whose views have been laundered into the upper echelons of the professional class as the height of Left praxis.
I'm concerned that the last chart, reprinted from Pew research "Latter-day Saints..." eliminated the row for Muslims completely. They claim "not statistically significant," but my Hindu husband asserts that the surveyors were probably astonished at the beliefs they found, and embarrassed for the Muslims, and chose to bury the evidence.
Somewhere down in the threads there's a back and forth about who "counts" as a Christian, with a link to someone saying "Nicene or you're out."
This is an occasion to recommend a fascinating book on fifth-century ideological/politcal intra-Christian battles. The councils, the great violence, the stakes of subtle theological disagreements...The book is Jesus Wars, and it's by religion scholar Philip Jenkins (now at Baylor?).
It concerns the heated divisions over orthodox understandings of Jesus' nature (divine, human, both?) and the consequences it had for what we now think of as Christianity, as well as how it developed geographically, both where it grew and where it withered. A rich picture of the social dynamics and geographical power centers of that world.
I came to his scholarship through a cultural history of his on the long 1970s as a turning point in American history, a topic much written about since, but he was one of the earliest and clearest writers on this theme that I remember: Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America.
Overall, I think this is a great piece. However, I wrote my own lengthy comment elsewhere about while anti-Zionism in theory isn’t antisemitic, it pretty much always is in practice (I define Zionism as the belief that Israel should exist as a majority Jewish state).
Antisemitism on the right is much worse, and also much more direct. Jewish people are sneaky parasites. It’s not hard to understand that’s antisemitic.
Leftists, on the other hand, are often unaware that they are expressing antisemitic sentiments, for instance, accidentally conflating American Jews with Israel, or holding Israel to standards that none of our other allies are held to. It’s a lot more subtle. Some of this I think could be solved with education. For instance, I don’t think leftists realize that half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and there seems to be this impression that most Israelis are also European citizens who can easily emigrate if they don’t like living in a binational state.
Speaking as a liberal Jew, it’s also been extra disturbing to see people who I considered allies express genocide-adjacent views, and it’s hard to separate my emotional reaction from my intellectual understanding that they have no idea what they are talking about. I also have an emotional reaction to the *stridency*. I’ve always thought I/P held so much fascination because of the moral complexities, and it’s disconcerting to see that collapse into “Israel is a white colonizer.”
This imbroglio has made me oppose campus “safetyism,” which I used to think was excessive, but harmless. Frankly, if people think it’s okay to support ethnically cleansing Jews from Israel, I want to know about it. If that means we need to tolerate student clubs that think homosexuality is a sin, then so be it. There’s a lot of bad ideas in the world, and at some point, you have to get used to hearing them.
Off topic, Robbie Soave (Rising) did a piece on Fauci and lab leak. Fauci could acknowledge he misinformed the public on this issue. He was wrong at least based on the information he had then and now.
But instead he now says he never strongly ruled out a lab leak. Except he did just that over and over and over again and on video. Where is the misinformation community on this?
The question is about the level of antisemitism in elite spaces. Not whether people in Toledo are antisemitic or Memphis are antisemitic. If you were to interview that people who attended the SF council hearing where they voted for a resolution for a ceasefire, you would find a lot of antisemitic reasoning.
This is a classic Slow Boring post in that it marshals tons of data to complicate people's perceptions. It is well written and well argued.
I also happen to be a Jewish person with progressive views about Israel-Palestine who finds myself recoiling at all the whining -- and as Musa notes, "safetyism" -- that the pro-Israel establishment folks deploy at moments like these.
That said, I think that this piece fails to account for the emotional impact of specific anti-Zionist incidents or behaviors and why they might cause many Jews to feel targeted for being Jewish. Pro-Israel Jews -- and for the sake of discussion, let's use this term to describe the AIPAC crowd, more than J Street supporters or other more critical demographics -- have long maintained that global progressives hold Israel to a double standard on human rights that they do not use to apply to other countries, particularly those in the Middle East.
