any years ago, as a young reporter, I had the arresting experience of watching in real time as a random group of people spontaneously enforced the American taboo against antisemitism.
It was 1996. I’d gone with a friend to Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, to hear a famous English baritone sing a concert of lieder, or art songs. Most of the pieces were in French or German, but one was a cycle of English folk songs, in a musical setting by the composer Benjamin Britten. The lyrics to the French and German lieder were printed in the program, along with translations. The English folk-song lyrics were not, so it was a complete surprise to all present when the second song in the cycle turned out to be about “Little Sir William,” who goes to visit “the Jew’s wife,” who kills him and cuts him up in little pieces.
There was dead silence after the baritone finished the three verses of “Little Sir William” and paused for the conventional few seconds between items in a set. If it hadn’t been for that pause—in which a well-trained audience knows not to clap, but to sit in appreciative quiet—maybe the audience would have let it go. Instead, a gentle “Boo” floated into the silence.
“Boo,” responded two other people, almost conversationally.
The singer resumed, but by the time he made it to the next pause, a woman down near the front had apparently had time to think. She stood up and shouted, “That song is nothing but a blood libel! People have been murdered because of stories like that. How dare you come here and sing a blood libel?”
The singer and his accompanist bolted into the wings. Chaos broke out—well, what passes for chaos at that kind of event. There were shouts of “Let him alone!” and “No, she’s right!” Six or eight other people jumped to their feet; others cringed down into their seats. A few couples got up and left. Others started up a drumbeat of applause, which quenched the protesters and eventually reached the artist. He slunk back on stage and unenthusiastically finished the program. The evening was ruined.
It turned out later that the whole thing was a series of mistakes: The Britten piece was often performed with alternative lyrics that referred only to a “school-wife,” and they appeared that way in the printed version of the music and in the lone recording from the 1940s. In that pre-Google era, no one involved in planning the concert on this side of the Atlantic had any inkling that another version existed. (The friend who took me to the concert, who had done the program notes, felt particularly blindsided.) The baritone, for his part, had performed the original version all over England and Europe without encountering any trouble or picking up any asterisks; in fact, he had been awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. He was as surprised as anybody, apparently, to walk into an invisible wall between a culture with no inhibitions against singing this kind of thing in public and a culture where it was definitely not allowed.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like much of a story now, when every day brings its cargo of fresh outrage at antisemitic statements or physical attacks on Jews. But the incident has stayed with me as a kind of template for how decent people react when confronted with a taboo that we as a society take seriously. Especially these days, when so much public debate is a meta-debate over what is or is not forbidden to do or say—free speech or hate speech, censorship or cancel culture, snowflakery and whataboutism, the “Palestine exception” and cultural appropriation—it’s clarifying and bracing to be reminded what a functioning taboo really looks like.
Taboos matter. The word’s usually used as a pejorative, but actually, building and maintaining taboos—the right ones, the ones we agree on—is one of the most important and civilized things that human beings do. What is a taboo, exactly? Freud, in Totem and Taboo, defined it as a behavior (the example he gave was incest) that has been forbidden for so long that the reason for the prohibition has been forgotten. Some taboos, like that one, are ancient and foundational; others, like things you can’t mention, change over time, but they too are mysterious and to some degree involuntary. When they are violated, the recoil by witnesses is not intellectual but visceral.
Taboos represent a deep kind of agreement: They freeze an issue and set it off limits when, for better or worse, we’re done talking about it. If you can’t go near an issue, if it makes you uncomfortable even to think about it, you can’t challenge its premises. No one could publicly debate sexual mores in the Victorian era, or gay rights in the 1940s, because just mentioning them was a shocking offense. Taboos of this kind are obviously dangerous, but they also make life livable. We can’t be arguing about everything all the time. Our psychological bandwidth isn’t infinite, which means that at any given time, some subjects have to be off the table.
