Pondering the crimes of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compared their unprecedented scope to the relatively small-scale persecutions engaged in by the paradigmatic political villains of Shakespeare’s plays, such as Macbeth, whose victims numbered only in the dozens or hundreds. The disproportion between the number of victims claimed by modern totalitarian regimes and earlier forms of political tyranny couldn’t be explained merely by the different means at their disposal. After all, slaughter on a grand scale had occurred before the modern era. It was generally prompted by religious conflict, as during the crusades. Political persecution in the modern era bore a crucial difference from earlier periods: It was ideologically motivated. Like religion, ideology allows people to do terrible things with a clear conscience: “It is in the nature of a human being to seek a justification for his actions,” Solzhenitsyn observed. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.”
Ideologies arise from the ardent human need for certainty. They banish doubt and produce a sense of conviction and self-righteousness. According to Solzhenitsyn, the interrogators and guards he encounters in the Soviet gulag are not sadists or cynics but idealists; their sense of moral superiority allows them to torment their victims in good conscience. Revolutions happen when large numbers of such people, motivated by what they perceive as lofty goals or justified grievances, coalesce around a common purpose. Their shared beliefs become self-reinforcing; moral scruples are quickly abandoned. Thus do revolutionary movements give way to terror. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,” Solzhenitsyn puts it in The Gulag Archipelago, laying bare the moral problem revealed by totalitarian regimes. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Only a “quaver,” he writes, separates the victim and the persecutor. The ideological temptation is limitless and can make willing executioners out of decent, ordinary folk “squeezed by exuberant evil.” Solzhenitsyn’s phrase shows characteristic insight. Evil is often exuberant. It offers a kind of exaltation, a reprieve from the ordinary.
Solzhenitsyn’s insight offers a powerful lens on last spring’s occupations of college campuses across the country by scores of pro-Palestinian protesters, often accompanied by harassment and intimidation of Jews. The protestors seized on the charge of genocide against Israel to justify hateful slogans, disruptive tactics, and conspicuous flouting of rules governing the time, place, and manner of public gatherings. They used it to defend their targeted harassment of Jewish students, faculty members, and administrators. Their moral logic (“by any means necessary”) would have been familiar to Solzhenitsyn.
Particular focus should go to the “working definition” of antisemitism proposed by the report’s authors. It reads in full:
Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.
The report attempts to distinguish this “educational definition,” focusing on how antisemitism may be perceived by its targets (a standard metric for assessing other forms of prejudice) from a more exacting legal standard. The authors draw a lawyerly distinction between permissible but offensive forms of speech, including expressions of antisemitism, and the requirements imposed by Title VI regarding “discriminatory harassment” and the creation of a hostile environment. That students at Columbia experienced what they perceived as discriminatory harassment is beyond doubt:
Examples of incidents experienced by many Jewish and Israeli students as antisemitism, drawn from student experiences … include ethnic slurs (e.g., “F*** the Jews”), antisemitic tropes (e.g., “Zionist trustees and donors keep your hands off our university”), stereotypes (e.g., alleged threats from Israeli veterans), calls to violence (e.g., “Al-Qassam Brigade’s next target”), exclusion (e.g., of Zionists from student groups), and double standards applied to Israel (e.g., calls for divestment solely from Israel).
The question is whether those incidents individually and cumulatively meet the legal threshold required under Title VI. The report is no doubt intended in part to represent a good-faith effort on the part of Columbia’s administration to address allegations raised in pending legal complaints.
The report also addresses the fraught question of the relationship between antisemitism, a label pro-Palestinian campus groups reject, and anti-Zionism, one they embrace. Students interviewed by the faculty panel noted “a slippage that sometimes felt intentional … between ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew.’” The report’s authors acknowledge that “anti-Zionism is a term carrying manifold and blurred dimensions.” But their commitment to clarity on this topic is admirable. As they write, “to advocate for the active dissolution of the world’s only Jewish state is quite different from even the bitterest critique of its policies.” They conclude that “anti-Zionism, as it has been expressed in campus demonstrations during the past academic year, hews far more closely to antisemitism than to a simple critique of Israel.”
