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Glazed over: 2010s vibes abound in Ilana Glazer’s made-in-Toronto comedy special ‘Human Magic’
In 2016, the American comedian Ali Wong put out a comedy special. As reviewer Michelle Ruiz put it at the time for Vogue, “Until her, I’d never seen a pregnant stand-up. I’d never seen a pregnant stand-up pretending to trap a man’s head between her legs in simulated cunnilingus either, but this is the beauty of Baby Cobra.” Jason Zinoman of the New York Times meanwhile called Wong’s performance “something new, a pregnant woman in her third trimester delivering a deliriously filthy and funny hour of comedy woven into a sneakily feminist assault on the double standards of parenting.”
Going on a decade ago, it was refreshing, raw, what have you, to see a woman in this deeply domestic state, speaking about sex and bodies in a way more commonly associated with… well, with men. And a racialized woman, too—a further change of pace in the white, male world of stand-up.
During that era, American comics Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer had moved their web series Broad City onto cable television, showing that young women—not just young men—could be hijinks-having stoners. We were still in the era (Knocked Up, 2007) where men (perhaps played by Seth Rogen) could be slackers and some no-nonsense woman, perhaps played Katherine Heigl, would be the responsible one. We’re kind of back in that era now, but for five minutes there, it was allowed that women sometimes slacked.
Like seemingly all Jewish women at the time, I was a huge fan of this show. I particularly loved the 2015 episode, “Knockoffs,” that weaves together a plot with Abbi’s character trying out a certain new act with a male partner and Ilana’s discount handbag shopping with her mother. It was the second of the two that truly made the episode, showcasing a part of the New York mother-daughter experience never before seen, or at least not seen since The Nanny. But you need both threads to make sense of what follows: The bargains turn out to be found underground, as in literally beneath the road, yielding one of the best comedic lines of all time: “All the good shit is always down a manhole.”
Art about slackerdom, told from the slacker’s perspective, is always a challenge, but they nailed it. Broad City was objectively delightful, but also innovative in a way of specific interest to me: it presented unambiguously Jewish, Jewish-looking young women as protagonists, not sidekicks. They were the comic relief and the ones out having sexual adventures, and going on a satirical version of Birthright Israel. After growing up surrounded by a Gwyneth-led beauty standard, I got a kick out of knowing that I now lived in a world where women like these were considered desirable. What’s it to me if men think Scarlett Johansson’s hot? Abby and Ilana, this is another matter.
I’m a few months older than Jacobson and (this will be relevant) a few years older than Glazer, but close enough in age to both that it was a bit like watching my own early-20s Brooklyn-dwelling life, except hilarious. I remember it as a kind of counterpoint to Lena Dunham’s Girls, about a not-dissimilar milieu and life stage, but just so much sillier, and therefore more my speed. While I can’t say I’m committed to realism or representation in my television viewing generally (or else why so devoted to Midsomer Murders?) there was something special about how this show was covering familiar-to-me territory and getting it so right.
***
As I will be the first in human history to observe, time passes. For most of us, it’s a bit who cares. It’s unremarkable if the classmate who partied hard at 19 is more settled-down at 39. Not so if you made a name for yourself as your own free-spirited slacker-stoner alter ego, the picture of unfettered youth. If you’re Ilana Glazer, if you played the less responsible of the Broad City broads, and had the audacity to grow up, get married, and have a kid, your fans may demand an explanation.
Glazer’s comedy special, Human Magic, filmed at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto last May and released for streaming in the final days of 2024 (on Hulu in the U.S. but via the adult side of Disney Plus in Canada) , brings the fans up to speed. It reconciles the filthy-mind-possessing Ilana Wexler alter ego from Broad City with the grown-up, responsible, professionally accomplished Ilana Glazer before us today. It is also an attempt at making a 2010s… vibe? ethos? relevant to the 2020s.
Human Magic is the 2020s’ answer to Baby Cobra, which may be where things go awry. It’s no longer groundbreaking to be a pregnant woman or new mom who (glances around anxiously) does sex stuff. It is maybe slightly edgy to admit to being a mom who consumeth the marijuana, as Glazer does, as is central to her personal brand, but stonerdom itself isn’t the rebellion it once was, not with legal dispensaries surrounding the theatre she’s performing at on Yonge Street—to say nothing of the rest of North America—not with all the much-publicized research about alcohol as a carcinogen, making Team Weed seem as if they had the right idea all along.
That’s not to say there isn’t a twist. The twist is that Glazer is not like those other women who love their husbands and have babies with them and enjoy cleaning the house and help their inept-shopper husbands buy T-shirts. And I don’t just mean because she’s a famous person.
Glazer now describes herself as a “queer Jewy woman,” but does not elaborate on what sort of queer she—a woman with a husband—identifies as. A non-practising bisexual, one might guess. (Human Magic includes what might be the lewdest-ever way of expressing the fact that the speaker is monogamous, and much of the special is about her sexual history with men, though she does mime a sex act involving another woman, but only—hard to explain—to make a feminist point about microphones being too phallic.) And perhaps that as well, I have no idea.
