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The Holocaust as ‘white on white crime’ and other signs of intellectual decay

By David Bernstein February 5 at 10:57 AM

In a recent post, I alluded to a Facebook post by a recent Oberlin alumna, clearly a political progressive herself, recounting what she described as various anti-Semitic incidents she experienced at the school at the hands of the SJW left. I noted that I found most remarkable her assertion that multiple students had dismissively referred to the Holocaust as “white on white crime,” as if the “progressive” students there found it impossible to conceive of horrific racist violence outside the parameters of paradigmatic examples of racist violence in the United States. What’s remarkable about the incidents recounted, which range from gross insensitivity to blatant anti-Semitism, is not that such attitudes exist, nor that they are necessarily serious compared with what other minority students may face at college, but that, if the Facebook post in question is true, some of the most purportedly progressive students, those who are the most acutely sensitive to and active against other forms of racism, ignore anti-Semitism, belittle it and, in some cases participate in it.

I found the entire Facebook post of great interest, not just as a troubling sign of emerging hostility to Jews and Jewish concerns among self-proclaimed social justice advocates on left-wing campuses, but as an equally troubling sign of the degradation of intellectual discourse at such campuses more generally, as reason, compassion and just plain old decent manners are replaced with shrill sloganeering based on which group can most successfully proclaim itself to be a victim. Nor is there any indication, despite the purported focus on multiculturalism, that the students who engage in these antics have received anything resembling a sound education in world history and cultures, or much of anything else, as everything is shoehorned into simplistic ideological categories that bear no apparent relation to context and reality. (I also find it interesting that the Jewish students who find themselves the targets of anti-Semitic discourse by SJWs remain committed to the broader “social justice agenda,” as if it’s a mere coincidence that its advocates are also so often tolerant or even indulgent of anti-Semitism, but perhaps that’s a topic for a future post.)

The author of the Oberlin post, Isabel Storch Sherrell, has given me permission to reprint her post in full, and I do so, unedited, below:

bachophile

Feb 5 2016, 09:00 PM

That piece, coupled what happened in Chicago last week is very disturbing.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1.699452