by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
Jews have been the targets of cancel culture for centuries,
long before anyone formulated the expression.
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,683, August 9, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Cancel culture—the
denial to certain people of any platform on which to express their side
of an issue—has become more and more accepted in public debate. It led
to a letter decrying it by more than 150 writers and intellectuals in Harper’s Magazine.
But the signatories never saw fit to object to the longstanding
anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish cancel culture that exists at many Western
universities. The letter offers no operational conclusions, though a
logical one would be the reformulation of the First Amendment of the US
Constitution to make hate speech punishable by law.
In recent years the term “cancel culture” has
become more and accepted in public debate. It means denying someone a
platform on which to express his or her opinion, and often entails
boycotts of people or companies because they have done or said something
deemed objectionable. As Western societies grow increasingly polarized,
this trend is likely to worsen.
The popularity of cancel culture led to a letter against it signed by more than 150 writers and intellectuals and published in Harper’s Magazine.
The signatories are a varied group: they include philosopher Francis
Fukuyama, anti-American academic and self-hating Jew Noam Chomsky, J.K.
Rowling of Harry Potter fame, Canadian novelist Margaret
Atwood, former leader of the Canadian liberal party Michael Ignatieff,
and veteran feminist leader Gloria Steinem.
Salman Rushdie, a British-Indian novelist, is a
remarkable signatory. He was the victim of an ultimate form of cancel
culture. In 1989, the then spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, condemned his book The Satanic Verses and issued a fatwa (a Muslim legal opinion) offering a reward to anyone who assassinated Rushdie.
The letter in Harper’s speaks out against
the “intolerant climate that has set in on all sides” and “the
censoriousness [that is] more widely spreading in our culture.” Examples
given are “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming
and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a
blinding moral certainty.”
For anyone familiar with the history of
antisemitism, this letter suggests a very late awakening by the
signatories. Jews have been the targets of cancel culture for centuries,
long before anyone formulated the expression. Antisemitism has been
part of Christian culture for more than 1,500 years. It dates back as
least as far as the 5th century, when the prominent Church
father Augustine of Hippo in North Africa said it was good that the Jews
survived because it would show how inferior they were to Christians.
Decades before Nazism became dominant in Germany,
Jews were not admitted to certain positions there and in other European
countries. Today, with antisemitism manifesting itself predominantly as
anti-Israelism, there have been many attempts worldwide to boycott
Israel.
Long before cancel culture became a well-known
term, Arabs were boycotting Jews. A boycott of Jewish businesses in
Palestine was decided upon at a meeting of the Fifth Arab Congress in
Nablus in 1922. A similar call was made by the First Palestine Arab
Women’s Congress in October 1929. Other Arab boycotts followed in the
1930s. After Israel was created, a major Arab boycott targeted not only
Israel but also foreign governments, companies, and organizations with
ties to Israel.
The Jews are usually the first to be affected by cancel culture, but they are rarely the last. In 2007, I edited the book Academics Against Israel and the Jews.
The foreword was written by former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky,
who cited multiple examples of what we would now call attempts by cancel
culture to target Jews.
He wrote:
When I was minister I visited many
dozens of university campuses abroad to gain firsthand knowledge of the
defamation of Israel and the discrimination against those who support it
in the academic world as well as to encourage the resistance of
activists.
At Harvard Business School (of all places) a
student told me that if she signed the open letter against divestment
from Israel some of her professors would not like it—and that this would
affect her grades. She added: “I am a very good student about to
complete my thesis. These professors may consider my pro-Israeli
position when giving me marks, which in turn can influence my career. It
is better for me to wait and only afterward speak out in favor of
Israel.”
On a Canadian campus, a student said to me: “In
the past when I was active for Israel, I was often criticized and lost
many friends. Now I promote ecological agriculture, and everybody loves
me.” These types of remarks I heard again and again on different
campuses in Western countries. They reminded me of communist rule. We
were called the Jews of silence because we were not supposed to express
our opinions, yet some courageous people did speak out. It is very
worrying to see that some in the free world volunteer to be Jews of
silence.
