Confronting Anti-Semitism in Higher Education With Cary Nelson

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Cary Nelson, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Cary Nelson: Glad to be, glad to be here. I enjoyed our last conversation. So it'll be hard to get one better than that, but I'm ready to try.

John Tomasi: I think we may well, given the thing we'll be talking about, which is your fabulous new book. I just want to mention first that, I don't think I've told you this, but I, I, I've read your, I've, I followed your work on academic freedom, especially for years. The first time we ever met, I believe was just a year or so ago at the heterodox, at the heterodox conference in, in Chicago. And you were on that panel with, Amna Khalid, Nadine Strossen, Stanley Fish, and you were fabulous. And I just remember, I remember watching you up there on the stage and thinking, this guy's even, even better than everything, even better than I thought from reading his books. So I really enjoyed your, your live performance that day. It was superb. We're here to talk about antisemitism and especially, the campus conflicts and the role that antisemitism plays in those campus conflicts. You have a new book out, which just come out, a fabulous, a fabulous book, Mindless, What Happened to Universities, which I just finished reading just a few days ago. It's a, it's a short book, it's really well-written, and it's, as our, as our listeners will soon hear, it's full of all kinds of extremely interesting, extremely interesting analysis.

Cary Nelson: But it got shorter under the, editorship of, of the Jewish Quarterly, because they're very good at knowing, I think even more than I, what, what a popular audience doesn't want to hear or would be distracted by. So my film, The History of Zionism, Witt, and some other sections like that, that they felt just weren't central to the state of the universities. They're very interesting. They're great editors.

John Tomasi: Nice. Well, you'll, as an English professor, you'll know that Shakespeare makes Polonius say, brevity is the very soul of wit. And, of course, that line I always found very upsetting. I don't like to hear that. But it's put in the mouth of a, of a, of a windbag, right? Because Polonius, so he's, the bard is playing levels with us as, as usual. But, but we're talking about your, we're talking about your book, Mindless. And, I just want to, let's just, let me just start by setting some of the stage or better use that some of the stage for me. You know, one of the things you say is that, April, you pick out April 24 as being a really important, month, period of time. You say that the, that's sort of when the anti-Zionist political movement, you described as being the most rapid, the most rapid politicization of higher ed in our lifetimes. can you say a bit about what, what you see is, what happened that was so significant that, that month or the, and those, that, and that period? Sort of spring of 24, let's say.

Cary Nelson: It is, it is possible. I mean, who knows? but we might've seen, we could have seen something as rapid before if social media had been functioning. that just, that enabled the rapid transmission of manifestos. It enabled the rapid international transmission of strategies. So, for example, here on campus, we got electronic versions of booklets, how to break into a locked building with instructions about using crowbars and mallets. Another booklet was how to resist arrest with illustrations showing like a policeman arresting a demonstrator, and then people crowding around the policeman and knocking his arms down to free the protester. Or advice like a protester is locked in a police, car, but often the back doors can be opened from the outside. So, go and open the back doors, let the protester out. All these things are completely against the law, of course. You slap down a policeman's arms, but if there are other policemen around, you're in trouble, right? But it was, it enabled really, and these things were in different languages, so it enabled this incredibly rapid spread. I mean, the fact that the first demonstrations here in this country were in mid to late April, and by the first week in May, you know, Kuwait has an encampment, and there's an encampment, nine encampments in Japan, 11 encampments in Australia. And I think most Americans were, many Americans were aware of the spread of those demonstrations in this country, but they weren't aware that it was really going on worldwide. They might have heard about demonstrations in London, demonstrations in Paris, because those things certainly happened as well. But the simultaneous, simultaneity, virtual simultaneity, and the ideological conformity across the globe was something quite remarkable, and I think very upsetting. So, that meant that the chants were the same, although the languages sometimes changed, across the world, the strategies occupy a building, hold up signs for divestment. All of that kind of coalesced. So, that's the physical setting that one needs to be aware of to think about why it matters as much as it did. The patterns of sloganeering and the comments from demonstrators pretty much left some of the standard concerns of anti-Zionist demonstrations aside. For example, these were pretty much absent any sort of real-world suggestions for change. In other words, you didn't hear, these are the three things we really think the Israeli government ought to do. Instead, death to Israel. All those practicalities got collapsed into one murderous demand, which was in some ways the echo of the Hamas assault of October 7 itself. That being fundamentally a demand that Israel die as a nation-state and that its people be slaughtered. And Hamas, as we know now, intended to get much further into Israel. They didn't just expect it to be the communities in what's called the Gaza envelope, the immediate surrounding area. They thought they'd make their way to Jerusalem.

John Tomasi: I want to talk more about that, but I want to just go back a moment, if I may, to circle to something you just said a moment ago. A phrase that you use in your book, you refer to the mindless chanting or the incessant chanting on the campuses. And you seem to think there's some significance about the use of chant. Is that connecting to the performative characteristic of these events? Can you say anything more about the chanting, why this seems important to you?

