The new McCarthism is Antisemitism
It's not like the old McCarthyism
We’re seeing a lot of stories these days comparing the 1968 student takeover of several Columbia University buildings with the campus protests that kicked off with the tent encampment on the Columbia University campus on April 17 protesting Israeli's genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza.
We’re also reading stories comparing the congressional “starchamber” hearings in Congress in which university presidents are accused of coddling “antisemitic” student protests and professors said to be spouting antisemitism in their classrooms to the notorious Red-baiting “star chamber” hearings of the late 1940s and 1950s when writers, filmmakers, television newsrooms and college professors were accused of being Communists or “fellow travelers” and lost jobs or were even jailed for refusing to name names.
There certainly are similarities but there are significant differences, too. Ellen Schrecker, a leading historian of the McCarthy era, especially regarding its attack on academia (see her No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities), has recently written about the same topic in a later era (Lost Promise: America’s Universities in the 1960s). As a long-time academic herself, she has some thoughts about some of these similarities between the current campus protest and the response to those protests, and about how those two earlier eras are different from the current one.
“The thing I see all these eras having in common is the demonization of people who are protesting for change,” she says. “That’s what happened in the 1950s and ‘60s when everything was called ‘Communist’. That was the ‘eternal enemy.’ Now it’s ‘antisemitism.”’
In each period of campus activism, she says, there has been a double standard: HIgher education is supposed to haven for freedom of thought and speech, she explains, “but in these periods of camps protest, it needs to be neutered. The content of what is said is being punished.”
In a way, what has been happening at least with regard to protests and to freedom of speech, particularly at universities, but also in workplaces and in the new online media and social media may be in some ways worse than what was happening in academic settings. What was attacked in the Red Scare days was freedom of association. The Communist Party was actually outlawed by the federal Communist Control Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. While it was rarely used by federal prosecutors and was eventually repealed, it did serve as justification for a decade or so to remove people from jobs, including in colleges and univerrsities as well as grade schools and high schools. Speech was threatened in that what people said or wrote that supported allegedly communist ideas could be. used as evidence of one’s being a communist, but the speech itself was not what was found illegal. Today we’re seeing actual speech, for example the allegedly antisemitic phrase “From the river to the sea, palestine must be free,” being considered grounds for sacking professors or expelliing students from college. More broadly, Congress is considering a House bill that would make any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel as an apartheid state, a hate crime. Already, people have been fired from teaching jobs for advocating boycotting products under laws a number of states have passed making advocating boycotting Israeli products a crime.
In another more recent and troubling use of the the spurious conflation of anti-zionism or anti-Israel with anti-semitism tactic promoted by pro-Israel zionist organizations in the US has been by college administrators who have use anti-Israel chants and signs used by campus protesters of the Israeli military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as grounds to call in. police and arrest student and faculty protesters.
What Schrecker sees as different this time is the speed with which universities have caved in to outside political pressure from Congress to repress campus protest. “In October 1964, with the Free Speech movement that began at Berkeley, all the students wanted was the right to organize on. campus over civil rights.”
Begun as a bunch of students demanding an end to a UC Berkeley ban on political activism on campus grounds, and of a required loyalty oath for faculty members, the protests ballooned to include thousands of students. When ten weeks later the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department came in and arrested 800 protesters, jailing them briefly, it led to an even larger protest. The repression backfired, causing a far larger student protest, and ultimately led to a dropping of the organizing ban and of the faculty loyalty oath.
Four years later, when students, led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Afro-American Society (SAS), took over several buildings on the Columbia University Campus in the spring of 1968, including the university’s administration building in Low Library, it took a week before University President Grayson Kirk called in the New York Police Department, which obligingly dispatcherd 1000 cops from the its tactical units who charged in, arresting hundreds and injuring 100. The issues in the Columbia 1968 building occupations were multiple, including the local issue of a university gym opposed by mostly black local residents because it was being constructed on city park property popular with Harlem residents, and by student radicals who saw it as a racist affront, and also also widespread student opposition to the Vietnam War and Columbia’s involvement in it.The violent crushing of thart dramatic and very obstructionist protest action led to more student anger and to a viral spread of campus building takeovers on college campuses across the nation.
