I give credit to the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills for arranging the Shavuos forum and for the 100 or so people for showing up. However, I think there may have been a bit of a bait-and-switch, or a gaslighting of sorts, for the people who came expecting to hear what we can do about the widespread problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses and beyond. Instead, we heard that actually, anti-Semitism is not that big of a problem.
The speaker from the OU didn’t even focus on the inherent problem of anti-Semitism that we have seen from tens of thousands of students across the US. Two thousand protested in in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s house, to tell him to stop arming Israel. Rather, the speaker focused on what legal remedies there are to stop protesters when they go too far. By his logic, if all the protests of the tens of thousands of students were within the law, we would have nothing to worry about. That’s like saying that if someone has abdominal pain, let’s get a doctor to prescribe the patient a good painkiller.
Nily Rozic touted her own efforts to quash a bill from one of the Progressives in the Assembly that would’ve prohibited New York State from doing business with Israel, a bill named “Not on our dime.” She acknowledged that 23 of the other Jewish legislators in the Assembly were too intimidated to oppose it, but she stepped up to vanquish the bill. She also spoke of her efforts to introduce Holocaust education, which is not proven to diminish anti-Semitism. Teaching of Jewish victimhood in isolation of others who have also experienced oppression can teach students that perhaps Jews should be targeted. In fact, teaching in detail how Jews were a victim to such a grave extent can feed the haters that their hate is justified. I’ve seen this in my life in my experience in the Post Office, where I worked for 25 years. There were some who made jokes about the Holocaust.
The Queens College professor who spoke said that the problem is mainly from Muslim students and outside agitators. He went to further to state that a tiny minority can create an impression of a big problem. He said that of the 18,000 students at Queens College, if only half of one percent, or 90, students were anti-Semitic and Hamas supporters, they would have an outsized influence on events there and could make a lot of noise. He told us a story of a burka-clad Muslim female student who came to speak to him privately with questions about his lectures that he gave on computer science, and that gradually she came to speak to him about things in general. One day she came to him to say that that he ruined her life because he and others, faculty and staff of the Jewish faith at Queens College, were so nice to her that it ruined what she was taught by her own culture - that Jews were out to kill her - and now she had no idea what to teach her own children about the Jewish people. This is a lovely story. But does this represent the vast majority of Hamas supporters here in the US? No! Are they in the position to be converted to loving Jewish people?
Finally, there was a student from Brooklyn College, a tall and brawny type, with very chic long hair that wrapped around his head that looked almost like a streimel. He told of his not being intimidated to cross the protest lines in Brooklyn College, where he went. I gathered from what he had to say that although there were protests at college, perhaps the intimidation and fear that Jewish students felt was overdone. This goes in the face of what we heard from the Chabad rabbi at Columbia, who said that the Jewish students should not to appear on campus, and Columbia cancelled classes and graduation ceremonies. Brooklyn College perhaps did not experience the intensity of other more elite (and more Woke) universities and the reason that I noted the student speaker’s appearance is that he had an brawny appearance, which lent to others perhaps not wanting to harass him and he had, despite wearing a yarmulke, a Leftist’s type of hairstyle that could have signaled that he’s one of the Left anyway.
The college professor did posit that the educational system was at fault, but he limited that to K-12. Oddly enough, he did not blame higher education in this country, despite our knowing that there are mostly liberal professors who are poisoning the minds of college students to be against the West. They are taught that America is the worst of the offenders of the free world and of course Israel being the only democratic country in the Middle East has to be another colonizer and oppressor. The professor didn’t offer anything as to what can be done to correct this. It was to be assumed that the educational system is poisoning our youth the same way that water fills the oceans - that’s just the way it is.
So summing up, at the forum we were taught how to manage anti-Semitic protests legally, that a threat from Progressive legislators to prohibit New York State from doing business with Israel was for the meantime thwarted, that there are just some Muslim groups and outside agitators but pretty much a tiny minority of college youth who are the troublemakers and even when there are protests that you can just weave through it. All of this is a gaslighting of sorts, that the problem we’re seeing is all quite manageable and nothing to be concerned about. I can sleep better now. But if I have trouble sleeping, it will be because turning a blind eye to the poison that is being fomented in our entire educational system is not manageable and is breeding monsters and haters - from the Antifa to the BLM crowds and now the Hamasnicks - and that if we don’t do something to revamp the system, the anti-American, anti-Israel movement will only get stronger and more widespread.
Instead of learning what we can and must do to elect politicians to allow schools to enforce discipline, demand standards of competence from students and teachers alike, to give parents the choice to send their children anywhere they want. Have schools teach both American and world history along with civics, character, and patriotism the way things used to be taught. Turn this ship from crashing into an iceberg of Progressivism. But we learned that it’s all okay - don’t worry, be happy.
By Abe Fuchs