Through meetings like these I saw how the system
functions. Israel’s enemies on campus are so powerful because they feel
that the progressive world, the media, and intellectual powers support
them. They are not interested in the truth and can propagate lies
because few challenge them or even check what they say.
Cancel culture’s hostility to pro-Israeli thought
at universities is well-known. Throughout universities in the US,
Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere, cancel culture against Israel and
harassment of pro-Israeli students has flourished. This is a sign of the
widespread degeneration of academics, in particular in the humanities
and social sciences.
This version of cancel culture did not interest the Harper’s
signatories, who saw fit to ignore it for all the years that it has
been a problem. Only now, when they see themselves at risk, have they
started to make noise. The signatories wrote: “It is now all too common
to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived
transgressions of speech and thought.”
Many examples of anti-Israeli cancel culture are
noted in my book. One particularly infamous example occurred at
Concordia University in Montreal. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was
supposed to speak there on September 9, 2002, but the protesters were so
violent that his security staff decided it was not safe to bring him to
the university.
In the UK in 2002, Mona Baker, an Egyptian-born
professor of translation studies at UMIST University in Manchester,
sacked two Israeli academics from the editorial boards of two
translation journals that she and her husband own and edit. She said the
two Israelis could remain on the board if they left Israel and severed
all ties with it.
Another variant of cancel culture detailed in my
book happened in the Netherlands. Professor Pieter van der Horst, a
gentile, is an internationally known scholar specializing in early
Christian and Jewish studies. On June 16, 2006, as he was concluding his
academic teaching career at Utrecht University, he delivered a farewell
lecture on the topic “The Myths of Jewish Cannibalism.” In the lecture
he drew a line connecting the more than two millennia of classic
pre-Christian Greek antisemitism to the anti-Jewish blood libel now
popular in the Arab world.
On the day he gave the lecture, the Dutch Jewish weekly NIW claimed
that his text had been severely censored by the university’s rector.
Van der Horst later elaborated on this in an article entitled “Tying
Down Academic Freedom” in the Wall Street Journal. In the
piece, he said the Rector Magnificus of Utrecht University, a
pharmacologist, had summoned him to appear before a committee that
included three other professors. The committee and the rector told him
along with others that his lecture damaged the university’s ability to
build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims.
The committee also claimed that the scholarly
level of Van der Horst’s lecture was poor. This was a bizarre claim as
he was a member of the Dutch Royal Academy, the pinnacle of Dutch
scholarship. Later, his uncensored lecture was published as a book. It
is a well-conceived text. What Van der Horst had wanted to say before
the university’s censorship action was entirely true. If all Utrecht
University’s lectures were on the same level, the institution could be
proud.
In the last paragraph of the Harper’s
letter, it says: “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for
experimentation, risk-taking and even mistakes.” This statement is old
hat for defenders of Israel at the large number of universities where
cancel culture has appeared. In light of the Jewish experience in this
century, the Harper’s letter is an innocuous, inconclusive text.
Had the signatories of the letter thought more
deeply about the issue they were writing about, they might have arrived
at an operational conclusion. The text of the First Amendment of the US
Constitution in its present form is obsolete. It should be reformulated
to make incitement and hate speech punishable by law, as is the case in
several other countries. Then, for instance, America’s leading
antisemite, Louis Farrakhan, would be in jail rather than be flattered
and quoted by people who don’t mind his anti-Jewish hate speech. If that
amendment were changed, life might also become a little more
comfortable for the signatories of the Harper’s letter.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is
a Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center, a former chairman of
the Steering Committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and
author of The War of a Million Cuts. Among the honors he has
received was the 2019 International Lion of Judah Award of the Canadian
Institute for Jewish Research paying tribute to him as the leading
international authority on contemporary antisemitism.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/cancel-culture-jews-israel/
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