To my mind, this is mostly a form of what-aboutism used to deflect attention from Israel's policies. It both fails to account for the legitimate sense of responsibility that Americans and Westerners feel for the actions of a U.S. client state, and the particular emotional resonance of human rights abuses committed by a European-founded country established against the will of the local, indigenous population. (And no, I don't buy that because there was a small, non-Zionist Jewish community in Judea-Palestine-Israel for millennia, or that most Diaspora Jews can trace their roots there two millennia ago, that Zionism was a fundamentally "indigenous" movement.)
But the reality is, the idea that Israel is judged by an antisemitic double standard is an article of faith to a critical mass of politically active Jews -- whether a majority or not -- including many who identify as liberals. Then, the terror attack of October 7 occurs, awakening a sense of intergenerational trauma and group identity among even many Jews who did not think much of Israel beforehand. The very next day -- the blood still fresh in Israel -- left-wing groups, many of them on U.S. college campuses, issue statements that refuse to condemn the Israeli loss of life, and engage in demonstrations against Israel as if the attack itself were perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians. A small number of academics and activists actually praise the attacks. The pro-Palestine rallies that begin to dominate college campuses feature anti-Zionist slogans and iconography that usually reflect a generalized sense of solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli occupation and blockade, but also take as a given that the only Jewish country in the world must reconstitute itself as a place where Jews must trust the world that they will be safe living as minorities, likely under the rule of people who were at least sympathetic to the October 7 attacks. Some pro-Palestine demonstrators even use phrases like "long live the intifada" and engage in marches named after the "Al Aqsa Flood," Hamas's name for the Oct. 7 operation.
While there have been marches and demonstrations like this in response to Israeli invasions in the past, none was as forceful and immediate as the left's response to the events of Oct. 7 and Israel's subsequent response. Much of that is due to the lethality and destructiveness of the Israeli bombardment and invasion, but the day-after Oct. 7 demonstrations were not. And while Musa identifies the growth of intersectionality and victimhood currency as factors driving elite campus responses, to many Jewish college students, particularly at elite schools that the Jewish community sees as culturally influential, the net result of feeling like you can't say, show your pride in the world's only Jewish country without being yelled at, is hurtful all the same.
I don't think there's an easy answer here. Personally, I think until both Israel cleans up its act as a country, and the victimhood-obsessed, oppressor-oppressed dichotomy culture is dethroned in elite universities, this is the only logical outcome. And the heavy-handed responses from Jewish donors and organizations, which typically take the form of censorship or harassment of student leaders, tends to be not only illiberal and a much bigger policy problem than the supposed antisemitism itself, but also counterproductive to the cause of fighting antisemitism.
Still, I suppose I just understand why people are freaked out about the scale of anti-Zionism at elite colleges and see it as antisemitic, even if I mostly do not. There's more to this story than just mountains of data.
I disagree with the start of your post and I think you misunderstand how Israel was founded. That being said, in the spirit of slow boring, I will give you a like for expressing a nuanced and well-reasoned view.
Bastiat’s Window has a great response to this manipulative deception: https://open.substack.com/pub/graboyes/p/antisemitism-and-universities?r=1mebvk&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
After skimming it, my first reaction to this essay was negative. It seemed to gaslight many of the observations serious scholars have made recently on the excesses of social justice ideology and Critical Theory in academia.
After a careful reading, I changed my mind. This is a well- reasoned and accurate description of current opinion on "anti-semitism" and Israel in America, and none of it is in conflict with the also accurate insights of Mounk, Haidt, Tuxiera, etc.
My disappointment in the article stems largely from the data analysis cited to underpin many of the arguments. There’s a fairly well established generational divide, but there’s not much actual analysis of the under 25 cohort’s opinions.
Of that slice of America, what does the data tell us? I don’t carry about Party ID at the total population level. It’s not interesting. It was never part of the hypothesis.
This would likely require additional research that I frankly think has not been done to this point. Until then, I feel comfortable understanding the knowns and just waiting.
This was an excellent piece, and I'm a bit surprised it is so controversial.