As to the ever-vexatious question of what is to be done, the authors offer scattershot suggestions and a handful of concrete proposals. Risking the obvious, they state that “there is an urgent need to reshape social norms” at Columbia. But the recommendation of “in-person workshops about antisemitism and Islamophobia” rests on the supposed value of “having difficult conversations” among parties who disagree bitterly. There is more than a whiff of evasion in the disparity between the trenchant diagnosis and the vague program for treatment. The most specific and concrete recommendations focus on Columbia’s decentralized administrative structure and a need for greater control and coordination. Given the haphazard and inconsistent decision-making at Columbia and elsewhere in the face of the protests, that recommendation seems partially reassuring at best.
What is to be done about this “age-old and evidently ineradicable, utterly irrational hatred,” as the Austrian Jewish writer Jean Améry phrased it, remains elusive. That an allegedly progressive form of antisemitism should reappear in twenty-first century America is shocking, but Améry would probably not have been surprised. As a Holocaust survivor and an acute observer of postwar European culture, he had seen it all, Tiresias-like, more than once. For Améry, antisemitism was pure ideology: one of those “collective psychological presuppositions that are not amenable to reasoned debate. The antisemite both wants to see radical evil in the Jew and is compelled by these presuppositions to do so.”
Améry wrote passionately and lucidly about the same controversies a half-century ago, in the late 1960s, when Israel’s actions were the focus of leftist opprobrium and antiwar protests roiled many campuses, including Columbia’s. Confronting attacks on Israel’s legitimacy during and after the Six-Day War, he published a series of essays that unambiguously laid out his perspective on the upsurge of militant anti-Zionism on the far left. Améry saw a connection between the right-wing antisemitism of the 1930s and the denunciations of Israel and support for terrorism among radical left-wing groups such as the Baader–Meinhof Gang. Infatuated with the revolutionary aspirations of the Third World Liberation movement, some members of the anti-Israel left embraced the eliminationist rhetoric and sectarian violence of Palestinian militants. This was not limited to slogans such as “Strike the Zionist dead, make the Near East red!” West German leftists became directly involved in the terror campaigns of the 1970s, including the hijacking of a civilian airliner by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that ended in the dramatic Entebbe raid. For at least some portion of the left, persecuting Jews was justified by anti-Zionism.
Born in 1912 to a Jewish father who was killed in World War I and a Catholic mother, Améry identified as Jewish not by culture or upbringing but by a combination of parental heritage and historical accident. His childhood memories were typically Austrian (decorating Christmas trees, attending midnight Mass) with little to differentiate him from his prospective “Aryan” neighbors. What Améry emphasized, following Jean-Paul Sartre, was that the “Jew” as pariah was the construction of the antisemite. The antisemite decides who counts as a Jew marked for persecution. A paradigmatic example was the racial doctrine of the Nazi regime, established in the Nuremberg Laws. With their promulgation, Améry literally woke up one morning and found himself Jewish. He writes in “On the Impossible Obligation to Be a Jew” that “society, in the guise of the National Socialist German state, which the world unquestioningly recognized as the legitimate representative of the German people, formally and with all possible clarity, had just made a Jew of me.”
Jewishness was experienced by Améry not as a set of cultural traditions or ritual practices but as a “verdict” handed down by a society that now had categorized him as alien, and marked, ultimately, for destruction. Hence the startling remark in the same essay: “I now understood that being a Jew meant being a dead man on furlough.” Realizing the danger of Nazi antisemitism, Améry sought refuge in Belgium, which was overrun by the Wehrmacht in 1940. Active in the resistance, he was arrested in 1943 and brutally tortured by the Gestapo. Identified as Jewish, he was sent to Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen until it was liberated by the Allies.
