Hillel International Forbids Middlebury Chapter From Staying, Leaving

The Jewish students involved in Middlebury College's Hillel want to disaffiliate from Hillel International, citing (among other things) disagreement over implementation over the latter's "partnership policies."

Middlebury College’s Hillel student board made the decision last week after a yearlong consultation process with active participants in the campus organization, university administrators and Hillel International leadership, according to the student group’s co-presidents. The board also voted to disaffiliate from Hillel International, but were told by Middlebury’s administration that they lacked the authority to take that action, the co-presidents told the Middlebury campus newspaper.

The student group, renamed to Jewish Association of Middlebury, will continue to perform similar functions as Hillels do on hundreds of campuses around the world — holding events around Shabbat and Jewish holidays and other Jewish religious and social programming. The board says it will maintain an on-paper link with Hillel without adhering to its guidelines, and it will not receive any funding from the organization.

The response from Hillel International has been ... interesting:

Hillel International, which does not employ a rabbi or any professional staff at Middlebury, said in a statement that it was currently reviewing Hillel’s affiliation status with the college to confirm it will ensure that JAM “adheres to our mission and standards.”

“Hillel is committed to supporting all Jewish students — from all types of backgrounds and with a diversity of views and beliefs on a range of issues including Israel,” the statement in part read. “At the same time, we are a proudly Zionist organization, and do not provide a platform for programming that denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state within secure borders.

“All campus Hillels — even those that are just a student group without dedicated professional Hillel staff — are expected to operate in line with our mission, vision, values, and policies.”

[....] 

At the university’s behest, the students then met virtually with Hillel International, whose representative reiterated that the board members must universally adopt Hillel International’s political views and values about Israel, according to the Campus. But the representative also conceded that it couldn’t stop the students from changing the organization’s name.

“We said we want to disaffiliate, and they said you can’t. And we said, well, we’re going to change the name anyway. And they said, we can’t stop you,” Jaffe said.

So to recap: the Middlebury Jewish students object to following the partnership guidelines. Hillel says campus chapters have to follow the partnership guidelines. So the students say they want to disaffiliate from Hillel. They're told they can't. So the students say they won't follow the partnership guidelines. And Hillel says ... they're reviewing the chapter's affiliation status?

Forgive me, but what exactly is Hillel's endgame here? Disaffiliation? That's what the students wanted to begin with! It's just a farce at this point: "We're leaving" "You can't leave" "Well we're not following your rules" "Then we'll kick you out!"

I'm a general opponent of campus witch hunts targeting Hillel, which often does essential work as a center for Jewish life on campus. But it is the case that the national office of Hillel has a tendency to forget that it ultimately serves Jewish students, not the other way around, and this is yet another instance of Hillel resisting its badly needed dose of democracy. The reason why Hillel constantly steps in it when it comes to applying the partnership guidelines (among other issues) is that it lacks meaningful democratic accountability to its students. If the Jewish students of Middlebury involved in Hillel want to raise money for World Central Kitchen's relief efforts in Gaza (the incident which apparently set this whole train in motion), that's their prerogative, and it's outrageous that the national body thinks it should be entitled to intercede against it. 

Finally, it would be easy to connect the Middlebury students' decision with broader campaigns aimed at boycotting or rejecting Hillel as a "Zionist" or "Israel-connected" institutions. However, while their problems with Hillel International are certainly related to that organization's narrowness on Israel and Zionism, it's important to stress that the Middlebury students are very much not framing their decision as a general rejection of "Israel" or "Zionism":

“Let us be clear: this decision is not a rebuke of Zionism, Zionist students, or the importance of Israel to many in the Jewish community,” a Dec. 2025 email to JAM membership read. “Rather, it reflects a desire to create the most welcoming and pluralistic space possible.”

This choice, in other words, was not made by a group of radical purists who couldn't countenance brushing up against anything associated with the "Zionist entity." Rather, it was forced by a national office made up of, well, radical purists who couldn't countenance brushing up against anything associated with support for Palestinians. The latter category includes many Jews who most certainly do not see Israel as a dirty word, but nonetheless find themselves personae non gratae in too many Jewish spaces.

The Shut It Down Strategy at the University of Michigan

This is a really interesting article about goings-on at the University of Michigan, where a "Shut It Down" party won effective control of the campus student government in elections last spring (they have the presidency and vice presidency, and 22 of 45 student council seats). They ran on a platform of refusing to distribute student activity money unless and until the university administration acts on their demands for divestment. The funds not being dispersed include everything from subsidies for the airport shuttle to money for the Ballroom Dance team to rent rehearsal space. As many of the effected groups have noted, these consequences tend to fall on the most vulnerable and marginal students (who are dependent on subsidies and support to access the full panoply of campus offerings).

As far as "protests" go, it's hard to argue that this one is out-of-bounds. The students who ran on the shut it down platform made no secret about what they planned to do, and they were able to convince enough of their peers to vote for them (I don't know if 20% turnout is low or not for a student government election, where turnout often is thin even by America's comparatively low bar). "Democracy," as the saying goes, "is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard." We know well that political movements predicated on anti-"establishment" backlash and throwing sand in the gears of the "system" can generate genuine appeal -- at least temporarily -- and so too here. Whether that enthusiasm is sustainable once the machine actually starts sputtering to a halt is another question.

Practically speaking, the most obvious strategic analogue for what the students are doing is the recent choices of House Republicans, who have also regularly threatened to shut down government unless their political rivals cede to their demands. It is not clear, to say the least, that this strategy has worked out for the GOP -- either materially or politically -- and there are some reasons to think it will be even less successful in this context.

For one, House Republicans had the "advantage" of genuinely not caring about all the suffering their chaos play was going to cause. That sociopathic lack of empathy may or may not characterize the student political leadership at Michigan; it is quite plausible to me that they will feel more pressure to back down if and when the consequences of their defunding start to actually land on their fellow students. And I should be clear that when I say this sort of strategy isn't "out-of-bounds", I mean that it doesn't break any formal rules. Obviously, one can still criticize it for how it hurts vulnerable student in order to (perhaps not even effectively!) make a predominantly symbolic statement about a war occurring thousands of miles away.