It seems like most of the objections are based on a definition of antisemitism that includes "vehement disagreement with a portion of the Jewish citizens of a country very far away, who support their government's structure, policies, and practices."
It's fine to define antisemitism that way I suppose, but that word already had a broadly accepted definition meaning something like "bigotry or hatred against Jewish people on the basis of their ancestry or religion." Merriam-Webster says "hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group" which is basically the same.
This feels a bit like the recent redefining of racism as "anything that results in inequality of outcome for a nonwhite person" rather than "bigotry or hated against people of a different ethnicity or skin color." It's a little confusing, and we still need a word for that other thing!
Well, if I demanded black Americans answer for Darfur, or held African countries to completely different standards than European ones, I think that would reveal latent racism, even if I didn’t say black Americans were inferior to white ones.
If I recall correctly, you have the aggressors/ victims in Darfur backwards, but nevertheless, using your formulation:
What if I demanded the Sudanese government and its supporters answer for Darfur? And then a bunch of Americans, some of whom were black, got real mad at me about that because of some sense of solidarity with or admiration for the Sudanese government. And then I reiterated that the goings on in Darfur were bad, and supporters of the Sudanese government were deeply misguided at best ? Would that be racist?
Nice try. But the Jews you polled hate themselves. And you did not speak about the very fact that Israel/Gaza has gotten the amount of coverage that it has. I feel the author is being either slightly willfully ignorant or he’s another one inside his academic bubble.
I don’t think it’s fair to say those Jews hate themselves, but it’s certainly interesting that this conflict gets much more international attention than objectively bloodier ones, even when Muslims are being victimized.
That's partly because the world's greatest power very consciously chooses to heavily and obsessively involve itself with Israeli affairs. We don't send several billion in aid annually to very many countries; the US Secretary of State doesn't conduct shuttle diplomacy when two obscure(ish) countries in Africa goes to war. And so on.
I personally think we should substantially disengage from the Middle East. I don't see the vital national interest that requires the level of US attention, money and energy we give this region. (I said "Middle East" — not singling Israel out here). Our relationship with Israel should be like our relationship with Paraguay or Madagascar: cordial, correct and unexceptional. Washington's obsession with Israel makes Americans slightly poorer and slightly less safe. It might even make Israelis less safe, by buying that country's politicians space to oppose the eventual two-state deal they need for a secure future.
This article would’ve been much less controversial with the SB commentariat if it had been written in reverse order. Starting with acknowledgement and explanation of the issues people discuss here as a means of showing that they are understood, and then then moving on to [this is not usefully representative of the broader trend], would’ve been an easier pull. But it was a great article!
It still failed to address some of the responses a critic might come back with, e.g. that the polling data cited doesn’t address the claim that October 7th created a unique turn of left-leaning counter-polarization, which will become larger from here (I’m personally skeptical of that one, but it’s plausible!). But not all essays can cover all things, and it offered a useful perspective as well as valuable research. Looking forward to more guest posts like this!
There are some good points here, but it doesn't actually address the core concerns about the prevailing ideology in higher eduction. The current approach of applying critical theory to everything puts people into groups based on immutable characteristics and then makes judgments and hierarchies on the basis of those characteristics. This seems vile and prejudiced to me, and that was put on display when Hamas murdered thousands of civilians and many on college campuses reacted by saying "well my ideology puts these people into a group of oppressors so it's ok". It's not that it's specifically antisemitic, it's that I'm concerned about an ideology that can used to justify murder (or, you know, genocide).
Pointing out how technically "deprioritizing the challenges" of Jews is not the same as "actually wishing misfortune"--like sure yeah ok but there are a bunch who are wishing misfortune. My problem is with the people justifying murder, and it seems that engaging in this type of ideology allows people to slip right past "deprioritization" into murder celebrating, so maybe the ideology is total crap?
Really appreciated this essay. And it's nice to see my position as a Jewish American who is openly critical of Israeli policy AND Palestinian policy represented.
I file a lot of these types of issues under "A-holes get people mad, especially when they're supported by other A-holes."
