by Jonathan Rauch
My friend Jamie Kirchick has an interesting article at Tablet magazine on the demise of a special Yale center on antisemitism. I can believe that the center's activist orientation didn't always produce work that met the highest standards of academic scholarship, and that this was a factor in Yale's decision. But since when do ethnic studies and women's studies and gay studies always exemplify academic rigor?
I'm a Yale alum (as well as a Jew) and I know these decisions about academic programs are complicated. But there's an irony here. If there's a single special-interest "studies" area that should venture beyond pure scholarship, it's antisemitism. Antisemitism, even more than homophobia, is the prototype of the intellectual virus, the bad idea that crops up again and again in one ideological context after another, detached from any reality or philosophy—but always, wherever it occurs, a marker of danger to liberalism.
In fact, if you wanted a simple criterion to demarcate America's enemies, you could do worse than ask a single question: Is this country, movement, or ideology antisemitic? Since at least the 1930s, the Axis of Evil and the Axis of Antisemitimism have been basically congruent (imperial Japan and Asian Communism being the major exceptions). And no coincidence. As I wrote a few years ago in National Journal:
Think of anti-Semitism as a kind of social virus that, like AIDS, works not by killing its victims directly, but by undermining their resistance to other ailments: despotism, irresponsibility, cruelty, mania… Anti-Semitism is, in short, not a derivative nuisance but a fundamental foreign-policy problem in its own right.
Even if an activist-minded center on antisemitism is wrong for Yale, it's a good idea. Let's hope it hasn't been quashed.
The Dish 