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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
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I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater. Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to “sing” for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
Peterson’s address was a historian’s invitation to every student and parent in the Ann Arbor stadium to recognize that the fight for Palestinian rights shares roots with our greatest movements for justice, including the struggle against antisemitism.
The backlash, predictably, was swift. The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable.
But to me, Peterson’s speech was a reminder of one of the most important lessons I took away from my time at the University of Michigan: that questioning Zionism is a necessary part of any Jewish life that aims to center justice.
I graduated from Michigan in 1989, and spent much of my last year in Ann Arbor ensconced at Hillel, where I edited a magazine for Jewish students. I’d grown up going to Young Judaea summer camps and had spent a college semester in Israel, where I’d witnessed the beginning of the first Intifada. I returned to find a shanty in the middle of campus that had been erected, a student organizer told our magazine, “to bring the uprising to the community. It is to show the conditions of the Palestinians and the brutal oppression of the Israeli army.”
The shanty evoked those then prevalent on campuses everywhere to symbolize the struggle of Black South Africans against settler colonialism and apartheid. The new shanty on our campus asserted that these words also applied to Israel.
While I was strongly against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — where Israel would not remove any settlements until 2005 — I was distressed and confused by the shanty’s silent, everpresent message about Israel’s past and present. Is Israel an apartheid state, I wondered?
So I put that question on the cover of our magazine.
The Hillel director called me into his office and somberly expressed his concern. But Hillel International had not yet officially clamped down on student activities that question Israel and Zionism.
So our cover story ran and we dropped our magazine in bundles across campus. At the time, I thought of myself as a liberal Zionist, and I secretly rooted for the student who tried to disprove the devastating charge. But as young journalists, my fellow magazine staffers and I were committed to exploring the views of those who erected the shanty, no matter their hostility to Zionism. We didn’t code the hostility as danger. No one thought we should report our ideological opponents — the kids who fell asleep on their books in the library just like we did — to the dean or to the government for arrest or deportation.
Over my time as an undergraduate, I’d come to recognize in these kaffiyeh-clad Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students the same history-minded, righteous hope that animated me.
Decades later, in the spring of 2024, we all watched as pro-Palestinian student activists — including many Jewish students — set up campus encampments around the country to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. At Michigan, the encampment was set up on the Diag, the university’s public square, where on the day of my own graduation I’d protested the university’s military research. As the mother of a recent college grad, I was humbled by the determination of these kids, who put up tents, organized teach-ins, and then suffered as police turned off their bodycams and used pepper spray against them. They were lawfully protesting for the university to divest from Israel as it bombed the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza — which is now home to the largest number of child amputees in modern history.
What I understand, and Professor Peterson understands, is that the student activists that he lauded at the commencement are fighting not against Jewish life but for Palestinians’ right to survive daily, as people, and as a people. These activists have asked us to understand, finally, that Zionism is what it does.
“It has been hard work to examine my own mind,” Tzvia Thier, a Jewish Israeli mother, wrote in an essay in the 2021 collection A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. As a child, Thier immigrated to Israel from Romania in the wake of the Holocaust. In 2009, Thier accompanied her daughter to “protect” her while she joined an action to fight the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Thier was 65, and realized that it was the first time in her life that she had had conversations with Palestinians. She understood then that “it was not my daughter who needed to be protected, but the Palestinians.”
“Many questions leave me wondering how I could have not thought about them before,” she wrote. “My solid identity was shaken and then broken. I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty, and hatred by ‘my’ people toward the ‘others.’ And what you finally see, you can no longer unsee.”
When that shanty went up on Michigan’s campus in the late ’80s, I began to question all that I’d learned about Israel’s founding. I began to question the very idea of an ethnostate — in the name of any people, anywhere — that enshrines the supremacy of one group of people over another.
By the time I became a mother, I’d become anti-Zionist. I understood — with a grief that does not abate — that, as Jews, our history of oppression has become an alibi for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
We must reject the bad faith accusations of antisemitism that have emptied the word of meaning and enabled authoritarian repression. When students on campuses today charge Israel with apartheid and genocide, they are echoing reports from B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization. I ask the parents of my generation to read these reports and do as Thier did — to allow themselves to see what we have not wanted to see.
I stand with the more than 2,000 University of Michigan faculty, staff, students and alumni who have condemned the university’s response to the commencement address heard round the world.
For the sake of all of our children, I ask that we each do all we can to open our community’s heart to Palestinian history and humanity. That we each join the urgent struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people.
This is the way that our Jewish college kids will find the deep and true safety of community: by leaving hatred, fear, and isolation behind; by honoring Jewish history by standing in solidarity with all who are oppressed; and by roaring in a stadium for freedom and justice, along with their entire generation.