For two, I don't see where the actual leverage over the university administration comes from. The tangible pain the Shut It Down caucus is proliferating falls almost entirely on the heads of students -- it doesn't (arguably in contrast to some of the protest activities) make the administration's life significantly more difficult. Faced with student frustration over, say, airport shuttles that have doubled in price, they can pretty easily lean back and say "we hear you, and the student council can release those funds any time it wants." Fairly or not, the comparative lack of democratic accountability for the administration compared to the student council means that any student frustration will probably be channeled towards the student council, since they're the ones who can be most easily ousted and they're the ones who are most obviously holding up distribution of the funds.

Indeed, the article suggests that there's already been some kind of side deal where the central campus will fund the frozen student activities, with the promise that the student government will pay them back later. On the one hand, this insulates the Shut It Down caucus from the consequences of their demands, perhaps making their protest more sustainable over the long-term. On the other hand, it also obviates the theoretical leverage they're trying to exploit (i.e., immiserating the campus), returning the "protest" to the level of the near-totally symbolic (for what it's worth, the Shut It Down leaders appear to be opposed to this deal -- they do not want the pain to be symbolic).

So on the whole, I'm skeptical that this strategy will work, and I think there is a solid chance -- particularly if the funding freezes actually are allowed to play out -- that there will be a substantial backlash against the Shut It Down caucus whenever the next elections are. But as "protests" go, this one is clearly one that is playing inside the rules of the game. In contrast to "shout downs" or violent disruptions or indefinite occupations of campus buildings, there is absolutely no question that students are permitted to run for and win elections in their student government and then decide to freeze their own budgets. I'm very interested to see how this plays out.

Steinbach's Revenge

My next law review article is on academic speech issues and the regulation of campus protest. You know, taking a break from the fraught topic of antisemitism and shifting over to something placid and uncontroversial. The article was accepted for publication in March, but I did ask my editors if I could make some revisions before we started the editing process due to, er, recent developments (they've been very supportive).

The framing device for my article was the student protests of a talk by Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law last year (remember that?). Much of the attention surrounding that incident focused on the behavior of the Stanford administrator on-site, Tirien Steinbach. Steinbach was widely pilloried for her performance, which critics said was insufficiently protective of Judge Duncan's free speech rights and too accommodating towards the protesters. My view was that Dean Steinbach was being unfairly maligned -- she actually did a decent (not perfect, but who is?) job and that people were underestimating the difficult position she was in and the tough cross-cutting pressures that make superficially "easy" free speech issues hard.

I wonder if Steinbach is laughing, just a bit, right now.

A particular claim one saw coming out of the Stanford incident was that the disruptive behavior of the students was attributable to past and present failures by the Stanford administration to respond to illicit protest with a stern hand. Administrative indulgence was akin to tacit support, which emboldened the students to behave even more brazenly later on, and so the cycle went. If the university stopped mollycoddling and just crushed policy-violating protests with an iron fist, the argument went, then they'd send a message to the students that such activities were not okay, successfully deter future disruptions, and restore calm and campus order. Dean Steinbach's relatively conciliatory approach towards the Duncan protest was easily slotted into a villainous role under this narrative: it was a symbol of the limp and weak-willed administrative cowering that was ultimately responsible for "bad" protests.

When one looks at what is happening on campuses today, it's hard not to feel like that argument has been pretty decisively falsified. The current wave of protests and encampments really can be traced back to Columbia, and in particular Columbia President Minouche Shafik's decision to essentially immediately respond to largely peaceful encampments on her campus with a hyper-aggressive police intervention. The result, it turns out, was not that the students were duly chastened and slunk back to their dorms; the result was a cascading series of escalations and counter-escalations at Columbia and the emergence of copycat solidarity protest encampments at universities across the country. Even if one did believe that Shafik had the formal "right" to enact her decisions, it's hard for me to imagine that anyone can call these policies success stories, regardless of whether your metric is protecting free speech, preserving campus order, defending Jewish students, or anything else.

So with the benefit of now getting to see the road-not-taken, maybe Steinbach's choice to take a more conciliatory, non-confrontational approach toward the disruption at Stanford and not immediately resort to "am I formally allowed to call in the police to drag people away" didn't emanate from some personal disdain for freedom of speech. Maybe she was actually a professional who knew what she was doing.  Maybe there are lessons we can learn from her. Maybe the prevailing administrative value in responding to protests should not be reflexive insistence on asserting yourself as the boss.

There's very little for anyone to feel good about regarding what's happening on campus right now (I share Robert Farley's worry that we're rapidly constructing a social framing where "no one can be serious about protesting the war (or countering protests of the war) unless windows are broken and billy clubs bared"), but if anyone deserves to feel the slightest bit of schadenfreudean satisfaction, its Tirien Steinbach.

It's Not (Always) About IHRA

The Cal student government just passed a resolution denouncing antisemitism. However, a handful of student Senators (I've seen different reports -- between five and nine) abstained from the vote, contending that the resolution "penalizes" senators by "forcing them" to approve a resolution that "equates supporting Palestine with being antisemitic."

When I hear language like that, I immediately assume that the problem is over utilization of the IHRA antisemitism definition -- a widely accepted tool for identifying antisemitism that has come under significant scrutiny and controversy for allegedly improperly targeting pro-Palestinian speech or action.

But here, the resolution doesn't mention IHRA. In fact, the resolution doesn't talk about Israel at all. None of the "whereas" clauses speak to antisemitic incidents related to Israel. None of the resolution parameters in any way speak about Israel or Zionism in any way whatsoever.

So given all of that, how is it that a cluster of students -- a minority, but not an insignificant one -- thinks that the resolution "equates supporting Palestine with being antisemitic"?

The apparent answer is that the resolution identifies a webpage created by Berkeley's Center for Jewish Studies as a resource students can use to find more about antisemitism. And that webpage, in turn, among its many links and resources, contains a video about antisemitism which contains a small segment trying to articulate when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic. 

