Somehow it's December, and tomorrow will be two months to the day that the world changed. I mean, obviously not for everyone, but certainly it changed for me, for many of you who are still bothering to read this, and for 9 million Israelis (and for 2 million Gazans). But it seems that for many others life goes on as normal. At least that's what I've been told by a colleague, who I guess was trying to make me feel better by letting me know that things are not so bad back on my campus, that for the most part life is business as usual. And I guess that for most people that would be the case. The Israel thing is just one more item in their newsfeed, and the Jewish thing is just one more cause to hate on. And maybe everything is exactly as it was, back on campus. In fact, I'm sure that's the case. The difference is me. My feelings, my sense of security, my sense of comfort. My conception of my students and what I can teach them. And my understanding of the many colleagues I have still not heard from. And of my union, and my employer. And of my fellow Ottawans, and fellow Canadians. If I were there now, walking around, living my life, I don't know what business as usual would look like. But I can fully imagine wondering if the cashier at the grocery store, the guy riding past on his snowbike on the sidewalk, my neighbor, the delivery driver, the hundreds of people I see on a typical day... were they marching and chanting for the gassing of the Jews? Were they tearing down posters of kidnapped children? How would they speak to me, what would they do, if they knew I was Jewish? What would they be thinking? The same thing as they always had, and I just didn't know it?
Last night, two of my daughter's very good friends with whom she has shared a lot of good times and close relationships, unfollowed her on Instagram. And last week, a friend from high school with whom she was once very close, publicly called her a racist on Instagram. Why? Because she posted on November 30, commemorating a memorial day for the 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab lands. Yup, that's all she did. Apparently mentioning the historical fact that Jews were kicked out of Arab lands is now considered racist. And in his public slander, he included her name and Instagram handle for all to see; just in case she needed to receive any more hate messages.
So things may not be so bad back on campus, but we're glad we're not there. For many of us it is certainly not business as usual. And I don't know when it will be, if ever. Especially now that we have had it ascertained in Congress that calling for the genocide of Jews doesn't necessarily constitute harrassment or bullying, nor does it violate the policies of Ivy League schools.
I've been thinking a lot about what's going on on campuses, and have written about this a few times. I've also been reading a lot of others online who are still reeling from the betrayal of the Left, most recently in the wake of the failure of UN Women and other women's groups to condemn Hamas' atrocities on October 7th, but before that in the conflation of the cause of Palestinian oppression with Hamas' attacks on Israel and the basic refusal to understand anything beyond Israel = oppressor and Palestinians/Hamas = oppressed. I've continued to be grateful for the thoughtful discussions of several of my colleagues with me about this. Many of us have had similar experiences of being students in an educational system that assumes and perpetuates this simple oppressor/oppressed dichotomy and the resultant flattening of cultural understanding and omission of historical contexts that give rise to what we're seeing today.
I have a lot of thoughts about this but they are currently jumbled in notes; I'm looking forward to straightening them out and articulating them in the coming weeks. In the meantime though, I wanted to share excerpts from an email sent to me by a colleague who has been a close reader of this blog and ongoing discussant with me about all of this (with his permission). I think a lot of you non-academics reading this blog continue to be dumbfounded by campus culture's wilful ignorance and inability to think outside the simplistic ideology of leftist anti-western imperialism that has been imposed on the current war, so it might be helpful to get his perspective and experience here, in addition to mine. He writes the following:
The uncritical reaction of so many students over the last weeks has had me thinking about a classroom experience I had as a MA student back in 2000. That year's cohort in the "Religion and Culture" program had to take a seminar with a professor from the philosophy department, whose name I forget. This professor was very progressive and interested in environmental issues and wanted the class to think about the nature of "power" and whether human intervention--an exercise of power--would be necessary to help mitigate climate change. Given my language background I was tasked with giving a presentation on a sort of linguistic / etymological history of the term. Which I happily did, defining it plainly as an application of capacity or ability in a given circumstance. The reaction of my fellow grad students floored me. They were infuriated that anyone could talk about or even conceive of "power" as anything other than an act of aggression and colonialism. Some even burst into tears. Others bitterly complained to the department head and the poor prof was eventually forbidden from grading our assignments. It astonished me that these colleagues had been so indoctrinated by postmodern orthodoxy to consider "power" solely as oppression, that they couldn't think outside of that box. In fact, being asked to do so resulted in severe emotional distress. Ironically, 20 years later, we hear more and more every day about possible technological interventions to mitigate climate change.
One of the things, among many, that frustrates me in the western liberal response to the Hamas attack is all the postmodern word-games and the utterly cynical manipulation of important concepts. It shouldn't be surprising I suppose. Islamists have long been forging links with the left, out of political convenience and expediency, and now those alliances are bearing fruit. I recently had a student I'm currently working with casually refer to Gaza as an "open air concentration camp." This student is otherwise extremely intelligent and well read. I find this sort of constant warping and appropriation of terminology relating to the Holocaust particularly obscene in this context. If fact, as I'm sure you've noticed, the Holocaust is almost never mentioned as context in the story of modern Israel in the many articles and op-eds being churned out daily. Even the Oct 7 attacks on Israelis are barely mentioned.
A few weeks ago I read a couple of summaries by journalists of the video footage compiled by the IDF from the Hamas body cameras. Even though I haven't "seen" for myself, I don't think I will ever be able to "unsee" the extreme violence described even impressionistically. I can certainly think of a few people in my social media feeds that would do well to read such coverage. Instead, they are sneering at everyone to "educate themselves" and start boycotting and divesting. I guess it's because in their minds Jewish suffering simply doesn't matter, and, if it does matter, it is because it's deserved. All the categories that progressives like to champion around indigeneity, self-determination, intergenerational trauma, and racialized violence simply do not apply to a people beyond the pale. "White colonial settlers" and all that... Sadly, the surge in antisemitism since Oct only reinforces why the state of Israel was created in the first place.
I'm also faced with my own hypocrisy and complicity in some of these conceptual distortions. I'm continually telling students that we must study past societies "warts and all," looking at both positive and negative aspects. I have no problem at all talking about ancient Greek colonialism or Roman imperialism, or the role of slavery in those societies. Yet when it comes to the establishment of the Caliphate, I use words like "expansion" and "emergence," rather than colonialism, occupation, and conquest. Nor do I mention slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world. The Saidian perspective, only European powers have engaged in this sort of colonialism. The Ottomans were doing something else...I guess.
As you all know, I've been doing my own soul-searching along similar lines, and this colleague and I are not the only ones. I've heard from several others, Jewish and non-Jewish, the same combination of guilt and anger. I know that for me, as a female Jewish professor teaching about religious history, I am very careful how I phrase certain things for my students. I know I can hold my own if anyone tries to argue with me about the Bible, but I feel a lot less sure about the Qur'an (even though I've taught about Islam many times over the last 25 years), and so I try to be extra cautious about what I say in class. And since I've been teaching in Ottawa, there is always a significant percentage of Muslim students in most of my classes, so I'm wary about getting into an argument. Or worse, having something I say taken out of context and tweeted out to the world.
I have a lot more to say about all of this, and I wish I had been able to write more often the past couple of weeks because obviously -- at least in my world -- there has been a lot to think about and process. I've been keeping articles and making notes on things that I want to write about, and hopefully will work through some of that in the coming weeks. Right now though, we're still packing and trying to get organized to head back to Israel tomorrow, so it's hard to find the mental space to put much more of it into words. But I will. In the meantime, we are looking forward to going back. It will obviously be very different from the last time we landed in Tel Aviv, so full of hope and plans only 3 months ago. The country is not in a 'business as usual' mode. And neither are we.