A glance at Instagram and recent media coverage attests that Glazer uses she/her as well as they/them pronouns, suggesting that this is core to what Glazer’s referring to when speaking of queerness. Per a recent profile in The Independent—which was picked up by other clickbait headline outlets like it was still 2014—having a baby paradoxically tapped her into her own gender multitude (as versus the boring thing where it reminds you just how female you are), and today, “she identifies as a non-binary woman.”
“Broad City” star Ilana Glazer has opened up about their pregnancy, saying that the experience helped them realize that they are nonbinary. https://t.co/Q6bR2wkCfJ
— Them (@them) August 12, 2024
If this has you wondering who among us identifies as a binary woman, you are not alone. If you’re not wondering this, you are mad at me for having done so. Those are, you see, the only options.
But the interview got picked up, as they will, and held up as evidence that a beloved celebrity had Come Out As Queer. Fine, an assigned-female-at-birth, feminine-presenting, husband-having one, but why should any of that matter? It’s a big tent! Vogue publisher Condé Nast’s gender-celebrity website Them celebrated this revelation-of-sorts as follows: “We love a subtle nonbinary slay, especially when it comes from none other than Ilana Glazer.”
The subtlety is undeniable. Blink and you’d miss it.
***
You can never know, when talking about another person, what’s a tentative first step on a journey, and what’s a gesture taken on for symbolic reasons. It’s entirely possible that tomorrow, Glazer will announce exclusively they/them—or he/they, or he/him—pronouns, and whichever material transitioning in whichever direction, and I will feel like a terrible person for having even fleetingly interpreted this as a case of a functionally if not technically straight lady presenting herself as more interesting (or oppressed) than she is.
It is also possible that I will wake up tomorrow with the politics and inclinations of someone born a micro-era later than I was (Glazer was born in 1987, whereas I’m an ancient ’83er, and this seems a critical difference for this sort of thing) and be putting she/they into my bios and—despite nothing substantively changing about me or how I live my life—everyone will have to walk on eggshells when discussing me and my bog-standard hetero household.
Everyone apart from the right-wing rabble-rousers, who take a different tack. Well those, and people who from-the-left critique such things, often with the derisive term, spicy straights.
My commitment to the she/her (or, more precisely, to not stating my pronouns and letting others come to the likeliest conclusion) is more a matter of generation or sensibilities than place on any gender spectrum. I have no reason to believe I am more comfortable in my femininity, or however you want to phrase such things, than Glazer is in hers. My hunch here—and it can only be a hunch, I’m not in her brain—is that we have different frameworks for understanding the same kinds of experiences.
Why, then, am I walking on eggshells talking about this? Why am I questioning my choice to use she/her for Glazer, wondering at 9:15 p.m. whether the Wikipedia entry’s use of they/them (which it notes is for consistency, just to pick something) ought to have trumped the Independent profile’s she/her? If I had reason to believe Glazer consistently preferred they/them, I would use they/them, I have no whole thing about this, and believe in using the pronouns people request. Why do I feel like a bad guy here?
My jumpiness isn’t much of a mystery, though. It’s because I’m a repeat visitor to rodeos of this nature. There’s a subset of people who will be next-level furious at me for what they will call erasure, gatekeeping, transphobia. All this because of what is essentially a semantic difference of approach between two people whose lives are—apart from one of them being a famous person who helped create the brilliance that is Broad City—remarkably alike.
Who cares, and more to the point, what does any of this have to do with Human Magic?
The subtext of Human Magic is that Glazer is not just some straight-lady comic offering up relatable anecdotes. She’s someone you’d least expect to be leading such a conventional life. And she describes it all in this cool-kid tone that makes you almost forget that the things she’s talking about (loving your baby, enjoying sex with your husband) are, well, square.
***
I am not an Ilana Glazer-ologist, which is to say, my interest is the persona, not the person. And the persona she presents in Human Magic is no more or less conventionally feminine than the typical straight woman. It is not just the gushing about the husband (more on that in a moment), but visible to anyone with any familiarity with gendered self-presentation in our society. She’s dressed in a black, off-the-shoulder minidress or shirt-and-miniskirt (mini-skort?) combo, with black stockings, a chic necklace, and gorgeous shimmery eyeshadow.
Now someone could be as described and use any pronouns. But the overall effect—combined with Glazer’s own references to herself as a woman and “mom” throughout the special—suggests that one would not be misgendering Glazer to call her a woman. She calls herself a woman! (Why am I walking on eggshells?) And unlike her Broad City co-creator and co-star, who is married to another woman, Glazer is what one might call straight-passing. (A wife, if you’re a woman, is a dead giveaway about the not-straight thing.)
What I keep returning to is the T-shirt interlude. In this part of Human Magic, Glazer pokes gentle fun at her husband for his inability to buy his own clothes. She has to show him the websites and tell him what size he wears. Men!
This is standard stand-up fare. The bumbling husband, flummoxed by a domestic task, or maybe he deems it too trivial. There’s also something mildly absurd about how specifically I related to this (the scientist husband, those exact T-shirt websites). Queer Jewy women, straight Jewy women, not so different after all!.
