Free speech is hard
I’ve often written of my admiration and respect for Gen Z. All three of my kids are Gen Z and represent so many of the cohort’s best traits. Broadly speaking, this generation of young people cares equally about collaboration and individualism. Their progressive values include equity and sustainability, transparency and authenticity. My kids have called me out on my own hypocrisy. If something is wrong when Republicans do it, it should be wrong when Democrats do it. They lift each other up and work to make sure all voices are heard. Or so I thought.
In the current heated climate created by the Israel-Hamas war, Gen Z hasn’t been living up to its values. For all of their concern about lifting each other up, for all their concern about respectful debate and their history of demanding safe spaces and trigger warnings, how is it that college campuses have become the last place one would look to today as a model for how civil societies should behave? The climate of fear, harassment, and intimidation on college campuses has exposed the limits of Gen Z’s ability to show the rest of us what an idealized future can look like.
In the context of horrific, headline-grabbing attacks on Jewish students at college campuses and elsewhere, politicians and college presidents across the country are forming task forces to investigate incidents of antisemitism. Hillel reported 309 antisemitic incidents at 129 campuses from October 7 to November 7, including hate speech, vandalism, and harassment or assault, up six-fold from last year. At the same time, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it had received 1,283 requests for help and complaints of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bias nationwide from October 7 to November 4 — a more than 200 percent rise over the equivalent period last year.
What are we to do?
The opinion pages of The New York Times, this week alone, are filled with pieces about free speech, specifically, free speech on college campuses. Editorial board member Jesse Wegman asked How Are Students Expected to Live Like This on Campuses? In it, he wrote about what it takes to create a culture of basic respect and listening. It’s not just about engendering some vague idea of civility, he wrote. It’s about instilling and reinforcing the fundamental importance of building and maintaining a pluralistic society.
Regardless of how intelligent these young people might be, we know that their brains are still developing. We know that emotional intelligence is a basket of skills that need to be taught. The mission of higher education, certainly in a liberal institution, should be the development of the whole, critical thinking person, cultivating creativity along with social, moral, and ethical sensibilities and advancing the health and well-being of individuals and societies. That’s why universities must create a safe space for open debate that emphasizes listening and mutual respect. “To be open to both all people and all ideas,” as Suzanne Nossel, who leads PEN America, put it. “The imperative is to make room for vigorous debate…. The answer can’t be to shut down that debate.”
In direct opposition to this vision, Governor DeSantis of Florida signed three bills that restrict certain topics from being taught and prohibit campus-wide diversity statements. Similarly, several Republican members of Congress have introduced a bill in the House to cut funding for colleges that allow antisemitic speech on campus, including claims that Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own nations, despite the fact that Donald Trump, the party’s standard-bearer, has pedaled this antisemitic trope himself. Hate and intimidation can’t be tolerated, but these efforts are unfortunately rooted in a desire to undermine pluralism not foster it.
In another guest essay co-authored by three students from Brown, Cornell, and Yale, the students argued that What Is Happening on College Campuses Is Not Free Speech. They wanted to call attention to the “daily trial of intimidation and insult for Jewish students.” Among other horrific stories, they wrote of Jewish students at Cornell who were called “excrement on the face of the earth,” threatened with rape and beheading and bombarded with demands to “eliminate Jewish living from Cornell campus.”
But more than this, they wanted to remind us that free speech, open debate, and diverse views lie at the core of academic life. Codes of ethics of universities already condemn intimidation and hold students and faculty to standards of respect for others. Universities must uphold these standards, protecting all students from discrimination, threats, and hostility on the basis of their identify, including Jewish students. Drawing upon the highest values of Judaism, the students close with a poignant reminder that antisemitism doesn’t only affect Jews. History shows that it poisons societies at large.
In another piece, Michelle Goldberg asks When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say? While citing many similar gruesome stories of harassment and abuse directed at Jewish students, Goldberg also points to numerous laws officially limiting anti-Zionist speech. About 35 states already have laws restricting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeted at Israel or its supporters.
Without minimizing the pain and stress that Jewish students are feeling under these assaults, Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, a historian of Palestinian history, draws a distinction between interpersonal harassment and institutional crackdown. Both sides feel victimized, but the Patriot Act is only being mobilized against one of them. “That’s the difference,” he said.
There’s pressure on colleges and universities to take a public stand, but every institutional move into the political sphere is potentially fraught. “There’s no answer that will please everybody,” according to Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the Berkeley School of Law and an expert on free speech. “I put out a statement, the first sentence of which said I’m horrified by the terrorism that occurred in Israel. I got called a racist for that statement, because it labels it as terrorism.” And when he failed to issue a statement condemning students who defended Hamas, he got criticized for that.
One solution is to say nothing or as little as possible. This is known as the University of Chicago approach, after a report it issued in 1967 urging neutrality in response to student protests against the Vietnam War. As I wrote last month, Williams College President Maud Mandel took this approach. On topics of national and world events, she does not believe it is the president’s job to speak for the whole community, or even that it is possible to do so. This is becoming more evident every day.
