Policing Antisemitism

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In this episode

The pro-Palestinian protests that erupted on many college campuses in the spring of 2024 gave rise to a surge of complaints about antisemitism at colleges across the United States. Under pressure to respond, Columbia and Harvard Universities have both in the past year adopted into policy a common definition of antisemitism, using the text as a guide in discrimination investigations. But defining the line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and antisemitism has long bedeviled scholars, and refereeing such cases invites concerns about free speech and academic freedom. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, upon which Columbia and Harvard now rely, wasn’t ever intended to be a speech code and shouldn’t be used as such, says Kenneth Stern, who helped to draft the text about two decades ago. But how, then, should colleges respond to concerns about hatred and prejudice aimed at Jewish people?

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Related Reading

• Colleges Use His Antisemitism Definition to Censor. He Calls It a ‘Travesty.’ (The Chronicle)
• The Great Antisemitism Debate (The Chronicle)
• Why Anti-Jewish Discrimination on Campuses Might Not Violate Title VI (The Chronicle)
• UC Berkeley Hands Over 160 Names to the Federal Government for ‘Potential Connection’ to Antisemitism. (The Chronicle)

Guest

Kenneth S. Stern, director of the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College.

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling: This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Ken Stern: I’m never saying not to counter speech that we find deplorable. I’m just saying you don’t use a disciplinary code to go after pure speech.

Jack Stripling: As the Israel-Hamas war continues, the recent release of 20 living Israeli hostages has provided real but tempered hopes for a sustained peace. But the long shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still looms large in the United States, where college campuses have been at the epicenter of fierce debates over Israeli policy.

Those debates gave rise in spring of 2024 to protests on many college campuses, fueling concerns about antisemitism. In response, Columbia and Harvard universities have both in the past year adopted into policy a common definition of antisemitism, effectively forbidding behavior that crosses that line. But should universities be in the business of refereeing this?

That question has long been on the mind of my guest, Kenneth Stern, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College. Stern helped to draft what became known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which Columbia and Harvard now employ. In something of a twist, though, Stern isn’t too happy about how the definition he helped to create is now being used.

Jack Stripling: Ken Stern, welcome to College Matters.

Ken Stern: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor.

Jack Stripling: Ken, we’ve seen a lot of pressure on college campuses to rein in antisemitism since October 7th. This inspired a lot pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. And that pressure has really intensified, as you know, during the second Donald Trump administration. In a couple of high profile cases over the past year, universities have responded by adopting a new definition of antisemitism into their non-discrimination policies. And that’s what we want to talk to you about. This all sounds a little wonky, though, when I describe it to you: Incorporating a definition into a policy. Why is this significant, Ken?

Ken Stern: Well, it’s actually, the text is not new. The text came out in 2005 based on what was then called the European Monitoring Center’s working definition of antisemitism that I helped craft as a lead drafter. It was in the aftermath of the Second Intifada and the collapse of the peace process. And this group was looking at how to take the temperature of antisemitism across Europe.

So it correctly noticed that all the different countries that had to put data together didn’t have a common frame of reference. So it wanted one. That’s why in 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance adopted it and has been pushing it. And the problem to me is, and we can talk more about the details of this, is that the core of what it’s being used for on a campus is as a speech code to say certain things are beyond the pale. And we lose so much of what’s important in combating antisemitism, including making sure that students aren’t harassed, aren’t bullied, aren’t threatened, aren’t intimidated. But the focus has instead gotten to be on what people say, what people Tweet, what people teach, and that to me is problematic.

Jack Stripling: So, Ken, as you’ve said, this definition has been incorporated into some university policies. Colleges will point to the text and say: This is what antisemitism is, and if you do this, we’re going to punish you. But let’s start with the text itself. What is the definition? What does it say, exactly?

Ken Stern: Sure. There are many examples about antisemites, Holocaust denial, calling Jews for killing Jesus and so forth. The ones that are contentious are the ones about Israel. And I’ll tell you two of them. One of them talks about denying Jews the right to self-determination. This is e.g., claiming that the creation of the state is racist. And another one is requiring of Israel behavior not expected of any other democratic country. But it was never to say, if you believe those things, if you say those things that therefore you are an antisemite. And where it’s gotten abused, I’ll give you an example from the second one. The intention, you know, when I drafted that …

Jack Stripling: Second one being, applying this double standard.

