Peter Herman, San Diego State University

I am one of the lucky ones. Unlike many campuses, San Diego State did not have an encampment, and while a segment of the campus is strongly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian (which veers into pro-Hamas), there has been no violence or harassing anyone for their opinions. A visiting Israeli professor told me that everyone he met, both on and off campus, was friendly, welcoming, and sympathetic. We also have a Presidential taskforce charged with addressing antisemitism (I’m the co-chair) and a president. Adela de la Torre, who seems sympathetic to our cause.

Which does not mean that SDSU is immune to the waves of hatred washing over academia. A student, for example, was videoed ripping down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, and the University Senate refused to condemn this despicable act (Herman, “SDSU’s Response”).

In late April, a well-attended demonstration organized by Students for Justice in Palestine descended into shouting “Globalize the Intifada.” When a colleague lodged a complaint with the Center for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (CPHD) on the grounds that this slogan was deeply threatening (it encouraged violence against Jews worldwide), he was told there was no infraction (private email).

Even though the California State University’s “Interim Nondiscrimination Policy” states that “terrorist threats or the promotion of actual or imminent physical violence” do not merit First Amendment protection (“Interim”), and even though SDSU’s investigator admitted that “it can feel threatening to hear the word ‘intifada,’” nonetheless, “we do not have any information showing that the demonstration violated the Nondiscrimination Policy” (private email).

Apparently, it’s okay if Jews feel threatened.

But while my campus is (relatively) quiet, the terrible events of 10/7 and the subsequent response profoundly affected me.

Up until that point, I treated antisemitism more as an intellectual problem. While I understood that Jew hatred permeated both the radical right (e.g.,Charlottesville; Green, “Charlottesville”) and the radical left (e.g., Alice Walker; Flanagan, “New Yorker”), it always felt a little distant, a little abstract. I never felt personally threatened by antisemitism, and it was easy to dismiss both left and right Jew-haters as loons. Antisemitism never impinged on my life, either professionally or personally.

10/7 changed that. More accurately, the response to 10/7. In the immediate aftermath, the world’s sympathy was with Israel. But very quickly, that turned into sympathy for Hamas.

For example, on October 17, a rocket landed in the parking lot outside the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City. Hamas immediately blamed Israel (even though they knew perfectly well that the rocket came from Islamic Jihad), and the rest of the world jumped to believe Hamas. News source after news source ran headlines screaming that Israel had “bombed a Christian hospital in Gaza” and “murdered hundreds of civilians.” Almost nobody ran corrections or apologized when it turned out they were wrong.

Nor was this the only example. August 11, Israel used precision munitions (Fabian) to eliminate terrorists embedded in a school complex mosque. Video footage after the strike showed no damage to surrounding buildings. The IDF showed that 31 Hamas fighters died. But news reports from CNN (Nasser et al., “Israeli Strike”), the BBC (Usher and Mackintosh), “Israeli Strike”), and Reuters (Al-Mughrabi, “Israeli Strike”) all repeated Hamas’s claim that up to nearly 100 people died, and all were civilians.

Media bias against Israel is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the ADL, after 10/7, the number of antisemitic incidents jumped from 3,698 in 2022 (itself a scary number) to nearly 9,000 incidents in 2023 (ADL, “Audit”).

Some might question these figures by trying to distinguish antisemitism from anti-Zionism. In theory, the two are distinct, but in practice, the two regularly overlap. When students at my university tear down posters of kidnapped Jewish children, when members of the MLA delegate assembly hiss and boo when told Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women (Quinn, “MLA”), when demonstrators both on and off campuses chant “Globalize the Intifada”—a call for violence against Jews everywhere—it’s hard not to feel targeted, beleaguered, and afraid.

How to respond? First and most obviously, go where you are wanted; leave where you are not. So I dropped my membership in the MLA, and am now co-chair of my university’s Presidential Taskforce on Addressing Antisemitism.

I also turned to public writing. In addition to my usual academic scholarship on Shakespeare or Milton, I wrote an essay for Quillette, an online cultural magazine, on rereading Philip Roth after 10/7 (Herman, “Roth”). In his earlier work, he depicted the youth/old age dynamic in terms antisemitism: the elders worried about Jew hatred, but the young artist thought antisemitism was a thing of the past. The Holocaust happened in Europe, not Newark, NJ. Or has he puts it in Portnoy’s Complaint, “Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass!”

But now, post-10/7, when Nathan Zuckerman’s father says, “I wonder if you fully understand how little love there is in this world for Jewish people,” his is the voice of wisdom, not crabbed old age.

Looking ahead, it’s hard to feel hopeful. Israel’s leaders have not understood, or did not care, that Hamas aims at an ideological, not military, victory: their goal is the delegitimization of the Jewish state, leading to its dissolution. And they understand that with every civilian death, Israel’s capital goes down while theirs goes up, which is why Hamas launches missiles from supposedly humanitarian areas (Fabian, “IDF Says”) and uses hospitals to store weapons (Philips, “What Israel Says”).

Judging by the size of protests against Israel, the repeated calls for a ceasefire that seem to apply only to Israel, and the constant refrain that Israel is committing genocide, even though “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history” (Spencer, “Israel’s Has Created”). Hamas’s strategy is brilliantly successful. Furthermore, the fact that so many supposedly “progressive” faculty and students openly support an Islamist organization whose values are the exact opposite of the ones they support (e.g., women’s rights) is deeply discouraging. It seems that the humanistic values the university is supposed to teach go out the window when it comes to Jews and Israel.

Eventually, this war will end, and eventually, things will calm down. But the scars will remain. The response to 10/7 has revealed just how deeply antisemitism permeates our culture, both inside and outside academia.

To quote T.S. Eliot (himself, no friend to Jews), after such knowledge, what forgiveness?