The rise in antisemitism on college campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel has ignited debates over the limits of free speech and the type of environment that universities want to create for students. However, the crisis in higher education runs much deeper than the rules governing protests or universities’ better-late-than-never embrace of institutional neutrality. The root of America’s collegiate ills, such as the reemergence of the “oldest hatred,” lies in the ideological capture of students and faculty.
Antisemitism has long been a feature of ideologically closed societies. Most notable is the 1930-1945 Nazi regime that produced the horrors of the Holocaust. A horror in which 6 million innocent Jews were murdered simply because they were Jews. However, antisemitism was also a major element of the 20th century’s other great totalitarian regime: the Soviet Union.
Indeed, many modern talking points on anti-Zionism, which are used as a cloak for antisemitism, are derived from Soviet propaganda. The KGB even supervised the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Republic, which issued brochures such as the “Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism.” Modern supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah and their useful-idiot fellow travelers on college campuses are reinvoking these same tropes in their accusations against the only Jewish state.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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