Freedom to Offend? Maybe: A Reflection for Friday, 4 March 2016

Brian Levin protects Klansmen

Oberlin College, unlikely site of anti-Semitic hate

Everybody seems to be following the US primary elections.  And why not?  Even here in Australia, half a world away, what happens there reverberates strongly.  How could it not?  The US has a population 13 times the size of Australia’s.  And despite that China has the world’s largest economy, the US still largely sets the economic agenda in the free world.  So what happens in the USA matters, in that it ultimately affects other nations far and wide.  This election cycle, for better or worse, there’s another attraction:  what’s going on in the US is just so entertaining!

          Of course, the candidacy of billionaire and reality TV star Donald Trump is the main source of that entertainment.  But most Americans are not amused.  Many either relish the man with his powerful tongue and his penchant for saying exactly what’s on his mind.  Or, they loathe him for being on one hand a ‘loose cannon’ and on the other a ‘misogynist,’ ‘racist,’ ‘anti-Semite,’ ‘Islamophobe,’ et cetera.

          How about me?  I’m somewhere in the middle.  I don’t think for a minute that he’s a misogynist, racist, anti-Semite or Islamophobe.  But I would like to get to know more about him – beyond the bombast of his public persona – before I say whether I could vote for him.

          But my rant for today is not about Mr. Trump and his candidacy for President of the US.  Rather, it is about free speech and its limits.  Mr. Trump’s rhetoric certainly brings to the forefront the question of free speech and its limits.

          This week, in two separate stories Jews in the US have featured as major actors in controversies that involve the limits of free speech.  I believe that one of the Jews in question is on the right side of the issue, whilst the other is not.

          A Jew named Brian Levin, who heads a center for the study of hate and extremism at California State University, San Bernadino, attended an anti-immigration rally in Anaheim.  His purpose in attending was solely to document it.  Instead, he found himself protecting three members of the Ku Klux Klan who were set upon by a mob of counter-demonstrators.  Levin protected the three until the police arrived to separate the attackers from the Klansmen.  Of course, anybody who knows anything about the Klan, knows that they are rabidly anti-Jewish.  Like the Nazis of the Third Reich, they believe that Jews are a foreign and dangerous presence in society and should be ostracized or even expelled.  So it is not lost that the one man who came to the Klansmen’s rescue, possibly saving their very lives, was a Jew.  As Mr. Levin pointed out afterward, even when what one says is odious, one should have a right to say it without physical harm.

          Mr. Levin is on the right side of the debate on the limits of free speech.

The other incident this week involves Joy Karega, a faculty member at Oberlin College, a private liberal arts school in Ohio.  Karega, who teaches writing, is active in social media.  She’s an anti-Semite and a conspiracy monger.  She denies that the Holocaust happened, and she blames the Jews for everything bad that has happened to the US and the world in recent years, from the 9-11 terror attacks to the rise of the Islamic State.

This has caused quite a groundswell of sentiment to fire Karega, especially since she is not yet tenured.  Oberlin has student body of about 3,000, 29 percent of whom are Jewish!  The parents of these Jewish kids pay $50,000 per year tuition to send them to a quiet and serious school where they will presumably not be subject to the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic gauntlet that faces Jewish kids on larger, more politically-charged campuses.  Instead, in recent years Oberlin has become a hotbed for the anti-Israel Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement which seeks to deligitimise, period, the State of Israel.  It is therefore no surprise that the blatant anti-Semitism of Dr. Karega has surfaced.  But here’s the rub.  Oberlin’s president, Marvin Krislov, refuses to fire Karega.  He maintains that it is important for Oberlin to avoid any tendency to shut out voices one finds disagreeable, and therefore stifle the freewheeling debate of ideas.

The irony in all this is not that Dr. Krislov has both a given name and a surname that indicate he might be of Jewish ancestry.  Far more.  In a recent letter to the Oberlin College community, he stated: “I am a practicing Jew, grandson of an Orthodox rabbi. Members of our family were murdered in the Holocaust,”

          I believe that whilst Brian Levin is on the right side of the debate on the limits of free speech, Marvin Krislov is not.  It is one thing to allow people who hold views you find troublesome, to demonstrate publicly without fear of physical attack.  It is another thing entirely to allow people who spew hate-filled rants calculated to intimidate, to teach our children and to pay them a salary.

          A further irony is that more than a handful of my rabbinic colleagues in the Central Conference of American Rabbis, are Oberlin alumni.  This week there was some chatter on the rabbis’ Facebook group, urging colleagues with connections to Oberlin to quietly engage with Dr Krislov and members of Oberlin’s Board of Governors.  My own reaction, if I had a dog in this fight, would likely be more direct.  I would publicly inform the Oberlin board that I would be making no further contributions to the college, nor would I recommend Oberlin to any student looking for a place to study, until Dr. Krislov and Dr. Kanega are both fired.  There are times for quiet engagement.  When a college instructor, about a third of whose students are Jewish publicly expresses such hate and idiocy, that is not such a time.

          Free speech is a cherished concept in the USA and other democratic countries.  In the public square, it should be protected.  If a few idiot KKK members want to don their silly-looking robes and hold up signs in a public place, having applied for a permit to do so in advance so the authorities can maintain order and advise the public, I have nothing against that.  But if a blatantly hate-mongering PhD wants to teach, that’s another thing.  Oh, Oberlin has a right to continue to employ her.  She should lecture to empty classrooms and have her paychecks bounce for lack of funding.  And the President should be out looking for work.  Shabbat shalom.