Open Letter to the American Association of University Professors

The following is an open letter to the American Association of University Professors, in response to the AAUP’s statement on the recent campus protests. Earlier this week the author also wrote about the anti-Zionism on display in the trans community.

My name is Corinne Blackmer, and I am professor of English and director of Judaic Studies at Southern Connecticut State University.

I am also the co-editor (with Andrew Pessin) and contributor to a volume titled Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America (Academic Press, 2023). This work, which appeared shortly before the events of October 7, seems prophetic in hindsight. Doing this volume helped me comprehend rather than merely react to the events that are befalling us that are discussed in the impassioned AAUP statement.

I do not by any means regard the AAUP’s statement as antisemitic, nor do I think it intended to traffic in antisemitic tropes. However, it accidentally both was and did. This occurred in small part because of culturally inculcated patterns but mainly because the statement was rhetorically divided against itself by attempting to meet the demands of its primary audience while doing a modicum of compromised justice to the myriad issues that contradicted its arguments. Please understand, I have no interest in overplaying—or underplaying—the role that antisemitism has played in these protests; nor do I have less than an excruciating sense of how both Democrats and Republicans have, in classic antisemitic fashion, positioned Jewish people as a political football to be tossed around like a bauble. As a result of this invidious sport, Jews, with a few exceptions in both camps, have no place to go that feels like home.

I wish to go over these matters in the hope that my comments might prove helpful in articulating more form-fitted responses to future crises as they unfold around us. We have not seen the last of these kinds of protests for various reasons, so it behooves us to see matters clearly in order to anticipate the future and stay resilient and savvy.

(1) Paragraph one of the AAUP’s statement draws a sharp distinction between the professoriate, on the one hand, which is represented as disinterested, idealistic, and nonpartisan champions of free speech per se, and morally abject university administrators, on the other. The latter have ordered violent “militarized responses” to “peaceful protests” that have been met with “disturbing force” by the police, who are painted with dystopian fervor as cruel and brutal. The statement offers no modifications, qualifications, or exceptions to this portrait, which is unfortunate, given that Jewish students and their allies, who were the major counterdemonstrators, experienced most of the intimidation, violence, aggression, and antisemitic threats at the heart of these protests. It also understandably lambastes the Republican-led congressional committee recently convened to uncover antisemitism on college campuses. The statement excoriates alumni and donors who, in response to the nature of the protests, have withdrawn support or funding from many universities. While the Republicans obviously tried to turn campus antisemitism to their advantage, many Democrats left the field wide open to them by failing to defend laws and policies. The AAUP’s objections are patently partisan in nature, and it is hard to imagine that the statement would have had a similar reaction had the committee been Democratic and convened to explore violations of the civil rights of protestors and professors, rather than Jewish students whose rights were also violated on campuses.

Counterprotestors were spit upon, derided, assaulted, threatened, or had their signs and flags destroyed. This behavior was noxious and pervasive, and failed to address or remedy in any constructive fashion the suffering or death of Palestinian people in Gaza caused by Israeli military actions. However, although this violence and death were all too real, the destructive actions of the protestors offered aggression, violence, and hatred in response to military destruction and thereby lost moral authority. The protestors regularly chanted slogans of antisemitic eliminationism endorsed by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has direct links to Hamas, a terrorist organization supported by the murderous Iranian regime. They shouted out, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Return to 48,” and “Go back to Poland,” where 3 million Jews were slaughtered during the Holocaust. Do the protestors understand the rudiments of modern European or Middle Eastern or even American history? Despite claims to the contrary, it can be proved that they do not. Further, they called for the genocidal destruction of the Jewish state, one-fifth of which is Arab, in addition to Israeli Jews—9.5 million people.

These unspeakably violent and genocidal chants did not prevent the protestors from accusing Israeli Jews of various crimes against humanity, including genocide, settler colonialism, apartheid, and racism. They justified their intents because of false charges that Israeli Jews are settler colonialists who have displaced Palestinians. In truth, both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have, as two indigenous peoples, equal claims to the land that, finally, must be peaceably adjudicated. There were few pro-Palestinian protests that were aimed at such constructive actions. They did not call for a two-state solution or for discovering the means for Palestinians and Israeli Jews to peacefully coexist side by side, free from Hamas and Israel’s self-defensive military actions in Gaza. None asked for the return of hostages or voiced concern over the vicious and unspeakable Hamas attacks on Israeli Jews of October 7, which broke a ceasefire. In contrast, the truth about the events of October 7, particularly the systematic rapes, was vociferously denied or downplayed. This was represented as nothing more than Israeli propaganda, despite the extensive documentation available to the public.

