Irony of ironies: bludgeoning higher education on behalf of Jews to erase Jews

Today is a big day for Jewish pride. It is Emile Durkheim’s birthday.

Émile Durkheim was a son of a son of a rabbi. This legacy traced back eight generations and he himself was in a yeshiva studying to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. However, Jew-hatred directed him in a different direction. Durkheim wanted to both understand and explain the social systems of antisemitism.

This intellectual turn was fueled by his lived experience as a Jew in French Alsace-Lorraine. His Orthodox community coexisted peacefully with their gentile neighbors until the end of the Franco-Prussian War when his town had been temporarily occupied by Germans. The Jews were scapegoated for the losses and the rising wave of antisemitism both frightened and fascinated him. How had the minds of so many around him been radically reoriented simultaneously? It was almost as if their consciousnesses were not their own, but somehow interconnected. In working to understand this, one sees Durkheim’s orthodox upbringing shadowing his thought.

His question about the relation between individuality and collectivity would end up becoming the topic of his dissertation and then his life’s work as he became one of the founders of the field of sociology. His courses at the University in Bordeaux were the first ever in sociology taught in France.

Many rightly credit Marx as an influence on Durkheim. However, when engaging his work, one also finds the symbols and rituals of Durkheim’s orthodox upbringing lighting up his sociology. It’s easy to imagine him sitting in synagogue as well as living at home wondering about the enveloping symbols and surrounding rituals. He didn’t choose to be Jewish, but only how to be Jewish. The individual is affirmed by collective identity. Tension between community and individuals fascinated him.

Durkheim understood that each of us deliberate, choosing our actions while showing that these choices are made within cultural strictures that, while powerful, remain invisible to us. We are socialized from the youngest age to internalize social facts: behavioral norms that are enforced both formally and informally and become unquestioned presuppositions in our choices.

Little do we realize that Durkheim’s investigation of the invisible effects of social facts changed the world—and shaped politics to this day. Indeed, while the right rails against what it terms as “cultural Marxism,” what it is really opposed to is “cultural Durkheimianism.”

It is the insights and scientific project of Durkheim that is being dismantled with prejudice, although Marx is given the credit for rhetorical purposes—any combination of “Marxism” and “cultural” brings to mind the authoritarian suffering inflicted by Stalin and Mao, but the ideas they really object to are those of Durkheim.

His project can be seen in action in 1897 with his book Suicide. While people have always taken their lives for a range of unfortunate reasons, at the end of the 19th century there was a sudden spike in suicides across Europe. People were killing themselves in unprecedented numbers in different regions and countries. Surely, the decision to end one’s own life is the most personal imaginable, but as with the wave of antisemitism he saw as a teen, this seemed to be a phenomenon of the collective mind. The numbers indicated that there must be something beyond the personal happening here.

What made Durkheim’s work special was his use of the numbers, it was not speculative or purely theoretical. He collected and analyzed data to find trends and possible causes and factors for the observable social phenomena. And the results were shocking. Across the board, there was a correlation between the suicide rate in an area and the religious composition. The more Catholic, the fewer suicides; the more Protestant, the higher the rate. The relationship held everywhere he looked.

What would explain this? Both Catholic and Protestant theologies held taking one’s own life to be sinful. There did not seem to be a religious reason. But the schism presented itself outside of the Churches and in the cultures.

Catholic communities tended to be poorer and less politically powerful, but more socially integrated. Larger families and tighter-knit communities created one set of expectations, goals, and definitions of happiness and success. Protestants, who tended to wealthier, better educated, and more interested in power and prestige, also constructed a social structure that was more atomistic, praising the strong individual whose unrelenting work ethic drove them to embrace suffering which, like Jesus on the cross, could cleanse the soul. But it also provided anxiety which the lack of integration exacerbated. Protestants were more alone and this lack of integration came with devastating effects.

Durkheim’s work demonstrated that scientific analysis of social phenomena can expose interconnected elements within society. Social ills may result from individual choices, but the data can show that the root cause of the problems is cultural. If it is the social structure that is creating the problem, then its solution lays in changing the social facts, in altering the culture.

The effects of this study transformed how we see the world. It is the social scientific equivalent of Copernicus removing the Earth as the center of the universe. Social problems had to be understood in terms of interwoven political, economic, and social institutions. This was not just theorical musing like thinkers of the previous generation like Marx had done. This was backed up by the numbers. There was now no denying that public health, poverty, crime, and so much more needed to be understood and addressed structurally.

The problem, of course, is that there are some who benefit from the current social structure. Levelling the playing field eliminates the advantages some rely on. Those people do not want this research done and certainly don’t want the policies that result put in place. In the Reagan 80’s, conservatives frequently framed issues in terms of “personal responsibility.” This move was a direct attack on Durkheim. They demanded that we keep the focus on the individual. That person chose to smoke. This person chose to steal. The person over there got pregnant while on welfare.

All of this is the result of atomic individuals making their own decisions, the line went. It is certainly true that these people chose to act as they did, but as Durkheim showed, those choices are only made once changeable social facts were in place. By forcing the focus onto “personal responsibility,” the cultural questions could not be asked and the data could not be gathered so rational policies could not be framed in order to change the status quo.

The US administration with its Project 2025 has taken this approach to the extreme. What does Durkheim’s program need? It needs to have scientists cultivated and a place where they do their research. That research needs to be gathered and made accessible to policy makers to figure out what social levers could be adjusted to solve the problems. Finally, there need to be those with shoes on the ground implementing these policies.

Notice what is currently under attack. Higher education is the place where scientists are trained and the research done. While Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins have been high profile targets, the Vice President labelled all of higher ed the enemy. The dissemination of this information occurs in libraries which are firmly in the crosshairs of the administration. Those parts of the government that are tasked with interpreting and creating policy and those who are in the field helping the needy and vulnerable have been unceremoniously cut, entire programs from the Department of Education, Interior, Transportation, from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health erased from existence.

The administration wants to make people believe that Émile Durkheim never existed. Jewish erasure isn’t new. While their anti-DEI stance may explicitly target Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, it does so by trying to do away with another DEI—Durkheim’s Economic Integration in which the social, political, and financial wellbeing of all are properly understood as being interconnected.

Durkheim’s insight that gave rise to the way we address cultural inequities and social problems emerged from his need to understand the scapegoating of the Jewish minority from which he came. How ironic that it is the same sort of scapegoating of minorities that is now leading to the organized destruction of the institutions developed from the insights that Émile Durkheim left to humanity.

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Co- written with Dr. Steve Gimbel, Bittenger Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College. Gimbel authored “Einstein’s Jewish Science” one time finalist for the National Jewish book award, and co-author of “Reclaiming the Wicked Son.”