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Universities Must Be Forced to Address Antisemitism
University of California, Santa Barbara student body president Tessa Veksler on Feb. 26, 2024. Photo: Instagram
JNS.org – “Never would I have imagined that I’d need to fight for my right to exist on campus,” laments Shabbos Kestenbaum, a student at Harvard University who is suing the school because “antisemitism is out of control.”
Jewish students have suffered an unrelenting explosion of hate on American higher education campuses—so far with little relief. They have endured antisemitic rhetoric, intimidation, cancellation and violence. But those charged with keeping campuses safe—whether administrators who govern student and faculty behavior or federal agencies responsible for ensuring that schools adhere to civil rights protections—are failing in their jobs.
Many Jewish students have complained to their colleges’ administrators about the injustices. But instead of responding with measures to ensure Jewish students’ safety—like stopping pro-Hamas protestors from hijacking campuses or expelling militants who incite Jew-hatred— administrators have largely shown indifference. In some cases, college authorities have made things worse for Jewish students by appeasing the riotous, pro-Hamas mobs who have been primary perpetrators of Jew-hatred on campus.
Snubbed by college administrators, Jewish students and their supporters have appealed for federal protection, filing Title VI complaints with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the body tasked with enforcing protections under the Civil Rights Act. Unfortunately, the OCR, which has the power to levy severe financial punishments against colleges that neglect students’ Title VI rights, has so far rewarded negligent universities with little more than slaps on the wrist.
Until college and university boards of trustees begin hiring administrators committed to Jewish students’ safety—and until the OCR begins seriously punishing antisemitic perpetrators—we can expect no respite. Safe to say, colleges and universities run by arrogant, apathetic administrators will not change until their jobs and schools’ survival are threatened.
College/university administrators don’t take antisemitism seriously. Their reactions to Jewish students raising concerns about Jew-hatred range from indifference to outright hostility. For example, when Mohammed Al-Kurd, who the Anti-Defamation League says has a record of “unvarnished, vicious antisemitism,” came to speak at Harvard, Shabbos Kestenbaum and other Jewish students complained to administrators.
Rather than cancel Al-Kurd’s appearance, which would have been the appropriate action, the administrators ignored the students’ complaints. “Harvard’s silence was deafening,” Kestenbaum wrote in Newsweek. Kestenbaum said he “repeatedly” expressed concerns to administrators about the antisemitism he experienced, but as his lawsuit alleges, “evidence of uncontrolled discrimination and harassment fell on deaf ears.”
Administrators at Columbia University reacted to Jewish students’ complaints about antisemitism even more cynically. In fact, during an alumni event, several administrators exchanged text messages mocking Jewish students, calling them “privileged” and “difficult to listen to.”
When Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania if calling for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, none could say “yes.” The presidents of Harvard and UPenn have since resigned. Good riddance.
Some college/university administrators have outrageously granted concessions to pro-Hamas students. For instance, Northwestern University agreed to contact potential employers of students who caused campus disruptions to insist they be hired, create a segregated dormitory hall exclusively for Middle Eastern, North African and Muslim students, and form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists could wield undue influence. Brown University agreed to hold a referendum on divestment from Israel in October.
Similar appeasements were announced at other colleges and universities, including Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota and the University of California Riverside.
So far, OCR has failed to take concrete action against antisemitism on campus. This is evident in recent decisions involving the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Michigan. CUNY was ordered to conduct more investigations into Title VI complaints and report further developments to Washington, provide more employee and campus security officer training, and issue “climate surveys” to students.
The University of Michigan also committed to a “climate survey,” as well as to reviewing its case files for each report of discrimination covered by Title VI during the 2023-2024 school year and reporting to the OCR on its responses to reports of discrimination for the next two school years.
Neither institution was penalized financially, even though the Department of Education has the power to withhold federal funds, which most colleges and universities depend on. There are now 149 pending investigations into campus antisemitism at OCR. If these investigations yield toothless results similar to those of CUNY and Michigan, it is highly unlikely that colleges and universities will improve how they deal with antisemitism.
Putting an end to skyrocketing antisemitism on campus involves three things.
First, donors and governments at every level should withhold funds from colleges that fail to hire administrators who will take antisemitism as seriously as they take pronoun offenses or racism directed at people of color.
Second, the OCR must mete out serious consequences to Title VI violators in the form of funding cuts. This may require legislation that specifically mandates withdrawing funding from offending parties. A bill recently introduced by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.)—the University Accountability Act—may be ideal, as it is designed to financially penalize institutions that don’t crack down on antisemitism.
Third, if OCR won’t act, Jewish students and their supporters should turn to the courts. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the legal director of the Deborah Project, a public-interest Jewish law firm, argues that the CUNY settlement demonstrates the futility of going to OCR and that going to court is more likely to produce “a clearly delineated and productive result,” such as punitive and compensatory fines. As of late May, at least 14 colleges and universities are facing lawsuits over their handling of antisemitism on campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
As long as college administrators are allowed to ignore antisemitism on campus and as long as OCR and other government institutions fall short in punishing Jew-hatred, antisemitism will continue to plague Jewish students.
