Intellectuals and Antisemitism
Postmodern discourse has weaponized the life of the mind
In a recent Substack note, I opined that intellectuals as a group constitute a toxic blight on society—an opinion inspired by the resignation of five such people from the TED Fellows Program. Ayah Bdeir (inventor), Saeed Taji Farouky (filmmaker), cosmologist Renée Hlozek (cosmologist), Lucianne Walkowicz (astronomer), and Sarah Sandman (artist) resigned in protest against TED’s invitation to Bill Ackman and Bari Weiss to speak at its 2024 conference in Vancouver.
The resignation letter’s title gives the game away: “TED Fellows refuse to be associated with genocide apologists.” The letter lambasted TED for aligning itself with “enablers and supporters of genocide” and promoting their “racist propaganda.” Ackman and Weiss, of course, are vocal supporters of Israel in its war with Hamas, and equally vocal critics of the rising tide of antisemitism, especially on American university campuses.
Now of course neither Akman nor Weiss are enablers and supporters of genocide. That title is more justly applied to the five despicable Hamas huggers who peppered their resignation letter with antisemitic rhetoric. They accused Israel of engaging in “genocide and ethnic cleansing.” They charged that Ackman, Weiss and people like them have “cynically weaponised antisemitism” in an effort to “purge American universities of Pro-Palestinian freedom of speech.” Oh, and they demanded that the TED Fellows Program transform itself into the propaganda arm of Hamas.
At least fifty other individuals have added their names to the letter in solidarity with the five who resigned.
The sheer audacity of that letter, its impudent reversal of reality, its overt hostility to Israel and Jews everywhere, its moral corruption, demonstrate what I meant by describing intellectuals as a toxic blight on society. Yes, I know, it’s a generalization—exceptions to the rule and all that. But if it wasn’t a valid generalization, American higher education wouldn’t a be dystopian landscape of radical relativism amounting to nihilism, where a primitive death cult devoted to genocide is hailed as a gallant corps of liberators.
The charge that Ackman and Weiss “cynically weaponised antisemitism” is especially worthy of note. Cries that some issue or other has been weaponized against the opposition has become a staple of progressive rhetoric. For instance, sinister right-wing pressure groups were said to have weaponized plagiarism against Claudine Gay in a successful campaign to get her booted from her job as president of Harvard University. The converse was the case, of course: If anything, Gay weaponized plagiarism against herself. And the same thing is true of the so-called weaponization of antisemitism: It wouldn’t constitute a black mark against “pro-Palestinian” campus groups if they hadn’t made their antisemitism so blatantly obvious.
But progressive intellectuals—which means most intellectuals—are in the business of obfuscation. They produce nothing tangible; they are people whose stock in trade consists of words, symbols, and ideas. True, of the five fellows who resigned from TED, two are scientists who may be presumed to be genuine experts in their fields. But as has been frequently pointed out, scientific expertise by no means translates to broader wisdom. Though the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was a scientist and something of a polymath, his political ideas were childish. And Asimov was far from being the most annoying scientist of this type.
Politically active scientists may therefore be classified as intellectual adjacent: intelligent people working in specialized fields who mistake their mastery of some branch of the hard sciences for mastery of political, social and economic issues. But the real contemporary intelligentsia is based where such people have always been based: on the soft side of academia in the liberal arts and the social sciences, and downstream from academia in journalism, education, the media, and culture.
Progressive antisemitism is also downstream from academia. The ideas behind it, indeed its vocabulary, have their origins in postmodern discourse. The characterization of the long-running Middle East conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs as the oppression of “brown people” by “white people” amalgamates concepts found in critical race theory and colonial studies. The Palestinian Arabs are held to be “indigenous” to Palestine; the Jews are reviled as “settler colonialists.” A glance at the map would show that the “indigenous” Palestinian Arabs are a long way from Arabia, while the historical record shows that the Jews have occupied the land between the river and the sea from time immemorial. But postmodern discourse has had the effect of plucking the issue from its geographical and historical contexts, erasing inconvenient facts and fabricating an alternate reality that makes antisemitism seem intellectually respectable, and valorizes calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It may well be asked how well-educated, intelligent people manage to make themselves believe such vile and patent nonsense. George Orwell had some ideas about that. In Nineteen Eighty-four he thus described the ruling class of his imaginary future dystopia: “In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.” This seems a fair description of contemporary Western intellectuals, who gaze upon the present conflict between Israel and Hamas, and see a genocidal war being waged by the white-supremacist Jews against the suffering, oppressed Palestinians. The mental derangement that Orwell called doublethink is well on display in this case.
The life of the mind, then, is not necessarily a life well lived. Karl Marx was an intellectual, and the ideas he propagated unleashed untold misery and suffering upon the world. The dominant faction of our current intellectual class constitutes an ideological cohort, pressing its related ideas on society by asserting control over downstream institutions. The Washington Post’s disgustingly one-sided coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, the antisemitism of the Democratic Socialists of America and Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Party’s uneasy tolerance of its anti-Israel progressive wing—all such phenomena lie downstream from the departments of postcolonial studies, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, feminist studies, etc. The ideas propagated in their classes and seminars and conferences and journals are intellectual toxins, and the visible symptoms of their pollution multiply by the day. The TED resignations are one such symptom.
One aspect of the problem is that Muslim groups and activists who are hostile to Israel are well aware of which buttons to push in manipulating naive academics, intellectuals and college kids. Painting the Palestinians as victims of Western colonialism and imperialism has been a very effective trick. Falsifications of the historical record are also very effective with people who don't know much to begin with.
Well done! A pleasure to read. I call them pseudo-intellectuals. They are rife. But scholars are another quantity entirely and there are still quite a few of them around.