Taboos about sex roles, and many others, needed to be discarded so society could move forward. But there are also taboos that we don’t want renegotiated, that we built as a society with care and difficulty over time, whose breakage or deterioration would be tragic. Which brings us to the antisemitism taboo, a precious creation of postwar America and the foundation of a kind of Jewish comfort in mainstream American culture that European Jews never attained or even really understood.
Would a crowd react today as they did at Lisner? Is the answer something we can control, or even predict? I’ve been an observer and collector of taboos since that concert, preoccupied with the way things get placed off limits and, conversely, brought back into the realm of the discussable. And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the well-meaning things we are doing to fight the erosion of the antisemitism taboo are doing just the opposite.
here did the American taboo against antisemitism come from? Surprisingly, no one really knows. Most people think it has something to do with the Holocaust and the recognition it engendered of where casual bigotry could lead. Historian Jonathan Sarna has written that a long-standing sense among Jews in the United States that they could fight for their rights from an equal footing—they had never been “granted” equality but had possessed it from the beginning as part of citizenship—merged after the war with Americans’ growing postwar desire to show how different they were from their vanquished German foes. The historian Wendy Wall, in Inventing the “American Way,” traces how public education honored figures like the “four chaplains”—a priest, a rabbi and two Protestant ministers—who went down together on a military transport vessel and were memorialized with posters and a postage stamp.
Whatever the reason, antisemitism in all its forms—casual slur words, less-casual generalizations, full-blown conspiracy theories, blood libels and Holocaust denial—have been off limits for several generations in polite American society. Not because they were illegal, like Holocaust denial in Germany or France. Not because people didn’t say things behind Jews’ backs that they wouldn’t say to our faces—of course they did. But everyone in educated circles knew you didn’t even allow certain thoughts to form. For many decades, an unambiguously bigoted public comment about Jews drew instant, blackout condemnation.
And now? You’ll hear on many sides, as the bad year since October 7 stretches into a second one, that the taboo against antisemitism no longer exists. The British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore told a Sky News interviewer recently that on his side of the pond the antisemitism taboo has largely disappeared, along with other keystones of liberal progress since 1945—“They’ve simply worn out.” Wherever you live, you can go online, pull up X/Twitter and a few clicks will take you to posts with statements about “the Jews” that haven’t been said publicly for years.
But I’m going to go out on a limb: Here in the United States, at least, the taboo against antisemitism is still in effect. Not in the sweeping way it once functioned; not, perhaps, in the way we would like. But key elements of it are still in place.
The evidence is hiding in plain sight. It’s in the enormous flurry of media coverage whenever a public figure says something that crosses a sometimes contested but still aggressively policed line. It’s in the way accusations of antisemitism, like those of racism, cling tenaciously to the reputation of celebrities who’ve crossed that line. Most of all, there’s evidence of this continuing taboo in the prodigious efforts expended by the organized Jewish community in the last decade to define antisemitism and establish its exact boundaries, most notably through the “working definition” developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and the meta-arguments that erupted around that definition when the Biden White House sought to adopt it for official use.
Why spend years, and fight so hard, over a label? Why does it matter so much? Because everyone knows that antisemitism is wrong. Anything officially branded with that label can be ruled out of order without the need to argue constantly, exhaustingly, for first principles. Once something is under the antisemitism umbrella, arguments aren’t needed.
That the taboo works so well, in fact, may be one of the biggest dangers to its continued effectiveness. If a working taboo enshrines genuine social consensus, it’s tempting to believe that that consensus is unassailable—and wider than it may actually be. In times like these, who can blame us for the reflex of reaching for the antisemitism label whenever something makes us really uncomfortable? What with the fog of war abroad and the atmosphere of partisanship and paranoia at home, that could be almost anything. We endanger the taboo when we stretch it to cover things that actually still need arguing over, things that used to be off limits but aren’t anymore, and things that feel wrong for reasons we can’t quite remember, maybe because it’s so long since we last had to marshal the arguments.
hat does a real taboo look like? They’re hard to spot, but here are a couple of clues.
