A Light Unto Academe

As Israel fights the war against Hamas, its universities are giving their American and European counterparts a remedial course in the rudiments of morality. That is our takeaway from a remarkable wartime epistle penned by leaders of nine universities in the Jewish state. At a time when the Ivy League — and others — have lost their way, betraying their Jewish students and catering to the mobs, Israel is emerging as a light unto Academe.Our A.R. Hoffman spoke to one of the signers, Asher Cohen of Hebrew University. He called Harvard and Stanford “lighthouses that have failed.” How prescient that has proved to be, as alumni digest the sight of the president of the Harvard Law Review attacking a Jewish student. And as Harvard celebrates a professor, Marshall Ganz, who told two Israeli students that for their proposed project about Israel the word “Jewish” was a problem.The collapse of good will toward Jews on campus is measurable in the equivocal nature of the statements from campus brass and unequivocal hostility from many students and assorted administrators. One legal luminary, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, recounts: “I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.”It is quite a volte face from the dean, who a year ago maintained that “There are no Jewish-free zones at UC Berkeley or Berkeley Law” despite some clubs on campus adopting a bylaw that would ban Zionist speakers. He described the controversy those proposals sparked as “deepening the conversation” about “an enormously difficult issue.” No longer. Now, he is “stunned when students across the country, including mine, immediately celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7.”Let the dean visit Samaria, where Ariel University’s Ehud Grossman signed the letter from Israel. There he would be among scholars who grasp that, per the letter, that “Hamas shares no values with any Western academic institution” and that “many college campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments.” The Israelis call for “evidence-based, nuanced thinking that challenges simplistic narratives.” It has fallen to Zion’s professors to demand a “sea change in clarity and truth in academia on the matter of Israel’s war against Hamas, so that light will triumph over dark.” What a sorry state it is, the Israelis maintain, that the “very halls of enlightenment in America and Europe, ostensibly the bastions of intellectual and progressive thought that are your campuses, have adopted Hamas as the cause célèbre while Israel is demonized.” The ultimate audience for this letter, though, could be not mere professors but heroic parents, and not just Jewish ones. Hamas’s campus conquest bodes ill not just for the Jews, but to the institutions themselves. Employers are worried. The Israeli schools on this list have smaller endowments, and their facilities are likely to be shy of state of the art. Still, a moral compass is harder to come by than a gleaming gym. Studying abroad has never looked so good.

A Light Unto Academe

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