Academic Antisemitism at KU: A Religious Perspective

Last week, The Student Senate of the University of Kansas (KU) voted to condemn Israel for what they described as its “ongoing genocide in Palestine”. In an inspiring gesture of Jewish unity, KU Hillel and KU Chabad put out an excellent joint statement which addresses the substance of that vote and why it was so fundamentally wrong. My aim here is to provide a traditional Jewish spiritual framing for that same vote. There is nothing original in my upcoming analysis. I am simply applying the standard framework for antisemitism that one typically learns in a modern-day yeshiva, but to which the reader who did not study in such a yeshiva might not have been exposed.

Rashi on Bereishit 33:4 quotes Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai as saying: “It is a known halacha (matter of law) that Esau hates Jacob”. The word “halacha” is typically used to describe Jewish legal matters, such as how to observe shabbat and kosher, etc. The use of that word here is quite powerful. It’s Rabbi Shimon’s way of saying that antisemitism is a metaphysical reality, built into the fabric of the universe, like a law of nature. Some in the yeshiva world invoke this statement to mean that all gentiles hate Jews. I emphatically reject that interpretation.

How, then, should we interpret the word “Esau” here? In Rabbi Shimon’s time, Esau was a codeword for the Roman power structure of his day. Understood in that light, what he means is that there will always be those within the prevailing power structure who viscerally despise the tiny Jewish minority, and for metaphysical reasons that even they themselves might not understand.

Or, to borrow from the prevailing parlance in academia itself, in order to describe their own obsession with Israel: their antisemitism is “systemic” – deeply rooted, unconscious, centuries old, and baked into the Western mind of Esau. Indeed, Esau/Edom eventually came to represent The West in the rabbinic mind. This does not, as I mentioned, mean that all or even most Western individuals are antisemitic. It only means that the issue is a timeless and systemic one.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory taught that antisemitism morphs and mutates in every age. In Medieval Christendom, the sin of Deicide (killing God Himself, or His Son, as it were) was the worst sin that one could be accused of, and the Jews were collectively accused of it. In our secular age, human rights are now the highest value, and genocide is the worst sin that one can be accused of (and rightfully so!). I would ask those college students who voted against Israel: is it really a massive coincidence that Jews are always accused of the worst sin of the age, and that you voted to accuse the Jewish State of the worst sin of our time?

None of this absolves Israel of criticism. These students could have voted (also wrongly) that Israel’s war in Gaza is unjust, in the mold of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or in the way in which college students framed the Vietnam war as an unjust one a generation ago. But they didn’t frame it that way. They chose the term genocide, casting the Jewish State as uniquely evil in the world today. Is it a coincidence that this fits into a centuries old pattern of demonization?

There’s a moral laziness in declaring that war is bad (which it is), but without being able to offer any reasonable alternatives, given the circumstances. These privileged young students don’t understand the basic moral contours of Just War Theory, because they’ve never had to fight for their own freedom. If they would only drive forty miles north to Fort Leavenworth, they could meet patriotic young Americans their own age who do understand what that means.

The resolution against Israel at KU was coauthored by KU’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro Hamas group that openly supports the murder, rape and kidnapping of Jewish children as constituting legitimate acts of “resistance”, as well as endorsing violence and harassment against Jews around the world in general. SJP has called for the abolition of campus Chabad and Hillel houses across the country, since they are all “Zionist”.

When asked to condemn the events of October 7th, one of the anti-Israel presenters at KU deflected the question by asserting that the 1948 “Nakba” (founding of the State of Israel) was worse. She also risibly asserted that Hamas only uses weapons that are dropped on them by Israel, and which they are then able to “repurpose”, but that they otherwise possess no weapons of their own (!)

I actually take these students at their word that their hatred of Israel does not derive from animus towards Jews as such. Indeed, it is common to hear them declare that “some of my [token] anti-Israel best friends are Jewish”. But that’s as irrelevant as the libertarian in the 1960’s who was not personally racist, but sincerely opposed civil rights on States’ Rights grounds. In practice, their policy views were still seen, on a systemic level, as being against the interests of racial minorities. And in practice, the academic antisemites’ proposed policies – cutting off military funding and diplomatic support for Israel to wage its defensive wars – would lead to the mass murder of Jews. This isn’t theoretical. No one who supports Israel’s basic right to exist has any doubts about that scenario.

Some of these academics would no doubt cry crocodile tears for the Jewish victims in such a scenario. Many others would either openly cheer or tacitly condone it as a justified and understandable act of “resistance”, just as they did after October 7^th. That is the sad reality that we face in the elite universities today.