Cary Nelson: As the chants developed this time, they didn't reference a complex analytical agenda. They weren't shorthand for an analysis. They weren't shorthand for the academic activity of reflecting on and debating, coming to some conclusions. They were simply the embodiment of a preordained conclusion. Truth had been reached before the chants were played out. Truth had been reached before the encampments themselves materialized. And that's really not how academia is supposed to work. I mean, it's really, it's a rejection of debate. It's a rejection of conversation. And of course, that's been one of the developing features of the BDS movement. I mean, when it first started.

John Tomasi: 2005, I think it started, I would say.

Cary Nelson: Yeah. But when we didn't see at the very first, what's now a controlling feature. Which is called the anti-normalization agenda. And it's something BDS has adopted as a strategy and a principle. And it means you don't, you don't talk with people who might represent a Zionist viewpoint because you know that they're wrong. You know that they're evil. And so you don't talk with people who might represent a national group with now, you know, over 160 chapters around the country. And it was formed in the October to November 2023 period. Many of the chapters adopted an academically specific version of anti-normalization. That does indeed sound like jargon, but I guess we have to live with it. They've invented it. And one of those principles was, in fact, my faculty, well, our faculty for justice chapter here in Champaign-Urbana. No, I shouldn't say my, since I would disallow it by anything short of nuclear attack. They adopted the principle and distributed this thing that if your department or the university, this is addressed to faculty members, asks you to serve on a committee. And you discover that there's a Zionist on that committee, a faculty committee, you should refuse to serve. You should refuse to sit at the table on a university committee with someone who is recognized as a Zionist. Well, if you're coming up for tenure and, you know, you're asked to serve on committees and you say, I won't serve with the Zionists, most universities are not going to award you a certificate, give you a reward certificate for taking that position. It's not that good a thing for an assistant professor to do, I wouldn't think. But FGP recommends it. It was, you know, a new faculty specific form of anti-normalization. And the demonstrations themselves were constructed at their core and throughout their specifics on an anti-normalization principle. That principle had now spread to a mob.

John Tomasi: Nice. May I read it? There's one of the most striking lines in the book comes very early, and I just want to ask you about it. You say that you describe these encampments as, quote, large organized protests against the very idea of the university, close quote. Can you say a little bit more about that? They seem to me, from my experience going to the encampments and talking to people, to have a different flavor of some other kinds of even encampments that I've seen in my lifetime. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about that. I mean, I think you make some references to having, you were involved apparently in the 68 protests, which, and you described at one point how those, in that situation with the Vietnam War, it was the campuses, you described the campuses as being sort of a base for activities undertaken, to be undertaken primarily elsewhere. Obviously, there was a lot of destruction on campuses then.

Cary Nelson: There was some terrible exceptions.

John Tomasi: Certainly.

Cary Nelson: Yes, really. Obviously, Columbia. I'm sorry, Cornell and other places. Bombing in Wisconsin.

John Tomasi: Right.

Cary Nelson: Kent State. I mean, there were terrible exceptions. And my perspective may be somewhat warped by the fact that I went to Antioch College, and I chose that because I thought it was the most left college in the country, only one I knew one to go to. And in 1965, which is early on in the Vietnam days, the college president called a town hall meeting. Everyone's supposed to come. And he said, I'm ashamed of my faculty. I'm ashamed of my students. Why aren't you out there protesting the Vietnam War aggressively? I kept thinking, I thought, gee, these college presidents are great. But I discovered that my childhood experience wouldn't replicate perfectly. Anyway, two weeks later, I was in front of a—I interrupted, along with about a dozen students, Lyndon Johnson's speech. And I was wrestled to the ground by a Secret Service agent. So, you know, the fact that I was on a campus where the energy was so purely directed elsewhere, that, you know, that may be part of it. But on the other hand, I went—I had forgotten how many demonstrations I attended in Washington, D.C., how many times I was in front of the Pentagon. I like to remember the fact that at once, such Robert Lowell walked by me. But his presence there is remembered more thoroughly than mine is. So, I think there was a lot of energy directed perfectly at the government in Washington that was understood to be the necessary target. And for the most part, universities weren't the target. This time, there was a lot of focus on trying to get the university to do things that the university wasn't going to do. University wasn't going to divest. It wasn't going to turn its investment course portfolio decisions over to a bunch of undergraduates, appealing though they might be under other circumstances. Universities weren't going to do it. They haven't done it. They aren't doing it. If they have relationships with Tel Aviv University, they were going to cancel them because some of their students and faculty thought they should. So, they were making demands that were empty, that were purely symbolic, whereas we were making a demand of the government that it bring the Vietnam War to an end. And, you know, it may be an illusion on my part, but I think eventually we had some effect. I think that the anti-war movement did have an effect on the decision finally to give up and let North Vietnam win that war. So, I think, you know, in 68 or earlier for me, 65 for me, and then for the next 10 years, we had a practical plan to compel those in power to do something. And this time, people were waving their arms and chanting their chants, and nothing, nothing in material terms was being offered except hostility to the Jews on campus, hostility perhaps often to their administrations. The deepest effect was on the national atmosphere and on the well-being of Zionists on their campuses. We weren't really—I mean, there were mistakes of a comparable sort during Vietnam, one of which was blaming soldiers, which the people that I knew well never were willing to do. Soldiers were, you know, soldiers were, you know, black people, soldiers were—so many of them were, you know, underprivileged, poor people being drafted to do the work of death and dying. Not—so there were targets in those earlier days that were, I think, completely inappropriate, but there was at least a core of political realism and real politic about it.