The video draws the line in relatively normal places (criticism of Israeli policies is fine, supporting a Palestinian state is fine, supporting Arab rights in Israel is fine; relying on classic antisemitic imagery is not fine; Nazi comparisons are not fine; opposing Israel's existence where one supports analogous forms of national autonomy groupings for other marginalized groups is not fine). But one needn't find the video sacrosanct to think that it represents a tremendously thin reed through which to say that this particular resolution "equates supporting Palestine with being antisemitic."

I think this reaction, though, illustrates something important. Much of the criticism of, for example, IHRA, styles itself as lawyerly or technical objections to IHRA's vagueness, or over- or under-inclusivity. I share many of those criticisms; I think IHRA has many problems. Yet I've been very hesitant to join in on the various "drop IHRA" campaigns. And the reason why is that the underlying social movement that drives these campaigns is not one predicated on technical or lawyerly objections. It is based on belief in a more fundamental claimed entitlement: the absolute right that no type of "anti-Israel" or "pro-Palestine" speech or conduct ever be deemed antisemitic, in any case or context. Any condemnation of antisemitism that doesn't promise plenary indulgence for anti-Israel activity will be deemed tantamount to "equating supporting Palestine with being antisemitic."

For this reason, I think that many of the more thoughtful anti-IHRA critics are deluding themselves if they think their compatriots' problem with IHRA really boils down to things like "there's no need for a more specific codified standard of antisemitism" or "it's too vague" or "it's applied overexpansively". All of those things may be true -- but one can take them all away and the core opposition would still remain in any case where claims of antisemitism are treated as conceptually plausible in a non-trivial number of cases relating to speech or conduct about Israel or Zionism.

The Berkeley resolution studiously -- perhaps too studiously -- avoided the issue of Israel. It passed, which was good. But the minority opposition's claims that even a resolution that anodyne was objectionable -- that it was tantamount equating any support for Palestine with antisemitism -- I think is revelatory about a sort of political positioning on antisemitism that cannot be dismissed as a bit player. For some people, it isn't about IHRA, nor about technical objections or more precise language. A lot of the push here is by people who will settle for nothing less than a blanket, preemptive exoneration of anything and everything that might be said or done to or about Jews, so long as it styles itself as "supporting Palestine." And it's going to be up to the good faith critics of IHRA et al to recognize the existence of that cadre and its non-triviality, and decide how to sever them from the ranks, because right now they're unfortunately driving a lot of the conversation forward in a fashion that -- if they have their way -- would essentially make any non-nugatory move against antisemitism impossible.

On Loving "Campus Jews" While Hating Campus Jews

It is no revelation to say that Jews on campus experience their share of antisemitism, and deserve our support. But one of the more frustrating aspects of that reality is how that "support" often manifests in a fashion that is almost tauntingly unconcerned with what the Jews on campus actually want. "Support", too often, is not support at all -- it is a way for outsiders to exploit a headline or to ride their own hobbyhorses, and the campus Jews themselves are an afterthought. I do not know if Berkeley Jews wanted Noa Tishby to pay a visit to Sproul Plaza. I am very sure they did not want a Hitler billboard truck parked outside their door.

But those who drive the Hitler truck "in solidarity" do not at all care whether the Jews they "support" find their intervention all that supportive. By golly, Berkeley Jews are going to get this allyship whether they like it or not! And this is hardly an isolated event. Jewish students at the University of Michigan were livid at the Canary Mission putting their campus under the spotlight, complaining that it was making the environment for Jewish students on campus worse rather than better. No matter. Canary Mission's support for campus Jews is cheerfully indifferent to whether campus Jews feel supported.

So we should ask: Why are the actual Jewish students so often an afterthought in campaigns nominally about protecting Jewish students?

Part of the answer goes back to the story I told a few weeks ago, about the man who became furious with me when he found out my experience at Berkeley wasn't the hellscape he insisted it must be. What kind of self-hating Jew doesn't hate it at Berkeley?

Jews on campus are a diverse bunch, and even as individuals often have complicated feelings. They are typically not, contra some very vocal activist groups, a collective of screaming anti-Zionists. They also typically are not eager to spend their collegiate days engaged in ideological trench warfare on Israel's behalf. They do not appreciate "allyship" that forces them into a combative posture they may not wish to take and may not think is warranted or effective under the circumstances.

And the tragedy is that too many of their would-be supporters won't defer to that judgment. No, it's worse than that -- they actively reject it. They are aghast at the university Jews who do not support their form of support. They view those Jews as craven, cowards, or perhaps even (as my troll thought of me) antisemitic sympathizers. Incredulity becomes resentment becomes rage, at these terrible campus Jews who are refusing to cooperate with the best-laid plans for keeping them safe.

At the extreme, the loudest voices outside of campus waging war against campus antisemitism sometimes seem as if they're almost as angry at the Jewish students themselves as they are at the antisemitism the students endure. Those who have invested so much into their identity as protectors of the Jews cannot easily accept the idea that they are, in fact, making Jewish lives worse. Far easier to decide that if one is fighting antisemitism, than the only persons who could have a problem are the antisemites, and if the Jewish students have a problem, then ergo.... 

In this way, the Jewish students become just another enemy -- and an enemy far more vulnerable and easily targeted than the antisemites are. It is another iteration of the theme I wrote about in "On Loving 'Jews' and Hating Jews": the defense of "campus Jews" is a defense of an imagined "campus Jew". If actual campus Jews turn out to be more complicated than the imaginary picture; if they don't want to play the role they've been assigned -- well, love for "campus Jews" very easily can breed hatred for actual campus Jews.

None of this is to say that campus antisemitism isn't real, terrible, and destructive. It creates a toxic environment for Jews at our nation's colleges and universities. But how much more toxic that environment is, when those afflicted by it know that too often the banner of solidarity will actual just generate a new vector of dismissiveness, disdain, or even hatred. Such is the terrible, tragic circumstance of being a Jew on campus.

