By Phyllis Chesler, FrontpageMag—
Visibly Jewish civilians are being beaten on the streets in Europe and in North America. It reminds me of what happened in Germany in the mid-30s as documented by Erik Larson in his 2011 “In The Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.”
In addition, Jewish students and Jewish professors are being driven off campus and out of academic associations, or forced to walk a dangerously unpleasant gauntlet of campus anti-Israel/pro-Palestine demonstrations (Israel Apartheid Week), and BDS resolutions in favor of boycotting one country only (Israel).
In 2003, when I published “The New Anti-Semitism,” I received many letters from Jewish professors who were already struggling with being penalized and ostracized for their pro-Israel fact-based views. Free speech was awarded to those with anti-Israel views, not to those who dared defend the Jewish state. With their permission, I turned these letters over to the Education editor at the New York Times who was very interested in doing a story about this. Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, she was “stopped at the highest levels.” This same editor was also not allowed to review my own book. Since then, I have exhausted myself by writing countless articles about how the Western intelligentsia have, once again, betrayed the Jews.
More important, a number of important books began to appear on this subject including The Uncivil University: Intolerance on College Campuses by Aryeh Kaufmann Weinberg, Gary A. Tobin, and Jenna Ferer (2009), Nora Gold’s novel Fields of Exile (2014), and most recently, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech and BDS edited by Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben Atar (2018) and Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State by Cary Nelson (2019). I have also continued to write about this phenomenon in countless articles and in a new edition of The New Anti-Semitism. Continue Reading….