Glazer is nothing if not a member of her moment. She admits that she’s married, but encourages applause for the divorcees in the audience at the start of the show, calling herself a “divorce enthusiast.” She performs—literally, she is on a stage—the requisite feminist ambivalence of being in an opposite-sex relationship. “I feel so lucky to be married to my husband, but it’s hard at baseline to be a woman married to a man. Cause I see him sometimes as [here she gets dramatically angry] SOME MAN, instead of the person I chose to spend my life with.”
It’s performative misandry, but it’s also heteropessimism—or what would be called that if the person experiencing it identified as heterosexual. Glazer negotiates a squickiness surrounding her quasi-straight-womanhood (straight quasi-womanhood?) by describing herself as pro-guys, anti-men, with a whole routine about the difference between guys and men. Something about guys wearing sweatpants to buy groceries and men wearing jeans to work out in.
The guys-good, men-bad bit is a little funny, maybe? Not earth-shattering. It taps into something in the culture, though. Specifically, to the loophole according to which you’re permitted to be a ban-men feminist and have a male partner, so long as you tell anyone who’ll listen that you’ve found one of the good ones. Where this is meant to leave the women married to less-good ones (are they victims or just bad feminists?) I’m never clear.
***
Human Magic has its moments, in the Baby Cobra mould. Glazer describes a medical exam she had before giving birth as being “fingered” and in a positive sense—something I think I might find unnerving to hear if I were the doctor who’d performed the exam, but it’s a comedy special, maybe this never happened! She recalls the expletives she uttered when in awe of the miracle of having just had her baby. She confesses—in a scandalous tone—that she enjoys performing oral sex. Is the audience meant to be scandalized because sex, or because the sex-haver is a mom, or is it that third thing: that it’s yeah kinda shameful to be into sex with men, if you’re a queer feminist?
Loving your husband, enjoying sex with him, liking that he can carry heavy items (“I’ll tell you one thing daddies can do: carry shit”) not liking that he can’t be bothered to order his own T-shirts, loving your baby, worrying about your baby eating solids and how that’s going, enjoying cleaning your house (this is, Glazer explains, her Shabbat ritual), these are all things that put Glazer in community with the wide world of basic straight ladies. (I detest cleaning my house, which puts me where on the gender spectrum?) She presents her preferences for ordinary things as shocking revelations—the subtext being, can you believe someone like ME is into this stuff?
The more I think of it, the stranger it all seems. Annoying, but also kind of brilliant? There’s a part about how the first time she had fully unprotected intercourse was when trying for a baby. She describes this entirely banal fact of how one plans a pregnancy in extremely funny terms that sound both erotic and sordid.
What Glazer does—and what puts her in the spirit of Ali Wong—is remind that getting older, moving through the various life stages, does not magically remove women’s humanness. (Human Magic the title refers to reproduction, but could as easily refer to what’s imagined happens to women when no longer 22 and carefree.) Human Magic reminds that mothers are also women, that women are also people. Not just as in, people deserving of human rights, but people whose minds go to places that our culture ascribes to teenage boys.
The breakthrough of Broad City was showing that what’s thought of as teenage-boy-ness exists in young women as well. Human Magic extends the privilege to slightly older women. In a way.
***
Is the special not that funny because it’s too sanctimonious? After all, Glazer is an outspoken progressive, Broad City had a Hillary Clinton cameo in 2016 (whole lot of good that did, but I digress), and is a supporter of the Palestinian cause.
But we are not in the realm of humourless scolding a la Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 anti-comedy comedy special, Nanette. Glazer’s comic timing is still there, her exaggerated expressions, and if some of her qualities that were charming on Broad City now inspire a bit of, you do realize you’re borderline middle-aged now yes?, like when she refers to her toddler as “dawg,” it is clear she does in fact realize this, and is in on the joke.
Glazer comes across as aware she’s known for having righteous left-wing politics, and uses this as a way of offering unexpected twists. She talks about how dreadful it was, developing breasts early—“shtetl titties,” she calls them—and being sexualized from a young age. She then pivots to how, in her 30s, she’s no longer gently patted in public spaces and how she misses this. That’s it, that’s the joke.
Then there’s the interlude where Glazer admonishes mainstream (non-feminist) pornography for its emphasis on incest. She digresses a bit and you think she’s about to condemn the 1995 movie Clueless for its step-sibling romance. Really, you think, she’s out here cancelling Clueless? Instead she mimes her then-pubescent self let us say really enjoying the film—and in doing so, going somewhere far franker than Clueless itself ever did.
I suppose a part of me reacted to the knowledge that Glazer doesn’t fully identify as a woman the way I would have had I learned that she no longer considered herself Jewish. (Note: she absolutely does consider herself Jewish; it’s an analogy.) Broad City was such a triumph of Jewish female representation that maybe I am, on some level, unjustly attached to the idea of its creators as female and as Jews.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post Glazed over: 2010s vibes abound in Ilana Glazer’s made-in-Toronto comedy special ‘Human Magic’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote
Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’
Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.