“When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London,” Bette Midler said. What time is it now in New York?
On April 17, while Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was telling a congressional committee that she and her administrators had a handle on anti-Jewish incitement and violence at the university, hundreds of her students set up an unlicensed “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus’s West Lawn. A day later, Shafik called in the NYPD, who arrested more than a hundred students. The arrests attracted more protesters, some from outside the university, some from within.
The protesters chanted “Zionists not allowed here” and “Jews, go back to Poland.” They called for “10,000 Oct. 7ths” and hymned the al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. “Al Qassam make us proud, take another soldier out,” went one of their call-and-answer chants. “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too.”
When Shai Davidai, an Israeli professor in the business school, informed the university’s chief operating officer, Cas Holloway, that he intended to enter the campus and visit the encampment, he found that his university ID no longer worked. “To maintain the safety of the Columbia community, you are not permitted to enter the West Lawn,” Holloway wrote. “As a faculty member, you have a fiduciary duty to do everything in your power to help keep our students and campus safe.” On April 22, hundreds of Columbia faculty walked out to support the protesters. The arrested students were released without charge.
Mobs physically intimidating Jews from the campus. Calls for the deportation and mass murder of Jews. Professors encouraging their students. The authorities feeble or complicit. The police and courts unable to enforce the law. This isn’t Germany in 1938: By 1938, the Jewish professors and students had all been purged, and the Nazis had a grip on the police, the courts, and every other institution. It’s more like the years of Weimar disorder that preceded the Nazis’ rise to power.
It’s even more like 1968 than 1938. The historian Fritz Stern recognized this when the New Left revolution erupted at Columbia in 1968. Stern, who descended from Jewish converts to Lutheranism, was 12 years old when his family escaped to the United States in 1938. Thirty years later, he saw the playacting American students who attempted to storm Columbia’s library in the name of peace as the ideological heirs, whether they knew it or not, of the German students who had burned books as a prelude to burning people. The German faculty played along in the name of Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) and their careers — not unlike Columbia’s faculty now, when they turn out in COVID masks as if they too are engaged in a ritual of purification.
Where is this leading America now? To the Democratic convention in Chicago, as it did in 1968. Now, as then, an unpopular president is pursuing a foreign war that has split his party. The Left is in revolt, and the president under pressure not to run again. President Joe Biden is trying to hold the Democratic coalition together by speaking out of both sides of his mouth: supporting Israel while condemning it. The president who struggles to keep his balance as he totters across the White House lawn can barely read an autocue. “Four more years. Pause,” Joe Biden said to trade union members on April 24, channeling Ron Burgundy in Anchorman. But there is no pause, and this is no comedy.
As Fritz Stern saw, the American revolt of 1968 was tragedy repeating as farce. The radicals did not understand the import of their slogans, or where they might lead. Their followers did what followers do: they followed because people are conformists, young people especially, and because it looked like fun. The semipermanent insurrectionary circus of the last decade, another Weimar echo, is farce repeating itself as farce, and not even knowing it. As it was after 1968, the ignorance of the followers may in the long term be more dangerous than the ideals of their leaders. The Weathermen ended up in jail or in bits. Bill Clinton ended up in the White House. Farce is just as real as tragedy.
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The New Left tried to domesticate the elite European tradition of socialist revolution in America. They succeeded. They reduced ideology to advertising slogans, and they took over the elite universities. Columbia, the site of one of 1968’s biggest insurrections, became a key seminary. The American Left’s cult of the Palestinians was launched at Columbia. Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi taught Barack Obama there. We are only beginning to learn what that means.
Fritz Stern decided that Germany’s collapse into barbarity was “neither accidental nor inevitable.” It was an “avoidable disaster,” the cumulative effect of bad choices, including choosing not to choose. Today, the greatest and freest society in the history of the world is coming apart — partly by choice, partly by choosing not to choose. Close Columbia tomorrow, and the poison will still keep leaching through society for decades. The students are your future governors and administrators. They may not understand the slogans that constitute their degree-level education, but they’re going to apply those slogans to running the country, and even the world. Tomorrow belongs to them. And so, they believe, do you.