Last year there were a lot of article about progressive Jews who suddenly realized their allies on the left saw them as the enemy. I wrote about a couple of instances here and here. So this isn’t a new phenomenon but even months later it still has the potential to shock some people.
Columbia University is getting the lion’s share of the attention right now but things are not going well at Berkeley either. Within the past few days there have been a number of stories in which Berkeley progressives express shock over the amount of anti-Semitism that permeates the campus. Let’s start with this story out today from Politico.
Liberal members of the state’s legislative Jewish caucus have publicly castigated UC Berkeley for its handling of hostility toward Jewish students and professors amid the war. They’re pushing state laws targeting antisemitism in response to the events — including a violent protest of an Israeli speaker in late February that forced Jewish students to be evacuated.
“There is nothing more indicative of the failure of our college campuses to protect students and protect free speech,” Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who was UC Berkeley’s student body president in 2002, said of the incident.
Here’s video of that incident. You can scroll through several clips.
A more recent incident which got a lot of attention was the decision to hold a protest at the home of Berkley’s law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky. This came a few days after the protest group posted an image of Chemerinsky with blood dripping from a knife and fork in his hands. In a recent statement to the Nation, Chemerinsky expressed shock to see this kind of behavior coming from the left.
“I think there’s been a change in discourse in this country,” Chemerinsky told me. “Trump, in ridiculing people—it legitimizes ugly discourse. I always assumed it was from the right. Now, for the left to be engaging in this ugly, hateful discourse, it’s just very frightening.”
The idea that campus leftists are hateful and borderline violent isn’t shocking to most of us on the right. This sort of thing has been going on for years at Berkeley. The only difference is that now the mob is targeting people on the left instead of people on the right.
Finally, here’s a worrisome opinion piece from a Holocaust survivor who has lived in Berkeley since 1957.
Over the 65 years that I have called this beautiful area home, I have occasionally encountered antisemitism, but these one-off incidents never succeeded in destroying my spirit. When I was four years old, Nazis burst into my bedroom and sent me and my family to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. We were soon released and I was smuggled out of Germany by a Christian woman. After this harrowing experience, not much in the Bay Area could scare me.
But since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the hatred towards Jews that I have seen in Berkeley terrifies me more than anything I have experienced while living here. I am still reeling from being called a liar at a Berkeley City Council meeting, where I asked for a proclamation to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and spoke about October 7. The Jews at that meeting were circled and called “Zionist pigs” by menacing protesters…
It is incredibly painful to see my neighbors vilify Jews, tear down posters of Jewish hostages in Gaza and not believe Jewish rape victims. In this hotbed, hatred and hostility have become normalized. Families have moved their children out of public schools. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and boycotted. And lies about Jews and Israel have gone unchecked and unchallenged in our public forums. Our local Jewish community is both horrified and petrified.
She added, “I have seen where unchecked antisemitism can lead.” Indeed, this behavior could escalate to something much worse at any time. It has been six moths since all of this started. Why is anyone still surprised at this point?
WATCH: Susanne DeWitt, an 89 year-old Holocaust survivor who was arrested and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp at age 4, was repeatedly heckled by demonstrators as she spoke in favor of the City of Berkeley’s Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. pic.twitter.com/B3mx5mjjSo
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) March 28, 2024