I watched the congressional hearing on December 6, 2023, about the state of antisemitism on university campuses, namely Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania and unfortunately, the sound bites like this one are not outliers but spot-on summations.
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As we prepare for our oldest son to begin a tremendous milestone in less than a year – his freshman year in college – we find we lack the usual excitement & anticipation or even the typical frustrations that are part and parcel of the college application process. Instead, we've been overcome by ambivalence – which is confusing for two people who've made the pursuit of higher education a fundamental goal – we've spent most of our adult life in academic training. We met, married, and had both of our children while still in the midst of pursuing our medical education.
Here we are….asking ourselves if it's responsible of us to send our oldest to ANY university in the US now, let alone some of the ones he had previously picked as top choices. And I started asking myself these questions from the day I saw high school students walking out in the middle of the day in SF to 'demand' a ceasefire. I found it bold, but uninformed. Fundamentally impulsive – acting out in lieu of engaging in dialogue. That is a dangerous foundation to build a movement on.
The university protests that have since followed go beyond bold but uninformed. As someone born in one of the most tumultuous areas of the Middle East + for what's it worth, majored in political science as an undergrad – the campus protests are by & large uninformed – built not on gathering knowledge from research, first-hand regional experience, nor scholarship but rather the byproduct of TikTok stories sewn together like a gigantic quilt made of dissolvable thread. No matter how big it is, it isn't going to hold. There are no references for backup, just other TikTok videos.
While that presents its own existential dilemma, it seemed at least limited to one demographic. Then came the Deans of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT at the Congressional hearing. For this, I can't blame TikTok. All I know is that I'm no longer just ambivalent about my son starting college, I'm really worried. The grown-ups in charge are not going to protect them – that much is clear. And even beyond physical security, what is perhaps more nuanced, more damaging long term, are the effects it will have on how and who our Jewish kids develop into on college campuses. What will the effect of self-segregation be like? And trying to hide visible signs of being Jewish, which my sons have already started doing by not wearing their kippot.
After all, from the age of 18-22, while these are young adults, they are in terms of human development, very much still in a very important phase of defining and refining a sense of who they are, their self-worth, and establishing their anchor in a community. It is not an easy phase of life, especially for this post-pandemic generation which has seen one of the highest rates of suicide in this age group. It begs the question, what does the qualifier of 'context' or 'actionable act' being necessary for the call for genocide of Jews on campus to be considered 'harassment' or 'hate speech' communicate to Jewish students on campuses about the worth of their lives? Perhaps we'll send him to Israel for a gap year where he'll likely be safer or at least, he'll have the opportunity to develop as a young adult without repressing and suppressing or apologizing for who he is.
Otherwise, the best I can hope at US campuses is perhaps what we saw at Cooper Union – an offer to hide in the basement in the midst of genocidal chants. Who knows, maybe they'll even throw in a diary for him to write in.
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