Ken Stern: Double standards. What we were thinking of is, OK, imagine if Detroit was being bombed by Canada. Would anybody say, oh, you know, America would not have the right to somehow respond to that? But people were saying when bombs were coming into Israel, either from Lebanon or from Gaza, no, no, no. You shouldn’t respond. So that was the thought process. You know, you wouldn’t expect a democratic country not to do something to defend their citizens from harm. The problem to me is not what the definition says. What I’ve learned over the last 15-20 years is that in a political fight, anybody will take a weapon in hand and a definition is seen by many people as a weapon to be wielded and trying to suppress speech they don’t like.

Jack Stripling: And just so we clarify the history a little bit. So when you did work drafting this definition with other people in collaboration, the idea was scholars, people who monitor this internationally, need some common framework with which to talk about what is antisemitism, because it’s a somewhat slippery term. That was sort of what you had in mind when you started working on this?

Ken Stern: That’s right. I mean, a number of things. But the primary purpose, the reason why it was built around examples, was to give data collectors some indication of what to include and exclude and to give some consistency across borders in time.

Jack Stripling: And just to be clear, this definition is now most often referred to as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition. And we’ve seen that specific definition incorporated into some university policies. But we’re having a discussion about how this is applied, which is distinct from saying antisemitism is or isn’t a problem in this country. And in fact, there have been plenty of studies showing upticks in antisemitism in the United States. In April, the Anti-Defamation League released a report showing 9,300 some odd antisemitic incidents across the U.S. In 2024, which was the highest number on record since the ADL started tracking these incidents almost 50 years earlier. So incidents on college campuses rose more steeply than those in other locations. There’s a lot of reasons to be concerned about this. And I don’t want that to get lost in our conversation. I assume you agree with that.

Ken Stern: Oh, wholeheartedly. I spent my entire career looking at issues of antisemitism. I was at the American Jewish Committee as the appointed person on antisemitism for 25 years. My work on it preceded that and has followed it. And hate, you know, writ large, too. No one is saying that antisemitism isn’t an issue. What we’re questioning is how to deal with it, especially on a campus. And what troubles me is again going after expressions and expressions about speech.We’re talking about things that people chant, things that people say, things that people assign, tweets that people send. When we start focusing on those things, we lose so much about how we should actually be dealing with antisemitism.

Jack Stripling: Another example within the larger framework of these definitions that I don’t think you mentioned is drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. I think this is something we should drill into a little bit, Ken, because it would not be uncommon to show up on a college campus and see a pro-Palestinian protest where somebody accuses Israel of genocide. And I’m wondering if that would fit within this definition.

Ken Stern: And that’s part of, again, the problem of the definition, right? We can talk about whether Israel is committing genocide or not, but the question comes down to a campus. Students should be able to debate this. It’s an important question, as you say, and when you try to use instruments to say, wait a minute, this is out of balance, you’re doing a disservice to everybody on the campus, including Jewish students who should be to engage it. I mean, we just saw Charlie Kirk was assassinated. I can’t think of anybody that I disagreed with hardly more than Charlie Kirk, but I applaud him for going on a campus and saying prove me wrong. Why isn’t, instead of saying, OK, you can’t say, or we’re going to get you into trouble, or it’s going to be a Title VI violation if you say that Israel is committing genocide, why not just say, prove my wrong?

Jack Stripling: We should talk a little bit about why universities are adopting this definition in the first place. There’s been enormous pressure on some high profile institutions, Harvard and Columbia, to do more to confront antisemitism, and some have responded by saying, hey, we have this definition of it, we’re going to incorporate it into disciplinary policy. Talk to me a little about the motives that, as you see them, I know you’re not in the room, but the motives as you see them for institutions adopting this in the first place.