The post Universities Must Be Forced to Address Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’
In the mid-2010s, journalist Aaron Bastani coined the phrase “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” arguing that automation, AI, and synthetic biology would eventually make work and material scarcity essentially obsolete. Eventually this idea became a manifesto envisioning a post-scarcity, post-capitalist world.
The Internet took notice, and by the summer of 2015, Bastani’s earnest manifesto had spawned millions of trollish variations (including my personal favorite, “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” — the ‘gay’ and ‘space’ parts pointing to different ways to deal with overpopulation on Earth). As such things usually are, the memes were half-joking, half-serious, pointing both to a utopian vision of the future and to the impossibility of ever achieving it.
Eleven years later, though, the utopia may be at hand — though, as we’ve all heard by now, it could be more of a dystopia.
We’ve all read the takes: AI is taking our jobs, data centers are polluting the heartland, and, oh yeah, there’s a 10% chance that rogue AI agents will wipe out life on Earth. Of these three very different risks, Mira Fox recently wrote about the third from a Jewish perspective, and many pundits have commented on the second. I want to focus on the first one — on what happens to society when the value and availability of work changes so radically,and on how Jewish traditions may end up being of value.
On, in other words, Fully Automated Luxury Jewish Communism.
Let’s start in the present, when, as AI boosters are fond of saying, LLMs are the least-capable that they will ever be, yet have already radically altered the fields in which my husband and I both work. Jobs are already disappearing and highly qualified “white collar” workers are finding it harder and harder to get new ones. I’d guess that 90% of the work I did as a young lawyer could be done by 2026-level LLMs, with review by a senior attorney. And that’s today.
It is, at best, extremely unclear how our society is supposed to cope with the economic and social-spiritual-psychological consequences of this.
Economically, most AI-boosters say we’ll need some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to support all those laid-off actuaries, coders, call center operators, researchers, and technical writers. Never mind that many of these same AI boosters are libertarians opposed to the state doing anything at all, and that many others are contributing mightily to Republican politicians who are opposed even to raising the minimum wage or expanding healthcare coverage. These are the politicians who will usher in UBI socialism for all?
But the question is deeper than economics. When the work you do is done by a machine, who are you?
After all, work isn’t just about putting food on the table; our identities are often tied to our jobs, and, more generally, to our capacity to provide for ourselves and our families. (For traditionalists, much of this is still gendered — men do the providing — but not for most progressives.) Even if our material needs are somehow met by UBI and the explosion in productivity that AI is supposed to bring about, what about our non-material needs: our need for purpose, meaning and identity?
Lest this sound vague or ‘soft,’ consider that what philosopher Jon Vervaeke has called the ‘Meaning Crisis’ animates much of our contemporary politics today. MAGA populism is, in large part, a response to the erosion (real or perceived) in American conceptions of communal identity, economic opportunity, gender roles, and religion – i.e., the Meaning Crisis. Yes, much of MAGA’s resentment is driven by economics: by the hollowing out of the American middle class in the wake of globalization and other factors. And a lot of it is driven by racism. But much of it is also about meaning: what it means to be an American, to be a man, to be white, to be Christian. And Donald Trump has brilliantly, intuitively channeled the rage at those societal changes into a hopeless, nihilistic patriotism — the Lost Cause for the 21st century.
The point is, “soft” concerns often drive our politics. Sure, it’s the economy, but also what economic dislocation means to people who experience it. And that meaning is as much spiritual, for lack of a better term, as it is financial.
From my vantage point, as a rabbi/journalist/psychedelics scholar/meditation teacher, it seems obvious that we are headed for a collective crisis even more massive than the ones we have already experienced. In a sense, AI is to white-collar work what globalization, de-unionization, and technology was to blue-collar work. Twenty years ago, it was the factories that were closing. Now, it’s the law offices cutting back on hiring. What is supposed to happen next?
From that same vantage point, it seems equally obvious that, as a society, there will need to be significant reorientation toward non-economic forms of value. Of course, these exist already: people find meaning in family, religion, culture, creativity, sports, hobbies, and a thousand other interests. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch. But consider how many people in your life (present company included) also derive meaning from work, and what will happen when that is taken away.
Religion, in its broadest possible sense, will almost certainly grow in response. Already, we’ve seen some of this in conservative quarters — converts to Catholicism like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, for example, or even the broad religiosity of Joe Rogan. But Capital-R Religion’s price of admission may be too high for many people: belief in God, conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, and all the myths and stories that seem preposterous if taken literally.
But there is also what I’ve called lower-case-r religion: forms of communal, ethical, and spiritual cohesion that are less about God, dogma, and obligation and more about the sacred in everyday life, rituals that bring us together, and practices that help us to grow ethically and spiritually.
In other words, what a lot of liberal Judaism, at its best, is already about.