John Tomasi: Let me push on that point now, and we're going to move to sort of the central issues. 68 was sometimes described as the summer of love, but one of the really steady streams in your book is this tracing this idea of—a certain idea of hatred, that there's a hatred at play here that's very different than the 68 contrast. You said a few moments ago that one reason why the protests spread so quickly, these current protests spread so quickly, was because of social media. But another idea that I see in your book is that it's hard to explain, I think, from reading your book. It's hard to explain the rapidity of the spread, except for being powered by something really deep, something like anti-Semitism. So I want to just pause now and invite you to help me with a slightly more careful analytical scalpel now we'll start using together. Can you just say a few things about the connection of anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism? You say at one place that a certain kind of radical anti-Zionism is central to the account of the contemporary university. So can you just say a few things about anti-Zionism is and what form it takes that leads it to something like anti-Semitism, a kind of hatred that might explain something important in this moment?

Cary Nelson: Well, one of the things that many of us were just unprepared for after October 7, 2023, was the astonishing rapidity with which horror at the Hamas attacks was rapidly replaced by accusations against Israel. Accusations against any Jews who support Israel worldwide. And then often enough, since the number of Jews, the percentage of Jews that support Israel is very high, it was all Jews. And, you know, that began less than 24 hours after the Hamas assault. It basically began pretty much exactly when Americans began to hear of the Hamas assault. But the hostility to Israel and Jews occurred so rapidly that it cannot possibly have been an evolution of emotions earlier in that sequence of events. It has to have drawn on something that was pre-existing and something that we didn't understand, that we didn't recognize. I mean, so I feel that I and my friends underestimated the degree of anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish hostility in our communities. We didn't see how much it was there, even though I studied it, you know, I think I know about it as much as you can. I still missed it. Just as Hamas missed what Hamas, I mean, just as Israel, the IDF, missed what Hamas was planning. Under their nose, they were planning it and they didn't see it. And so I feel there's a parallel with our own blindness. There was blindness there. There was blindness here. And central to what was revealed, both in Hamas' assault and in the attacks on Israel and Jews in this country, was hatred. Hatred instead of a demand, again, that the Israeli government do X, Y, and Z. The demand was, go away. The demand was, cease to exist. Get in boats and head back to your beloved Poland or Germany, where you were so welcome in 1944. I mean, the demand was, in some cases, for the elimination of the Jewish people. We're hearing, not most frequently, but we sometimes heard those chants on campuses here and abroad. Death to the Jews was often done in Arabic or Farsi. But on the other hand, students were given translations of the Arabic and Farsi chants. So, you know, they knew what they meant. And occasionally it was done in English in this country. And that's, you know, and to do that, either cheerfully or in anger, is a statement of hatred. It's not a request for policy change. It's an absolute categorical condemnation. And I cohered around that condemnation in the spring of 2024, and it was quite frightening.

John Tomasi: Cary, I want us to go a little slower so you can help us take the steps from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. I'm very interested in what you were just saying. We're going to work our way back to that in a moment, I promise. Let's just start with anti-Zionism for a couple of moments. And you describe anti-Zionism. You say it involves things like the idea that Israel is not just wrong in its policies, that one administration or another is making mistakes and someone might not like that. Anti-Zionism is something deeper. It involves first something like the claim that Israel is comprehensively misguided in its policies. And it also includes a second element, you say, that anti-Zionism includes the claim that Israel is engaged in genocide. And then there seems to be a third element, as I read you, that it involves something like a claim that there's a worldwide group and organization coordinating support for Israel. Is that a fair summary of what you see anti-Zionism as being?

Cary Nelson: Well, okay, let's do this historically. Anti-Zionism begins, obviously, long before there's a Jewish state. And there are lots of Jewish anti-Zionists because there's a debate about whether there should be a Jewish state.

John Tomasi: Of course.