Schoolchildren Shouldn't Have To Live Like Jews

In the wake of the Uvalde massacre, the internet is replete with proposals on how to avoid or at least mitigate the risks of yet another school shooting. Some in the Jewish community have suggested adopting some of the measures we have taken to keep our schools, centers, and synagogues safe -- things like controlled entry, on-site security, and other forms of "hardening the target".

Some of these suggestions might be good ideas, and most are being made with the best of intentions. But I feel like they overlooking something very important.

Growing up Jewish, these sorts of security interventions are so normal one can almost forget how abnormal they are. Of course there is a noticeable police presence during high holiday services. Of course someone has to check you in at the door before you're allowed to even enter the synagogue. Of course there is onerous keycard entry requirements if you want to access the building for a evening Torah study session. It is jarring to encounter the freedom of places that don't have that sort of security because they don't operate with the background presupposition that someone could be trying to kill their patrons at any moment.

Because these interventions are so normalized, we forget that having to impose these sorts of security measures is bad. These measures make Jewish life worse -- less open and more stressful, less accessible and more cloistered. Does anybody think that the ideal synagogue experience is like this? They may nonetheless be necessary because of the dangers Jews face -- but that's just it: they are reflective of Jews being a persecuted minority who are regularly targeted with violent threats and assaults. What does it mean to cross-apply them to the context of public elementary schools? It's saying that every 5 - 11 year old in America is as vulnerable as a member of the minority group that is, per capita, the most common target of hate crimes in the country! That's terrible! That should be seen as a catastrophe! If that is indeed the state of being a student in America, that is an appalling failure!

The title of this post is deliberately provocative. Jews should not have to live like this either. We should be able to live our communal life open and without fear, not looking over our shoulders for the next active shooter. But we've resigned ourselves to an inability to eliminate the root cause of our problem, antisemitism. We can't do it on our own, and broader society is not interested in investing the effort to make the project a success. So stuck with the reality of persistent violent antisemitism, at least over the medium term, these measures are suboptimal ameliorations of the consequences of our continued marginalization.

If schoolchildren are in the same boat, that must mean we've reached the same conclusion for them: as a polity, we just have given up on our ability to actually eliminate the threat to schoolchildren. We cannot be bothered to make the social and political investments necessary so that the status of schoolchildren is not analogous to that of a persecuted minority regularly targeted by violent threats. We have resigned ourselves to that level of vulnerability for our children, and now just seek to ameliorate the effects. That is appalling. It is appalling that Jews are forced to accept this; and it is a perverse form of justice that this quiescence be extended to every family with minor children.

I do not claim that the experiences of the Jewish community cannot be helpful in building out better security for public schools, in this decidedly suboptimal world where we have apparently decided to just accept this terrible vulnerability as a baseline. But we should not lose sight of the fact that if our experiences are even analogous -- what a striking indictment that is of our society. People should not have to live like this.

When Will a Show Get Today's Students Right?

I'm watching The Chair, because I'm an academic so of course I am (the Sandra Oh top billing isn't necessary, but it's nice). Most of the commentary I've seen on the show has come from academics, who give it the usual lovingly mixed reviews one expects when one's own profession is placed on the big- or small-screen (lawyers do this so often we've given up). The offices are absurdly big. There are no contingent faculty. Nobody is teaching an oversubscribed first year writing class. The old White men of the department would have gone to grad school in the late 70s and 80s -- they are far less likely to be scandalized by the teaching of sex in a novel than they are to be a little too enthusiastic about it. Being a department chair is less of an "honor" and more of a "massive headache someone has foisted upon them unwillingly." And so on.

But I want to ask a different question, and one not limited to The Chair: when will one of these shows stop doing today's students dirty?

The Chair isn't even the worst offender here -- that would be the current(?) season of Billions -- but it is certainly in the family. Hollywood has gone all in on a very specific caricature of the modern Gen-Z student: a bunch of whiny, self-indulgent and self-righteous identity activists who willfully take things out of context in order preserve a posture of angry, confrontational grievance. Every class includes some student yelling out "when are we going to talk about patriarchy!?" in a tremendously sanctimonious voice, to murmurs of agreement meant to evoke the incipient formation of a mob. Rallies feature speeches and chants that are pulled straight from a tumblr thread and any challenge is derided as verbal bullying or silencing.

It sounds familiar because it's the portrait of today's student one gets from reading any Free Beacon article. As always, it's not entirely coming from nowhere -- no caricature does -- but it's already grown intensely tiresome. I've said before how little it tracks my own experience with Berkeley students (a place where one might expect such a caricature would be most accurate). It's the epitome of a cold take that still thinks it's hot -- story after story of student boots stomping on Erika Christakis' face, forever.

Is there any show set at a college that doesn't fit this template these days (putting aside those going with the far older template of "college students are engaged in one giant party/orgy/frat rush") -- one that actually tries to deal with and present today's students as actually thoughtful, considerate, nuanced individuals -- at least normally? The closest I can think of -- and I haven't seen the most recent season -- might be Dear White People, which is not perfect on this front either, but certainly is putting forward a far more genuine effort. Beyond that? I'm drawing a blank.

Toxic Analogies About Israel Run Rampant on the ... Right?

There is a serious problem in the conversations swirling around campus about Israel. People treat backing Israel as if it were akin to being an avowed racist or bigot. Why, they openly analogize holding the view that America should support Israel to having opinions like "Some racial groups are less intelligent than others" or "Transgender people have a mental disorder."

And by people, I mean the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and RealClearEducation, in their 2020 survey on "tolerance" in higher education. When creating a set of questions designed to elucidate students' willingness to permit hateful speakers on campus, the list included a hypothetical speaker who favors "the U.S. backing Israeli military policy" right alongside proponents of the aforementioned "some racial groups are less intelligent than others" and "transgender people have a mental disorder" (the other positions were "Black Lives Matter is a hate group," "All White people are racist," "Abortion should be completely illegal", "Censoring the news media is necessary," and "Christianity has a negative influence on society.").*

For what it's worth, while FIRE and RCE may think these opinions are of a kind, students very much hold them apart. Of all the issues surveyed, students were by far least likely to oppose allowing a speaker who thinks the US should support Israeli military policy on campus (just 14% registering "strong" opposition). By contrast, over 70% of respondents would strongly oppose allowing a speaker who thinks some racial groups are less intelligent than others on campus, and around 50% strongly oppose those who think transgender people have a mental disorder (a similar percentage, incidentally, to those who would strongly oppose permitting a speaker who says all White people are racist, suggested that the censorial instinct towards views perceived as hateful does not track simplistic left/right divides). 

