Review of Cary Nelson, Mindless: What happened to Universities. The Jewish Quarterly, Issue 259, March 2025.
Early in this excellent and disturbing essay on the post-October 7 state of American universities, Cary Nelson observes that what has taken place since then has at any rate brought to an end “a decade’s debate both on and off campus over when and if anti-Zionism actually amounts to antisemitism. There is a growing consensus among Israel’s supporters that there is no longer a meaningful distinction between the two phenomena.”
What has finally robbed the distinction of a difference, Nelson argues, is the increasing dominance in anti-Zionist discourse since October 7 of the so-called “genocide libel.” This has served to unite at the heart of today’s anti-Zionism all the guiding delusions of traditional antisemitism: that Jews and Judaism are inherently evil, that they and they alone are responsible for some vast current abuse, and that Jews constitute, collectively and individually, a worldwide conspiracy
Radical anti-Zionism as encountered on campus embodies a belief that Israel is so misguided and destructive that it is beyond repair, that the country cannot be reformed . . . [that] there’s something fundamentally offensive about a Jewish state, and since it cannot be fixed, it must be eliminated. Since October 7, campus anti-Zionists have decided that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, or trying to do so. This suggests Israel is an immoral state in violation of a core principle of justice. These two beliefs — that Israel is comprehensively misguided in its policies and guiding principles and, moreover, a state that is now committing genocide –can combine to turn anti-Zionism into antisemitism. But then radical anti-Zionism takes one further step: it deems that Jews worldwide collaborate to support Israel and therefore share responsibility for Israel’s purported crimes. From there it is easy to invoke a new, Israel-specific version for the conspiracy theories that have fuelled antisemitism for thousands of years. (p.5)
I can confirm that this sadly perceptive analysis applies equally to sections of university opinion in Britain. In the summer of 2024, about nine months after the appalling Hamas pogrom of October 7 2O23, my wife and I attended a garden party largely populated by university faculty. At one point the topic of antisemitism came up. My wife unhappily mentioned that I had published work on this topic, which led a lady in the group to say sharply, “I do hope you make the point that anti-Zionism is in no way antisemitic!” I replied that in my opinion the vast bulk of today’s anti-Zionism is extremely antisemitic, at which point the social temperature cooled sharply. “But how can you call it antisemitic to point out that Israel is conducting a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza?” I answered that genocide is the attempt to subject, wholly or partly, an entire population, on ethnic, political or religious grounds, to mass extermination without regard to age, sex or combat status; and is sharply to be distinguished from the unintended collateral death of innocent civilians, for which, sad as it may be, most modern nations, including Britain, have been responsible over the years to a far greater extent than Israel in any or all of its wars. To this my interlocutor replied that “genocide may mean many things, including cultural genocide,” at which point a newcomer interrupted us and the conversation took a more profitable turn.
The problems with the genocide libel, of course, are not merely definitional. A weaker version is the claim, popular with journalists and commentators at the BBC and elsewhere, that Israel’s response to October 7 has been “disproportionate,” This is advanced either simply on the ground that the number of Israeli civilians who died in the original incursion is greatly exceeded by the number of civilian Palestinians who have died as a result of subsequent Israeli action, or else on the supposed ground that Israel’s response to October 7 has been excessive in terms of some established international standard.
Even if one ignores the fact than statistics of civilian deaths issued in wartime generally turn out, when peace returns, to have erred on the high side, the fact that all current statistics on Palestinian deaths in Gaza, though currently cited without question by news organizations worldwide, derive from Hamas-run organizations with an obvious interest in inflating the proportion of civilian over combatant deaths, and the threats to civilian life in Gaza posed by Hamas’ policy of locating tunnels and other combat-related infrastructure under hospitals and schools, both the above two grounds are faulty. Losses, in any armed combat, both civilian and combatant, can and do vary greatly between the two sides; while the law of armed combat defines collateral losses of civilian life as “disproportionate” not in relationship to parallel losses on the other side, but rather in relationship to the military importance attaching to the specific action in which they occur. On the one hand October 7, by demonstrating the potentially existential nature of the threat to Israel posed by continued Hamas control in Gaza, has vastly increased the military importance to Israel of the war; while at the same time Israel has continued its long history of sacrificing its own military advantage to the avoidance of harm to enemy civilians by issuing warnings of where it intends to strike next.