Cary Nelson: Many Jews think, well, we have a chance of assimilating into Germany. You know, we gained some civil rights. We're now gaining a few political rights. Maybe we really can be part of these European countries. And then, of course, that conviction was lost rather horrifically, not just because of the Nazis, but because of how many countries collaborated in the Holocaust. It's too widespread any longer to have confidence that you're safe in Europe. And, of course, in the last few years, any illusion that safety is guaranteed is now undercut again. France, a country not—liberty, egality, fraternity is not a country that's safe for Jews.

John Tomasi: Extraordinary.

Cary Nelson: So, in any case, anti-Zionism changed radically in 1948. The moment there's a Jewish state, anti-Zionism comes to mean not opposition to a theoretical Jewish state, but opposition to an actual place where people live, that has citizens, that has, you know, buildings and culture, and where people are speaking Hebrew and all of those things. So, anti-Zionism changes radically at that point. But it was still possible, at least theoretically, to separate it from anti-Semitism. Over the years, that's become more and more difficult to sustain that distinction. And one of the features of the year and a half, or almost year and a half, since October 2023, is that the confidence that these are separate, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, that these are philosophically and politically distinctive commitments, has begun to disappear. When you hear a supposedly anti-Zionist demonstration shouting death to Jews, or when you realize that Muhammad Khalil, the previous spokesperson for Hamas, announces in 2024, January 2024, just in case there's any illusion, What we mean by, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, free is that we want the whole place and we want rid of the Jews. Sometimes we might say, well, we might say it doesn't really mean that. But we're just putting you on at that point. We're just doing that to get you to believe us for a moment. But don't worry, we mean that as an absolute rejection, absolute intolerance for any presence of Jews in what should be our homeland. So, this distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism begins to disappear. At its core, anti-Zionism is the desire for the Jewish people to have a homeland, a state, in their ancient homeland, which they've been in in one form or another for 3,000 years. That's Zionism in its simplest definition.

John Tomasi: Can I, may I just add to that? So, I understand, I like the formulation of Zionism, the definition of Zionism as something like the pursuit of justice for the Israeli people, which is a formulation you use a couple times in your book. What I like about that formulation, and you can help me understand it better, but what I like about that formulation is that that formulation to me seems compatible with a person thinking there's such a thing as a concern for justice for the Palestinian people of some sort, whatever it might mean. You can have a self-determination for a Jewish people and take that serious as a moral commitment. But as I understand you, you can have a thought, but what that means for the Palestinians, but as I understand you, you're saying that when anti-Zionism is formulated in such a way that it includes three features, if it adds these three features to the definition, that Israel is comprehensively misguided in its policies, comprehensively. That it's engaged in genocide, that it's engaged in genocide, and that there's something like a global coordination supporting Israel around these issues. That moves anti-Zionism into anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. Is that the right way to understand your argument?

Cary Nelson: I'd add one more thing, because it's one of the things we've seen over the last two years, and I think you'll notice this. You don't hear a lot of people saying, and you certainly didn't hear it in the demonstrations, that the problem begins in 1967. You do not hear that the problem begins with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It began in 1948. That's a big change. It began with the inception of a Jewish state, which was wrong from the outset, which was racist from the outset, and which therefore had nothing but inappropriate policies from day one. That is this huge change. You don't hear simply complaints about the occupation. There are virtually none anymore. They've disappeared. Israel is, from the moment of its founding, unacceptable, an immoral entity, and I think that's an anti-Semitic perspective. So I would add that, just the moment of time when this whole thing is triggered, and that has really changed over the last couple of years, and it makes practical negotiations much more difficult, because it's no longer a question of what policies Israel could adopt. There aren't any policies it could adopt, except get the hell out. That's the policy it can adopt.

John Tomasi: I want to move us back to campus soon, and I especially want to talk about the experience of Jewish students on campuses, which are just wonderful things to say. But first, just one more moment, if we may, on the anti-Semitism question, because I think it's important. Have you happened to have seen any of the videos that are popular on YouTube by John Mearsheimer, who is the distinguished international relations realist professor from Chicago, who has done some work on the Jewish lobby, for example, and he's been producing videos for the past year or two that have kind of made him a YouTube sensation. Have you seen any of those?

Cary Nelson: I did see one, and I can't bring it to mind carefully. I mean, usually, forgive me for this human failing. I sort of avoid him whenever it's possible, having acquired a less than loving feeling toward him years ago. But I did watch one a couple of months ago, and it's not coming back with enough clarity to really respond to it.

John Tomasi: Well, I've seen them. I'm not sure if I've seen them all. There are so many, but I've seen them, and I've seen a number of them several times, because I was trying to – I've been very interested in the IHRA definition, which we talk a lot around here at HXA, and I'm struggling to understand the depths of it and what use it plays, and I'm increasingly interested in that definition. And here's – I just wanted to share something with you that I've observed. I don't know about it in my last book that we talked about.

