Non-Ideological Thinking

Roger Berkowitz

Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from the antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard. There was no one reason he did so. He praised the work of the committee and complimented Harvard’s embattled President Claudine Gay. He reminded us all that most students at Harvard and other colleges are there to get an education and are not in the grip of morally reductive ideologies. At the same time, Wolpe recognizes that there is an ideology at Harvard and other liberal arts campuses “that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.” The ideology he refers to goes by many names but its basic orientation is that there are victims and oppressors and that the victims are indigenous and powerless while the oppressors are white and Jewish.

The world is not as simple as ideologists would like it to be. Hannah Arendt argued that ideologies are pseudo-scientific theories that attempt to explain all that is wrong with the world and that thereby justify violence and terror to set the world right. The two ideologies that Arendt thought had succeeded in inspiring large followings in the 20th century were Nazi racism and Soviet Bolshevism, to which we can add the system of Jim Crow racial apartheid in the United States. Ideologies work by offering a single idea that claims to explain the truth of suffering in the world. Racism argues that it is black people or Jews who are responsible for the suffering of white people; it promises that if Jews are eliminated or blacks are enslaved, this will allow Aryans or whites to thrive. Communism insists that the bourgeoisie are the root of all social evils and stand in the way of the rise of the proletariat. Eliminating the bourgeoisie will pave the way to a communist utopia.  

Neither racism nor communism are dominant on college campuses today. Rather, the ideology that is widespread is one that sees the world through the simple lens of colonialism.  According to this ideology, all people are either colonized or colonizers. Colonizers are evil by nature, while all so-called indigenous people are innocent victims. The ideology of decolonization claims that all injustice is rooted in colonization, so that if the colonized people rise up and overthrow their colonizers, there will be freedom and liberation. I’ve written about the difficulties with settler colonial ideology here. 

One consequence of the ideological fervor around decolonization is that it makes it difficult to have sympathy with wrongs or harms done to those who are labeled colonizers. This is why too many students and faculty on American college campuses find it so difficult to sympathize with Jewish suffering. They issue statements of solidarity with Palestinians, but ignore any mention of Jewish suffering. They tear down posters of Jewish hostages because the fact of Jewish suffering is incongruent with their ideological frame. They deny that the Jewish Temple ever existed. They insist that Jews have no connection to the land of Israel. When facts put ideological tenets in question, the facts must be denied. 

None of this is to deny the pain and suffering of Palestinians. There is no doubt that the Palestinian people have suffered injustice. They have seen their dreams of a nation-state denied. They have suffered through five wars that they have lost and an increasingly brutal occupation of their remaining lands. Most recently, the people of Gaza are experiencing one of the most devastating campaigns of aerial bombardment and destruction in the history of warfare. It is heartless to not sympathize with the plight of Palestinians. Those who say that Palestinian children deserve what they have coming to them are speaking a racist language that must be called out and resisted. Especially on college campuses, students should be encouraged to express their sympathies with the awful death and destruction occurring in Gaza. 

The sad fact of injustice suffered by Palestinians should not, however, blind us to injustices suffered by Jews. Too often, however, this is what is happening.  The incapacity to recognize Jewish suffering is widespread today, and it is ultimately what lay behind the difficulty three college presidents from Harvard, Claudine Gay, the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, and MIT Sally Kornbluth had at a Congressional hearing last week in simply condemning calls for a genocide against the Jewish people. The question they were asked was stupid in its simplicity: Is calling for a Jewish genocide a violation of campus policy. The obvious answer is, yes. Just like calling for lynching blacks is a violation of campus policy. Who can deny this? 

To say that calling for murder of Jews is wrong and violates campus policy does not mean that all students who might hypothetically make such a call should be punished or that they should all be punished in the same way. And it is important to note that this was a ridiculous hypothetical question as I don’t know of any students or faculty calling for a genocide of the Jews. But if such a call for genocide were to be made, the reaction to such heartless and thoughtless comments would have to balance clear condemnation with our pedagogical responsibilities. Our job at universities is not to punish students but to educate them. With that in mind, how we respond to individual students should be a pedagogical decision. Still, none of that changes the simple fact that calling for the killing of people based on their race or their religion is wrong and violates basic norms of an academic institution. 

The fact that three college presidents had such difficulty expressing basic sympathy with Jews is based in the powerful hold de-colonial ideology has on college campuses. As Wolpe writes, “Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.  Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe.  Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.” These should be simple and non-controversial statements. That they are not is evidence of the extent of the problem with ideological antisemitism. 

It is not at all obvious how to combat ideological antisemitism. Educating people, explaining to them the factual inaccuracies in their arguments, is often ineffective because the whole point of ideological thinking is to simplify the world in ways that make it necessary to deny inconvenient facts. If ideological thinking is like a logical vice that captures its adherents and squeezes out fact, nuance, and complexity, thinking—what Arendt called the activity of thinking from the perspective of others—demands challenging our own perspectives, seeking out facts and insights that make us question our prejudices. Only such a commitment to thinking in the Arendtian sense can help undo the word-and-thought defying banality of ideological thinking so prevalent today. The work before us on campuses and in certain fields populated by recent college graduates is immense. There is no silver bullet, but we must recommit ourselves to the difficult task of thinking. As Wolpe writes:

Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university.  It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character.  This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning. Part of the problem is a simple herd mentality – people screaming slogans whose meaning and implication they know nothing of, or not wishing to be disliked by taking an unpopular position.  Some of it is the desire to achieve social status by being the sole or greatest victim. Some of it is simple, old fashioned Jew hatred, that ugly arrow in the quiver of dark hearts for millenia.   
 
In this generation, outside of Israel, we are called to be Maccabees of a different order. We do not fight the actual battle but we search for the cruse of oil left behind.  Remember the oil was to last one night, but lasted eight - which means there were seven nights of miracle.  But of course the first night was the greatest miracle — because the motivation to light the initial candle, to ensure the continuity and vitality of tradition in each generation, that is the supreme miracle. Dispute but also create. Build the institutions you value, don’t merely attack those you denigrate.  We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see. Time to kindle the first candle.  Create that miracle for us and all Israel — Blessing to you and Hag Urim Sameach