All of these objections to the genocide libel pale, however, before the most fundamental problem for the mainly student anti-Zionist groups populating the “Gaza Solidarity” encampment that sprang up on campuses across the world, and for their faculty supporters and apologists: namely, that in the current Gaza conflict there is indeed one agency whose goals and conduct, both in intention and in action, have been shown to be in the strict sense genocidal. Unfortunately for the anti-Zionist, as Nelson points out, that agency is not Israel but Hamas. October 7
. . . was not the familiar blind assault by unguided Hamas rockets, though a shower of rockets did fall from Israeli skies. Some 3000 terrorists and an equal number of looters broke through the fence separating Gaza from Israel and rampaged through the Israeli border communities. The murder spree was a shockingly violent, intimate assault on Jewish families in their homes and neighborhoods, young adults at a dance festival and travellers in their cars. Families were burned alive. Parents were shot in front of their children. Women were raped, then murdered, their bodies desecrated or displayed in triumph. Rather than hiding these vicious face-to-face crimes, Hamas terrorists videotaped them and broadcast the footage to Israel families, fellow Gazans and the world at large. (pp.12-13)
The object of the attack was not, in short, to engage, except incidentally, with the IDF, but to kill as many Jews as possible, without regard to age or gender, and to gain enough success to force support from other groups, including Hesbollah and Iran, on a scale sufficient to make it possible to go on killing indiscriminately until the entire Jewish population of Israel had been exterminated. The attack, in other words was an attempt to set in train a genocide: in effect, a second Holocaust. It follows that the anti-Zionism of the current “progressive” left is politically and morally incoherent. On the one hand it accuses Israel of genocide without any means, short of arbitrarily redefining the term, of making the accusation stick; while on the other hand it either excuses the genocidal intentions and conduct of Hamas, or celebrates it and openly calls for more of the same against “Zionists,” or to put it plainly, against Jews.
These criminally irresponsible calls have now, sadly, helped to bring about more innocent Jewish deaths, this time in America, in the Washington shootings of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky by an attacker who shouted “Free Palestine!” But the threat posed by anti-Zionism to Jews is not Nelson’s topic, at least in the present book. His issue here is the threat it poses to all of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, through the danger it presents to the fundamental mission and future of the university.
Cary Nelson is a leading American academic, whose long commitment to the American Association of University Professors, of which he was president from 2006 to 2012, has given him a deep understanding of the workings of the American campus. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the author of books on the literature and poetry of the American left, on freedom of speech and on the mission of the university, the latter including the witty and eloquent Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. As that suggests, his politics are left-wing, but belong to the older version of the left whose roots lay in the fight for working-class, women’s and black rights, not the present-day, predominantly anti-Enlightenment, middle-class and intellectual “New” left whose roots lie in identity politics. As he says at one point in the present book,
My political views are progressive, and I count myself a member of the left — the generally unheard, though not silent, left. But my left no longer matters politically. (p.18)
Nelson’s conception of the mission of the university is profoundly rooted in the values of the Enlightenment. The university exists to provide a forum devoted to “truth, reason, argument, inquiry. . . and freedom of thought,” in which “debate informs learning and unfolds without preordained conditions.
For Nelson, therefore, the problem with the pro-Gaza encampment demonstrators and their faculty supporters was that neither were interested in such debate, no doubt in part because the errors and internal contradictions that infect current anti-Zionism on the progressive left would have made such debate unprofitable. What interested them was not rational inquiry without prior reservations, but commitment and denunciation.
