Trump, Antisemtism, and Academia - Christopher Browning - New York Review

 Trump, Antisemtism, and Academia - Christopher Browning - New York Review

On March 10, three days after the Trump administration canceled federal grants and contracts worth $400 million at Columbia University, the Department of Education sent a letter to sixty universities and colleges warning of similar consequences if they did not protect the safety of their Jewish students, including “uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” This was accompanied by a statement from the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, which said, in part, that the Jewish students at these universities and colleges “continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year.”

I have spent my teaching career at three of these schools: Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where I taught for twenty-five years; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I taught for fifteen years; and the University of Washington in Seattle, where in retirement I taught as a visiting professor for two quarters. At all of them I regularly taught a highly enrolled course on the history of the Holocaust. During my career I also published eight books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, three of which won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. In short, I am not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of antisemitism as it has manifested itself in history.

In 2016 President Trump’s election campaign produced two notorious ads: one featuring Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and a Star of David, and another promising protection against global special interests and featuring the portraits of three Jewish financiers, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein. Both ads were blatant renditions of the classic antisemitic smear of Jewish money and Jewish financiers as the sources of power behind an opponent. In August 2017, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstrators marched with swastika and Confederate flags in a Nazi-style torchlit parade, chanting the Nazi slogans “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Responding to this incident, Trump found there to be “fine people” on “both sides.”