'Death to the Jews!'

Maybe it's just me, but there's something about large, angry crowds chanting "Death to the Jews!" which makes me uncomfortable. It might have something to do with the fact that I'm Jewish. Or that I'd prefer not to die at the moment. But whatever the reason, there's just something about large, angry crowds chanting "Death to the Jews!" that rubs me the wrong way.

To be sure, this sort of chanting crowd is one that I've never encountered firsthand. In fact, I can't think of any time in my life that I've ever experienced real anti-Semitism. At this point in American history, Jews no longer qualify as an oppressed minority group, having been fully integrated into that big old melting pot of easy privilege known as "whiteness." When Harvard President Larry Summers suggested in a September speech that there was a dangerous rise in anti-Semitism on America's college campuses, he was thus dismissed as a crank, exactly the kind of out-of-touch administrator who would quickly lose his most prominent faculty members to Princeton.

But sure enough, just in time to prove the otherwise laughable Summers correct, there are reports circulating of large, angry crowds of American college students chanting "Death to the Jews!" Rather than from the usual suspects on the radical right, the chant came from "activists" on the radical left. Rather than in English, or even in German, the chant was made in Arabic.

According to the Yale Daily News, that old, genocidal mantra could be heard in its new translation ringing through the halls at last month's national anti-Israel divestment conference at the University of Michigan. Representatives of the divestment movements at colleges nationwide were there to hear it.

Now, I've never been one to believe what I read in the Yale Daily News. Nor am I unaware of the dirty tactic many supporters of Israel's right-wing government have been using, tarnishing any who attack Ariel Sharon with a charge of anti-Semitism. I'm well aware that Princeton's own advocates of the misguided policy of university divestment from Israel are unlikely to be anti-Semites, if only because so many are themselves Jewish. But when I read that report from Yale, I was deeply chilled. Even if it proves to be false, the fact that the collegiate anti-Israel movement has descended to a point that such reports are even conceivable is profoundly disturbing.

Who would ever believe a charge from the right that leftist activists were chanting other sorts of genocidal slogans at a rally? Who would be so foolish as to make such a ridiculous charge? But a charge of anti-Semitism seems all too plausible; on America's campuses, Jews cannot help but fear that they are now fair game.

For the first time in my life, I am now afraid when my acquaintances learn of my heritage. When pressed, I reveal it like a dirty secret, as I imagine my grandfather did when he faced the old-fashioned, right-wing kind of anti-Semitism on a different Ivy League campus three-quarters of a century ago. Since then, we have seen where anti-Semitism can lead, and for several decades this hatred was taboo among American elites, all the more so among liberal or leftist elites.

On the leftmost fringe of the anti-Israel divestment movement, however, that taboo may have recently been broken. One can only hope that such behavior will be firmly denounced by the rest of this movement, by the rest of the collegiate left and by the nation's academic community as a whole.

Death may come for all of us in time, but for the last 2000 years it has had an unfortunate tendency to arrive artificially early for Jews — aided as it has been by Centurions, by Crusaders, by Cossacks, by the SS and by the suicide bombers of today. Unfortunately, for the protestors at the University of Michigan, death may not be coming for us fast enough. Yet here we remain, adamantly repeating the words of our ancient, if rather modest, rallying cry: "Am Yisrael Chai! The people of Israel lives!" Michael Frazer is a graduate student in the Politics Department. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.