A university is intended to be a centre of discussion and debate, but the 2024 encampment demonstrators had no patience with that principle. They did not issue calls for a conversation. They had, from their perspective, evolved beyond the discussion stage. Instead, highly committed groups sought to impose their views on everybody else. They did not doubt they were in possession of the truth and they sought compliance with it. There were still places on campus to which carefully vetted groups could retreat to have rational conversations about whether Israel was an apartheid state and committing genocide in Gaza, or whether citizens of Israel have a right to political self-determination — but not anywhere near a Gaza Solidarity encampment. In effect, therefore, the encampments amounted to large, organized protests against the idea of a university. (pp.1-2)
At the same time , Nelson contends, organized erosion in the name of anti-Zionism of the university’s commitment to freedom of discussion and opinion, did not begin with the Gaza Solidarity encampments, and will not end with them, because the movement those encampments represent is not a mere matter of student politics, but has deep and long-standing roots in the institution itself. Many American universities have over the past few decades come to contain a range of academic departments in which a commitment to anti-Zionist activism has become central to the departmental mission. In certain academic disciplines such departments have become the norm rather than the exception.
These commitments tend to make not only the outdoor spaces of the campus but entire areas of academic life highly unwelcoming to the vast majority of Jewish students unwilling or unable to abandon or disguise their sympathy for Israel.
Commitment to Israel is not solely political for Jewish students. Israel is integral to their self-understanding, to their larger historical community, to a sense of peoplehood, identity and belonging and even self-esteem . . . an emerging ethnic identity can provide a bulwark against prejudice, but it also gives opponents a target for attack. Until, moreover, an ethnic identity acquires sufficient strength, it can make people more vulnerable to targeted hostility. The escalating effort to stigmatise Israel on campus can break down Jewish students’ sense of group belonging, an important component of their emerging identities.
With Palestinians stigmatised as terrorists and Israelis stigmatised as genocidal killers, the contest of identities has become still more stark. Universities have protocols for dialogue to negotiate such conflicts, but there is no negotiating if people refuse to talk to one another. That is now standard practice among BDS advocates. There is no such policy among Zionists.
There is no way all students can feel welcome on campus if academic departments adopt controversial political positions . . . as official policy. (pp.80-81)
It is not just that such policies and commitments make whole groups and categories of students feel threatened and unwelcome on campus, however. They also serve to
undermine the psychological safety necessary [for the institution as a whole] to function academically. Psychological safety means students believe that their colleagues will not reject them for being themselves or for expressing their opinions, though the opinions themselves are open to challenge. Thus they can engage in constructive conflict or confrontation. They learn and grow in an environment where they are willing to experiment and take risks.
Faculty members too must feel psychologically safe, for their own sake and that of their institutions. Otherwise, individuals may self-censor and withdraw from colleagues, and the department loses their contributions to its development. The lack of support for staff in hostile environments then exacerbates the problem. (p.19)
Then there is the further problem that the existence of departments committed to sectional political activism invites the growth of hostilities not merely between individual faculty members and between isolated individual faculty and the academic environment in which they find themselves, but between entire sections of the faculty of an institution. Departments collectively committed to anti-Zionist activism are for the most part to be found clustered in the humanities and social sciences. This can only increase the alienation felt by those in STEM (“science, technology, engineering and mathematics”) fields.
Some faculty members in STEM fields already feel contempt for politicised programmes in the humanities and social sciences. That contempt replaces what was once guarded respect based on what were recognised as different modes of understanding. But such respect assumed mutual commitment to evidence-based, reasoned argument. Many in STEM fields do not [now] consider the humanities disciplines in question to be authentically academic. . . . With confidence in those common commitments fading, we are faced with a contemporary version of what novelist and chemist C.P. Snow famously described as the two cultures problem. Rather than the lack of universal scientific knowledge that Snow decried, however, we now face fully-fledged competing value systems separating science and humanities disciplines. The result is clusters of disciplines inherently at odds with one another Institutions keep the peace by pretending that the problem doesn’t exist, but that will not succeed in papering over the problem. The radical differences displayed in disciplinary politicisation may bring the matter to a head. Israel will be at the front of that debate. (pp.102-103)
Nelson is emphatic that anti-Zionism is a minority commitment, both among students and faculty in American universities. Students active in anti-Israel demonstrations have “amounted to no more than 10 per cent of the student body. According to a Brandeis survey the hostility to Israel experienced by 80% of Jewish students on 60 US campuses was “driven by about a third of students who held distinct patterns of belief about Jews and Israel.” Among faculty the proportion who find anti-Zionist activism unacceptable is doubtless mirrored in the sharp drops in Faculty membership suffered by subject-based professional associations and the AAUP, as they have become more politically committed over the past twenty years. By 2024 the faculty membership of the Modern Language Association, long consumed by endless conflict over proposed resolutions to boycott Israel, “represented about 12,000 of the roughly 100,000 eligible, including 4,000 life members (like me) who are no longer required to pay fees.”