After the war he returned to Belgium. Like his near-contemporary Paul Celan (né Antschel), Améry changed his name, from Maier, to disassociate himself from his German identity. But he continued writing in German and for a predominantly German cultural audience. This decision forced both Améry and Celan to reckon continuously with the legacy of antisemitism and its world-altering impact. It was largely because of this engagement with this audience that Améry grew concerned about rising antisemitism in the seemingly virtuous guise of anti-Zionism.
For Améry, antisemitism was a particularly insidious form of hate. It lacked even the quasi-coherent structure of a conventional prejudice; it was rather the “predisposition and willingness” toward violence against a suspicious target. Like more conspiracy-minded forms of bigotry, such as anti-communism, antisemitism traffics in suspicion. It not only finds Jews and their influence lurking everywhere but imputes nefarious motives to Jewish presence. As Sartre wrote, “What the antisemite wishes, what he prepares, is the death of the Jew.” In the contemporary context, it is reasonable to wonder whether something similarly sinister is at work in the impulse to tear down posters of Israeli hostages; or, as a lecturer did at Stanford, to force Jewish students to identify themselves and stand in a corner; or, as a Columbia professor allegedly did, to ask a student with a “Jewish sounding” name to explain their views on Gaza.
In its broad sweep, Améry’s analysis confirms how anti-Zionism frequently overlaps with and echoes familiar antisemitic tropes. In some key respects, anti-Zionism also shares the underlying structure of antisemitism. The antisemite’s willingness to designate Jews as other and to target those who have been so designated for exclusion or worse finds echoes in anti-Zionist discourse and practice. What matters to many radical anti-Zionists is not whether someone is a “Zionist,” but whether they are perceived as being allied with Israel. Thus Jews collectively come under scrutiny unless they openly repudiate the Jewish State. As Améry remarks, “one is a Jew if one is identified by others as a Jew”; similarly one is a “Zionist” if one is identified as such by anti-Zionists.
As a Holocaust survivor, Améry was filled with dark foreboding by the surge of animosity toward Jews in Arab countries after the establishment of Israel. His premonitions gained urgency in 1967 during the leadup to the Six-Day War. To Améry, an avowed leftist and a strident critic of the United States’ war in Vietnam, it nevertheless looked as if something awful was happening, cheered on by erstwhile friends and allies: “The Arab states, supported by the Soviet Union and the entire socialist bloc, seemed to be on the verge of snuffing out the tiny state of Israel.” Améry saw Israel’s plight as an “inescapable” and perhaps predestined result of its Jewishness, arousing implacable hostility from both right- and left-wing opponents. It was from this perspective that he came to see the emergent “red-green” (leftist-Islamist) alliance against Israel as antisemitic. He saw the anti-Zionism of the post-1968 New Left as a “scourge” that lent itself to the preparation of “the coming genocide” in the Middle East. Améry believed that the victims of this genocide would be Jews.
Améry’s support for Israel’s predicament had another source as well. Having “experienced Hitler’s crimes in the flesh” in Auschwitz, he understood the fate of the Jewish people in existential terms: as necessarily involving every individual marked as Jewish by what one might want to call the antisemitic gaze. The antisemitic gaze received emblematic form under the auspices of Nazi propagandists like Johann von Leers, a professor of racial science at the University of Jena, whose work purported to illustrate the physical degeneracy and moral depravity of Jews. Leers’s propaganda circulated widely in Europe and later in the Middle East; Leers survived the war, fled to Argentina, and eventually converted to Islam and settled in Egypt. The historian Jeffrey Herf has perceptively explored the subterranean links between recidivist Nazis, western leftist radicals, and Islamist movements including the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and their convergence around a singular hatred of the Jewish state.