Taboos are invisible. By definition, they are things no one talks about: You only glimpse them at the moment of collision, when someone tries and fails to break the rule. Like the original Freudian taboos, the cultural ones retain some of that sense of mystery. You can’t entirely control what is taboo—to some degree, it happens organically and can only be observed after the fact. True taboos have very little to do with free speech; they exist on a level that the First Amendment generally does not touch. Sometimes laws reinforce a non-speech taboo, but generally, these are things people don’t say or do even if they have the right to.
Taboos are enforced spontaneously; there’s no referee. The enforcement of a true taboo is automatic, with the enforcers often as surprised as the transgressor. The conservative philosopher Leon Kass wrote a classic (and controversial) essay in 1997 called “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” arguing that if something makes you recoil involuntarily, that’s essential data that a society ignores at its peril. The occasion for the essay was cloning. The appeal to revulsion can get problematic fast: What about socially induced repulsion for interracial marriages? Or for two men kissing in public? And revulsions once deemed “natural” can be schooled away or dulled by familiarity. But absent such schooling, the mechanism works pretty well. Twenty-seven years on, the taboo against human cloning seems to be holding up.
The linguist and columnist John McWhorter writes in his wonderful book about profanity, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Then, Now and Forever, that while the left brain handles language, scans show the right brain lights up when people use a “forbidden” word. He quotes George Carlin, from the classic “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” routine: “These words have no power. We give them this power by refusing to be free and easy with them.” In other words, the more we observe the taboo, the more we strengthen it.
Seeing a taboo violated is an all-body experience. It doesn’t surprise me at all that students who have never encountered direct disagreement with a principle they hold dear might initially think they’ve been “harmed” by its mere articulation. Hearing something you thought unspeakable is very aerobic: Your heart pounds, your ears ring, tears may spring to your eyes. In my memory of the “Jew-wife” song, I’m cringing, staring at my clenched hand on the armrest, wishing I could hide under my seat. I also have a primarily physical memory of the first time I heard someone (an earnest non-Jewish housemate) say they thought the creation of the State of Israel had been, on the whole, a mistake.
But you have to be careful about this one, too: Discomfort by itself isn’t evidence of taboo. It’s a two-step process: discomfort, then consensus.
Consensus can take time. Recall what happened when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022. (The annual Academy Awards are actually a pretty good window into what’s taboo, since the assembled cultural arbiters aren’t expecting to be called upon to make judgments of this sort unrehearsed—but they’re good at it once roused.) The first reaction from both those in attendance and those watching at home was disbelief: Did I just see that? The audience seemed to think at first that it was watching a gag; a half-round of confused laughter died away quickly.
Taboos matter. The word’s usually used as a pejorative, but actually, building and maintaining taboos—the right ones, the ones we agree on—is one of the most important and civilized things that human beings do.
Smith took the podium later in the program without significant pushback. Indignation built only slowly: Comment sections seesawed back and forth endlessly on Twitter and Facebook, as more parties were heard from: Academy members, Variety columnists, funders of future movies. After a couple of days, the waters unmuddied and an answer emerged: Unlike in the storied 1960s, when an actor could sock a negative reviewer in Elaine’s, there is, in fact, a taboo against one celebrity smacking another one in public.
Agreements can be broken. Taboos change. Taboos that deep-freeze a cultural consensus are broken and renegotiated when that’s no longer acceptable. Facing down the terrors of coming out of the closet in the 1980s, gay rights activists I knew in college adopted the rallying cry, “The only cure for the problems of visibility is more visibility!” The New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse wrote a 2023 column about the way the first cracks in the taboo against discussing abortion appeared in 1962 when Sherri Chessen Finkbine, a beloved children’s TV host, sought an abortion after she was exposed to thalidomide. Her quest for an abortion that was then illegal in every U.S. state brought discussion of the topic to a squeamish public. (“A subject largely hidden from public view was suddenly national news,” Greenhouse recalled.) Half a century later, movements like “Shout Your Abortion” and #MeToo played explicitly off this dynamic of saying something that made you feel strange and a little shamed, then getting past it because of all the solidarity and support.