Columbia utlimately gave in to many of the protesters’ demands, including cancelling of the controversial gym project mockingly called by its opponents the “Gym Crow.”
The wave of student protests against Israel’s genocidal war on the captive Palestinian residents of Gaza that swept the country also began, as in 1968, at Columbia University on April 17. It spread quickly across the country after Columbia president Minouche Shafik, a day after she had been grilled by Congressmembers about her allegedly limp response to supposed “antisemitic” incidents on her Ivy League campus. That’s when she ordered that the encampment on a quad lawn be cleared by the NYPD. The police, in tactical riot-control gear and armed with assault rifles, accommodated her, arresting 103 students while armed police sharpshooters ominously watched from posts atop university buildings, their rifles trained on the peaceful demonstrators below.
“Today, what is astonishing is that administrators right from the start are being very repressive,” says Schrecker, suggesting that the wave of police violence against protest encampments came because college administrators “were afraid of losing their positions.” She calls the use of militarized police on university campuses and the subsequent brutal arrests of campus protesters “an abject failure by these high-flying university executives who were thinking about keeping their jobs, not about defending what their students were doing.”
Inerestingly, one way the current campus activism has differed from the campus uprising in the late ‘60s, is that the current protesters are remarkably peaceful. Despite the evidence-free accusations by feckless Washington politicians (of both parties) of violent threats to Jewish students on campuses like Columbia and UCLA, and the purported use of antisemitic chants (most of which turn out to be anti-Israel and to be chanted equally by many Jewish participants in the protests), a study by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) which looked at 553 campuses that had anti-Gaza genocide protests between April 18 and May 3, found that 97% were completely peaceful, with the violence coming primarily from police. Contrary to wild claims by right-wing and pro-Israel politicians that campuses were ‘in chaos,” only on fewer than 20 campuses was there any serious violence or property damage, and the most serious of these, a two-hour night-time attack on peacerful encampment protesters that was mobbed by some 200 stick-armed pro-Israel outsiders as police stood by doing nothing to stop them.
The ACLED study further found that in at least half the less 20 protests that did experience some violence it was by students resisting police acts of violence against them and their originally peaceful encampment.
My own visit to ther Columbia campus the day before it was raided by police, showed the camp to be not only peaceful, but completely unobtrusive to the university’s educational enterprise, located as it was, not on any sidewalk through the central quad, but on a grassy area bounded by sidewalks and separated from them by a low decorative metal fence. There was simply no cause for a raid except for executive fears of politicians and perhaps embarrassment that a protest during graduation if the encampment were still there at that point.
Back in the ‘50s, getting called a “Commie” was commonplace for activists on the left, whether one was protesting nuclear weapons, the Korean War or segregated schools. It was a catch-all smear that, if the label stuck, could jeopardize one’s job. Professors with tenure lost posts because, accused of being Communist, they would refuse to reveal the names of any Party members they knew. Much of the time, victims of such smears weren’t even Communists, or if they had been, were no longer Party members (many US Communists left the party in 1953 when Nikita Krushchev released information about Joseph Stalin’s many crimes as the leader of the USSR).
Now the smear of “antisemite” is serving the same function to instill fear and silence among university faculty and students.
As classes end and the anti-genocide protests of necessity move off the campuses and onto the streets of cities like New York and Washington, DC, the false charge of antisemitism will then predictably be used (as it already has been) by callow politicians like NY Mayor Eriic Adams, and Washington DC Mayor Murial Bowser, and even President Joe Biden, who himself has falsely accused the campus protests of being both antsemitic and violent, as a justification for turning to state violence to disrupt them.
Yep