The kind of anti-Semitism college students should fear

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!

Facetious tropes about Jewish privilege and domination should not be dismissed as harmless jokes; they slip into peoples' subconscious and shape their perspectives.

Attacks against Jews surged around the world in the wake of the fighting between Israel and the Gaza Strip this summer, prompting a flood of articles decrying Europe’s revived anti-Semitism. One of these was by the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, who describes the various guises of anti-Semitism throughout history before explaining how it has taken to a new pretext in the 21st century – one based on a mix of anti-Zionism with a pinch of Holocaust denial.

Yet, in his article, Levy overlooks an age-old form of anti-Semitism that still lurks among us, though perhaps in a subtler garb: facetious tropes about Jewish privilege and domination. And nowhere do I hear them more than on my college campus.

This is how I recently went through a day at college:

I woke up and checked the UChicago Secrets page on Facebook to find post #4145 with 39 likes: “I secretly think that President Zimmer doesn’t exist, and that if you were to open the door to his office, you would find a table full of elderly Jewish men making all the decisions and just passing themselves off as a single reclusive individual.”

Later, I found my way to one of the bathrooms in the bookstore and noticed the graffiti on the stall: “Jewish men run the CIA". I opened my reading for my Social Science requirement to hear Marx claim that malicious capitalists are “inwardly circumcised Jews” (Capital, Volume I). In other words, Marx associates the source and propagation of sinister economic forces with the Jew. After passing the pinwheels on the quad in honor of the horrific death of children in Gaza with no context as to what prompted and transpired during the most recent conflict there, I went to see Steven Salaita, a professor whose job offer was rescinded at University of Illinois, presumably because of a string of strongly worded anti-Israeli tweets like “I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing” after three Israeli boys were kidnapped, or “Zionists: transforming ‘antisemitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.” At the event, Salaita painted a picture that could be interpreted to suggest Jews control academia and silence views they don’t like, while repeating several times that he is not an anti-Semite.

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