Cary Nelson: Yes, I remember. I remember.

John Tomasi: That's kind of what got me going. That's what got me started on the quest to learn more. Let me just report to you something that I saw in one of his videos that really struck me, and I want to hear your take on it. It's just my interpretation of what I saw, of course. So Mearsheimer is talking about – he's criticizing Israel's conduct in a variety of ways, and he says that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing of the Gazans, and he says another point that Israel is engaged in genocide. And at a key moment, his interlocutor says, are you saying that the Jewish state is like Nazi Germany, which, as you know, would be a definition that would satisfy antisemitism by the IHRA definition. And at that moment, Mearsheimer, I think, intriguingly stops and said, I didn't say that. What there are is we have these conditions that define what ethnic cleansing is. We have conditions that define what genocide is. It involves a combination of certain actions a state will take. It involves certain analysis of what statements they make about why they do the actions. If a state – if you analyze a state's actions and it matches that definition, then you say that state is genocidal and or engaged in ethnic cleansing. But interestingly to me, he avoided making any claim about Israel being like Nazi Germany. I wonder what you think about – as I read the IHRA definition, this is the last thing I will talk about before we move back to campus, because I just want to hear how you take this. As I understand that definition, Mearsheimer could be read as saying to compare the Israeli state to Nazi Germany would be antisemitic, and he's not willing to do that. He instead wants to stay on the line where he is legitimately criticizing Israel's policies as matching up to these definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing. What do you think about that? Do you think – is there a line to be drawn there, and did he stay on the right side of it, on my account of what he said?

Cary Nelson: Well, comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are a commonplace feature of the academy at this point. And in fact, they've been that for quite a while. I was trying to remember when the first year was – well, I commented on that in print. It was a while ago. Might be 20 years ago, right? So it's been a feature of the academy. And I think that as I see applying the IHRA definition, you would have to have the freedom to say, this thing that the United States did is just like stuff Nazi Germany did. This thing that the Israeli state did, this action that it carried out, is Nazi-like, and it's terrible. Now, I think those are sloppy analogies, because I like to reserve Nazi comparisons for much more thoroughgoing denunciations, rather than just a casual conversational equivalence. But if people want to make those sloppy comparisons, they're a feature of our life which we can do nothing about. Now, it seems to me that the IHRA definitions, it's one of its 11 examples, comparisons with Nazi Germany. When that applies, when you say Israel is the equivalent of a Nazi state from A to Z. Or I'm writing about a Canadian faculty member from Brock University at the moment. I'm revising a co-authored article about him. And he says, the problem with those comparisons is that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany. And therefore, that's a sloppy comparison. You're letting Israel off the hook when you make a Nazi Germany comparison. But in any case, I mean, there's only a short list of people willing to go that far. But there are some faculty members on the list, for better or worse. And when you make a thoroughgoing identification with Nazi Germany, part of what that says is there's no reforming Israel. There's no fixing it. It's a rogue state so deeply and irredeemably that it has to be eliminated. And I think that's where the IHRA definition really connects at that point.

John Tomasi: Good. Good. That's good. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think that does show the kind of the core of the IHRA definition. And that leads me naturally to the question I want to ask you now about returning to campus and the students. I remember I taught at Brown for most of my career, many, many years. And I remember vividly in one of my early years at Brown, a student from a very prominent family in New York was sitting in my office. He was one of my advisees. And I said, so, you know, tell me about yourself or, you know, where are you from? What do you believe? And he told me a few things about himself. He described his family's background. And he said, I'm a Zionist. And it was the first time I've had a student sit in my office and describe himself that way. Through the years since then, I had a number of Jewish students talk about their love of Israel, what it meant to them to visit Israel. And, you know, as a guy who spent some time in Israel when I was in my 20s, I still am aware that there's something, there's a connection. It seemed to me that there's a liveliness in the minds of young people about Zion, which is hard for a non-Jew to understand. But it seemed I heard it often enough and I felt it from these young people for years that I saw, as an outsider again, how intimately it seemed connected with their own personality and identity. For some, I would say many students who shared those things with me. And so now I want to know what you see is going on on the campuses. Because you say that for many Jewish students, there's special pressures on campus, that there's dangers of the risks of ostracism, the risks of being cast out of the moral community among 18 and 20-year-olds who are so concerned about idealism in all different kinds of ways. And, of course, many Jewish students, I don't want to stereotype, I'll just do a little bit. They tend to be on the left in my experience. And yet they're loving Israel, let's say, most of them, many of them, as part of their identity. And you describe in your book, there's this passage in your book that just made me think about some of those students who sat in my offices through the years caring about Israel. And you describe how they have to require, they're almost required to internalize anti-Zionism, yet they want to remain part of the moral community. Can you say more about that?