Améry’s critique of anti-Zionism might seem to overlook a vital group: Israel’s Jewish critics on the left — including some students and faculty members who supported last spring’s protests. In fact, he acknowledged the dilemma faced by Jewish leftists unwilling to countenance Israel’s violence against Palestinian civilians. Yet when misgivings about Israel’s military actions spilled over into calls for its dissolution, he felt a moral boundary had been crossed. Anti-Zionism imposed a new kind of auto-da-fé on the left: Jews would be welcome only at the cost of repudiating Israel’s right to self-defense. Yet one “need only imagine,” as Améry wrote during the Six-Day War, the practical consequences of Israel’s defeat. Those who praise “decolonization” through violence, as the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine did after the October 7th attacks, lend substance to such fears.
Améry foresaw that as a Jewish state Israel would fall victim to this dynamic and would be demonized regardless of its actual politics. No change in government, ceasefire agreement, or peace treaty could ultimately satisfy the demands of the anti-Zionists. Israel was hated for reasons beyond practical politics, as a symbol of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism — evils that many leftists, influenced by Soviet propaganda, equated with Zionism and with Jews. As Marlene Gallner points out in her perceptive introduction to Améry’s writing on antisemitism, the fact that contemporary Israeli society’s tolerance toward gay, lesbian, and transgender-identifying individuals meets with scorn from leftist academics and activists is evidence of this can’t-win predicament: “Regardless of what it does, the Jewish state is assured of the anti-Zionists’ hatred.”
Améry was concerned above all about the ritualization of anti-Zionism on the left — which has indeed come to pass on many campuses — serving to discredit Jewish participation in public life. He saw worrisome signs of this development among center-left German social democrats of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), whose youth organization demanded that “older comrades in the party … issue anti-Zionist statements.” He also feared the well-funded and coordinated anti-Zionist campaigns of the Soviet Union, concocted to advance its geopolitical influence in the Middle East and among national liberation movements of the “nonaligned” world, as well as to further marginalize its own restive Jewish minority. Améry also clearly understood the distinction between antagonism toward Israel’s existence and criticism of its government or the occupation, which he decried forcefully.
Yet he understood Israel’s turn toward reactionary right-wing Zionism, embodied by the Likud party led by then-prime minister Menachem Begin, as a response to the outpouring of antisemitic vitriol and violence among Palestinian militants alongside their western and Soviet anti-Zionist allies. He clearly recognized the cycle of violence between Israelis and their Palestinian and Arab neighbors as a dialectic that could have only to two possible outcomes: reconciliation — meaning the willingness to come to terms with the mutual existence and legitimate aspirations of both peoples — or catastrophe.
There have been many calls since October 7, especially from pro-Palestinian activists and sympathizers, for more attention to the “context” in which violence, counterviolence, and protest takes place, alongside demands to recognize as valid any action characterized as “resistance.” Améry supplies a greatly needed counterweight to that position: the perspective of an antifascist partisan, Holocaust survivor, and committed leftist who fiercely supported Israel’s right to exist.
Like Solzhenitsyn, Améry lived his commitment to human dignity and justice with extraordinary courage and endured unimaginable suffering for it. Yet for all that he had suffered, Améry felt that the solution to the seemingly intractable conflicts of modernity lay in the universalist legacies of Europe, particularly in what he termed the “radical humanism” of the Enlightenment. In this regard, he was not too distant from Solzhenitsyn’s insistence on the importance of individual agency and objective moral principles, even in the direst circumstances.
To put it more simply, for both Améry and Solzhenitsyn, each person had to decide, based on the dictates of conscience, how they would respond in a crisis. Much turned on that decision. Historical events were not predestined; they required individual human beings to embrace good or evil — either to bend to a collective dogma or resist it. Abdicating that responsibility was the purpose of ideology, which offered the follower’s excuse of going along to get along. Both also embraced, personally and politically, an ethics of decency against the prevailing climate of factionalism. Recent experience suggests we have yet to absorb the lessons they sought to teach.
Let’s hope we can wake up in time to avert disaster. Over the past year, liberal institutions, including colleges, have shown themselves to be frail and vulnerable to disruption. They remain resilient only to the extent that they take stock of their failures and self-correct. The Columbia report gives a glimmer of hope that the core principles of elite colleges hold firm to some extent — and that they can still change course.