The anti-Semitism question

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission is asking Congress to amend Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to include anti-Semitism. The New York Sun has the details:

WASHINGTON – The United States Commission on Civil Rights is calling on Congress to amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to explicitly protect Jews against anti-Semitic harassment on America’s campuses.

The provision is one of a series of “findings and recommendations” adopted yesterday by the seven-member federal commission after a heated meeting held by teleconference and open to the public. The commission’s recommendations came after months of delay and negotiations with the federal Department of Education over what protections Jews are afforded under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and were adopted over the objections of the commission’s chairman, Gerald Reynolds.

“Congress should amend Title VI to make clear that discrimination on the basis of Jewish heritage constitutes prohibited national origin discrimination,” the adopted recommendations state.

The commission also determined that the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights “should protect college students from anti-Semitic and other discriminatory harassment by vigorously enforcing Title VI against recipients that deny equal educational opportunities to all students”; tasked the Education Department with conducting a public-education campaign to inform Jewish students of their “right … to be free from anti-Semitic harassment”, and urged the department to collect and report data on instances of anti-Semitic discrimination at post-secondary institutions.

The findings mark the end of a long battle initiated in November, when the commission held a hearing on the prevalence and nature of campus anti-Semitism, and the phenomenon of anti-Semitism masked as “anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist propaganda,” particularly in departments of Middle East studies.

“I find it rather appalling that we’ve taken this long to put out a document condemning anti-Semitism on college campuses,”commissioner Jennifer Braceras, a Massachusetts-based lawyer and writer, said during the teleconference.

So far, so good. But now we run into the problems. The Civil Rights Act does not cover religious discrimination, and we have the age-old question here of whether anti-Semitism is religious discrimination, or discrimination against an ethnic group.

Yesterday’s debate appeared to hinge on whether anti-Semitism is an act directed against Jews as observers of a religion, or Jews as members of an ethnic group. The use of the word ‘ethnic’ in these discussions is itself loaded, as the word means – according to both the Webster’s Second Unabridged and the Oxford Dictionary – not Jewish or Christian. Misuse of the word has resulted in less strict dictionaries accepting other, more general usages relating to peoplehood, and it is apparently that latter, bowdlerized usage that the members of the commission were referring in their use of the word ‘ethnic.’

“Religious harassment of a Jew is inseparable from ethnic harassment of a Jew,” Ms. Braceras said yesterday, during an exchange in which commissioners shouted over one another and pleaded to be heard. “I don’t know of any Jews that would make that distinction.”

“That position has not been accepted by the agency that is charged with enforcing Title VI,” Mr. Reynolds responded, referring to the Department of Education.

And there you see the problem. It is impossible to make most people understand that Judaism is both a religion and an ethnicity. You can be an atheist and still be a Jew. You can be an atheist, have children who are atheists, and those children can still be Jews. We make that disctinction easily among ourselves, but Gentiles seem to have a serious problem understanding it. Or anti-Semites deliberately misunderstand it, insisting that they are not against Jews, only against Israel’s policies — and yet, when they come to protest marches, their signs bear anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic symbolism.

The Sun said the committee meeting was “heated.” I imagine it would be. Members of Middle East studies departments all over the country must be quaking in their loafers at Jewish students having the ability to sue them for anti-Semitism, because the Middle East studies departments are responsible for much of the anti-Israel — and resultant anti-Semitic — attitudes on today’s college campuses.

Do you remember the anti-Semitic mob attack on Jewish students at San Francisco State University? Four years ago, Laurie Zoloth sent these words in an email that was published on my blog and others:

I cannot fully express what it feels like to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled “canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,” past poster after poster calling out “Zionism=racism, and Jews=Nazis.” This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern–except if you are a Jew, and you understand that hateful words have always led to hateful deeds.

This is the atmosphere that amending the Civil Rights Act would end. And that’s what the anti-Israel side is afraid of. But the members of the commission who are against changing the law are hiding behind semantics.

Mr. Reynolds was joined in his opposition by another commissioner, Peter Kirsanow, who argued that the commission could not adopt Ms. Braceras’s proposed findings until it held a separate hearing into the matter of whether Jews were both religious observers and members of an ethnic group.

“I’ve got to be honest here,” Ms. Braceras retorted. “This is basic to me.”

And what is basic to me is this:

As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to “Get out or we will kill you” and “Hitler did not finish the job,” I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised.

The haters do not stop to wonder whether or not Jews are a religious group or an ethnicity. But pro-Israel speech and speakers are protested, shut down, shouted down, and threatened — while pro-palestinian speakers, speeches, and demonstrations go on unhindered, save for the occasional peaceful protest held outside.

If anti-Semitism were covered by Title VI, we would have civil discourse on our campuses once more — after the first few lawsuits.

I’m all for amending the Civil Rights Act. Perhaps we should start a letter-writing campaign to our Congressional representatives.

Yes. Let’s do that.