Cary Nelson: Yeah, well, imagine what it's like to be in a department, and you go to the department's website, and the department says, we are formally opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, which we see as a racist and immoral entity. And you're getting your degree from that department, and you're working with the faculty members in that department who have signed on to that position. Well, you're Ruth amidst the alien corn. You are the department, and I don't think this works so much for undergraduates, but for graduate students, the department is really the site of your professional aspirations. It's your future home, isn't it, as a professional in a career, and yet it's a poisoned home. It's a home that views you in some ways as a moral outlier, morally unacceptable. It's extremely painful. And then, God help you, if your graduate students have a union on campus, and if your graduate student union, which is supposed to represent you in grievance process, procedures, as this graduate student union here at Illinois is supposed to do, and is also formally opposed to the existence of Israel, which is part of your identity. It's not your whole identity, but it's there. You know, there's this phrase that the concept of the self-hating Jew, and I've never accepted it. But the only reason I've never accepted it is that I don't think the demand is that you be thoroughly self-hating. The demand is that you hate part of yourself, and that you encapsulate and separate part of yourself, symbolically cast it out of you. That's the part of you that identifies with Israel. But on the campus now, you can't do that once. If you do it this morning, maybe it will last you through the afternoon. But you have to do it again tomorrow, or next week, or next month. It's a demand that's made of Jewish students, staff, and faculty continually. You have to testify to your alienation from that central part of Jewish aspiration and identification over and over again for you to be accepted within the progressive community on campus. And it's very painful, and it's destabilizing. You no longer have a sense of psychological safety. You know, campuses aren't supposed to provide you with intellectual safety. They're supposed to provide you with intellectual challenge.

John Tomasi: I want to talk about intellectual safety in a moment. Can I just, can I quote, let me quote you on something, on the point you were just making. You say that, and I'm talking now about undergraduates, that experience, which is of special interest to me. You say, and I'll quote, I'll quote you, quote, quote, for many Jewish students, internalizing anti-Zionism requires a disabling fracturing of their identity, close quote. Can you say a little bit more about that disabling fracturing of their identity? Just disabling.

Cary Nelson: Well, that's what I was just saying, requires a rejection of part of yourself. And I think psychologically, I'm sort of using Jacques Derrida here, who, despite his misrepresentation, I remain very fond of. You encapsulate a part of, you encapsulate a part of your psychology. That is, you build a kind of wall around that part of yourself, and you separate it from the rest of your self-awareness. That's the, to get to that anti-Zionism, if you love Israel, or have some fundamental sense of its necessity in the world, and you have to reject it, what psychological processes do you have to go through to reach that equilibrium in yourself? And I think it's very difficult, and it is disabling, and it does require a separation or a fracturing. You have to split yourself into your professional identity, your social identity on campus, and a large part of the way you've grown up, and your history. You know, I'm not an observant Jew, but it's part of my identity. My father founded two synagogues. I was president of two synagogues, and I taught Hebrew school for a couple of years. It's just, you know, it's part of a long part of my life, and I ain't about to give it up. I'm not going to go through that process of splitting and separation. And yet, I will consider myself a progressive. I think we need income distribution in the United States. I think if it's going to be health care at all, it should be a universal right. And, you know, the principle that you should get health care if you can afford to pay for it seems to me obscene. So I see myself holding it, you know, still holding a lot of the progressive beliefs I've held for decades. And yet, you know, am I broadly accepted on campus as someone on the left? Certainly not. A few months ago, I won an award for my last book, and I sent the notice to my department head, and the associate head, who happens to be a friend, encouraged her to distribute that to the department as a whole. No way. She was not going to inform the faculty of the award.

John Tomasi: I want to ask.

Cary Nelson: You get alienated, in my case, despite 35 years of being on the faculty and another few years of service.

John Tomasi: There's a phenomenon that's familiar to you, and I'm sure it's familiar to me, and I'm sure it's familiar to you, too. And I tend to think of it as being most common on the political left, but one sees it on campus, especially among young people. And it's a phenomenon that I describe as the view that all good things go together. And so there's some people sometimes think, and they present these ideas in certain orientation programs that happen on certain campuses, especially around race and justice, for example. That's a lot of good people on one side of the world, and a lot of other people, the bad people on the other side of the world. And all good things go together. But as I think about anti-Semitism, especially in light of your book, again, the book is mindless, what happened to universities. When I think about, you're adding another element, I think, within this that sort of supercharges that strain placed on Jewish students. You say that there's a new permission structure on campus, not just permission to criticize Israel, which has been out there for a long time. Every country can be criticized. Every country makes mistakes.

Cary Nelson: But you said the permission structure that— They always criticize their country perhaps more than virtually any other population on Earth, right? You know, they're a querulous lot. And they are stiff-necked people.

