The three deans include Cristen Kromm, the former dean of undergraduate student life; Matthew Patashnick, the former associate dean for student and family support; and Susan Chang-Kim, the former vice dean and chief administrative officer.
The suspension of the deans is the latest example of how Ivy League schools have moved to squash any speech critical of Israel or simply challenging the view that students who express pro-Palestinian sentiment are inciting antisemitism.
Columbia has been the spotlight of the student protest movement in solidarity with Gaza over the past several months.
anti-Semitic in 2024:
No, it means the same thing it’s always meant.
Why are people letting the pro-Israel groups control this narrative?
Comments like the one above make fun of how Netanyahu and the Israeli right use the term “antisemitism”, and how they want us all to use it in an absurd way that supports their political objectives and inoculates them against criticism. The comment attacks the Israeli right’s undermining of the notion of antisemitism, not the notion itself. To preserve our ability to call out actual antisemitism we must reject this politically motivated attempt to spread the concept so wide and thin that it loses all force.
I think that’s the point of comments like the one you’re replying to: they’re ridiculing the Israeli right’s narrative, not following it.
They’ve made it very clear in subsequent replies that if they read the word ‘antisemitism,’ they assume it means ‘anti-Israel criticism’ and that it’s the news’ duty to tell them when it doesn’t mean that.
As much as I don’t like it, language is highly adaptable and contextualized. The experienced truth of what the word means, has historically been very flexible, complaints dating back to the '80s about the ADL using the anti-Semitism term to simply mean not following the Israeli government party line demonstrates this.
Word inflation, is just part of the human experience. So the lived experience today, is if you hear antisemitism, it is almost certainly somebody saying hey hey hey maybe we shouldn’t genocide some people today
Okay, then what would you say we call an act like what happened in Cincinnati last week? https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/us/cincinnati-jewish-cemeteries-vandalism/index.html
Petty vandalism that had nothing to do with hating Jews? A protest against the Ohioan Jews who died in the 1800s for their support of the genocide in Gaza?
Or maybe we can all agree that the pro-Israel groups don’t get to own the language and antisemitism has meant what it’s always meant.
A hate crime.
Beating up a gay person is also a hate crime. We have a special word for that. Should we get rid of it?
No need to - “gay bashing” is unambiguous and hasn’t been used for decades to describe criticism of gay gangs that go around clubbing trans people to death.
Acknowledging that Zionists have robbed the word “antisemitic” of its meaning is the first step in reclaiming the word. The second step is to use other words to describe actual antisemitism so that people understand it still exists. The third is to refuse to allow Zionists to continue conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
You asked how to describe it, and I engaged with you in good faith to provide an answer. You responded with a second rhetorical device, and I engaged for the benefit of other readers. I won’t bother a third time.
[Edit: I removed the last paragraph after initially posting, being unsure I was responding to the same user in both cases. When I re-added it after confirming, I used slightly different language. Their quote of “rhetorical trick” below matches the original wording, and is a legitimate quote of my response]
I wasn’t going for any sort of ‘rhetorical trick.’ The word I was talking about was homophobia.
There is nothing wrong with having words for different types of bigotry to clarify what you’re talking about.
With that way of thinking any hate group can just remove every useful word by simply misusing it and having hapless people carry water for them trotting out the ole “language is mutable” line.
You know. Like they’re doing.
We can, as we are doing now, lamenting the The dilution of a previously very impactful word. By political groups who have an agenda
We can call acts of hate, acts of hate, we can call religious hate religious hate. But today, as expressed in the news cycle, anti-Semitism for the most part means antigenocide
Or we can, as I said, not let Zionists control the narrative by taking over that word.
Why are you willing to allow them to do that?
I’m just stating the reality is when I hear anti-Semitism in a news article, I have to read it assuming that it does not mean hate based on religion. And 80% of the time right now in the new cycle it simply means people who don’t support a genocide.
That is the reality as language is being used right now today.
In fact the trap is the opposite thing, arguing with people about what is and isn’t anti-Semitic is the trap. It means people are not talking about the genocide. They’re talking about philosophical debate of language, when quite frankly that doesn’t matter, what matters is people are being killed right now.
The reality is, again, you are allowing them to control the narrative by making that assumption.
You do not have to make that assumption. You are letting them control your ideas of what bigotry means.
Shrug. I’ve had the same battle over AI vs algorithm.
I’m not the one writing news articles.