In September 1944, with the genocide of European Jews underway and the violence of World War II at its peak, Max Horkheimer, co-founder of the Institute for Social Research – aka the Frankfurt School – and The methodology of “critical theory” he developed declared that “voluntarily or involuntarily, the Jews became the martyrs of civilization.” …Protecting Jews has become the symbol of everything humanity stands for. Their survival is the survival of culture itself.
It is telling that 80 years later, with the forced resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, many of the same issues that then occupied the Frankfurt School are at the center of a culture war that, as we approach the 2024 presidential election, could determine the fate of the school. of democracy in the United States – as the founders of critical theory predicted. Only now, it is the Palestinians and not the Jews who are the martyrs and symbols, whose survival as a national community in their land has become, more than any other contemporary conflict, an indicator of the possibility of resolving the problems of increasingly insoluble problems facing humanity.
Criticisms of Gay’s forced resignation, even taking into account his admittedly sloppy citation practices, point to his race; advocacy for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies; and most importantly, his overly lawyerly response to questions about “calling for genocide of the Jews” at the now-infamous December 5 congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on campus as reasons for his departure. But her position was doomed to failure, and rightly so, before she fumbled in her contextual response to Rep. Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calls for genocide on campus would be considered a hate speech.
It was Gay’s moral cowardice in the face of Stefanik’s blatantly mendacious preparation on the issue of genocide that exposed not only Gay’s unfitness to lead the world’s premier research university, but also the deepest intellectual and political rot at the highest levels of American academia.
The MP claimed that by simply chanting the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the Intifada,” protesters were in fact calling for “violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.” “Are you aware of this? » Stefanik asked Gay.
Here, Stefanik was brazenly deploying the well-known fascist tactic, recently resurrected by Donald Trump to great effect: the “big lie.” It couldn’t have worked better; Before Stefanik could even finish her accusation, Gay said she found the sentences “hateful, reckless and offensive speech (that) is personally repugnant to me.” Soon-to-be-fired University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who months earlier had worked overtime to prevent the Palestinian Writers’ Literature Festival from taking place at UPenn, also bent on Stefanik’s concocted allegations of rabid anti-Semitism on his campus.
Gay may have trouble quoting his colleagues, but it is simply inconceivable that the current former president of Harvard is so ignorant and misinformed that he thinks these two sentences amount to a call for genocide (it should be noted note that “the river to the sea has been used by Zionists for over a century, most recently by Netanyahu to declare that there will be “no Palestinian state from the river to the sea”). Her willingness to support Stefanik’s racist accusation in the most “personal” way possible represented both a total repudiation of what she and her colleagues must know to be reality and the kind of groveling university leaders have toward public servants. of the State which characterize totalitarian systems and not functional democracies. .
If ever there was a time when academic integrity could show its face, it was then. If ever there was an inflection point in the fight against fascist propaganda in the halls of Congress, this is it. The only ethical response to Stefanik’s deployment of such blatant lies in the service of repressive politics was that which another Harvard alumnus, Joseph Nye Welch, gave to Senator Joseph McCarthy some 70 years ago after McCarthy, when in a nationally televised audience, accused a young colleague at Welch’s law firm of being a communist and suggested that the man be fired. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch said before refusing to answer further questions about it.
Only clear courage and hard truth can defeat “the big lie.” Welch’s shaming of McCarthy’s “cruelty and recklessness” transformed public and media opinion on McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade against him overnight. Since then, it has inspired congressional witnesses, but clearly not Gay and his colleagues. And the price for their cowardice arrived directly with the punchline of Stefanik’s interrogation: his demand that they declare whether chanting about “genocide of the Jews” would be allowed on their campuses.
The question baffled the three Ivy League presidents, precisely because no such phrase was chanted on their campus or any other. Instead, in another deployment of big lie tactics, chants accusing Israel – plausibly, it must be emphasized – of genocide in Gaza were deliberately and falsely transformed by the formidable hasbara, or propaganda machine, of ‘Israel in chants calling for the genocide of the Jews. , spread virally on social media, then taken up by Stefanik as the basis for his self-righteous inquisition of Gay, Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
Perhaps a generation ago, the three university presidents could have been forgiven for not immediately responding to such a fantastical accusation, because it existed outside of the reality-based universe in which academics are accustomed to functioning. At the time, as Karl Rove stated in the main article—until the U.S. invasion of Iraq (another big lie that shaped U.S. politics for a generation), the imperial U.S. were so powerful “that they created their own reality.” But at least academics and journalists were still allowed “to study this reality… judiciously, as you see fit.”
Today, even this courtesy is no longer extended to the intellectual class as the empire moves closer to ruin and its realities become more difficult to maintain. The “reality-based community” in academia, journalism and social media is under unprecedented attack, not only from hard-line conservatives, but also from the gatekeepers of political, economic and political power. and dominant culture – especially when it comes to criticism of Israel.
Whether it’s Columbia University banning both Students for Justice and Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, Harvard and UPenn fighting at every turn against solidarity with Palestine, University of California which advocates for “point-of-view neutral history” while its campuses increase pressure on Palestine solidarity activities, or even outright criminalized and incessant threats, harassment, From (self)censorship and sanctions against faculty, students and staff, the campaign against Palestine solidarity is inseparable and in fact spearheads conservative attacks on supposedly “woke” academic disciplines and their attempts to increase the measure of justice and societal power for long-marginalized communities.
In this regard, it is worth emphasizing that despite their obsequious loyalty to Israel, Magill and Gay were sacrificed when it served the interests of the system they were protecting, in this case by demonstrating the power, even of a young MP, to impose a manifest policy. a false narrative about the leaders of America’s elite centers of knowledge production. Tony Soprano would approve.
For more than half a century, the strange alchemy known as Israeli hasbara has produced such political gold and with it unprecedented power for the Israel lobby and carte blanche for Israel to sink ever deeper. deeply as the last active colonial occupation in the world. But this transmutation of money and connections into political power has poisoned American domestic politics and foreign policy in equal measure, derailing a truly progressive agenda for the benefit of global empire and settler colonialism that, along with he arrival of the neoliberal order has always had repercussions. more harmful in an increasingly militarized domestic sphere.
Today, the idea that support for Israeli colonialism can coexist with racial, economic, gender or climate justice rings hollow for a generation that sees through propaganda the massive violence and injustices it has long obscured . The Palestinians may not enjoy the cultural, economic and political prominence that the Jews had before the Holocaust and, therefore, their “survival” or “martyrdom” may not seem to some as globally significant. that the Frankfurt School saw the plight of the Jews, but Palestine has long “bridged the gap” between the progressive youth rebellion in the West and the liberation movements in the Global South, precisely the coalition that reformed thanks to the growing global movements for climate, race, economics, gender and other forms of social justice.
Universities, media, cultural industries – the institutions that were at the center of the analytical gaze and practices of critical theory a century ago – are, like the Frankfurt School itself, once again at the center of culture and, through it, of political war. . As leaders remain trapped in the system, artists and academics, journalists as well as students and even government officials are creating solidarity networks of unprecedented scale, able to withstand the intense pressure exerted by those in power to impose their loyalty and silence dissent.
Through these solidarity networks, the fight for the future of the university will be increasingly linked to campus struggles for Palestine.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.