Fight antisemitism by protecting free speech

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Consider these claims:

1. Antisemitism at American universities is real, and we should raise our voices against it.

2. We must protect free speech, even for ideas that we find antisemitic.

That sounds like a contradiction, I know. But if we erect new rules to restrict what we can say — about Jews, Israel, or anything else — we’ll lose the ability to function as teachers, scholars, and citizens. Rather than censoring antisemitism, we need to speak up wherever we see it.

And right now, it seems like it’s everywhere. At Tulane, a Jewish student’s nose was broken in a melee that started when someone tried to burn an Israeli flag. Jewish students took shelter in a library at Cooper Union in New York City while pro-Palestinian protesters banged on its glass walls. At Cornell, a student was arrested last week for posting messages calling on readers to shoot “pig jews” and slit their throats. And at Penn, where I teach, staff members received emails threatening violence against members of the Jewish community.

Let’s be clear: Violence is illegal, and so are direct threats of the same. It’s not enough for universities to denounce these acts; we must discipline people who engage in them. Nobody on campus should fear for their physical safety.

But at the same time, nobody should expect that our schools will be safe from offensive speech. Consider “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” which students at Temple Law School chanted as they walked out of class on Oct. 25. To my ears, that sounds like a demand to eliminate Jews from Israel. I fully understand — and, I’ll admit, share — the wish to stamp out those kinds of odious sentiments.

But it’s not an explicit threat to harm Jews on campus, like the Cornell and Penn posts. And if we banned it on those grounds, we wouldn’t hear from people like Palestinian American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), who was censured by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday for using the same phrase. Tlaib has described it as “an aspirational call for freedom” for Palestinians — not a demand to eradicate Jews — and I think the history of the phrase suggests she’s wrong. But muzzling protesters who use it would prevent everyone else from deciding whether she’s right.

Ditto for claims that Israel is a “colonial” or even a “white supremacist” power. These statements ignore the fact that most Jews in the country descend from people who lived in Palestine before Israel was founded and that half of the current Jewish population came from Arab or Persian lands. Many of them fled to Israel when they were exiled by Iraq, Egypt, and other countries in the region.

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Calling these people “white” imposes America’s own racial typology upon a country that doesn’t share it. You might even call the claim colonialist, insofar as it assumes that our way of defining and counting race is right and proper for everyone else.

But it would be an enormous mistake to ban these statements from campus, which would deprive us of the opportunity to confront and refute them. And that’s precisely what several GOP presidential candidates are proposing.

Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) has argued that any school “coddling” antisemites should lose its federal funding. Likewise, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum says he would use Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to revoke funding from any university that “enables” antisemitism.

Never mind that Scott cosponsored a 2021 Senate resolution blasting “restrictive speech codes” on campus as “inherently at odds with the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment,” or that Burgum signed a North Dakota law that same year barring universities in the state from discriminating against speakers based on their viewpoint.

Apparently, all of that goes out the window if Scott and Burgum think a viewpoint is antisemitic. Then we should shut it down, they say, via precisely the kind of restrictive speech codes that they used to deplore.

I don’t want to live in a country where politicians get to decide what is so heinous that the rest of us shouldn’t hear it. And I certainly don’t want to work at a university that places some ideas — even ideas I detest — out of bounds.

To her credit, Penn president Liz Magill has underscored the need to protect free speech even as she pledges to fight antisemitism. “Those in positions of leadership must not act as censors,” Magill told a trustees meeting last week.

She’s right. We can denounce hate and defend the right to say hateful things, all at the same time. It’s the mark of a first-rate intelligence. And, I hope, of a first-rate university.