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An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
Graduation season is upon us, with its regalia, music, orations, crowds and controversies. This year, I’ll be attending two university ceremonies: my daughter’s graduation from Binghamton University, and the commencement at Case Western Reserve University, where I teach. As both a parent and a faculty member, I look forward to being part of the powerful ritual moment when graduates are ushered out into the world.
But I’ll also be listening with an analytical ear, attentive to what these speeches reveal about the institutions delivering them — especially in a season when the same fault lines keep opening over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and over who gets to speak and about what.
Amid financial, political and technological pressure, the question of what universities owe their students, and society, has rarely felt more unsettled or more contested. As speakers or planned speakers at the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Georgetown have drawn fire over their stances on the Middle East, it’s clear that while campus protests over Israel may have died down, the tensions provoked by the Israel-Gaza war are still defining the American campus environment.
A close reading of the biggest controversy to date, sparked by historian Derek Peterson’s address at the University of Michigan’s spring graduation ceremony, can help illustrate the dangers of that fact.
Peterson’s platform has few equals in American academic life. A MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and a Fellow of the British Academy, Peterson, among the most decorated scholars of his generation, addressed a crowd gathered in the largest stadium in the United States. He did so as a representative of the faculty, invited to the lectern to speak for those who actually taught these students.
This was a rare chance for a professor, an opportunity to publicly offer an answer to the question every student has implicitly asked for four years: what is all this education for?
In a brief oration, under six minutes long, Peterson structured his answer around a single elegant literary device, Michigan’s fight song.
He reframed a song usually understood to herald student athletes — “Hail to the victors valiant, hail to the conquering heroes” — by asserting the real victors are not athletes, but the activists who have fought for justice throughout the university’s history.
Sing for Sarah Burger, a suffragette who fought for women’s admission to the school, Peterson urged. Sing for Moritz Levi, the university’s first Jewish professor, who opened Michigan’s doors to generations of Jewish students fleeing antisemitism at East Coast universities. Sing for the Black Action Movement students who demanded a curriculum reflecting Black experience and identity.
Each of these invocations gestured toward a group that was once shut out of the university, and honored the activists who responded to that exclusion with repair. The crowd answered Peterson’s appeals with applause and cheers that grew louder with each invocation, as he skillfully built toward his climax.
At the high point, Peterson delivered the line that would reverberate far beyond Michigan Stadium: “Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists,” he called out; for those “who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
The roar that followed was the loudest and longest of the entire speech. “The greatness of this university,” he summarized, “rests on the courage and the conviction of student activists who have pushed this university down the path towards justice.”
Within hours, the university president Domenico Grasso issued a public apology, saying Peterson’s words were “hurtful and insensitive.” In response, more than a thousand faculty members signed an open letter demanding Grasso retract the apology. Peterson’s defenders insisted the controversy was manufactured from a single out-of-context clip, and Peterson himself posted the YouTube link urging those offended to watch the whole thing.
Peterson’s defenders are not wrong to insist that context is everything. But they misinterpret what the context shows. Watching the full performance, and the crescendo that greeted the pro-Palestinian invocation, it’s clear that Peterson’s statement on pro-Palestinian activism was the destination the whole speech built toward.
The first three appeals each share a common logic: expand the circle and welcome the excluded. The fourth breaks that logic. Peterson did not exhort his audience to sing for students who built relationships across lines of difference, or who forwarded a vision of peace. Instead, he urged them to sing for students who drew attention to Israeli “injustice and inhumanity,” and who offered not a plan to make room for all, but instead an accusation.
That contradiction is worth naming plainly. Peterson’s other entreaties celebrated universal inclusion — all genders, all races, all religions. Then he singled out and damned the one Jewish state in the world, immediately after celebrating Michigan’s historic welcome of Jews. The speech that began by opening doors ends by pointing a finger, and that act of condemnation was offered as the moral crown of enlightened progress.
The depressing predictability of this genre of moral performance is that it builds, with apparent generosity, through history and conscience and song, only to arrive at a hackneyed, self-congratulatory denunciation of Israel as the apex of a liberal education. With so much at stake right now on our university campuses, is this really all we can offer our students as the culmination of their years of learning?
A university education is supposed to widen the aperture through which students see the world, and to equip them with the intellectual tools to engage the world with curiosity, humility and rigor. It is supposed to send them out equipped to ask hard questions, and with the tools and habits of mind to wrestle with them.
When a faculty leader uses a significant platform to show students not how to think, but what to conclude and who to condemn, he suggests something alarming: that narrowing of minds, pointing of fingers and pronouncing of verdicts is what four years of university education has amounted to.
That is a profound loss. Not only for those Jewish graduates who felt alienated and excluded by the singling out of the Jewish state, but for every student in that stadium, who invested years of time, money and intellectual effort in the hope of emerging with something larger: the capacity to engage the world by thinking freely and curiously across difference, and by imagining what real repair might actually look like.
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