In the same way the AAUP, now a leader in anti-Zionist advocacy, has become, to the distress of Nelson as a former president,
a dark shadow of its former self. Once representing nearly a million US faculty members, it now boasts fewer than 40,000 members, many having resigned in the 1970s or later in opposition to the association’s move into collective bargaining. Some are now resigning in protest over its anti-Zionism.
. . . Shibley [Robert Shibley, former director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education] worries that the AAUP may not survive if it continues in this pattern. . . . I predict that the AAUP will in fact continue to promote higher education’s intolerant politicisation. That is what AAUP president Todd Wilson intends with his pledge to make the organisation truly activist. “Activist” for him means complicit with the demands of Faculty for Justice in Palestine. (pp.71-72)
Nelson does not believe that it impossible for civility and respect for truth to be restored as the guiding rules of campus debate, and offers a number of suggestions for practical measures to promote restoration. But he is pessimistic about their prospects for implementation.
There is one important development already in play that has the potential to begin curtailing antisemitism and promote other reforms. As I write, taskforce reports from four major institutions — Columbia, Stanford, University of Washington and UCLA — have detailed the presence of antisemitism on their campuses. Many of their suggestions for addressing the problem are widely applicable. But other establishments will not implement them unless detailed evidence of their own problems are documented through comparable internal reviews. I expect my own campus will not institute such an exercise, and would appoint anti-Zionist faculty to the taskforce if it did, just as Northwestern University did in negotiating with campus protestors.(p.118)
As that might suggest, Nelson thinks that internal taskforces will only be as effective as the overarching university administration allows them to be. His pessimism here is fuelled by the 2024 House Committee report, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC), “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed”. The Committee used its subpoena powers to release emails and text messages, of a kind not available to internal university taskforces, that reveal how adminstrators negotiated with student demonstrators and faculty during the pro-Gaza demonstrations.
To say that administrators were unforthcoming about their real motives is hardly adequate. Indeed, some appear to have been fundamentally unsympathetic to their Jewish community members, while others had anti-Zionist sympathies. . . .The report also disclosed the clear and unsettling information about the role anti-Zionist faculty played in protecting encampment students who violated university rules from suffering any consequences. . . .More seriously, the report insists that the failure of Harvard and other campuses to condemn the Hamas attacks points to the ” the moral rot that has infected at the administrative heart of the university in much of postsecondary education. That may be true, but elsewhere the report’s authors settle on cowardice, which seems to me to be the case. Administrative cowardice has long applied wherever the campus community is divided and its leaders aim to appease “both sides.” Most know there is no moral ambiguity in the Hamas murder spree. (pp.119-120)
Nelson may be right that cowardice rather than covert or open Jew-hatred of the old Nazi type is the main thing at work here: the fact remains that elsewhere in the book he finds no shortage of “anti-Zionist” faculty members ready to celebrate and exult in the massacres of October 7.
The book ends with an open question: “How much damage is anti-Zionism doing to the fundamental mission of the university? We are well on our way to finding out.”
The re-launched (2021) Jewish Quarterly. in its new, book-length format, is to be congratulated on publishing this important essay. It deserves close study by anyone, Jewish or non-Jewish, with a stake in the future — and the moral health — of our universities.
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Bernard Harrison
Emeritus E.E.Ericksen Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah;
Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Sussex
Author: The Resurgence of Antisemitism; Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion. Lanham-MD. Roman & Littlefield (2006); Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion. Bloomington-IN. Indiana University Press (2020)