You can soften taboos by accident. Linguist McWhorter, in discussing the “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” monologue, makes a distinction between two kinds of taboo: a hard taboo that no one goes near because of genuine shared moral horror, and a soft taboo that can be cracked for the comic frisson and the ensuing (uncomfortable) laugh. “Seven Words,” he says, marked a key shift in what society considered “hard” taboo, from obscenities—which were prohibited by broadcast rules but good for a laugh—to “words about groups,” such as the n-word, which are so taboo now that they aren’t even funny.
It may be that this kind of gradual softening of taboo, through humor, into mere transgression is inevitable—it’s just something culture does. And whether something is funny-transgressive or just hateful is a central dispute, maybe the central dispute, of today’s comedy industry. (Many comedy clubs now require patrons to deposit their cell phones at the door, lest a mistake in locating this line doom a comic’s career.) But making jokes about hard taboo subjects can turn them into soft taboos without that being anyone’s intention, as with Borat, the movie by the British Jewish director Sacha Baron Cohen, with its impossibly over-the-top antisemitic remarks played for laughs. (There continues to be a marked difference in comfort level with this sort of thing between the two sides of the Atlantic, but it doesn’t matter much in today’s linked-up world.)
You can grow new taboos, but you can’t force them. Society is always sorting through its taboos, new and old. What’s off limits, and what is newly acceptable? What will get you ostracized, kicked off your social media accounts, fired from your job? What will lose you an election, or, surprisingly, turn out to be acceptable? More than in the pre-social-media era, we can watch a lot of this work being done in real time. For a while, Twitter seemed to be the engine of new taboos, with everything from a singer’s “appropriated” hairstyle to a thoughtlessly named ice cream flavor becoming grounds for cancellation. You could be banned from Twitter in 2014 for “deadnaming” a transgender person, that is, referring to them with the name they had used before transitioning.
This rule did not, of course, survive Twitter’s change of management. But it also suggests that a rule generated by a social media company is not going to suppress a practice unless that practice is widely and informally seen as unacceptable.
aken together, these natural laws of taboo give an idea why we are doing so badly at hanging onto the ones we want to keep. The American antisemitism taboo today feels like a melting glacier, its hinterlands swamped, its center softening. Our tactics in defense of what’s left increasingly seem to be contributing, instead, to the meltdown.
Once upon a time—well into the 2000s—the usual way for the community to determine whether something was to be considered antisemitic was to consult Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. A Holocaust survivor, a community pillar and a confidant of multiple U.S. presidents of both parties, Foxman, who’s now retired but occasionally still comments on current events, was an example of that vanished phenomenon in American politics, the neutral arbiter. Was it antisemitic for President Ronald Reagan in 1985 to make a visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where SS officers were interred? Foxman, weighing in after a firestorm of criticism, called Reagan “well-meaning.” In 1999, the Rev. Jerry Falwell told his congregation that the Antichrist was probably already alive and “of course he’ll be Jewish.” Foxman, consulted, said the statement “revisits the worst in intolerance that resulted in persecution of the Jewish people and inquisitions.”
No one fills that role now, so we’re stuck with two strategies—it’s probably more accurate to call them reflexes—that are manifestly inadequate. First, when someone says something that clearly breaks the taboo, our superheated media environment—including Jewish media, which feed the wider dialogue—leaps on it and repeats it hundreds of times across every imaginable platform until we’re numb, dulling our sense of the forbidden. And second, when the transgression is not so clear, when it’s located somewhere on that melting hinterland, we struggle to pretend that it’s still in the center, where it can be deemed taboo and rejected without discussion.
What happens when someone says something egregiously antisemitic in public? For an example of the first reflex, consider the infamous Trayon White case, in which White, a young D.C. councilman, was caught on video warning his constituents that “the Rothschilds” were controlling the weather. As calumnies against Jews go, this one was pretty obscure. I’d never heard it before. (White himself protested that he hadn’t even known the Rothschilds were Jewish.) Regardless, White’s dumb remarks caused a national, then an international outcry. He received threats. His transgression was described over and over in tones of gleeful outrage. Within days, it was on the late-night shows, making the trek from hard taboo (the gut-check No! Stop! Don’t say that!) to soft (Can you believe this guy said that?). When I went to synagogue that week, the security guard said, “Thanks for arranging this nice weather” as he checked my bag. We both laughed, then sighed. It wasn’t funny, exactly; but it was also no longer even remotely shocking.
