Mick Hartley

As Harvard shows – and of course not just Harvard – antisemitism now thrives among the well-educated. Perhaps particularly among the well-educated. It's nothing new. Cory Franklin at Spiked:

'Anti-Semitism is a symptom of ignorance, and the cure for ignorance is knowledge.’ These words were spoken by Harvard University president Claudine Gay during her congressional testimony about anti-Semitism earlier this month. This may seem like a simple, comforting homily, but parse that sentence and you will find a thin layer of self-serving hubris. Implicit is the message that because we are Harvard, we cannot be ignorant. So we can’t be anti-Semitic.

History teaches a different lesson. Gay would be well served by reading the speech delivered by late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia at the 1997 Day of Remembrance commemoration for Holocaust victims. It included these words: ‘The one message I want to convey today is that you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that [the Holocaust] happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.’…

It is perhaps not entirely surprising that anti-Semitism would fester among the most highly educated. In 2021, three researchers came to a conclusion at odds with Gay’s association of ignorance with anti-Semitism. A study by Jay P Greene, Albert Cheng and Ian Kingsbury found that: ‘Contrary to previous claims, education appears to provide no protection against anti-Semitism, and may in fact serve to license it – in part by providing people with more sophisticated and socially acceptable ways to couch it.’…

President Gay, godspeed in your fight to eradicate anti-Semitism at Harvard. But remember one thing: as Justice Scalia cautioned, the German scholars who revered Beethoven and were well versed in Goethe were the same ones who facilitated genocide.