I don’t have any New Year resolutions to break, but I do say that at the start of every year, I promise myself that I will listen to more lectures on interesting subjects, and that I will listen to more music. As I write this, I am listing to Martha Argerich play Schumann’s piano concerto (yes, his only piano concerto). Argerich, now 82, has been a prized pianist for decades. Her Jewish family emigrated to Argentina from Germany before she was born and lived in one of Baron de Hirsch’s agricultural colonies. But, German origin notwithstanding, Argerich is a Catalonian name. The presumption is that her ancestors were from Spain, so that it’s interesting that her parents wound up moving back to a Spanish speaking country. (OK, none of this is interesting – I am just trying to show how well rounded I am)

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know what my general themes are. Jewish identity and security. American right wing political dangers. The failure of America’s contemporary educational system.

Yesterday, I wrote about a presentation by Yale professor Tim Snyder on Hitler’s rational, if totally misguided, belief system. Today, I listened to another program, this one featuring historian Niall Ferguson, now at the Hoover Institute, and formerly a professor at Harvard. He was being interviewed by someone (not introduced) from the Jewish Chronicle (the London Jewish newspaper) and his subject was antisemitism. While I don’t agree with everything Ferguson says, most of what he said on this program makes a lot of sense. Let me see if I can make some of his points coherently.

1. There has been a lot of changes on American campuses over the past 10 years or so. This first change was the emergence of “cancel culture”, where free speech took a back seat to making sure no one would say anything that would offend the sensibilities of the student body, or the reputation of the institution. He believes it was the progressive left that first popularized cancel culture, but that the right and the left now both operate on the premise that one should not argue with people with whom you disagree, but make sure that their voices won’t be heard.
2. He also believes that a double standard exists at most major universities, when it comes to certain groups, and in particular Jews. He claims that there is no punishment when it comes to badmouthing Jews (as we see from the recent Congressional hearing with the three university presidents), but woe to anyone who dares say anything against Blacks or other “favored” groups.
3. He believes that left wing cancel culture is still the most visible and that it has often turned against Israel and therefore Jews (he believes that, as perhaps not true elsewhere, on campuses anti-Israel thinking is clearly antisemitic – that Israel and Jews are viewed as one), and this gave the Islamist students the ability to become allies, although they are miles apart on virtually every other issue.
4. As to why this phenomenon has taken place on campuses, he does refer to what I have written about a number of times – the prevalence of social justice thinking, anti-colonialism, and conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed. He believes that the Islamist movement has milked this theory for all that it’s worth, applying it to themselves even when it doesn’t apply, and turning the Jews into not only white oppressors, but super white oppressors. He also believes that, within the progressive left, which is clearly an anti-capitalist movement, there are those who hold onto the old trope that Jews are central to capitalism.
5. He, like Snyder, is a historian of the Holocaust (in fact he is a historian of almost everything). He was asked to compare what is going on in our universities with what went on in German universities in the 1920s and 1930s. While he didn’t do a direct comparison, I thought what he said about German universities (which he said were clearly then the best in the world) was interesting. One of the most prevalent movements at that time was the study of, and belief in, eugenics, differences based on race, and that Germany was a center of the eugenics movement, and therefore its institutions were primed for determining that Jews were inferior (or at least different) and therefore should not be teaching at the universities. He also said that there was something selfish in all of this, as there were many, many Jewish professors in Germany, and their disappearance certainly helped the careers of the others.
6. Finally, he is very disappointed as to the way the media is following the Israel-Hamas war. He mentioned the BBC, the New York Times, and the worst offender of all, which he described as NPR, which he now doesn’t bother listening to. He said again this was the double standard at action, which has been imported into the media from the academic campuses, and which he feels will get worse as the younger generation – with ideas different from their elders, and experiences much different – become even more prominent in the mainstream media (as they are now on social media).

Of course, there was much more that he said. But you’ve been reading this long enough. (By the way, the Schumann just ended, and I have switched to Rostropovich playing the Dvorak cello concerto.)