But I’m going to go out on a limb: Here in the United States, at least, the taboo against antisemitism is still in effect. Not in the sweeping way it once functioned; not, perhaps, in the way we would like. But key elements of it are still in place.
White was a punch line for a while; then people moved on. But the insane idea that Jews, or anyone, controls the weather ended up as a stupid but not especially transgressive comic turn. It merged along the way with the equally bonkers and perhaps better-known conspiracy theory about so-called Jewish space lasers, which, after being floated by Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, had a similar can-you-believe-she-said-that trajectory in the media. Now, it’s even the title of a book on conspiracy theories and the Rothschilds. People were appropriately indignant when the weather-fixing trope became a broader, more damaging accusation this past September in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. But they weren’t shocked.
The storm-of-outrage coverage model has the same bleaching effect on all taboo statements and ideas, not just about Jews, but on virtually every subject. The era of Donald Trump has highlighted this mechanism as it denatures taboo after taboo. From the start, whenever Trump has said something that falls outside previously accepted bounds of civil public discourse—crude nicknames, sexist insults, “enemy of the people” rhetoric, penis jokes, comments about “Pocahontas” at a ceremony honoring Navajo code talkers—a massive wave of media has taken to repeating it over and over, as if to drive home its utter unacceptability, in the process dispelling any whiff of the transgressive. Scholars of the phenomenon call this “normalization.” But most discussions of normalization treat it as a symptom of gradually diminishing outrage. What do we do when it’s generated by the outrage itself?
For the media, dealing with bigotry without amplifying it has always posed a conundrum. Do you show the swastika in a news story about a swastika? Do you show it with a warning? There used to be norms of restraint on this, but in the media of today they’re a distant memory.
When an underlying consensus seems to be slipping away, is there no shortcut? Must we go on forever, explaining yet again what a blood libel is and why George Soros is not a Nazi?
The polling industry offers a different type of desensitization. For years, pollsters have asked people whether they agree or disagree with statements such as “Jews are the source of most of the problems in the world.” I always flinch at this—is it really helpful to call up hundreds of people, read them this statement, and ask whether they agree or disagree with it? In January, The Washington Post reported, with appropriate horror, on a YouGov poll that showed half of Americans agreeing with the (Trump) statement that illegal immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America. (The numbers shifted slightly when respondents were told Trump had said it—Republicans agreed more, Democrats less.) It was a frightening and necessary story, but I was distracted by the mental image of pollsters emailing hundreds—thousands?—of normal people who had never once had such a thought—because, truly, it’s a thing Americans once knew they should not think—and asking them: “Do you agree or disagree that illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation?”
The other, more subtle way we unintentionally drain the antisemitism taboo of its power is by overworking it—recoiling from public utterances as if they were taboo, when in fact they need discussion and refutation. Because it still works so well, it’s enormously tempting to use the antisemitism label to shut down anything that invites a discussion we don’t want to have: a stray shout of “Free Palestine”; an assertion that Congress should cut off military aid to Israel or that the so-called Israel lobby has too much power; or even the statement that Israel has no right to exist, which the American Jewish Committee calls “textbook antisemitism.” But the firm consensus that once condemned all these statements, the one that put them beyond the bounds of discussion and made them taboo, no longer can be counted on.
hen the White House released its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism in May 2023, media coverage focused not on the contents of the policy, which called for hundreds of actions to be taken across all agencies of government, but on a fight among Jewish organizations over which definition of antisemitism would underpin it—the “working definition” developed by the IHRA and originally adopted by 31 nations, or the alternative Jerusalem Declaration signed by several hundred academics. There was a clear subtext to the dispute: Most organizations involved in combating antisemitism prefer the IHRA definition because it covers more ground, particularly when it comes to anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel. The “working definition” begins with a basic statement—“The term ‘antisemitism’ means a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”—but then amplifies the statement in terms that can cover many forms of anti-Israel animus and condemnations of Israeli policy. “Manifestations” of antisemitism, it states, may include “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,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” or “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The narrower Jerusalem Declaration, which explicitly describes itself as a response to IHRA, seeks to “protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine” and draws lines in a way that excludes more categories of criticism of Israel, however harsh, from the definition. (The White House sidestepped the conflict by saying it would use both definitions as needed.)
