As a Jewish member of the Wesleyan community, I was deeply troubled by Professor Vera Schwarcz’s Wespeak condemning Students for a Free Palestine’s conference as “nothing less than hatred of Jews.” In her Wespeak, Schwarcz takes her place alongside Abraham Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and numerous others in a broad intellectual movement that seeks to redefine anti-Zionism. For them it includes almost all criticism of Israel, as an expression of the rising tide of a new anti-Semitism. The truth is that it is their intellectual leap, and not the agonizing and age-old reality of violence and hatred toward Jews, that conjures up the frightening specter of anti-Semitism lurking in every corner of our society, and in doing so detracts from the real meaning of the word.
As well as being logically flawed, this argument opens the door to a brand of religious McCarthyism in which everyone who is not with Israel at all times must be against the Jews. I can remember very few experiences as infuriating as being called a self-hating Jew for criticizing Israel’s actions on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as if the lessons about racism and abuse of power that I drew from my own family’s painful history in the Ukraine and Germany were somehow unacceptable. I had not been planning to attend Saturday’s conference because of my reservations about the International Solidarity Movement, but after reading Professor Schwarcz’s Wespeak, I decided to change my mind.
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