Ken Stern: Well, I think they’re getting pressured. I think they’re getting pressured from, you know, some people inside, board members and donors. I think that they’re getting pressured by the government. I think they’re getting pressured by the lawsuits. And again, some of the lawsuits are alleging things that I think are worthy of alleging, you know, spitting, shoving, attacking, harassing, and so forth. But, you know, they’re seeing this as an easy way to somehow control the pushback against what was perceived on campus. It’s, you know, to me a horror in terms of how they’re doing it. I mean, we saw at Columbia, you have Rashid Khalidi saying after they adopted it as part of the settlement with the Trump administration, I can’t teach anymore about Palestine. You saw a Jewish professor, tenured, who’s from a family of Holocaust survivors who teaches about genocide and is worried she’s going to get in trouble teaching about Hannah Arendt. So there’s a lack of concern about academic freedom, I think.

And I think this is an easy way to somehow placate but part of this is, again, the seduction of what I was writing about 30 years ago about hate speech codes, is they become, oh, the simple way we’re going to deal with a problem. No. On a campus, what you want to do is you want a survey, you want to train, you wanna build curriculum, you want to build ways for people to talk across differences. You don’t want to have rules that say, you know, this cannot be said. And, you know one of the problems too is that we’re now seeing a proliferation of definitions. So there’s one of anti-Palestinian racism, there’s of anti-Hindu racism. There’s one of Islamophobia. Are we going to start having rules for each of these things of what can be said and can’t be said on a campus? That I find horrifying.

Jack Stripling: And Ken, my understanding of your position is, have a harassment policy, have a bullying policy, have a discrimination policy. We don’t need to go around defining every kind of “ism.” Help me understand the distinction and why you see that as a better path for these institutions.

Ken Stern: Oh sure, because I think the schools have an obligation to tell students you’re not going to be harassed, you’re not going be assaulted, you are not going to be intimidated, you aren’t going to be a victim of true threats, and we’re going to stand up should that ever happen. You should be disturbed by ideas. You want to come to college to really shake up your thinking as an 18- to 22-year-old. You’re going to spend the rest of your life recalibrating, we hope, how you think about things, to think about where you may be wrong. We want to make you critical thinkers, we want to encourage you to try on ideas.

Jack Stripling: And I understand it’s almost hard to talk about this without looking at a specific case, but it’s certainly common to hear people in higher education say, you’re coming to this place, you’re going to hear some things you don’t agree with, you’ve got to have a thick skin, this is part of intellectual discourse. I think the students who are concerned about this would say, yeah, but there is a point at which an environment becomes hostile, and it can become hostile based on speech. How do you respond to that?

Ken Stern: Well, there’s no question that speech can be used in a way that’s hostile and can create that environment. So words can certainly harass, there’s no question about that. But at the end of the day, you want to be able to have detailed discussions of things that cut you to your core, as long as they don’t cross that line into harassment, intimidation, and so forth. And once you start defining the boundaries of what ideas are OK and are not OK, that’s again undermining what an education should be.

Jack Stripling: But that’s not the way a lot of students felt after October 7th. There were students who felt they couldn’t get access to buildings, all of these things.

Ken Stern: Yeah, and I understand that when somebody is blocking somebody, which happened, when things happen like a Cooper Union, other places, you know, that’s deplorable. That’s not what I’m talking about. What people were talking about in terms of using the definition was saying, oh, it disturbs me when somebody is chanting from the river to the sea. Those are the types of things. You don’t need to use the IHRA definition to look at speech, to look at actual harassment.

And this becomes more complicated, too, because there’s a whole other layer in this, which is that there’s an internal Jewish debate looking at issues about how Jews should relate to Israel. And most Jews, including me, are Zionists, and Israel is important to us. But there’s a growing number of young Jews, many of whom are involved with, IfNotNow [sic], and Jewish Voice for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine, whose Judaism leads them to a position that’s anti-Zionist. They can’t square in their religious understanding how Israel could exist, how we treat the stranger and how we repair the world are important parts of their Jewish identity.

Asking the adoption of IHRA is saying you want the government, you want the administrations to decide this internal Jewish debate, that deciding one side gets supported and the other side doesn’t.

Jack Stripling: So just to clarify for listeners who may not know what you mean by “IHRA.” IHRA is shorthand for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. That’s the organization that adopted this working definition of antisemitism we’ve been talking about. Let me come at this a slightly different way, though, Ken. Do you see any issue with a university saying, we have zero tolerance for antisemitism?