Those findings perhaps can raise an eyebrow amongst free speech absolutists, but they do show that students are not cavalierly clumping in Zionists with hardcore bigots, and they also seem to show that students' departure from free speech absolutism of students is not resulting from the miming of leftist shibboleths either. 

* Interestingly, though just two of the eight questions asked deal with positions that we might expect would generate greater opposition from conservative students -- the anti-Christianity and anti-White ones --  both of those questions, and only those two questions, were dropped when FIRE/RCE actually generated their "tolerance" scores.

Holocaust Trivialization Leads To Holocaust Mockery

A recent news story reports on two Minnesota high school students who released a TikTok video titled "Me and the boys on the way to camp." It was making fun of the Holocaust.

Elsewhere in the country, Republican and conservative leaders have gotten very trigger-happy comparing coronavirus restrictions to the Holocaust. An Idaho state representative insisted that stay-at-home measures were "no different" than Hitler sending Jews to extermination camps. The Colorado House Minority Leader said that Governor Jared Polis' (who is Jewish) efforts reflected a "Gestapo-like mentality".  We all saw the pictures of right-wing protesters in Michigan holding signs saying "Heil Witmer" [sic] with a swastika on them (referring to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer). There are other examples.

These are not the same thing. But they are related. The latter is a form of Holocaust trivialization, where it gets employed in opposition to political moves that fall clearly and obviously short of concentration camps and mass extermination.* The effect of Holocaust trivialization is to make the Holocaust utterly ordinary and mundane; unremarkable save for how it can pack an emotional punch in ordinary and mundane political debates. And once the Holocaust is ordinary and mundane, one can do ordinary, mundane things with. Leverage it in attack ads. Use it as a bit of effective (if perhaps hyperbolic) rhetoric. And, of course, mock it. Ordinary and mundane events in the political sphere are legitimate subjects of parody and mockery. It is the Holocaust's status as something distinct from the ordinary, in a separate class, that justifies keep it insulated from such insults. Take that away, and why shouldn't it get its share of snipes and jabs? There is a direct line from trivializing the Holocaust to mocking it. The kids in Minnesota and the elected officials in the GOP are not doing the same thing -- but there is a familial lineage.

The past few years have seen the GOP talk a very big game about what great friends they are the Jews. They say it every election season, of course, and they always put on such a display of hurt and confusion when that friendship isn't reciprocated. Well, here's part of the reason why. Given the slightest opportunity, they'll cheapen our genocide in service of a destructive, paranoid, and frankly inane political agenda. They won't care in the slightest the damage it does to the Jewish community. Hell, I doubt they even notice it. But we do.

* Here is what I wrote, incidentally, on comparisons of  immigrant detention camps in the U.S. to the Holocaust. I did not and do not like them, though in that case at the very least there is non-frivolous basis for the comparison (though not on the axis of systematic extermination) which made me feel as if litigating the comparison was of subsidiary importance to keeping our eye on opposing the underlying policy. By contrast, there is no remotely plausible basis for comparing stay-at-home protocols aimed at fighting a pandemic to Nazism. It can do nothing but trivialize the Holocaust.

On the Oberlin Verdict

You might have seen the news that a bakery won a $44 million dollar judgment ($11 million in compensatory damages, plus $33 million in punitive damages) against Oberlin College (under Ohio law, the punitive damages are capped at $22 million, so that will likely be reduced).

The short background is this: An Oberlin student tried to buy alcohol at the bakery with a fake ID. The ID was rejected, and he tried to leave with the bottle anyway. A store employee gave chase, a scuffle ensued, and the student and two friends (all who were Black) were arrested. Many on campus believed the incident was one of racial profiling, and protests by Oberlin students against the bakery quickly ensued. The bakery was labeled a "racist" institution, and the college briefly suspended its contracts with the bakery.

Ultimately, the students plead guilty to a crime; and follow-up investigations suggested that there was no pattern of profiling by the bakery.

Under these facts, it seems pretty clear that the bakery was treated poorly by the Oberlin community. That said, a damage reward of this magnitude poses a massive threat to free speech on campus -- a concern that many of those crowing over the verdict seem worryingly unconcerned about.

The evidence that Oberlin, as an institution, was responsible for the allegedly libelous statements by the students (and we should wonder whether claims of racism--an evaluative opinion--can qualify as libelous, though in context it's arguable that here it was an opinion based on undisclosed facts) is quite thin. Not non-existent, but thin. The administration let students use the copiers. They didn't censor the student government (an independent body) which issued a condemnation of the bakery. Administrators were "present" at the protests and didn't try to shut them down. One reportedly helped pass out fliers, and then wrote a remarkably bratty message considering "sic[cing] the students" on a dissenting professor before deciding that the college needed to "put the matter behind us."

Some of this -- like the "sic" message -- is genuinely bad behavior. Some of it is the college not proactively censoring its students. None of it comes close to justifying an eight-figure damage verdict.

But if the idea is that this verdict "sends a message" to colleges, what is the message they're likely to receive? Put differently, what is the compliance takeaway here, if you're a college administrator?

Here's a hint: it isn't "don't libel local businesses". It's "don't do anything -- whether in the form of action or inaction -- which could even hint at tolerating speech that the most hostile possible jury could consider to be libelous towards a sympathetic plaintiff." The latter is quite different from the former.

One thing I've learned from spending some time in "free speech" oriented social movements is that free speech has a lot of fair-weather friends. There are some principled actors. There are many more whose avowed commitment to free speech is in fact wholly one-sided, and in fact are eagerly insistent that colleges and universities in particular act against student or faculty speech that they dislike. They want faculty to be fired and students to be punished, suspended, or expelled; they want their clubs defunded and their newspapers pulled from the shelves; they harbor a deep populist resentment towards the entire modern educational system which yearns for an outlet.