Well-done, thanks. As an elderly Jew, I'm very unhappy with the trend you identify of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. I believe this confusion is amplified by several ideologically-driven groups, especially subgroups of Israeli right-wingers, fundamentalist Christians, and Republican Zionist Jews.
I’m a Jewish Democrat, and if I never see the statement that “Anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism” again, I will die happy.
I agree accusations of antisemitism are often used in bad faith, but it goes both ways.
I broadly agree with the numerical findings, but I think there's a missing component of interpretation. Insofar as the "Great Awokening" has meant anything, it has meant disciplining such demographics as highly-educated white liberals into not only tolerating but accepting and advancing the views of such demographics as non-college Democrat-aligned conservatives of color. The truth being revealed in these numbers is that the "Bernie Bro" narrative was basically backwards: the real "left-wing Trumpists" are the self-declared conservatives, largely voting for centrist Democrats like Clinton and Biden, whose views have been laundered into the upper echelons of the professional class as the height of Left praxis.
I'm concerned that the last chart, reprinted from Pew research "Latter-day Saints..." eliminated the row for Muslims completely. They claim "not statistically significant," but my Hindu husband asserts that the surveyors were probably astonished at the beliefs they found, and embarrassed for the Muslims, and chose to bury the evidence.
Somewhere down in the threads there's a back and forth about who "counts" as a Christian, with a link to someone saying "Nicene or you're out."
This is an occasion to recommend a fascinating book on fifth-century ideological/politcal intra-Christian battles. The councils, the great violence, the stakes of subtle theological disagreements...The book is Jesus Wars, and it's by religion scholar Philip Jenkins (now at Baylor?).
It concerns the heated divisions over orthodox understandings of Jesus' nature (divine, human, both?) and the consequences it had for what we now think of as Christianity, as well as how it developed geographically, both where it grew and where it withered. A rich picture of the social dynamics and geographical power centers of that world.
I came to his scholarship through a cultural history of his on the long 1970s as a turning point in American history, a topic much written about since, but he was one of the earliest and clearest writers on this theme that I remember: Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America.
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Wars-Patriarchs-Emperors-Christians/dp/0061768936?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=dd71ad85-4cd7-48b9-be98-3539a9eae5e8
https://www.npr.org/2010/03/18/124767195/excerpt-jesus-wars
Overall, I think this is a great piece. However, I wrote my own lengthy comment elsewhere about while anti-Zionism in theory isn’t antisemitic, it pretty much always is in practice (I define Zionism as the belief that Israel should exist as a majority Jewish state).
Antisemitism on the right is much worse, and also much more direct. Jewish people are sneaky parasites. It’s not hard to understand that’s antisemitic.
Leftists, on the other hand, are often unaware that they are expressing antisemitic sentiments, for instance, accidentally conflating American Jews with Israel, or holding Israel to standards that none of our other allies are held to. It’s a lot more subtle. Some of this I think could be solved with education. For instance, I don’t think leftists realize that half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and there seems to be this impression that most Israelis are also European citizens who can easily emigrate if they don’t like living in a binational state.
Speaking as a liberal Jew, it’s also been extra disturbing to see people who I considered allies express genocide-adjacent views, and it’s hard to separate my emotional reaction from my intellectual understanding that they have no idea what they are talking about. I also have an emotional reaction to the *stridency*. I’ve always thought I/P held so much fascination because of the moral complexities, and it’s disconcerting to see that collapse into “Israel is a white colonizer.”
This imbroglio has made me oppose campus “safetyism,” which I used to think was excessive, but harmless. Frankly, if people think it’s okay to support ethnically cleansing Jews from Israel, I want to know about it. If that means we need to tolerate student clubs that think homosexuality is a sin, then so be it. There’s a lot of bad ideas in the world, and at some point, you have to get used to hearing them.
Off topic, Robbie Soave (Rising) did a piece on Fauci and lab leak. Fauci could acknowledge he misinformed the public on this issue. He was wrong at least based on the information he had then and now.
But instead he now says he never strongly ruled out a lab leak. Except he did just that over and over and over again and on video. Where is the misinformation community on this?
