How I became an antisemite

In The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. He replies, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”  I could say the same about becoming an antisemite. The gradual way involved the evolution of my thinking about Israel. The sudden way involved the adoption of a controversial definition of antisemitism by Columbia University, where I am an adjunct faculty member.

All of my life I have considered myself philosemitic, if anything. Growing up in Melrose, a white middle-class suburb of Boston, I had no Jewish friends or acquaintances in my youth. (Melrose wasn’t WASPY; there were lots of Italian and Irish-Americans, but in my high school class of 400, there were only one or two Jews.) That changed in the summer of 1963, after my junior year of high school, when I attended a summer session at Mount Hermon Academy. My roommate there was Jewish, and so were several students in my classes. We got along well, and I suppose I found their interests and values more intellectual and mature than those of my classmates back home. 

At Dartmouth, this trend continued. My roommate was Jewish; my fraternity included a number of Jews (including Robert Reich). I enjoyed their irreverent humor, their occasional Yiddishisms, and their secular skepticism. When told by Jewish friends, that I could pass as Jewish, I took it as a compliment. 

Despite my Jewish friends, Israel was an unknown quantity to me. I was certainly familiar with its received origin story. My generation grew up reading the Diary of Anne Frank or seeing the play performed–a staple of high school drama (even, or especially, in Jew-free suburbs like mine). The Holocaust was a sacred story. But I had no special interest in, or ideas about, the state of Israel. I had no need to. 

With the military draft looming over us, many of my generation were anti-war; my friends and I certainly were. So I was taken aback when, during the Six-Day War of 1967, some of my Jewish friends were galvanized with pro-war fervor, even boasting that they’d gladly serve in the Israeli army. Obviously, they had a stake in the fate of Israel that I lacked, which was a bit of a mystery to me. But I assumed their judgment was sound; the war was justified, not the land grab I now consider it to be. In any case, it was quickly over. 

Not long after I graduated, a close Dartmouth friend (Jewish) and his Jewish wife, whom I knew from Mount Hermon, introduced me to a Brandeis classmate of hers. We dated, fell in love, and married. It wasn’t that simple, of course. At the time, it was not easy to find a rabbi who would preside over the wedding of a Protestant and a secular Jew. After some unsuccessful interviews, we engaged a rabbi who was a chaplain at Columbia. We divorced about five years later, but the failure of the marriage had nothing to do with religious differences, and we are still friends.

Over the following decades, I got a PhD in American Studies and taught American literature at Connecticut College and then at Hofstra University. As a professor, I had many Jewish students and colleagues (especially at Hofstra) and got along well with them. 

But Israel was always there in the background. I quite intentionally avoided thinking critically about it. I remember telling a Jewish friend (whose daughter lives in Jerusalem) that I didn’t “do” Israel. I had the sense that it was too “complicated.” Not only that, but divisive and controversial, and I didn’t want to take a side. Other political issues were more important to me. 

Of course, I was aware of the movement to boycott Israel, which enlisted many academics, including people I liked and admired. Even as I supported disinvestment from South Africa, I was leery of boycotting Israel. If you’d asked me, around 2000, I’d have replied, “Why pick on Israel?” The implication being that while the country might be problematic, there were other oppressive regimes in the world. 

Well, suffice it to say that my question has been answered by Israel’s disproportionate response to the attack by Hamas on October 7. There’s no need for me to rehearse the events of the last two years. The relentless images of the genocidal assault on the Gazans have gradually shifted my attitude toward Israel from the benign neglect of my youth and the cautious leeriness of middle age to increasing hostility and anger. That hostility applies, of course, not just to the Israeli regime, but to American support of it. I feel that our complicity in this horror is inflicting constant moral injury on those who object to it, especially since we feel powerless to stop it. 

I have been haunted by the words of Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself in protest: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” What I’ve done, after doing nothing for a long time, is join Jewish Voice for Peace and contribute to BDS, minor gestures that ease my conscience a bit.

So my attitude toward Israel has shifted over the decades, accelerating in the last few years. And I suspect I am typical of countless others. Outside of Western Europe, Israel is increasingly a pariah nation. And in the United States, its staunchest ally and funder, opinion polls show declining support for Israel.

At the same time, the definition of antisemitism, per the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, has been expanded so that it now applies not only to hatred of Jewish people but to criticisms of the nation of Israel that seem to me obvious, fair, legitimate, and morally necessary. After all, it has been the conclusion of various international institutions and scholars equipped to make such judgments that Israel is an apartheid state that is committing genocide.

As an adjunct professor in Narrative Medicine at Columbia, I was dismayed by the University’s recent acceptance of this expanded definition of antisemitism, in response to pressure from the Trump administration, which seeks to punish the institution for its alleged tolerance of protests.

College administrators love to make proclamations like “There’s no place for antisemitism” at their institutions. But they know that large numbers of faculty and students are antisemitic under the definition that they have embraced. What does it mean for me, and other professors like me, who are critics of Israel, to teach at an institution that implicitly characterizes us as antisemitic? We may not be fired, but we are certainly discouraged from speaking out. 

The definition seems unfortunate on several grounds. For starters, it seems to me logically faulty, conflating attitudes toward an ethnostate with attitudes toward the ethnicity privileged by that state. This distinction may be hard to make in practice, but conceptually it’s pretty clear. As Caitlin Johnston likes to point out, if Palestinians hate Jews, it’s not because of their religion or ethnicity, but because a Jewish state is their oppressor. 

To conflate reproach of Israel with hatred of Jews may be a transparently convenient way of warding off criticism by smearing opponents, and it supports the narrative of a rise in antisemitism. But it ignores the role of Israel’s genocide in this apparent trend. In addition to genuinely antisemitic acts, some anti-Israel or anti-Zionist activity has been counted as antisemitic. If antisemitism has been rising, it has not happened in a historical vacuum. 

In any case, the broader definition may ultimately prove counterproductive. Collapsing the distinction between the state of Israel and Jewish people risks inviting hatred of Israel to be extended to Jewry at large. In addition, the IHRA definition risks weakening or removing the stigma from antisemitism. If opposition to Israel’s genocidal enterprise makes me (and so many people I admire) antisemitic, where’s the sting? As a younger person, I’d be horrified to be accused of antisemitism. Now I can shrug it off.

Finally, as a lifelong member of the ACLU, I am very troubled by the implications of this definition for freedom of speech and academic freedom. In the normal course of events, the topic of Israel would not be on my mind or agenda in my Columbia classroom. But it will kind of be the elephant in the room, won’t it? I’ll be hyper-aware of the possibility that any allusion to Gaza might be reported as threatening to Jewish students. Unfortunately, if I and other critics of Israel (many of whom are themselves Jewish) are now antisemitic, it is because Israel and the IHRA have made us such.