On Thursday, the New York City Council held a hearing about the growing problem of anti-Semitism at the City University of New York (CUNY)—one the institution’s chancellor declined to attend. During the past year, CUNY faculty and student governments have approved boycott-Israel resolutions, an anti-Israel activist who wants to “globalize the intifada” spoke at graduation, and there have been numerous incidents of the harassment of Jewish students. Armin Rosen examines the situation and the proposed solutions:
Even if one doesn’t believe that repeated, organized, and highly selective attacks on the world’s only Jewish state are anti-Semitic, Jewish students and faculty have often reported a climate of stifling hostility that has forced them to hide outward signs of their Jewishness, and made it impossible to hold or to promote even neutral events like Holocaust commemorations. An engine of social mobility for generations of Jewish New Yorkers had become a place where one of the city’s largest ethnic minorities no longer felt welcome. Like the high quality of the municipal tap water, CUNY is one of the last points of pride in New York City’s rapidly declining public sector. But to its critics, the university administration doesn’t care about the anti-Semitism in its midst, or even recognize it as a problem.
The critics’ strategy seems to be to use both the legal system and legislative pressure to force CUNY to include Jews more fully within its existing diversity bureaucracy. This means accepting the divisive logic of this bureaucracy, which would turn Jews into another one of a range of aggrieved and oppressed campus minority groups, complete with their own designated institutional protectors who can supposedly ensure that they are treated with the level of respect that federal civil-rights law and the university’s nondiscrimination policy require.
This approach comes with its own complications and contradictions. Perhaps it is the sensitivity-training industrial complex that itself creates the current hierarchy of bureaucratic concern, for example, allowing for fashionable bigotries like anti-Semitism and Israelophobia to fester and bloom while focusing its efforts on what are deemed to be more urgent manifestations of America’s incurable racism.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/cuny-schools-jews-on-the-new-race-regime