John Tomasi: But as you say in your book, you say in your book, the new permission structure is not just to criticize Israel, but a permission to hate Israel and to hate those who support it. And I think that's what does the fracturing in some unusual way. It's not like merely all good things go together, more or less. There's a special element now being added where there's permission to something like hate.

Cary Nelson: A simple example, because I'm talking mainly about undergraduates. Even in high school, as an undergraduate, you get very much involved in reproductive rights. You start being in the age of political activities when you're pretty young. I mean, I was 17 when I was on the mall for Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. I was going and listening to socialist lectures at age 15, right? So it was all starting pretty early for me. And then you arrive on campus and you just start to, great, there's a reproductive rights organization here. That means I can really keep up these commitments that have meant a lot to me. And you go and they find out that you're a Zionist and they say, no, you're morally unfit. You can't be in our reproductive advocacy organization because you're morally compromised. You don't have a right to advocate with us for a woman's right to choose because you aren't ethical enough in your core to be able to join that call. I mean, that's pretty upsetting, especially if you've developed that kind of commitment over years. And yet, of course, that's been happening a lot in the last two years. And, you know, it's not a complex thing for a university to say, if you're going to be funded by student affairs or by student athletic contributions or whatever, wherever the money comes from, then you have to accept membership from people who believe in your mission. You can't cast out people who believe in your mission because of some other set of political beliefs that they have. It's a simple rule, it's a simple rule, and it should be enforced. But there it is. That happens to you as an undergraduate, and then you go back, and unless you're pretty thick-skinned, it's bloody well insulting and disabling.

John Tomasi: Yeah, you said fracturing of their identities, and that really struck me. I want to talk a bit about safety to pick up the point you made a few moments ago. There's a study that I've read that you mentioned in your book, a 2024 study, showing that more than 80% of Jewish students view the environment on their campus as hostile to Israel. I mean, a hostile to Israel can be read in different ways, of course, but 80% of Jewish students view, have that view about their campus, their own campus. So if you think about the safety of campus and what kind of safety students can reasonably require, what they're reasonably, what they're owed, and the kinds of safety that they're maybe not owed. I think of safety in sort of three categories. I think I'm sort of following roughly what you do in your book. We've got to talk about the physical safety of students, and there's been lots of incidents where the physical safety of Jewish students has not been protected. There's psychological safety, and there's something like intellectual safety. And, you know, I told you at the start of this podcast that I first knew of you by reading your works on academic freedom, so I know you're a master of some of these distinctions. Can you just say a little bit about those three kinds of safety, physical safety, psychological safety, and intellectual safety? And, you know, I'll just remind you, you're on the HXA podcast, you know, we're an organization that, at least a few years ago, we're the ones saying, hey, stop coddling students. They need to toughen up on campus. And now we're confronted with a new phenomenon on our campuses, we think. And we're trying to understand what that means and how we think about these different kinds of safety. Could you say a little bit about what psychological safety is and what its relationship is to intellectual safety or vice versa, however you want to do it?

Cary Nelson: Yeah, well, I did read a lot in the psychological literature about psychological safety, in part because so many of my colleagues around the country don't even imagine that there's a distinction between psychological safety and intellectual safety, right? That it's all collapsed together, and they think they're terrible. That's what universities are not about. The principle of psychological safety is that you have to be able to feel that you can say what you think and that people can disagree with it as intensely as they wish, but that they will not reject you as a human being because of what you believe. That you won't be, that you will feel personally able to share your beliefs and your identity with your fellow students and faculty, but that that doesn't protect you from having your convictions condemned. That's, you know, in the intellectual world, you get passionate rejection of the things that you believe, and that's supposed to get you to think about them more seriously. And that's, and that's, those challenges, many of us like to have them. We like to be unsettled intellectually and to, and to think, damn, I'm going to have to sit down and mull that over because maybe I was wrong. That's how we grow, right? That's how we grow. And that's how, when students come to campus and they have their views, and if you can, that's one of the joys of teaching is to watch students confront their beliefs, grow, and then come back to them again and see them in a richer way sometimes and move on to other views and other times. That's the, that's part of the greatest joy of being on a campus. And you, it teaches you, if you go through that dynamic, it teaches you to find those experiences as pleasurable, as lots of fun, not threatening, but exciting. That, you know, you're, I always told my undergraduates, because I often offered my opinions, something I, you know, I would need to, you know, be bound and gagged not to. I would always say, if you can do a good job of disagreeing with me, you get extra credit for class discussion. If you can, if you can really, if you can really call my positions into question, you get rewarded for it in this room. That was just one of my simple devices to get them to realize that I don't want them parroting what I believe, because it's totally boring. It's just, it's, it's not interesting people disagreeing with you. That is often fun. So I think, but if you feel that when you express your views, you will be categorically rejected as a human being, then you don't have psychological safety. You're alienated and you're cast out of the group. And then I think your ability to learn is hampered, and your ability to learn from one another is hampered. Physical safety, well, you can be physically unsafe and still learn intellectually. It takes a lot more strength of character to do it. It takes a lot more courage to persist in your intellectual development, although you are physically threatened. But it's something many students simply cannot do, especially if they come from their homes, where they're, they're protected physically and psychologically. And suddenly they're in a place where they feel physically endangered. I think adults can learn that, and maybe even some younger people have to learn it, because there are countries in this world where you aren't physically safe. And, you know, and yet you still try to, in some ways, develop intellectually. But it's a, it's a disabling reality for most American students. They're not, they're not up to that. They can't, let me. I can't feel someone is going to shoot them this afternoon, and they can still sit down and read Wittgenstein calmly.

