Anti-Semitism on Campus

In the late 1960s a brand new philosophy began to invade American graduate studies. It offered itself as a new way to read texts. Graduate students in the humanities thought it was the latest in radical thinking and they flocked to it in droves.

Its name was deconstruction. Its leading proponent was a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida. As everyone knew, it had originated with a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger. Though he had called it Destruktion. 

From which we conclude that deconstruction is destruction with a con. Of course, in French, the word con has a slightly different connotation.

Everyone knew that Heidegger had been a fervent member of the German Nazi Party. While he was rector at the University of Freiberg, Heidegger had militated in favor of Adolph Hitler.

Yet, Heidegger’s followers believed that his philosophy had nothing to do with his fervent embrace of Nazism. And they knew that Heidegger had ceased his militancy in 1934 after what has been called The Night of the Long Knives.

On that fateful evening, Hitler and his henchman liquidated the Storm Troopers led by Ernst Rohm. This group was responsible for public attacks against Jews, among other monstrosities.

Anyway, Heidegger preferred the Storm Troopers to the more organized and less theatrical and more mechanical SS led by Heinrich Himmler. 

Still, serious graduate students did not take Heidegger’s association with Nazism very seriously, until 1987. Then, a Venezuelan scholar, named Victor Farias, wrote a book about Heidegger and Nazism. He dug up materials that showed Heidegger to be an avid anti-Semite. He suggested that Heidegger’s efforts to deconstruct certain cultures were directed against Jewish, as well as Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Funnily enough, some of the leading deconstructionists decided at that time to abandon their new discipline, the better to work on post-colonial studies.

In any event the Farias book caused a significant ruckus in the academic world. Among those who argued for the close association between Heidegger and Nazi thinking was a New York Professor by the name of Richard Wolin.

As for what it all meant, I have suggested that deconstruction is a euphemism for pogrom. It aims at a cultural cleanse, designed to identify and eliminate all traces of Western empiricism, the kind associated with the religion of the patriarchs and the religion of Moses-- not to mention its Anglo-Saxon manifestation.

Of course, Nazi thinking was all about race. It valued or devalued people by their race, not by their contributions. It derided merit in favor of racial purity. Does that sound vaguely familiar?

And it insisted on uniform belief, of groupthink. With that you are approaching the basis for the Third Reich.

So, when the current crisis in the Middle East exposed anti-Semitism in America’s universities, it should not have come as a surprise.

Of course, it had entered leftist thinking through deconstruction. Many leftist Americans, in and out of the university systems, had decided that since fascism and Naziism were right-wing movements, they could bnest be combatted by fighting every right wing thinker and politician.

Americans who were consumed with the war against Donald Trump missed the point. Christian Schneider explained in National Review that the media, having repressed conservative analysis of the academic mind, was shocked by the anti-Semitism that it had been incubating on college campuses.

As for how the universities became overrun with anti-Semites, Niall Ferguson suggests that it has been a long time coming.

He offers three basic reasons. 

First, the old liberals decided to hire faculty on the basis of ideological purity, not of achievement. 

Second, students who were admitted to fulfill diversity quotas did not feel like they belonged. They resented those students who had arrived on the basis of merit-- like white, Asian and Jewish students.

Third, the disruptions caused by diversity and affirmative action quotas made it necessary for universities to hire more administrators. Their wish to produce a multicultural paradise caused them to disparage and disdain merit.

If we extend our analysis we can argue that multiculturalism represents a return to pagan idolatry. It proposes a society organized around multiple cults to multiple pagan deities. An early version was the Egypt of the pharaohs.

Evidently, Moses led his people out of a world of pagan idolatry toward a nation founded on monotheism. But it was also founded on a single set of rules applied equally to all members of the group.

This is to say that the Egyptian model prefigures what we call Empire. In German one of the terms for empire is Reich.

An empire does not cohere by having people speak the same language, observe common customs and play by the same rules. It can contain multiple cults, but it can also join together a multitude of nations, each with its own language, customs and rules. It coheres because the different constituent parts all unite to extol the glory of a human idol, the emperor.

The more multicultural we become the more we will be searching for a new emperor. 

The Mosaic alternative involved One God, not many gods. It produced a nation, not an empire. And it offered a single set of rules, a common language and one group of customs and mores. Its first manifestation was the creation of Judea, now called Israel.

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