When it comes to current events, best to learn before shouting
H.G. Wells, the novelist who wrote "The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds" at the end of the 19th century, figured human history was "a race between education and catastrophe." I fear catastrophe is winning.
When it comes to dealing with the future of the American republic, with antisemitism and with the war in the Middle East, too many Americans find it's easier to spout a slogan than to learn the facts.
When Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, he crowed, "America First." But those words have an ominous meaning in American history. Before World War II, the aviator Charles Lindbergh spearheaded the America First Committee which expressed admiration for Nazi Germany and warned against the danger posed to the United States by Jewish "ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." Stephen Jacobs, a Holocaust survivor, said in a 2018 interview that Trump's America "feels like 1929 or 1930 Berlin."
In recent weeks, Trump has resorted to even more Nazi rhetoric. He's accused immigrants of "poisoning the blood of our country." In 1935, Hitler promulgated "the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor." An adage often attributed to Mark Twain says, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." Too bad it's rhyming with Nazi racism.
In recent weeks, too, Ivy League universities stand accused of tolerating antisemitism on their campuses. For anyone who follows the history of American higher education, these allegations echo through the years. Columbia was the first of the Ivies to have large numbers of Jewish students. According to professor Jerome Karabell's book "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton," a ditty popular a century ago went like this: "Oh, Harvard's run by millionaires/ And Yale is run by booze/ Cornell is run by farmers' sons/ Columbia's run by Jews."
Columbia responded to this kind of slur on its reputation by putting a quota on the number of Jews it accepted. Yale capped Jewish admissions at 10-12% up to the 1960s. In the 1920s, a Jewish assistant professor at Harvard said students had taken to "Jew-baiting" as a "new kind of college sport." No wonder Jews are sensitive about antisemitism on the university campuses today.
It's popular among those who oppose the existence of the state of Israel to attack its supposed support of white European settler colonialism. That's a strange thing to be claiming during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which celebrates the establishment of a Jewish kingdom in the land of Israel over two thousand years ago. Over the last two millennia, it's been the Romans, the Ottomans and the British who were the colonials. The Jews are the indigenous people. White European? Over half of Israeli Jews come from Arab and Muslim lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Twenty-one percent of the country are Arabs.
A slogan often chanted on campus and at anti-Israel demonstrations is "from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free." In a poll of 250 college students sponsored by UC Berkeley professor Ron Hassner, almost half of the supporters of the slogan were unable to identify which river and sea were being referred to. When asked about the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s, over a quarter of the chant's supporters claimed no such peace agreements had ever been signed at all. After learning some basic facts about the Middle East, over two-thirds of the students went from supporting "from the river to sea" to opposing it.
A free Palestine? The last elections in the Palestinian Arab West Bank and Gaza were held in 2006. I'm no fan of the current government of Israel, but there have been five parliamentary elections there in the past five years. Israeli Arabs, who as noted are over a fifth of the country's population, were among the voters each time.
Rabbi David Wolpe, currently a visiting scholar at the Harvard Divinity School, wrote that "Part of the problem is a simple herd mentality -- people screaming slogans whose meaning and implication they know nothing of."
Aldous Huxley, the author of "Brave New World," lamented, "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." Maybe it's time to change that so we can better understand what's going on around us.
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