A Switch Has Been Flipped

By Abe Greenwald

This morning on the podcast, we talked extensively about the Trump administration’s (already blocked) attempt to bar international students from attending Harvard. I was quieter than usual, for two reasons. First, I was completely engrossed in what the others were saying. Second, I felt like a troglodyte in comparison to my colleagues. John, Seth, and Jonathan Schanzer were wisely considering the potential negative consequences and mixed motives of Trump’s latest move against the university. But given where I’m at on the issue, all I can really think is hit Harvard with everything you’ve got.

Maybe I’m wrong. And I’m not saying that merely out of custom. I’m saying it pointedly because I know that, over the past year and a half, some sort of switch inside me has flipped. The switch pertains to matters concerning Israel, Jews, and the liberal establishment. I admit it: I’m just no longer that thoughtful about certain things. Where I could once be circumspect, I am now, frankly, simple: The current enemies of the Jews must be taken down. It might not be done in the way we’d prefer, and it might have knock-on effects that we will have to negotiate in the future. But in the present, my thinking is binary. There are the Jews, and there are those who are trying to wipe us out. I’ll worry about the future when it gets here.

And no, this is not my way of justifying a “genocide” of Gazans. There is no genocide of Gazans. But the false allegation of one is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be countered with whatever tools are at our disposal. If that means ruining the careers of the blood libelers, have at it. It’s not cancel culture to uphold standards of truth in media and international fora. 

The same applies to campus anti-Semitism in all its forms. While I’m passionately pro-immigration, my priority now is to keep anti-Semites and America-haters out of the country and deport the ones who have already made their way here. Again, hit them with everything you’ve got.    

As far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump can’t lean too heavily on Harvard. Withhold its grants, revoke its tax-exempt status, and, yes, prevent it (if possible) from enrolling foreign students.  The plight of advantaged internationals matters little to me at the moment, and Harvard’s sense of itself as the omnium gatherum of young global gentry matters not at all.

Jonathan Schanzer, however, made an arrestingly good point this morning in arguing against Trump’s crackdown on elite education. He noted that, historically, anti-intellectual movements that take off in anti-Semitic atmospheres lead to catastrophe. And it’s true that Jew-haters lurk in the corners of the populist right. 

It was only after the podcast that I thought of what David Ben-Gurion said in 1939 about the British, who, while fighting Nazi Germany, had issued the White Paper restricting Jews from entering and purchasing land in Palestine. “We must help the [British] army as if there were no White Paper,” he said, “and we must fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”

We must help the populists fight the Ivies as if there were no Tucker Carlsons, and we must fight the Tucker Carlsons as if there were no Ivies. These are the kind of choices that history demands of Jews in dangerous times. We are not approaching such a time—we are in one. And I have made my choice. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.