Ken Stern: It depends on what they mean. If they mean antisemitic, bullying, threatening, so forth. Same with zero tolerance for anti-LGBTQ things, anti-racist things, so forth, I have no problem if that’s what they mean.

Jack Stripling: I think the reason I ask it that way — sorry to cut you off — but I think the reason that I ask it is, what would follow from there is, you can’t say you don’t tolerate something if you don’t know what it is. And that’s the rub.

Ken Stern: Well, but the point is that the, well, two things. One is if you’re talking about not tolerating it, I think you’re talking about behavior and actual hostile environments and so forth. But you don’t have a parallel definition just to put this into context. Nobody’s saying if you say, if we don’t tolerate racism, nobody’s saying, well we don’t have a definition of racism. Let’s have a parallel one, compared to the IHRA definition. And let’s include political examples, because that’s what the Israel ones are, about opposition to Black Lives Matter, or opposition to the removal of Confederate statues, or opposition to affirmative action. You know, nobody’s saying we need those markers to decide how to create a campus that is against racism.

Jack Stripling: Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling: Ken, one of the reasons that you’re a compelling person to talk to is not only because you’re an expert on this stuff, but there’s an interesting arc to your story as somebody who participated in drafting this definition who now has deep concerns about how it’s applied. So that’s kind of an interesting twist. You have other people who worked with you before who land differently on this, and one of them is Rabbi Andrew Baker. He’s the Director of International Jewish Affairs at the American Jewish Committee, which is a Jewish advocacy group. And he played a role along with you in drafting and adopting this antisemitism definition. I talked to him recently and asked him what he made of some of the issues you’ve raised about this definition chilling free speech, and I want to play you a short clip of what he said, if we can listen.

Andrew Baker: Now we can talk about the definition being misused, and you can debate whether universities should have speech codes at all. And if so, you know, to what degree and how much speech and in what areas, you know should it be limited. That’s all fair. The definition can be misused. But it seems to me the answer is not to say, well let’s have no definition. Really, let’s educate people on how to use it.

Jack Stripling: What do you make of what Rabbi Baker is saying there?

Ken Stern: You know, I worked with Andy for a long time, and he was very involved, and the reality is that it’s taken on a life of its own. Again, it was intended to be a tool for data collectors, primarily. Again, I said there were other purposes too, but that was the primary one. But it hasn’t really been used that way. It’s been used primarily to go after pro-Palestinian speech. And if you look at the IHRA website, where it has the definition, it links to an EU report on how to use it. And what it talks about is going after speech on campus, what could be taught. It goes even further. It talks about what groups can be funded ...

Jack Stripling: But are you just, are you, I think this is something Rabbi Baker wanted to know. Sorry to speak for him.

Ken Stern: No, please.

Jack Stripling: Do you still think this is a good definition of antisemitism? Let’s set aside whether it should be used this way.

Ken Stern: Listen, I think the definition, if it had been used for how we thought it would be used back in 2005 to do reports, to take temperature, to clarify hate crime, that would have been fine. It hasn’t been used that way. It’s been used to target pro-Palestinian speech. And so that’s my concern. It’s not the text of the definition. It’s the weaponization of the definition. And one of the great ironies, if you look at the IHRA website and talking about it, it says it’s non-legally binding. Then why the heck are people pushing it in legislatures and in Congress? And if you want to look at one real frightening example of what almost happened, in Arizona, it passed to use it on educational, K-12 and presumably college too. And it gave an individual right to parents to sue teachers if something happened that was violative of the definition. And the governor actually vetoed it, thank God.

Jack Stripling: Ken, I don’t want us to go off on too much of a tangent here, but there has been

Ken Stern: No, I love a tangent. I’m an academic, Jack.
Tangents are fine with me.

