This month, we at History, Rinse & Repeat celebrated, with no fanfare, a significant milestone. It was last October that we posted our first piece, Kowtow vs.
This valuable piece rightly locates the threat of anti-Semitism on the left--and in redoubts of prestige in the culture, especially the universities. In Europe and the West, Jew hatred traditionally is a right-wing phenomenon whose adherents had an almost pre-modern mindset--think the anti-Dreyfusards, think the Klan, think the people who lynched Leo Frank. Think Charlottesville. Today, while the threat from the right should not be minimized, left-wing anti-Semitism is far more pernicious. Nobody takes the Charlottesville protestors seriously. But the universities are different. Professors have influence. Nutty theories which divide the world into Manichean categories--oppressors/oppressed, slavers/enslaved, colonialist/anti-colonialist seem to have a footing among naive, students who don't know much, and are ill-equpped to mount a counterargment. HRR performs a valuable service in recounting how Harvard reflects this shift from the sorry Putzi Hanfstaengl saga to the rot in today's progressive college pedagogy.
This valuable piece rightly locates the threat of anti-Semitism on the left--and in redoubts of prestige in the culture, especially the universities. In Europe and the West, Jew hatred traditionally is a right-wing phenomenon whose adherents had an almost pre-modern mindset--think the anti-Dreyfusards, think the Klan, think the people who lynched Leo Frank. Think Charlottesville. Today, while the threat from the right should not be minimized, left-wing anti-Semitism is far more pernicious. Nobody takes the Charlottesville protestors seriously. But the universities are different. Professors have influence. Nutty theories which divide the world into Manichean categories--oppressors/oppressed, slavers/enslaved, colonialist/anti-colonialist seem to have a footing among naive, students who don't know much, and are ill-equpped to mount a counterargment. HRR performs a valuable service in recounting how Harvard reflects this shift from the sorry Putzi Hanfstaengl saga to the rot in today's progressive college pedagogy.