Young Zionists vs. the professoriate regime

I had the pleasure of meeting a group of young Jewish writers who are standing up to the totalitarian oligarchy that rules academia.

Photo: Shir Shelef and Scott Wall

My apologies to readers (especially you wonderful paid subscribers) for my recent silence. I just had the pleasure of attending the Z3 Annual Conference in Palo Alto. I was generously invited by the Z3 Institute at which I am a fellow—and for whom I am writing a book on Jewish self-defense—and its head David Hazony, who runs the excellent Substack Jewish Priorities. Since my return, I have been decompressing rather than writing; for which, again, my apologies.

It was, I must say, a very heady experience. I have never attended a Jewish conference of such size and scope; nor had the chance to meet such a wide range of Jewish leaders and activists from around the world. Among the highlights was a talk given by Naftali Bennett, who continues to be one of the few Israeli politicians to genuinely impress me. In particular, I got the chance to meet several of the young activist writers who contributed to the wonderful new book Young Zionist Voices, which Hazony edited.

Meeting these young writers only solidified my belief that, above all, American Jewry ought to be in a state of hope. Yes, the challenge at the moment is fairly dire, but the rising generation of Jews is more than capable of successfully overcoming it. They have taken the brunt of the assault on college campuses and, as a result, they labor under none of the delusions or despair that far too often typify my generation and older generations of Jews. They know how bad it is out there and it was wonderful to see that they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.

Speaking to these young Zionists, however, did not only reinforce my conviction that our ultimate victory over the antisemitic Red-Green Alliance will belong to and can only belong to the young. It also reinforced my sense of the nature of our enemies. What I heard from all the young writers was defiance and resolution, but especially when they recounted their campus experiences, I also heard an endless series of horror stories. They were stories of psychological and emotional abuse of such cruelty and violence that, in another context, they would prompt evacuation to a safe house or a foster home.

Yes, these young people were over 18 and therefore adults. Adults should be prepared to face the horrors of life and these young Zionists have faced it with enormous courage and fortitude. They are very far from “snowflakes.” However, this does not change the fact that they should never have been subjected to such abuse in the first place. That they were subjected to it and that the adults in the room, the administrators and faculty who should have and likely did know better, did nothing, is not just dereliction or depraved negligence—it is evil. I am not sure what else one can call anyone who wantonly abuses and degrades young people to sate his sadistic impulses, whether out of political or other motives.

I was struck, in particular, by one of the young activists who recounted how she was forced to write papers denouncing Israel in order to pass a class run by an antisemitic professor. Several others stated that they had to do the same. To be forced to defame one’s own people to survive academically is not just despicable, it is a monstrous crime. The professors who committed these crimes should have been summarily fired. That they never will be tells you everything you need to know about the regime they serve.

Thus, I learned from these young people an essential truth: This regime, the dictatorship of the professoriate that has conquered and colonized academia, is not simply politically biased or a font of deranged cultural neuroses. It is a genuine totalitarian oligarchy and, as such, can only perpetuate its rule by persecution. The persecution of anyone who dissents from the ideology through which the regime justifies its tyrannical rule. If young people must be abused, if they must be traumatized and psychologically damaged in their most formative years, to maintain the regime’s power, the regime has no compunctions about doing so. And this is a very slippery slope into absolute nihilism: First, the regime commits such crimes to impose its power. But then, crime becomes an end in itself. The abuse becomes the point. Eventually, crime is nothing more than what the regime simply is.

What this means is that there can be no quarter in the struggle against the professoriate regime. It must be either remade from top to bottom in Thatcherite fashion or completely smashed. I have all manner of misgivings about the incoming administration, but one thing that does strike me as hopeful is that it is very likely the administration and the congressional Republican majority will take on the professoriate in a very serious manner.

Whether this will extend to smashing the regime outright, I do not know, though it is unlikely. The regime has multitudes of defenders and even more cowards who are terrified of confronting it. Nonetheless, there is every reason to think that the regime is about to find its totalitarian power greatly truncated and at least some form of accountability imposed. This might be a small comfort to the regime’s victims, but it is some comfort all the same and, at the very least, a measure of justice.

No totalitarian regime is destroyed overnight. It falls slowly and then all at once. Young Zionists on campus have, in some ways, emerged as the regime’s most potent and powerful early dissidents. It may take decades to get them justice, but the first cracks in the professorate’s wall are showing. Let us hope that all at once comes sooner rather than later.