Jack Stripling: No, but I mean, there has been some back and forth with you and Rabbi Baker about whether you’re in fact the lead drafter of this or whether that’s the right term. I really am not terribly concerned with this. Your involvement is not in dispute in some way of drafting this definition. What I am curious about though is the concern that by coming on shows like this and saying it’s problematic the way this is being applied, that you sort of unwittingly perhaps make it easier for antisemites to get away with antisemitism, to not be called out for using coded language that is in fact antisemitic because the nuance of your argument is somehow lost. And what comes off is the guy who wrote the definition thinks it’s nonsense, too. Do you worry at all about that? I know you can’t control it.

Ken Stern: I’m not ever saying combat speech or contest speech that you don’t like and you can call it whatever you want, but I’m saying don’t use instruments of the state to suppress what teachers can teach and what students can hear. That’s doing a disservice and it’s doing a disservice to Jewish students too who really do want to engage on these issues and as I said are on other sides of the issue as well. And I want to create the environment on a campus in particular where people can have productive discussions, and we can talk a little bit more about how to do that. But there are ways educationally and I can spend a lot of time talking about ones that I think actually work. But when we get down to saying ah what we want to do to deal with this is to have a cut and paste definition to look at speech we absolutely blind ourselves to all those things.

Jack Stripling: And I should say that Harvard and Columbia who have adopted this to some degree into policy have both said we can do this and not infringe upon free speech. So these institutions are certainly saying they think they can do both.

Ken Stern: But the reality is they can’t. Which is why you have the professor who teaches genocide studies saying I can’t teach. You have Rashid Khalidi not doing it. Listen going back, I wrote this book called the Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel-Palestine Campus Debate back in 2020 because I saw each side trying to suppress speech on the other side. By different means. But each so much not liking the other side’s speech that they were trying to suppress it — heckling on one side and interrupting speakers and academic boycotts, and then pushing, you know, IHRA in particular as law on the other side.

Jack Stripling: And IHRA again is shorthand for the Holocaust definition.

Ken Stern: Yeah, for the text the definition of antisemitism with all these examples about Israel. You know, people were taking this and hunting for lawsuits based on what a professor was teaching, what somebody said in a class, what texts were assigned and I found that deeply troubling. And what I see with the adoption of the definition is now encouraging more hunting of speech on campus for both complaints and government action.

Jack Stripling: How prevalent is the use of the definition to your understanding? Only a few universities have actually, to my knowledge, actually said we’re adopting this. Now there is an executive order that we should talk about as well. But is this a pervasive issue in higher education really?

Ken Stern: I think so because what you’ve seen is whether there’s a formal adoption or not, there’s an awareness of the push by the Trump administration, and again predating that, the use of the definition is a hook for lawsuits.

Jack Stripling: We should say just as a matter of fact, Ken, sorry to interrupt you. But under a 2019 executive order President Trump directed agencies that enforce civil rights laws to consider the working definition. So are you saying that that is effectively putting universities on notice, use this definition even if you’re not saying it out loud?

Ken Stern: Well, no. But you’re right the way you described it. The executive order didn’t apply, you know, to say universities have to use it; it said the executive agencies had to use it. But if you’re sitting as a general council of a university you’re certainly aware that this is the template that the administration is going to use, right?

But you know what I’ve said — I was just speaking about this in Ann Arbor the other day — I said but if you are the general council of the university, you have other obligations. And one of them is to academic freedom and free speech. It’s not to become, you know, just the enforcement arm of the federal government. But to your point what I’m more worried about and have been for a long time, even before you know the Trump executive order and the you know the current administration, is the the chilling effect — the knowing that people are going to hunt for speech about Israel they don’t like and claim it’s antisemitism and use the definition as sort of the stepping stone for Title VI, even where it shouldn’t be used. They are going to get people to say why am I teaching about Israel and Palestine? My PhD is in Shtetl life in Europe; I’d rather teach about that. Nobody’s going to sue me, nobody’s gonna get my provost upset or my dean upset or my president upset or the alums upset. It’s much safer. And I think we’re at a moment where students really do want deep engagement on these issues and the people that probably can bring up the most are the ones that are going to be most likely to be [saying] should I really teach this or not.

Jack Stripling: Well, and I do think you’re right that there are some students who certainly want to be able to have a civil and legitimate debate about Israeli policy. It’s interesting, when that executive order was passed back in 2019, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who was then a senior advisor to the president, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times that I wanted to ask you about. He says quote, the Remembrance Alliance definition makes clear what our administration has stated publicly and on the record: anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Is that a valid interpretation in your view even of the definition?