That doesn't describe everyone, but it describes enough potential jurors that -- when tens of millions of dollars are on the line -- colleges are pretty much going to be forced to accommodate them. All the more so in communities where town-gown relations are frayed. I've heard that was already true in Oberlin. Certainly, the decision by a local judge to disallow the students what seemed to be a perfectly normal plea deal because doing so would supposedly validate the student protests -- something that I've mostly seen to underscore the community "standing up" to campus bullies -- to me instead underlines a deep-felt hostility and antipathy towards Oberlin, a desire to show those snooty hippies what's what.

(Likewise, if my alma mater of Carleton College -- which in many ways has a similar profile to Oberlin as a rural, highly-ranked national school with a liberal student body, an elite reputation, and iffy town-gown relations -- got sued by a local business, I imagine any trial attorney they'd hire would try to do anything and everything to keep the case away from a local jury).

And when you're trying to comply with that juror in mind, the need not to just avoid bad actions, but also avoid anything that the most negative possible factfinder could stretch to interpret as bad, ends up encompassing a lot of wholly innocent (or even laudatory) conduct. For example, having administrators observe student protests without interceding might seem to be a responsible, mature decision -- unless a hostile jury views it as a tacit endorsement and wonders why the administrators didn't try to proactively tamp down on the student speech. Which, in many circumstances, would itself be a free speech violation -- a fact which in turn emphasizes the impossible situation colleges will find themselves in.

Or another: in a bid to reduce tensions, Oberlin tried to cut a deal with the bakery where it wouldn't push to criminally prosecute first-time shoplifters. The bakery refused, saying shoplifting was a major source of lost revenue. They had every right to give this answer, but again, I've seen Oberlin's gesture interpreted in the most hostile possible light -- as granting all of its students a "get out of shoplifting free" card -- as if nobody had ever heard of alternatives to prosecution for first-time, low-level, non-violent offenses (let's not forgot the other side of the coin of bringing the full hammer of criminal law down upon every single shoplifting case).

I actually suspect that at least some, if not all, of the verdict won't survive an appeal. The damages are just so wildly out of sync with the college-qua-college's bad conduct, and the line between what the college did and the alleged libel so attenuated, that it seems very vulnerable. Plus, the conservative lawyers who've been backing the bakers have already got their headline, so I think they'll be more amenable to settlement than they had been before.

All of this is fully recognizing that the bakery was -- again, to reiterate -- treated poorly by the Oberlin community. The sort of conduct that many Oberlin students engaged in isn't just righteous anger or blowing off steam -- it hurts real people and impacts their real livelihood. But this verdict isn't about making a wronged bakery whole. It's a shot across the bow at institutes of higher education which many people simply loathe -- loathe for censoring speech and loathe for tolerating it, loathe for strangling student freedom and loathe for letting students run wild, loathe for their liberal uniformity and loathe for their diverse students bodies, loathe for thinking they're special and loathe for not making their specialness sufficiently accessible. That sort of loathing isn't healthy. And when it can get its hands on massive tort verdicts, it's positively dangerous.

Mandatory Swastika Recommendations, Part 2

Last year, I wrote about a case in Massachusetts where a teacher was punished for withdrawing a letter of recommendation for a student who constructed a swastika in the school hallway. The school suspended the teacher, accusing her of "bullying"(!) the student. Fortunately, the teacher was unionized, and her union contested the sanction.

Today, I saw that an arbiter reversed the suspension and found almost all of the teacher's actions to be permissible. The one bit of bad news, though, is that the arbiter did find that the school could punish the teacher for following up with the colleges she had sent a letter of recommendation to, informing them of her reason for withdrawing the letter (that is, telling them of the swastika incident). Since the incident was the subject of disciplinary action by the school administration, the arbiter found that the school could legitimately require the teacher to not provide any details herself or, at most, refer those who ask to the administrators. However, the arbitrator nonetheless concluded that this relatively narrow breach did not warrant a suspension but, at most, a letter of reprimand.

I not wild about even that much of the disciplinary decision being upheld, though this is certainly a net-win. But this case had inspired me to add a proviso I make all students requesting a letter from me agree to, that they license me "to write a letter of recommendation ... (including any follow-up messages or other communications [I] deem[] necessary), using any information [I have] that [I] deem[] relevant."

Put another way, if I credibly hear that one of my students is putting up swastikas, I absolutely will rescind the letter and I absolutely will tell the recipient why I'm doing it.

Time for a Democratic Hillel

I have a new column for the Forward on why Hillel International needs to become a democratic organization. In other countries, most notably the UK, Jewish student organizations are run by the students themselves, with national elections yielding national leaders who set (when necessary) national policies (in the US, the recently revived American Union of Jewish Students is seeking to promote a similar model).

Hillel stands out for just how undemocratic it is -- its national leadership structure is almost wholly unaccountable to the students it purports to serve, leading to a sizeable democracy deficit and reasonable questions about whether its more controversial decisions (e.g., in applying the Partnership Guidelines) are actually legitimately representative of the will of young Jewish students. If these decisions were made by elected student leaders, they'd both be more likely to reflect the actual views and concerns of young Jews, and have political credibility and legitimacy as the authentic expression of Jewish democratic preferences.

Liberal Academia Fails Again

A new study by Kyle Dodson of UC-Merced finds that, while student-student interactions have a politically polarizing effect (liberals push further left, conservatives move farther right), student-faculty interactions tend to moderate students (liberals and conservatives each move closer to the center). Obviously, something has gone awry in the liberal academy's indoctrination machine.

In all seriousness, while I'm not surprised by this finding, I do think it is worth kvelling over a little bit. Group polarization is a well-established phenomenon, and most professors are left-of-center, so one might expect that student engagement with professors would push left-wing students further left. That this doesn't happen even granted the political composition of the professoriate speaks very well of our professionalism and sense of intellectual mission.