“The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity,” the University Chicago said in its report. “It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.”
Institutional neutrality is the best way to ensure a campus climate of open inquiry and vigorous exchange between diverse political and philosophical perspectives.
— David Sacks ’22, Brown Daily Herald, November 30, 2022
On this subject, Kenneth Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate, wrote “The complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict should make it an ideal subject to teach critical thinking and how to have difficult discussions. Instead, it is being used as a toxin that threatens the entire academic enterprise.” At Dartmouth College, however, within days of the attacks by Hamas, two professors — Susannah Heschel, chair of Jewish studies, and Tarek El-Ariss, chair of Middle Eastern studies — created a forum for students to discuss their thoughts.
At the first forum, a student suggested that Hamas’s attack and Israel’s retaliation demanded moral outrage, not academic discussion. “We can do two things at the same time,” responded Ezzedine Fishere, an Egyptian novelist, diplomat, and academic. “We can be morally outraged at brutality. And we can try to understand what leads to it, where it comes from, what explains it, and so on. Those are not mutually exclusive things. And in a college, that’s what we’re doing. This is why we study.”
“I think we as colleagues are very interested in nuance and in our scholarship, so we are people who are not looking to use scholarship to make political statements. We’re not here to give them political rants,” said Heschel. “We’re here to teach.”
Colleagues from other institutions suggested to Heschel that her position demands that she represent the Jewish Community or the Jewish Federation on campus, but she has been clear that that’s not the role of an academic. Her focus must be on opening the dialog to all of her students who come from around the world. And even if her classes were exclusively for Jewish students, how could she pretend to represent a single Jewish perspective when groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Not In My Name also represent the views of many, many Jews around the world?
It’s valid to discuss and debate not only whether Israel is justified in defending itself, or whether its response is moral or ethical, or who is to blame, but it’s also valid and appropriate — and maybe even most important — to debate whether Israel’s military response is even likely to deliver the peace and security and stability that it’s seeking.
For a while now, there’s been a generational divide in the US regarding support for Israel. But there are signs that this gap has widened since the conflict began. Republicans and older Americans have more positive views of Israel. In March of 2023, Gallup found that Democratic sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%. Israel saw a net positive sympathy level of +46% among Baby Boomers, while there was a massive drop-off among Millennials, where net sympathy for Israel versus Palestinians was -2%. Just five years ago, net sympathy for Israel among Millennials was 32%.
The trends are similar among Jews. Younger Jews in the US are less likely to respond positively to any number of questions about Israel — ranging from their connections to Israel as an essential part of their identity to the feelings about the BDS movement targeting Israel. Generally, the spread is anywhere from 10 to 20 percentage points less favorable toward Israel.
Recent broad-based polling is even more pronounced. In a Harvard Harris poll, 51% of Americans age 18–24 think the Hamas attacks can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians compared to 9% for those over 65. And in a Pew Research Center poll, 56% of Americans age 18–29 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel compared to 27% for those over 65. Admittedly, I found these numbers somewhat shocking.
The reasons for these feelings are difficult to pinpoint. Politicians and pundits on the right, including Sen. Josh Hawley, are eager to blame TikTok. In a letter to Treasury Security Janet Yellen, Hawley wrote, “Analysts have attributed this disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok, where most young internet users get their information about the world.”
While Gen Z and Millennials do, in fact, get information about the world from social media, they also still rely on traditional sources; fully 74% consume news and information at least weekly from traditional outlets, while 45% do so daily. I don’t think Hawley has the full picture.
Global sympathies have been building for the Palestinian people for many years. I believe younger people are drawn to the plight of the Palestinians, in part, due to the hard rightward shift of the Israeli government, but also because of the increasing time and space between them and the Holocaust. Not that they don’t understand the history, but they just don’t feel it as acutely, and as a result, their opinions are simply more easily shaped by their worldview today.
For as long as I can remember, I have pleaded with my children to watch Shoah, the 1985 Claude Lanzmann documentary about the Holocaust. To my knowledge, not one of them has. I don’t know if it would change the views of young people today — or if they would even experience it in the same way that I did. When I watched it, I was moved by the ignorance, hatred, and racism of ordinary people and their willingness to not only turn a blind eye to — but to be complicit in — the horrors being inflicted upon Jews by the Nazis. My kids may also feel this way, but I suspect they may be even more impacted by the evils that can be perpetrated by the systematic control and manipulation of political, economic, and social structures by powerful nationalist forces.
Whatever one’s perspective on the plight of the Jews and Palestinians in Israel today, it’s clear to me that we have to be able to listen to each other. We need to refrain from throwing around words like colonizer, apartheid, and intifada — words that have layers of meaning that aren’t going to help us understand or get out of the crisis we are in today. This applies on college campuses as well as at work or on social media.
Simply forwarding, sharing, and retweeting things at each other isn’t communicating or debating — and it’s certainly not listening. And if we can’t establish a culture of respect in a liberal, pluralistic democratic society, we don’t stand a chance of pulling off any kind of lasting peace in Israel.