Ken Stern: Well, the definition doesn’t say that in so many words, but it’s a valid reflection of how it has been used, to say that every instance of expression of anti-Zionism — again remember I’m a Zionist …

Jack Stripling: And let’s define that for folks …

Ken Stern: Believing that Israel has a right to, you know, to exist. So what Kushner was saying is that every instance of anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And look at the reality. Clearly there are times where anti-zionism is antisemitism. You know, use the classic tropes about Jews and cut and paste them to Israel. Those types of things absolutely so. There’s times where it’s clearly not. If you or I or somebody else was a Palestinian, the existence of the state of Israel had an impact on you and your ability to control your life. If your objection is not because these are Jews doing it, but because this is what happened to us, that to me — you know, I may disagree with the implications of it but I wouldn’t call that antisemitism.

And then as I said before, you know, the Jewish community, this is a big issue inside. The Jewish community would I dare say never call Satmar Jews antisemitic. Satmar Jews have a theological belief that you can’t have a Jewish state until the Messiah comes. OK.

You have young Jews for whom, as I said before, their Judaism leads them to a place where they say I can’t justify a Jewish state because of what it means to Palestinians. How do you treat a stranger? How do you repair the world? I’m not going to say their theological interpretation is any less legitimate than the Satmar one, and I don’t want to call them antisemites. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in the gray area which we have to live with.

Jack Stripling: So one of the things that I think invariably comes up in these conversations, Ken, is that there’s a lot of attention devoted to antisemitism, perhaps less national attention devoted to Islamophobia, anti-Muslim behavior. Harvard released two reports from task forces back in April that looked at both in terms of climates on their campus and one of the findings was that Muslims and Jewish people both felt to some degree physically unsafe on their campus. It was higher among Muslims I think was about 47 percent.

Ken Stern: It was 56 to 26.

Jack Stripling: In any case this isn’t a contest obviously. But what do you make of that larger part of this discussion which is to some degree the antisemitism conversation has overshadowed the Islamophobia conversation?

Ken Stern: I wouldn’t disagree, and I think there are political and other reasons for why that’s the case. But again if you’re thinking as a college administrator or a faculty member or part of the college community you have to realize that both of these things are happening. You’ve had instances of antisemitism, you’ve had a lot of attention to it. But you’ve had Palestinian students who have been victimized by doxing. I’ve talked to professors who said wait a minute I have kids coming into my office and closing the door and talking about their relatives in Gaza and things that they’re hearing on campus and I’m not equipped to help them. And also let’s not forget there were some Palestinian students shot in Vermont and there was a kid that was murdered post-October 7th. So there is a deep problem, not only for Jewish students.

And one of the important exercises with the reports that you’re mentioning is I think you have to read them in tandem, because they absolutely reflect what you’re talking about. Each one is a mirror image of the other. Each is saying, wait a minute the administration sides with the other side, they don’t feel heard, and they could each give examples. One of them, for example, Jewish students pro-Israel Jewish students may say how come we have to follow the rules? The other doesn’t get to follow the rules and we would never do that and they get away with it. Why is that fair? And the pro-Palestinian folks say wait a minute why were you OK with the bending of the rules during Occupy Wall Street or apartheid South Africa, but I’m not here on this issue? And so I think all those things have to be engaged, so yeah

Jack Stripling: … Students looking for moral and intellectual consistency from college administrators.

Ken Stern: I know. Well, you know, we’re back to talking about double standards. But the reality is that all those things are happening. And other things are happening, too. Let’s not forget at the moment that if you’re a Palestinian student or a pro-Palestinian student and you happen not to be you know like me an American citizen you can get whisked away without due process for co-writing an op-ed. That’s part of the environment, too.

Jack Stripling: You’re talking about the visa revocations.