With regard to political views, academic engagement promoted moderation. "[T]he results indicate -- in contrast to the concerns of many conservative commentators -- that academic involvement generally moderates attitudes," Dodson writes. "While conservative students do become more liberal as a result of academic involvement, liberals become more conservative as a result of their academic involvement. Indeed it appears that a critical engagement with a diverse set of ideas -- a hallmark of the college experience -- challenges students to re-evaluate the strength of their political convictions."

I'm not a fan of moderation for moderation's sake, but I'm a big fan of getting people to reassess their political priors and consider the validity of views-not-their-own. So go us!

My How the Pendulum Swings

A professor at Arizona State permitted his students to hold a protest on an issue of their choice as their final project. Students elect to do so. Conservative commenters view this as inappropriate. Said commenters then demanded that the university take official action against the students. Awaiting soul-searching think pieces from other conservative intellectuals about growing illiberalism in their community, how, even if one disagrees with the decision of the professor or the students, it clearly falls within the parameters of academic freedom and First Amendment protected activity, and how the way to respond to speech one dislikes is with more speech etc. etc. in 3 ... 2 ... forever ....

The thing is, conservative discourse about American academia swings, pendulum like, between "college is a cesspool of leftists indoctrination which must be stamped out" and "college is about encountering difficult ideas and if you don't like it, you hate freedom." Some people have the courage of their convictions. Most people are rather fair-weather.

The Berkeley Republican Challenge

Speaking of Republicans here at Berkeley, UC-Berkeley's own news site has an interesting piece on the particular challenges facing Berkeley Republican students this year. Of course, it's always a bit awkward being a conservative on the Berkeley campus. But Trump complicates things greatly, and the article interviews a range of perspectives -- from the Latino President of the Berkeley College Republicans (who had done border patrol work with the Coast Guard and was disturbed by Trump's rhetoric regarding immigrants), to a woman who is running a quixotic GOP bid for our local state assembly seat and agrees with the "locker room talk" explanation for Trump's rhetoric on women, to the child of Iranian refugees who was more of a "pox on both houses" sort. It's a good read.

One other thing I'll note on this is that my undergraduates this year are hardly the stereotypical collection of raging leftists one might expect. Certainly, they clearly lean left-of-center as a whole, and on issues like gay marriage they can barely even comprehend the argument that it should not be a national civil right. But on other issues, they're quite open to "conservative" arguments: many are deeply dubious of a strong federal government at the expense of states rights, and many at least had questions regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare. And -- in perhaps the starkest contrast to the contemporary zeitgeist of Kids These Days -- I've found them perfectly willing to contemplate and consider ideas which challenge their pre-existing belief systems (the African-American student who started by turning her nose up at the mention of Clarence Thomas, but eagerly gobbled up some of the resources I offered her about his judicial and political philosophy and its intersections with African-American political thought, was a striking and heartening example). By and large, I've found my undergraduate students to be a thoughtful, considerate, intellectually curious lot.

In entirely unrelated news, tomorrow some Berkeley students (and a few faculty members) will protest to demand that the University stop talking to Jews. You might think that's a little hyperbolic, but given that their final demand is that the University stop "coordinating" with, among other organizations, the ADL, the AJC, and the Jewish Community Relations Council, I feel okay with the descriptor.

Bobby Newport Gets Ambitious

The current Parks & Recreation storyline features protagonist Leslie Knope running for city council against Bobby Newport. Newport is the son of the wealthiest man in town (owner of a candy company), and he is basically an utterly unaware moron. He's not a "bad guy", per se -- in fact, his main flaw is he seems utterly oblivious to how anything matters to anyone. As far as he's concerned, everyone should be happy all the time -- not realizing that not everyone has a trust fund they can dip into when times get rough.

I'm starting to view Mitt Romney as similar. He's not as obviously dumb as Bobby Newport is. But he just seems completely unaware that not everyone has a free pile of familial wealth to dip into when things aren't going well. Responding to the issue of student debt, Romney recommends ... having mommy and daddy give you a $20,000 loan. Of course, I'd imagine a substantial majority or recent college grads don't have parents with a spare 20 grand they can just lend at will. But for Romney, it just seems clear as crystal.

UCI Students Convicted for Disrupting Speech

Last year we talked about an incident at UC-Irvine where various students affiliated with the university's Muslim Student Union disrupted a speech being given at the school by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. UCI ended up suspending the MSU (the suspension was originally for a year, but this was reduced on appeal). But the students were also criminally charged under a California statute which prohibits "willfully disturb[ing] or break[ing] up any assembly or meeting that is not unlawful in its character", and have just been convicted.

Eugene Volokh analyzes the statute and its application against First Amendment doctrine and thinks it is constitutionally permissible as a legitimate time, place, and manner restriction.

Getting Chippy

I was going to post on this yesterday, before the Giffords shooting became the key story.

Claiming it promotes racial hostility and "ethnic solidarity", the Attorney General of Arizona has ordered Tucson Unified School District's Mexican-American studies program shut down. Similar Arizona programs targeted at the life and history of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Native Americans were unaffected. The program is open to students of all backgrounds, although most of the students partaking are Latino. The Arizona AG, Tom Horne, has a history of tension with the Latino population in general and this program in particular -- students enrolled responded to a speech by one of Mr. Horne's aides designed to argue that Republicans were not anti-Latino by turning their backs and raising their fists in the air. And of course, this decision comes at a time when tensions between the White and Latino population of Arizona are at their peak. It's almost impossible to view the decision to outlaw this program as simply another salvo in the ongoing battle between White and Latino Arizonans as to whether the latter are truly equal members of the state.

Richard Jeffrey Newman has a good post on the topic at Alas, a Blog, and I wanted to riff a bit on a point I made in the comments over there.

There's a lot of talk regarding these sorts of programs that they play towards a politics of victimology, that they encourage these kids to see themselves solely as the beaten down, crushed, hopeless objects of White racism. As an alternative, the proposal is that we teach American history as the story of a bad past, albeit with some Whites who "got it", and then a progressive shift towards more and more White people "getting it" until today, when racial problems are mostly a thing of the past.

