According to Joy Karega-Mason, assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, a group of “Rothschild-led banksters [sic]” were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks; the slaughter at the offices of Charlie Hebdo was carried out by the Mossad; and Jews and Zionists have controlled every American president. These and similar statements filling Karega-Mason’s Facebook page recently came to the attention of Oberlin students and faculty as well as the public at large. So far, the college president and other administrators have alternated tepid condemnations with expressions of fealty to the principle of academic freedom. Abraham Socher, an Oberlin faculty colleague, comments:

I do not contest Professor Karega-Mason’s right to say whatever she wants on Facebook or anywhere else. . . . But anyone who is tempted to think that what she has said was not anti-Semitic or can be creatively contextualized away ought to think about what would constitute anti-Semitic speech, and whether they would apply such alibis or restrictive, ahistorical definitions to any other form of hate speech. Perhaps a simpler way to put it is this: [a graphic posted by Karega-Mason] seems to have originated on neo-Nazi websites. Did it somehow become less repellent when Professor Karega-Mason posted it on her Facebook page? And, if so, why? . . .

In my sixteen years at Oberlin College, I have never publicly criticized a colleague. But it seems to me that to look quickly away from Professor Karega-Mason’s posts without explaining exactly what is wrong with them would be to confirm that Oberlin College is indifferent to—or at least very squeamish about [recognizing]—anti-Semitism.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.