Ken Stern: Yeah, visa revocations. Or the student at Tufts, no due process. And the larger implications. too. I mean you know when I go to synagogues and talk about antisemitism and what worries me, I tell them two things that worry me the most are these: first the vilification of anyone in American society. What I know from hate studies is that when you open that tap for seeing anybody among us as inferior as a threat to be demonized and feel good about it, it leads to antisemitism. Because antisemitism at heart, whatever definition you want to use, has these two elements: conspiracy theory that says Jews conspire to harm humanity and giving an explanation for what goes wrong in the world. And there are reasons when you see that you’re losing to people that you shouldn’t because the leaders define them as somehow a threat to you that makes antisemitic views more appetizing. And the second thing I say is that antisemitism and all forms of hate thrive the best where democracy is the most challenged. So, one of the things that we’ve learned from history — look at the McCarthy period, look at Palmer Raid period, those were not good times for Jews. And if you’re going to protect democracy you have to protect due process independent judiciary independent press, thinking in schools, academic freedom, and probably most importantly free speech.

Jack Stripling: You mentioned at one point Ken that there’s something alluring about being able to define antisemitism: we have a policy. This is how we deal with it. One of the things that comes through in those Harvard task force reports is that this stuff is really messy. What is within the college’s purview to deal with? What are the rules around how professors talk about things?

I’ll give you just a few examples. Students were concerned about messages on an app called SideChat. This is an online platform where people can post anonymously within a specific school, and it devolved into these hateful posts about Israel and Jews and the Holocaust. Other examples were instructors excusing class absences so students could go join in pro-Palestinian walk-out demonstrations. All of these cases are untidy to some degree. Can you talk about the complexity of what colleges are facing? Because you may not have a policy that really addresses all of this stuff.

Ken Stern: Sure, and those are messy things, and you have people on both sides, and again, to use a word that got some college president in trouble, context matters. So I got asked this question in the Senate committee about people giving extra credit for going to a pro-Palestinian demonstration, and I said, it depends, right? If your point is, Oh, you have to support this, and clearly that’s why I’m letting you go and giving you extra credit, that’s a problem. But I said to Sen. Collins, on the other hand, if I were teaching that semester and there was a demonstration on campus and I’m teaching about issues about antisemitism and hate, I might give extra credit for students who went to the demonstration and then put together a two- or three-page paper on the arguments they were hearing on either side. So context does matter.

But again, what’s being missed in all of this, it seems to me, is what you can actually do. I’ll give you a couple of examples. I loved it that a colleague of mine at Bard, who was involved with the Hate Studies Center initiative, saw that students were flinging around terms like genocide, settler colonialism, Zionism, antisemitism right after October 7th. And she thought, gee, we’re a college. Why don’t we actually have a class on this, what these terms mean? Let’s bring in experts. Let’s have discussions about why people hear them differently. You know, those are the types of things that I think are better initiatives than talking about what is our exact policy going to be when this happens or that happens and when are we going to live up to and when we’re going to bend it.

And those are the types of initiatives that we want to get on campus to say to the students, you may have strong opinions about this, but it will make you a better advocate if you understand more deeply with emotional empathy and intellectual curiosity, why that otherwise friendly student that you interact with in your dance class or physics class or math class or whatever has these views you define as not only wrong, but potentially evil. Aren’t you curious?

Jack Stripling: So Ken, you mentioned at one point in this conversation, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And obviously the country is going through a lot right now as it relates to speech, as it relates to political violence, as it relates to protest. What concerns you most about the moment we’re in and what would you like higher education to do about it?

Ken Stern: There are lots of things that concern me, the attacks on democracy, including the attacks on higher ed, the use of antisemitism as a wedge on this issue. I mean, JD Vance had talked when he was a senator about going after universities, much like Victor Orban did. So I think there’s an agenda there that transcends real concern about antisemitism. I think it’s being exploited politically at the moment. And the universities are under assault. I think universities have to stand up. I think that the core blood of the university is academic freedom and free speech. And you can’t sacrifice those principles and still be a university and still lead students to become critical thinkers, which we need for the next generation to succeed.

Jack Stripling: That’s very well stated Ken. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your views. I really appreciate it.

Ken Stern: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, too.

Jack Stripling: College Matters from the Chronicle is a production of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at Chronicle.com/collegematters. If you’d like, drop us a note at collegematters @ chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.