The question is about the level of antisemitism in elite spaces. Not whether people in Toledo are antisemitic or Memphis are antisemitic. If you were to interview that people who attended the SF council hearing where they voted for a resolution for a ceasefire, you would find a lot of antisemitic reasoning.
This is a classic Slow Boring post in that it marshals tons of data to complicate people's perceptions. It is well written and well argued.
I also happen to be a Jewish person with progressive views about Israel-Palestine who finds myself recoiling at all the whining -- and as Musa notes, "safetyism" -- that the pro-Israel establishment folks deploy at moments like these.
That said, I think that this piece fails to account for the emotional impact of specific anti-Zionist incidents or behaviors and why they might cause many Jews to feel targeted for being Jewish. Pro-Israel Jews -- and for the sake of discussion, let's use this term to describe the AIPAC crowd, more than J Street supporters or other more critical demographics -- have long maintained that global progressives hold Israel to a double standard on human rights that they do not use to apply to other countries, particularly those in the Middle East.
To my mind, this is mostly a form of what-aboutism used to deflect attention from Israel's policies. It both fails to account for the legitimate sense of responsibility that Americans and Westerners feel for the actions of a U.S. client state, and the particular emotional resonance of human rights abuses committed by a European-founded country established against the will of the local, indigenous population. (And no, I don't buy that because there was a small, non-Zionist Jewish community in Judea-Palestine-Israel for millennia, or that most Diaspora Jews can trace their roots there two millennia ago, that Zionism was a fundamentally "indigenous" movement.)
But the reality is, the idea that Israel is judged by an antisemitic double standard is an article of faith to a critical mass of politically active Jews -- whether a majority or not -- including many who identify as liberals. Then, the terror attack of October 7 occurs, awakening a sense of intergenerational trauma and group identity among even many Jews who did not think much of Israel beforehand. The very next day -- the blood still fresh in Israel -- left-wing groups, many of them on U.S. college campuses, issue statements that refuse to condemn the Israeli loss of life, and engage in demonstrations against Israel as if the attack itself were perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians. A small number of academics and activists actually praise the attacks. The pro-Palestine rallies that begin to dominate college campuses feature anti-Zionist slogans and iconography that usually reflect a generalized sense of solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli occupation and blockade, but also take as a given that the only Jewish country in the world must reconstitute itself as a place where Jews must trust the world that they will be safe living as minorities, likely under the rule of people who were at least sympathetic to the October 7 attacks. Some pro-Palestine demonstrators even use phrases like "long live the intifada" and engage in marches named after the "Al Aqsa Flood," Hamas's name for the Oct. 7 operation.
While there have been marches and demonstrations like this in response to Israeli invasions in the past, none was as forceful and immediate as the left's response to the events of Oct. 7 and Israel's subsequent response. Much of that is due to the lethality and destructiveness of the Israeli bombardment and invasion, but the day-after Oct. 7 demonstrations were not. And while Musa identifies the growth of intersectionality and victimhood currency as factors driving elite campus responses, to many Jewish college students, particularly at elite schools that the Jewish community sees as culturally influential, the net result of feeling like you can't say, show your pride in the world's only Jewish country without being yelled at, is hurtful all the same.
I don't think there's an easy answer here. Personally, I think until both Israel cleans up its act as a country, and the victimhood-obsessed, oppressor-oppressed dichotomy culture is dethroned in elite universities, this is the only logical outcome. And the heavy-handed responses from Jewish donors and organizations, which typically take the form of censorship or harassment of student leaders, tends to be not only illiberal and a much bigger policy problem than the supposed antisemitism itself, but also counterproductive to the cause of fighting antisemitism.
Still, I suppose I just understand why people are freaked out about the scale of anti-Zionism at elite colleges and see it as antisemitic, even if I mostly do not. There's more to this story than just mountains of data.
I disagree with the start of your post and I think you misunderstand how Israel was founded. That being said, in the spirit of slow boring, I will give you a like for expressing a nuanced and well-reasoned view.
I appreciate it.