I got an e-mail from a reader today, asking about what I would say to Jewish college students who feel assailed, outnumbered, and collectively targeted by anti-Israel and anti-Israeli speech that they perceive—perhaps quite correctly—as anti-Semitic. What is the value, they might ask, of freedom for speech like that?
By coincidence, today I saw a post by Rice Prof. Moshe Vardi, "A Moral Rot at Rice University," that reports on various anti-Israel speech there, including from the Rice student government. The post closes with this:
I was well aware that antisemitism is alive and well in the US, but I had believed that it exists only in the margins, among the extreme Left and extreme Right. I have been rudely awakened. I now realize that not only is it a mainstream phenomenon, but it is also quite prevalent on my very own campus, among Rice faculty and students. This is a profoundly bitter lesson for me. I am not quite sure how to cope with it.