There were also calls for divestment from Israel. Those asking for a halt to American weapons manufacture were not necessarily antisemitic but immoral for other reasons. Like so much of the other pro-Palestinian protests, these objections existed in woeful ignorance of, for example, events in Ukraine, which suffered vast losses due to unconscionable delays in receiving weapons manufactured by the United States. Further, the calls for divestment also asked for the end of cooperative relations with Israeli institutions and the breaking of ties with Israeli academics, and even with Hillel, a student group. Such actions openly violate the precept of the free exchange of ideas that undergirds academic freedom and that the AAUP supposedly protects. Yet, unbelievably, the AAUP silenced and tossed aside these matters as unworthy of commentary or concern. Protests calling for the end of military actions in Gaza were wholly commendable and were the major point of peaceful agreement between the two warring groups on campuses. But all in all, the AAUP statement crossed the line into dissembling about the protests since admissions of their actual nature would have eviscerated claims about their peaceful character. They simply cannot be compared to the anti-war protests of the Vietnam War era for many reasons. Those former protests directly involved the lives of American citizens, whereas these concern foreign affairs that have no direct impact on Americans. The earlier protests also featured two groups who opposed one another. These recent protests were different and distinct: they were fundamentally antisemitic and anti-American in nature. Protestors broke into Jewish community centers or Hillel buildings and engaged in direct vandalism and defacement.

For too long, campus administrators ignored these events, despite the opposition and fierce condemnation of donors and the public. For the latter, these protests were yet more proof that putatively “educated” elites were ignorant, self-indulgent, and out of touch with the citizens they were supposed to serve. Administrators did not call the police in a timely fashion because they were reluctant to do anything that could be accused of taking sides or being repressive and militaristic. Accordingly, they ignored violations of policies governing the time, place, and manner of peaceful protests on campuses, and in the main they only crossed the line into calling the police after crimes of trespassing, vandalism, and violence could no longer be brushed away. They also acted in those instances when it could not be ignored that protests were fueled, organized, and funded by outside agitators who, as police intelligence determined, practiced upon the naive idealism of college protestors and, much more seriously, directly attacked American civic norms, such as the rule of law, dialogue, and peacefulness, which would have commended these protests in the eyes of neutral outside observers. Sometimes the implications of the protests became quite frightening, as when police investigators communicated to administrators that they were the work of hostile foreign parties who sought to undermine the United States, foment chaos, or subvert American democracy.

(2) For these reasons and others, the AAUP statement starts, in paragraph two, with denial. It insists that antisemitism and hate have no place on college campuses. Yet the second sentence takes this claim all away. It papers over dissembling contradictions and alludes to the miniscule number of Jews who joined in the protests. Some of these Jews were associated with a hateful antisemitic group deceptively called Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP). But all were tokens, so the AAUP engaged in blatant tokenism, giving these unrepresentative Jews a central place in disproving claims that the protests were antisemitic or violent in nature. The fact is that the vast majority of Jews are Zionists who believe in Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. They object to Netanyahu, settlements in the West Bank, and, in some cases, military actions in Gaza, but they believe passionately in Israel.

However, the response to these protests raises the specter not only of ethical disregard for the principles that the AAUP espouses but also of double standards: would the AAUP have given the professors and students such respectful regard had they been protesting civil rights for gays, blacks, Hispanics, or undocumented immigrants? If the honest answer is no, then the AAUP cannot assert that it endorses a transcendent adherence to First Amendment rights, as it claims to do. The statement also must dismiss contentions about a preference for upholding the First Amendment instead of curtailing free speech in the interests of ensuring the safety of students. The AAUP upheld preferences for “safety” when they covered other minorities, but it objected to them when they are applied to Jews. Finally, in this vein, praise for administrators who reached agreements with the protestors were extremely disturbing as in most cases they complied with demands to divest from Israel, even though they violated the principles of freedom of association indispensable to academic freedom.

In conclusion, these protests force us to perceive them in the eyes of neutral outside observers and ask three salient questions: (1) Why were these students not taught critical thinking skills, and why did protestors refuse to speak with others or engage them in debate or dialogue? (2) Why are these protests focused obsessively on Israel/Palestine but silent about other, far more egregious and lethal violations of human rights around the world, including verifiable genocides? (3) What do students learn about the nature of international conflicts that result in mutual harms and that defy simplistic binary models that see the world in terms of a Manichean battle between oppressors and oppressed, instead of, with some exceptions (see Ukraine and Russia), being acknowledged as having complicated histories, not to mention plenty of blame and praise to go around?

I thank the AAUP for its attention to this missive.

Best of all,
Corinne Blackmer

Corinne E. Blackmer is Professor of English and Judaic Studies and Director of Judaic Studies at Southern Connecticut State University as well as Affiliate Professor at University of Haifa.

This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Israel initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.