The IHRA’s clauses about Israel became urgently relevant after October 7, when college campuses erupted in anti-Israel ire and the question of what constituted an antisemitic incident or an antisemitic statement (especially when chanted at a rally) took on practical and disciplinary weight. But ideas enshrined in the IHRA definition had already been a key factor in other matters, notably the Jewish community’s response to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). For almost a decade, a major argument against BDS—aggressively spearheaded by the government of Israel—had been that such a movement constituted antisemitism by definition and thus should be attacked with all the tools available to fight bigotry.
I heard Israel’s then-ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, make this argument to a group of Jewish journalists at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. (The IHRA definition had been formally adopted about a month earlier.) Boycotting Israel, Dermer argued, constituted a double standard, since other nations were not so targeted; and subjecting Israel to a double standard on anything, according to the working definition, was antisemitic. Others argued that supporting BDS was antisemitic because it was equivalent to calling for the destruction of the State of Israel, thus denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. This was hardly a farfetched argument. Calling for the destruction of the State of Israel was taboo enough in 2018 that when the CNN commentator and academic Marc Lamont Hill called for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” in a speech to the United Nations, the network fired him a few days later.
But when public debate undergoes a shift, whether because of events in the real world or for other reasons, not even the clearest definition can make up for it. Now, six years later, “from the river to the sea” is among the most disputed phrases out there. Chanting it today won’t even get you suspended from school.
The practical purpose of an internationally-agreed-upon definition is, of course, unassailable: To counter hate in a systematic way, you have to be able to scan for it and quantify it. This has been the reasoning behind organizations such as the ADL from the beginning: Know it when you see it, record it, track it, make clear it’s not OK. In countries where it’s legal to prosecute speech, definitions take on more practical weight; but even without resort to legal muscle, this kind of naming and shaming can be a powerful tool. When I recently asked Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, a champion of the fight against antisemitism and for Israel, if he thought there was still an antisemitism taboo functioning, he immediately drew the connection to this kind of systematized approach: “Words have consequences. You never want to normalize a certain kind of language or give it oxygen.” Actions can be prosecuted—vandalism, graffiti, targeted harassment, maybe even creation of a “hostile environment” for Jews. Speech can be denounced. But it’s harder, more slippery.
The insistence that there is a definition out there that will cover antisemitism comprehensively—and that getting it right will end the discussion—ironically pays tribute to the power of the antisemitism taboo and the faith in it by all parties. But there may be such a thing as too much faith. The Anti-Defamation League, having spent several years reporting on skyrocketing numbers of antisemitic incidents, was obliged to admit that at some point it had begun counting all pro-Palestinian rallies as incidents of antisemitism. The numbers were horrific with or without this amplification: The ADL said it logged 5,204 incidents between October 7 and the end of 2023, “more than the incident total for the whole of 2022,” and that 2,718 of those post-October 7 incidents—52 percent—“included references to Israel, Zionism or Palestine.” If a pro-Palestinian rally is in itself enough of an offense against Jewish sensibilities that it should be considered antisemitic—if, that is, it breaks an established taboo—then the numbers suggest that the taboo isn’t being enforced very effectively.
o now what? When an underlying consensus seems to be slipping away, is there no shortcut? Must we go on forever, explaining yet again what a blood libel is and why George Soros is not a Nazi? Obviously, the resurgence of antisemitism and the waning of taboos against criticism of Israel aren’t the result of any actions by Jews or Jewish organizations. It’s quite possible that nothing could have slowed either one. And yet it’s also clear that strategies that had long seemed to work—against BDS, for example—eventually broke down under the onslaught that followed October 7.