John Tomasi: Right. Let me take what you just said and put it into an HXA framework. And I just want to hear what you might, might think about this way of, of seeing things.

Cary Nelson: By the way, I think there are ways in which students are coddled. I don't disagree with that. So I'm not a...

John Tomasi: I agree. I think, I hear you. I understand you on that point. But let me, let me just try this for a moment. And I'd love to hear your reaction. So at HXA, we're increasingly working on this idea of what a campus is or what a, what a, what a, what it means to be on a university campus. And the concept we have is that a university campus at its best is a community of imperfect learners. That means that on a university campus, everyone, the professors and the students alike, they all know that they're not perfect in their understanding. They know they're imperfect. Their imperfections are shown in different ways, but they're all, we're all imperfect. And they come together in community, embracing that imperfection of themselves and of one another. That means that they can talk with one another to try to become better at the things they don't know well enough yet. And so there's this idea that a community, a campus is something like a community of imperfect learners. But when I read your book and just thinking about the distinctions you were just making, this is how I would analyze that now, what's happening on campuses with anti-Semitism. There's a group of people, a very loud group of people, who claim to, on some topics, not to be part of the community of imperfect learners, but to rather be perfect themselves on certain issues. Being perfect, they now have set themselves aside from that community of imperfect learners and they're challenging the very idea that imperfection and recognizing our shortcomings and our need to learn more. They're exempt from that because they have the truth perfectly. And when we said at the beginning of this conversation that, you know, you're lying, that there's some deep challenge to the very idea of the university going on in these protests, something new and stronger than we've ever seen before to that core idea. When I read that line, when I read your book, that's what I kept thinking. I kept thinking, it's an attack on the idea that a campus is a community of imperfect learners because some are claiming to be perfect. And the ones who don't line up with perfection are not sympathetic to, oh, you need to learn something. Let me explain to you my reasoning. Let me describe to you. No, you're imperfect through your very nature unless you convert on this issue to my perfect understanding. And I'm putting your words in your mouth, but that's how I read you.

Cary Nelson: It was extremely well put. And if I still had my manuscript in front of me, I would add it to mindless. I probably wouldn't even give you credit for it, just to be outrageous. No, I'd give you credit. Yeah, that's well put. I mean, look, in 1915, when the AAUP published its wonderful declaration, its founding definition of academic freedom and of the university of life, university purpose, it said academic freedom exists to protect the search for the truth. Well, that was it, the search for the truth. Academic freedom was not founded to convince you that you were already in possession of the truth and didn't need to search anymore. And I think you're right that in some ways, at least some portions of the campus have given up that search in particular topic areas. The problem is, once you give it up here, you're giving it up there. Once you give it up here, it corrupts the possibility that you'll sustain the search elsewhere in your life on other topics. And that's one of the ways that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have corrupted the university as a whole. That is, it has corrupted the search for the truth, and it has corrupted that sense of community that needs to be the umbrella under which the campus operates. It's the community and the norms that the community sets are the only counterforce that we have to identity politics. Strong as they are on campus now, if identity politics is an absolute zero-sum game, in which truth and righteousness and justice can only reside in some identities and not in others, then the university cannot function as a learning community. You need that overall structure even more now than you would have needed it 10 years ago. And of course, now it's under unique threat. But somehow we have to begin to restore it. I do think it can be restored if administrators and faculty make that a priority. I think they can rebuild it. But we do need it to be rebuilt. And it's hard to go directly at identity politics and fix that. That's pretty rooted at this point and resisted. So you need to have the overarching set of principles and purposes that prevent identity politics from being a zero-sum game. And we have to work at it or things will get only at worst.

John Tomasi: Cary, it's really been a pleasure talking with you. I just want to mention your book's name again, if you don't mind. It's Mindless, What Happened to Universities. Cary Nelson, thank you for joining me on Heterodox Out Loud.

Cary Nelson: Thank you again so much. It's a great pleasure.

S2 Episode 32: Confronting Anti-Semitism in Higher Education With Cary Nelson

What does it mean for a university to become a battleground against deep-seated prejudices and historical tensions?

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