"We Have No Pope." Prof. Ken Miller on President Shipman's Antisemitism Announcement
Earlier this week, President Claire Shipman sent yet another letter on “Our Additional Commitments to Combatting Antisemitism.” (Once again, not a word in the missive about discrimination against Muslim and Arab students.) Ken Miller, Peter Taylor Professor of Neuroscience at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, has written the following response:
As a proudly Jewish Columbia faculty member, I find the new “anti-semitism” policies to be appalling. They clearly have nothing to do with concerns about combating anti-semitism, and everything to do with restricting freedom to express certain political views, as dictated by Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. For a major university to agree to this repression of the ability to explore and express certain ideas is antithetical to everything a university should stand for.
The adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism carves out realms of political speech that become forbidden. This is amplified by the demand for training about anti-semitism from groups, such as the ADL and, to a lesser but significant extent, Project Shema, that embrace the problematic ideas of the IHRA and, at least in the case of the ADL, exacerbate them in many ways. Here I will focus on the IHRA definition. Its examples of “anti-semitism” include:
“Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” If I believe that AIPAC pushes US policies toward those favored by Israel and that this is detrimental to the interests of the United States, am I now not allowed to express this belief or engage in principled, evidence-based, academic dialogue to support it?
“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” If I believe that the state of Israel, in its current control of all the land “from the river to the sea,” is governing that land as a racist, apartheid state in which Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens are subject to a completely different set of laws and have little to no rights – as has been stated by such groups as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli Human Rights organizations B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Adalah, HaMoked, Peace Now Israel, and Combatants for Peace – am I now not allowed to express this belief? And if someone believes that Zionism fundamentally calls for a nation in which Jews have rights that other citizens of the nation do not have, and that this is inherently racist, do they not have the right to express this and to make the argument for their position?
“Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” If I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians without simultaneously criticizing all other human rights violations around the world, including for example China’s treatment of the Uighurs, am I an anti-Jewish racist? If I criticize China’s treatment of the Uighurs without simultaneously criticizing all other human rights violations including Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, does this make me an anti-Chinese racist?
“Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” If I consider Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide—the definition of which does not involve extermination, but instead is “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such”—a belief shared by many of the world’s scholars of genocide, including Israeli scholars Raz Segal (who says “Can I name anyone whose work I respect who doesn’t consider it genocide? No, there’s no counterargument that considers all the evidence”), Amos Goldberg, Shmuel Lederman, and Omer Bartov—can I not express this because ‘genocide’ may be seen as a comparison to the Nazis (although, there are many examples of genocide not involving Nazis, and as far as I know no one is claiming that Israel is trying to kill all of the Palestinians, as the Nazis aimed to do with the Jews, but only to destroy the Palestinians as a people)? If I believe the condition of Palestinians in Gaza is very comparable to the conditions of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, where my Mother’s grandparents and many uncles, aunts, and cousins were confined—in some ways in better conditions (the land into which Israel is confining the Gazans will have only about 1/3 the density of people in the Warsaw Ghetto; people in Gaza are on the verge of starvation but not yet dying of starvation in substantial numbers) and in some ways worse (people in Gaza largely do not have buildings to live in, but must live in tent cities without sanitary facilities, heat, clean water) – can I not express or argue for this belief?
All of the beliefs I posit above are beliefs about specific political and military actions and governmental policies. None are in any way anti-semitic. Similarly, during the Vietnam War I felt my country, the U.S., was engaged in war crimes and mass murder of millions of people, and I protested against this. This did not make me anti-American, indeed I have pride in many aspects of my heritage as an American, although I’m also very aware of many failures of that heritage that I still believe and hope can be overcome.
It’s important to note that Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, has condemned the use of this definition as the basis for a campus speech code. In a 2019 article on the occasion of an executive order from Trump calling for adoption of the IHRA definition, he wrote:
Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism” [the IHRA definition]. It was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders.
It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.
...
starting in 2010, rightwing Jewish groups took the “working definition”, which had some ex- amples about Israel . . . and decided to weaponize it with title VI cases. While some allegations were about acts, mostly they complained about speakers, assigned texts and protests they said violated the definition.
...
If you think this isn’t about suppressing political speech, contemplate a parallel. There’s no definition of anti-black racism that has the force of law when evaluating a title VI case. If you were to craft one, would you include opposition to affirmative action? Opposing removal of Confederate statues?
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and special adviser, wrote in the New York Times that the definition “makes clear [that] Anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. I’m a Zionist. But on a college campus, where the purpose is to explore ideas, anti-Zionists have a right to free expression.
...
The real purpose of the executive order isn’t to tip the scales in a few title VI cases, but rather the chilling effect. ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] and other groups will hunt political speech with which they disagree, and threaten to bring legal cases. I’m worried administrators will now have a strong motivation to suppress, or at least condemn, political speech for fear of litigation. I’m worried that faculty, who can just as easily teach about Jewish life in 19th- century Poland or about modern Israel, will probably choose the former as safer. I’m worried that pro-Israel Jewish students and groups, who rightly complain when an occasional pro- Israel speaker is heckled, will get the reputation for using instruments of state to suppress their political opponents.
No one can define for a Jew what it means for them to be Jewish, what they must believe, or how they must behave. Each of us must define that for ourselves. We have no pope. A rabbi is just another member of the congregation. The Jewish people are not uniform, there are divisions between us (as the old saying goes, “two Jews, three opinions”). There is a strong left tradition in Judaism, from which I come, that aligns with Albert Einstein’s famous statement “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence—these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.” Passover, the feast of freedom, was always my favorite Jewish holiday. We were slaves in Egypt and we stand passionately with all the oppressed, demanding justice. “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The love of learning, an almost fanatical love of justice, the commandment to do right by the stranger—these to me are the core of the Jewish tradition, in which I take great pride, and the core of the strong left tradition in Judaism. This is why 70% of American Jews vote Democratic whereas only around 40% of other whites do. But there is also a strong strand of Judaism for which it is fundamentally a tribal identity, which in its extremes believes that the commandments of the bible only apply to our treatment of other Jews, not to others. These differences lead to very different attitudes in the willingness to accept injustice and oppression coming from the state of Israel. The IHRA definition not only is an attack on free speech and academic freedom, but it is an insult to me as a Jew and it is anti-semitic, because it tries to force upon me a government-dictated definition of how I must be a Jew and what I must believe as a Jew. I will never, ever accept this.
Another fault of the newly declared policies is that they focus entirely on “anti-semitism.” The problems raised in terms of safety and hate speech by the war in Gaza obviously equally affect Muslim and Arab students and Jewish students—this is shown even by the survey of students done by Columbia’s task force on anti-semitism. A good faith interest in stopping racism and hate speech engendered by the war and the protests against it and in securing student safety would equally address all of these groups. A bad faith effort would follow the dictates of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump to suppress criticism of Israel and support for Palestinians by focusing exclusively on a fatally flawed definition of “anti-semitism.”
These new policies attack free speech, freedom of religion (how must I be a Jew?), and academic freedom. It is deplorable for an otherwise great academic institution to capitulate to such McCarthyite demands to carve out a zone of forbidden political speech, in the name of fighting “anti-semitism.” I know anti-semitism. My brother had rocks thrown at him by kids yelling “dirty jew” in elementary school and middle school. I deplore anti-semitism. And I deplore this bad-faith use of anti-semitism to suppress political speech.