It is this same dynamic in academia that led Judith Butler, an assimilated Jew, and the world’s leading expositor of incoherent postmodern nonsense, to declare, back in 2006, that “understanding Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” Many Jews, when stripped of the heritage of Jacob, come under the sway of Esau. This is also a cosmic and timeless metaphysical truth, built into the fabric of reality itself, even if Butler is not self-aware of it. It should be noted that, ironically, the name Judith is Hebrew for: A Woman from the Land of Judea.

The individual Judah was the scion and royal son of Jacob. And Esau hates Jacob. And when a Jew reject the heritage of Jacob, they will inevitably gravitate to the far more popular and powerful Esau, in order to find a sense of meaning and community which they would otherwise lack.

The grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai sits on Mount Meron in northern Israel, in naked eyesight of Butler’s purported allies in Hezbollah. The Talmud in tractate Berachot 5a quotes Rabbi Shimon as teaching: Three things are called Divine gifts for the Jewish People, but they can only be acquired through suffering. They are: Torah, the World to Come, and Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel).

Rabbi Shimon understood what it meant to suffer for Eretz Yisrael. He and his mentor Rabbi Akiva supported the revolt of Bar Kochba, the last major attempt to restore Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel in the second century CE. Rabbi Shimon was forced to hide from the Roman invaders in a cave with his son for twelve years.

Freed Israeli hostage Agam Berger has written of how she drew strength in her captivity from the example of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who endured a similar ordeal of isolation and darkness, and still retained his spiritual resilience nonetheless.

Agam Berger is the greatest example of a true “Yehudit”, a proud Jewish “Woman from the Land of Judea”, and the perfect counterpoint to Judith Butler’s performative and exilic self-loathing.

Rabbi Shimon spent his time in the cave studying the mystical secrets of the Zohar. When he emerged from the cave, his face was said to radiate with a supernatural fire. The Zohar teaches:

“The Holy Land is the center of the world, and Jerusalem is at the center of the Holy Land; the center of Jerusalem is the Holy of Holies and all good and sustenance for the entire world descend there from above, and there is no settled place which is not nurtured from there.”  [Zohar, Terumah 157a]

The Land of Israel is the center of attention for the academic world as well, in keeping with this teaching of the Zohar. Their obsessive focus on that Center is a spiritual reality beyond their own comprehension. But we Jews can see it for the timeless phenomenon that it is.

Rabbi Shimon witnessed the Roman invaders of Esau/Edom rename the Land of Judea as “Palestine”, in memory of the Philistines, our ancient enemies, and as an insult to the indigenous Jews. None of that is the fault of contemporary Palestinian Arabs, with whom we’ll have to find a way to live in peace. Indeed, I have more hope for finding commonality with our Arab cousins of Ishmael than I do for our doing so with the contemporary elites of Esau. We and the Arab world tend to both laugh at the sheltered naïveté of Western academics.

Psalm 83:5 quotes the sentiment of the antisemite of every age:

“They say, ‘Come, let us destroy them from being a nation, and the name of Israel shall never be remembered again!’”

Those words could have been uttered, verbatim, without any sense of irony, by any one of the members of Students for Justice in Palestine who presented against Israel at KU last week, and their supporters would have cheered. Some approximation of those words was uttered by countless Hamas invaders on October 7th. The students from SJP presented their case while donned in keffiyehs, a trendy piece of apparel which has fittingly become known as “the hipster swastika” on campus.

“Come, let us destroy them from being a nation, and the name of Israel shall never be remembered again!”

Were those words really written in an ancient Psalm three millennia ago, or in a chic Ivy League student group manifesto just last week? Such is the timeless prophetic power of the Psalms. And any Israeli Jew can read those verses in the original Hebrew, without the English translation. The verses go on to say that those words are uttered from the tent of Esau/Edom, in a pact with certain allies from amongst Yishmael, from the Middle East.

The Talmud in Berachot 18a teaches: “The righteous even in death are called alive; the wicked even in life are called dead”. The same applies to ideas. The temporally fashionable ideology which animates the KU Student Assembly is the pseudo-religious cant of the Postmodern High Priestess Judith Butler, which shallowly asserts that power equals evil, and that any brown skinned people seen as opposing Western power equals virtue. Disregard the fact that the skin tone of the average Israeli Jew is only a shade lighter than that of the typical Arab. Our ancient identity and connection to our Homeland transcends their modern conceptions of race in ways that they can’t understand or incorporate; and they hate us for it.

Their transient but popular ideology is, in a spiritual sense, already called “dead”, even while it briefly holds sway in some circles today. And the People of Israel Live, even if their practical right to do so is not recognized on many college campuses today. In one hundred years from now, the current campus ideology will have passed on for the next popular thing. And in one hundred years from now, Jewish children will still be studying the teachings of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai in the cities of Judea and the outskirts of Jerusalem. And therein lies our victory.