In May 2023, five months before October 7, Harvard’s student newspaper, The Crimson, published an editorial expressing full-throated support of Palestinian rights and specifically of BDS.
Emails flew among the newspaper’s many opinionated and probably overly involved alumni: Should the grownups weigh in, and if so, how? Should we write letters to the editor? And if so, should they explicitly accuse the editorial of antisemitism?
In the letters that ultimately appeared in The Crimson—from alumni but also from many others—you could see the different approaches on clear display. One letter signed by a number of faculty members, teacherly in tone, walked the editorial writers painstakingly through a series of historical errors and ways in which people of good will might have been misled into believing, mistakenly, that BDS was something other than a call for the destruction of Israel that would bring atrocity in its wake. Many more, though, denounced The Crimson for antisemitism, “intentional or functional,” as then-President Lawrence Bacow, whose mother survived Auschwitz, told a reporter.
It was hard to imagine that the teacherly approach would penetrate, given the fury that was already superheating the Israel-Palestine issue on campus—even at this point, in the spring before the academic year that brought October 7. Then again, students seemed equally unlikely to respond to the implicit “You can’t say that” that follows the assertion, “This is antisemitism.” Without the taboo, it’s not an argument—just an appeal to authority.
Disputes over racism or antisemitism online often end with a virtual flounce: I’m not going to do the emotional labor of explaining this to you. Go do the research. This doesn’t seem to result in a lot of conversions, but neither does the path we’re so often following by default: Bingo! You’re a bigot! Look how wrong this is! Let’s repeat it everywhere to show everyone just how wrong you are for saying it! The alternative is slower, less exciting and much more work: “All or part of this is wrong or not true. Let me explain it again.” It’s excruciating, sure, but there’s one advantage to doing the arguing yourself, without benefit of taboo or shorthand. When something hateful like antisemitism has been safely taboo long enough, it’s easy to forget how strong the arguments are against it. You forget why you’re right about things. Your mental muscles atrophy.
If we’re headed for a world where the taboo on antisemitism is fading and the taboo on condemning Israel is long gone, is there any hope we can build up a decent consensus again, using the classical liberal weapons of reasoned argument? If it sounds like an uphill battle, that’s probably because taboos, being partly emotional, are likelier to be cemented by emotions (such as horror at the Holocaust) than by arguments rooted in logic. On the other hand, what’s the alternative to trying? It can’t be any more damaging to the state of the discussion than those partisans who cling desperately to the remnants of the taboo in order to avoid having to make even the simplest pro-Israel case, as if refusing to believe that their arguments can carry the day.
A prime example of this unfolded recently around Brown University, where last spring President Christina Paxson got student protesters to dismantle their encampment in time for graduation by negotiating a deal. The student groups would be allowed to present their case—an atypically specific and narrowly drawn demand, as student demands went, that Brown divest from ten companies they considered complicit in Israel’s operations in Gaza—to the Board of Trustees. Afterward, the trustees would vote on whether to divest. Getting the chance to argue their views was enough for the student leaders, who packed up their tents without police being called. (Several other schools negotiated similar outcomes.)
But as the fall rolled around, at least one anti-divestment trustee broke ranks. Instead of staying to vote against divestment, Joseph Edelman wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he was stepping down from his post in protest. “I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered, much less that it will be held,” he wrote, “especially in the wake of the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
The gesture was met with a spatter of approval from right-wing media. David Suissa of the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles amplified the op-ed with an approving article teased with the cover line “When is a vote not a vote?” The answer, it seemed, was that a vote was not a vote if it involved considering a question that opponents of divestment consider beyond the pale. “It looks to me like Brown got ambushed by cynical Jew-haters who exploited an innocent-sounding idea like a vote,” Suissa wrote, concluding that “the vote itself is the real offense.”
Meanwhile, the meeting went ahead, and the Brown trustees voted no.
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