In an article for Slate, Joel Swanson, a newly hired professor of Jewish Studies at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC), selectively presents only part of the story regarding the college’s response to the wave of anti-Semitism that swept SLC following Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. No surprise to me, Swanson uses the piece to argue that Donald Trump’s budget cuts and investigations into SLC present are the real threats to Jewish students. He writes:
My students … are unified in doubting the Trump administration’s commitment to genuinely fighting campus antisemitism. When the Trump administration is telling German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of government, and appointing officials with long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to high office, my students across the political spectrum doubt that Donald Trump and his administration are serious about fighting antisemitism. Rather, they see a government using the pretext of fighting antisemitism to destroy the foundations of the liberal arts education that all my students, despite wide political differences, cherish and value.
Swanson’s account portrays SLC as reasonable in its handling of student behavior and institutional values. His leaves readers to wonder why the federal government has intervened by leaving out details about the school’s failure to address rampant anti-Semitism and its role in fostering an epidemic of Jew-hatred. By omitting the dire reality for Zionist and Jewish students, Swanson’s telling does not just distort the truth—it conceals it.
He writes, for example, that “Since last fall, when our school had its Gaza solidarity encampment, Jewish students have come to my office to speak about their feelings about the campus climate.” While the professor correctly points out that Jewish and non-Jewish students alike hold a variety of views about the current war in Gaza, the school did not have simply a “Gaza solidarity encampment.”
What really happened was that a group of violent and dangerous students took over a central campus building in the middle of the night, trapped students in their dorm rooms on the building’s upper floor, barricaded themselves in the building, and negotiated with a weak administration to set up a camp with the school’s blessing in exchange to leaving the central campus building. With the school’s administration’s blessing, the students who were part of the Sarah Lawrence College Students for Justice in Palestine group—an un-American student group “supporting the fight for Palestinian liberation from the Zioamerican colonial project”—welcomed dangerous outsiders to campus such at Unity of Fields—”a radical far-left, anti-Zionist ‘direct action network’ that engages in and/or promotes aggressive, targeted protests and the defacement of property belonging to Jewish and non-Jewish organizations and individuals it considers supportive of Israel or Zionism or ‘complicit’ in Israel’s alleged actions.”
Zionist and Jewish students were terrified— critically important truths about campus life last semester Swanson overlooked.
[RELATED: Sarah Lawrence Has Fallen]
The problems with the piece go further. While he admits that “a Jewish student … sufficiently threatened by some of the rhetoric coming from the protesters that they did not want to leave their room for several days, ” he doesn’t say that some students have left campus entirely and have gone remote for fear of their safety. He says nothing about any of this. Moreover, he seems to misunderstand the distinction between legitimate forms of free expression and illegitimate ones.
Speech in opposition to SLC is welcomed and encouraged at SLC, but the “encampment” episode crossed the line and was violent, dangerous, and in real violation of the school’s code of conduct. As leaders of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have made very clear, “students must have the right to protest … But protesters don’t have the right to get classes canceled, to shut down study in the library, or to engage in violence.” There is no question that students at SCL crossed the line. There is a crucial distinction between free expression and intimidation—one that this professor entirely overlooks. He ignores the relentless hate and threats that Jewish and Zionist students have endured simply for openly supporting Israel. As FIRE rightly notes, “when that protest spills over into unprotected speech like violence and harassment,” it crosses a legal line—one that has been repeatedly violated on campus. The hostility has been so pervasive that students in my own class were targeted simply because I am a Zionist Jewish professor.
Finally, and unsurprisingly, the professor casts himself as a victim of the Trump administration and censorship. He claims to fear teaching openly yet took no action when the situation on campus was spiraling out of control. Now, however, he has no hesitation in condemning the government’s legitimate role in higher education oversight, casting it as the real form of anti-Semitism. He even ends with a defiant message to federal officials: “Stay away from our campus. Our students deserve better than to be your pawns.” He is welcome to do just that, and since I know the SLC will read this and share this piece with him, here is the link to share his thoughts: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
I completely understand and agree with the professor’s sentiments that “As the sole permanent tenure-track faculty member in Jewish Studies at my school, I would really rather be spending my time helping students pore through complicated legal arguments in old tracts of the Talmud, or evaluating the differences between rationalist and anti-rationalist trends in medieval Jewish thought, or thinking about the knotted course of Jewish emancipation in modern Europe. But in the past year, as our campus has become embroiled in contentious protests about Israel’s war in Gaza and debates over our college’s responsibility to respond to it, my academic discipline of Jewish Studies has become unavoidably politicized.”
However, I have to ask this professor: What was his role in promoting the balance he now claims to value? Where was his pushback against the madness? The anti-Semitic, violence-endorsing faculty group—Sarah Lawrence Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine—organized unsanctioned, one-sided teach-ins and events. Yet, where was his effort to ensure intellectual diversity and multiple perspectives?
He states that “[c]ontrary to what the Trump administration seems to think, I have seen my students in class have productive, sensitive discussions about the complicated histories of the Israeli and Palestinian national movements, and how these histories redound today.” I have no reason to doubt that. But why didn’t he take on a larger role when the school desperately needed it? What are his thoughts on the students distributing literature that called for the destruction of Jewish students’ homeland and families? Or the Jewish students and community members—including myself—who were followed on campus, screamed at, and told that Hamas or the Nazis should have “finished the job”?
On these real and urgent issues, the professor is silent.
SLC is on the Trump administration’s radar because it has been in chaos—so why is this professor speaking up now when he could have helped keep the school focused on its mission of teaching and learning all along? He is certainly aware of my concerns, as my work has been circulated among the faculty, yet he never reached out. I would have welcomed an ally in the effort to restore balance.
The truth is, too many faculty members remained silent as their institutions unraveled, only to now protest when the spotlight is turned on them. These after-the-fact critiques are both embarrassing and troubling. When faculty see their school’s mission slipping away and choose to stay on the sidelines, they—like this Jewish Studies professor—share responsibility for the consequences alongside the activists driving the chaos.
I appreciate Swanson for admitting that “antisemitism on college campuses and in American society more broadly, and it deserves to be addressed. But that would mean investing more in education, to learn critical lessons from history. And it would mean having difficult but necessary discussions about Israel and Palestine and their relationship to Jews and Palestinians living in the United States, discussions involving the kind of questions I know my students are fully capable of posing.” But we as educators cannot realize the goal of having real and challenging discussions and solving problems that invite intervention when particular truths and facts are ignored and unspoken.
Swanson did not present the full truth about SLC to readers, and in doing so has revealed that he is part of the problem the Trump administration is now trying to solve.
Image: “A Colleg Education” by MTSOfan on Flickr