A majority of non-Orthodox Judaism is already what Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie has called “God-optional” — it may have some general notion of the universe as sacred (I once wrote a book about that), and may maintain traditional God-language in liturgy and text, but it’s not focused on belief in an old man in the sky or obedience to Him for fear of punishment. Rather, as I wrote about in these pages in 2009, it’s focused on what religion does: how it can nourish the soul, teach ethical values, mark the passages of time, and bring people together in communities of meaning.
DZ Kalman, a leading theorist on Judaism and artificial intelligence, told me that “neither Judaism nor any other religion has a ready-to-hand answer for what to do when a chunk of the world’s jobs is suddenly no longer necessary. We have thoughts about the value of work, but those ideas are premised on a world where human labor is necessary to keep society running. We are not yet ready for a ‘time that is wholly Shabbat,’” a metaphor for the messianic age.
Yet, Kalman continued, “Shabbat is fundamental here. Humans can simply be; AI (for the moment) cannot. We as a society are not good at championing the value of presence, which is core to the Shabbat experience.”
But soon, we are going to have to be. Because what is “fully-automated luxury Jewish communism” if not a time that is wholly Shabbat?
What “religion” looks like in its particulars will vary with every person who experiences it. For some, it may mean a recommitment to seemingly non-religious activities: rescuing animals is ‘religious’ in this sense, as is throwing elaborate parties, seeing films, writing poetry, or, of course, raising a family. For others, it may well be the full traditional package, which excels at providing holistic systems of meaning. And for me, it will continue to mean a combination of spiritual practice (meditation, psychedelics, ritual), family life and political activism. Judaism and Jewishness already encompasses all of these things; just peruse the weekly schedule of a mainstream suburban synagogue, and you’ll find most of them already.
Personally, among those various possibilities, I’m interested in whether we’ll see a Jewish ‘archaic revival’ — a term coined by psychedelic theorist Terrence McKenna to describe a resurgence in ‘primitive’, non-rational ways of relating to the great mystery of the human condition. I’m excited by that possibility, which will likely be accelerated by psychedelics in particular (if you haven’t yet, please read the ‘Jewish Journeys’ study which showed how psychedelic experience super-charged people’s interest in spirituality). There are plenty of risks as well: Contrary to hippie myths, spirituality does not make one more politically liberal, and often makes people more particularistic. But I’m intrigued by an embodied Judaism newly revitalized to meet the needs of a post-work future.
Of course, that’s only one Jewish path, and not the most popular one. The broader point is that as work recedes in importance and society faces radical and destabilizing changes, we are going to need more and better ways to understand ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Which, for all its shortcomings, Judaism has been exploring for around 3,000 years.
The post AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board
(JTA) — A Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after passengers reported that an altercation broke out between two pilots. Israeli officials are describing the incident as a terrorist attack and passengers say they intervened to restrain a man who had attacked one of the pilots.
The flight, carrying more than 100 Israeli passengers, was diverted while flying over Jordanian airspace and eventually landed at Tabuk Airport in northern Saudi Arabia, an Israeli official to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
An Israeli official briefed the media and was quoted by Israel’s Channel 12 as saying that one pilot stabbed the other and attempted to “do a 9/11” — either by hijacking the plane and flying it toward Israel or crashing it. The official said that a “dramatic disaster was prevented.”
According to accounts from passengers posted on social media and reports by Israeli media, the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to take control of the aircraft. At least two people were injured in the incident. The entire incident lasted about an hour and a half.
“We are on the flight from Dubai. We took control of the flight. There was an attacker with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots,” passenger Itzhak Liber said in a Facebook video. “A few of us jumped in and pulled him out of the cockpit. Everything is OK now. The terrorist is neutralized. There is a pilot who is seriously injured.”
“It was tough. Everything is covered in blood,” Liber added.
Another passenger, appearing in a video posted to social media with blood visible on his face, said the passengers were in the middle of a hijacking and had restrained the attacker as the plane prepared to land. In another video, several passengers said they were protecting the pilot.
A third passenger told Israel’s Channel 12, “There were moments when we were sure this was the end.”
Saudi authorities said the two pilots were taken to a hospital after sustaining injuries, according to international media reports. Flydubai, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, has acknowledged that there was an “incident” that led to the diversion of the flight. It stressed that the plane landed safely and that all passengers were safe. UAE officials had not commented on the incident as of publication.
Data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft descending roughly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds during the incident. The plane subsequently diverted from its route and landed in Tabuk.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had held consultations and was monitoring developments. “Following concerns over an aviation incident, the prime minister held consultations on the matter and followed developments,” Netanyahu’s office said. “The incident is under control, and all measures are now being taken to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”
Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations, but the two countries maintain ties. This is not the first time a flight carrying Israeli passengers has landed in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a post on X that there had been an attempt to “crash” the aircraft and “murder 180 Israelis.” He called for Israel to hold accountable the “state or terrorist organization” responsible for the incident.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board appeared first on The Forward.
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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