What is strange, though, is that this latter program seems to me to be sending a considerably stronger message of passivity towards Latino students. Teaching the history as the story of White people progressively "getting it" doesn't provide any agency to the Black or Latino or Native American communities. It reinforces their status as objects, passive recipients of the abuse and later grace of the White majority, and it doesn't provide any narrative elements by which they can build themselves up, as opposed to waiting for White justice to strike again. If anything, it is a far more "victimizing" narrative than the ethnic solidarity alternative, which tends to be very si, se puede (or, as the Black nationalists put it, “do it for self, brother”).

That's why these programs are typically associated with higher achievement levels, not lower ones (and that seems to be the case in Tuscon, where the students enrolled outperform those who are not). Sure, these programs say "you've gotten fucked over, hard". But any remotely historical program will teach that, and moreover, these kids are living their lives, so they’re going to know that anyway. But instead of saying "but then the White folks saw the light and it all got better, and if you're good boys and girls they'll do right by you too" — a very passive, objectifying, stultifying way of looking at it — it says "but our people fought back, and won our rights, and earned our spot, and if they can do it, you can do it too, no matter what obstacles you face." It's the educational equivalent of a halftime pep talk. "White people are racist, ergo, you're doomed" is a bad message. "There is racism out there, and it's still a big problem -- but look at all the people who fought it, and beat it, and made the world better for themselves and everyone around them," is a salutary, inspirational message.

The other sentiment floating around here is that these programs turn the enrolled students into radicals of some sort or another. This does seem to rest uneasily with the claim that it enforces Latino passivity -- radicals aren't exactly known for sitting on their hands -- but put that aside. As I noted a few years ago in a similar case, a young student being a radical for awhile isn't exactly the worst outcome in the world. Many of our great intellectuals (liberal and conservative) spent time as youthful radicals. I was far more radical when I was in high school than I am now, and I think I turned out alright.

We can say that maybe turning your back on a public official and raising a fist isn't the most mature act in the world, but guess what -- teenagers aren't really known for their maturity. Certainly, this manner of acting out -- seeking to make a political statement, however misguided or inappropriately expressed -- is a far cry better than many of the other ways 17-year-olds can act immature. I'll trade a little juvenile political theater for higher graduation rates any day of the week.

Finally, lest we forget, we live in capitalist, competition-driven system. There's not only no harm in teaching kids to come out of school with a burning desire to fight for what they want, it's the whole point. If you're coming from a place where you don't have a lot of advantages and don't have a lot of social capital backing you up, it's probably a good thing to come out of school and into the real world with a bit of a chip on your shoulder -- a belief that you've got something to prove and a determination that you're capable of doing it. That, again, is something salutary. It shouldn't be discouraged.

UC-Irvine Bans MSU Over Israeli Ambassador Disruption

Wow. The formal decision letter is here, detailing the various provisions of the UCI student code that the Muslim Student Union violated when it persistently disrupted a planned speech on campus being delivered by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. As a result, the university has suspended the MSU for one year. I'm not an expert on campus free speech issues, so I don't weigh in on the legal issues this undoubtedly raises, but I do think this is probably going to turn into a much bigger controversy.

Via the VC.

Hostage Scene

A group of Jewish students were forced to barricade themselves inside York University's Hillel in what the Jerusalem Post called a "hostage" situation.

Jewish students at York University in Toronto were forced to take refuge in the Hillel office last Wednesday night as anti-Israel protesters banged on the glass doors, chanting, "Die, bitch, go back to Israel," and "Die, Jew, get the hell off campus."
[...]
During the clash in the hallway, Jewish students were singled out and pursued by a mob of more than 100 students. Tepper and the 15-20 other Jewish students escaped upstairs to Hillel's offices, where the situation worsened.

While students sat in the shelter of the Hillel office, listening to the "pounding" from the York Federation of Students office below, demonstrators reached the Hillel office, banging on the glass doors and made it impossible for students to leave.

Campus security personnel arrived and advised the Jewish students to stay in the Hillel office.

The police arrived almost an hour after the incident had begun and tried to "remain neutral," Tepper wrote.

The students in the Hillel office were evacuated soon after by police escort, amid cries of "Get off our campus" and "Shame on Hillel."

"I have never in my life felt threatened and hated like I did that night," Tepper said.

Ferman, the Hillel president, who was called a "f*****g Jew" and a "dirty Jew" by the protesters, said, "We were basically being held hostage in our own space."

The incident was somewhat "ironic," Ferman said, because 45 minutes before the press conference, members of Hillel and the Hasbara student organization had met with members of Students Against Israeli Apartheid, in an attempt to "decrease tensions" between the groups.

Ultimately, the students had to leave Hillel under police protection. You can get an eye-witness account by one of the Jewish students here.

The event that precipitated the scenario actually had nothing to do with Israel at all, though the mob besieging the Jewish students nonetheless yelled "Zionism equals racism!", "Viva, viva Palestine" and one student declared "Zionism does not speak for Jews. Zionism is an embarrassment. Shame on the Zionists." Rather, the situation flowed out of a press conference Hillel students participated in support of impeaching the York University student government for its support of a TA strike which had crippled the university for months.

I know nothing about the specifics of the labor dispute, and thus take no position as to what position on the matter is correct. I do know that it is distressing that (a) Jewish political advocacy on a topic of general concern immediately manifested itself into hatred and threats towards Jews qua Jews and (b) those threats manifested themselves in the guise of anti-Zionist talk, even though Zionism had nothing to do with the putative controversy.

This piece from the National Post is reporting a lot of rumor, so take it with some salt, but one thing he mentions is the possibility that the York Federation of Students is trying to change the subject from its support of the strike to the question of Israel and the Gaza operation. That would help explain how a move by Hillel to support an end to the strike was transformed into an opportunity to threaten Jews, and would also explain why Israel was used (as usual) as the "hook" in order to do so. It would be the same thing we're seeing in Venezuela: drumming up rage against Jews to cement shaky political support.

Unfortunately, this event was not isolated. Police already had to be called after death threats were made against a Jewish student earlier in the week. In general, Jewish students have been alleging a rapid deterioration in the security of their environment at the school over the last several years.