I wasn’t shocked by the outpouring of virulent antisemitism coming from America’s colleges and universities, but that’s because I’ve been paying attention for forty years to what’s been going on there. A lot of people were shocked, though, and struggled to understand how that cancer could grow. There are three reasons: leftism, professional antisemitic agitators and, as a study from the Network Contagion Research Institute revealed, at least 200 American academic institutions have taken in around $13 billion from antisemitic countries…which they then “forgot” to report, thereby violating American law.

I attended UC Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I loathed the place and my wish, always, was that the buildings would be razed and the ground salted. I wasn’t political, so I didn’t recognize that I hated it because I was on the receiving end of leftist tripe. I just knew it was a bad place…and an antisemitic one.

Because Berkeley sparked in me an utter disdain for academia, I paid attention to news reports about other academic institutions, mostly in California. That’s why I knew that San Francisco State University, once a respectable urban institution, was a hotbed of antisemitism and other madness. The same was true for UC Irvine and UC Riverside, both of which I heard, in pre-internet days, were also antisemitic.

Image by Andrea Widburg using AI.

In other words, the rot has been in academia for a long, long time. The question, of course, is why. There are three reasons:

One: Beginning in the 1930s, but with accelerating speed in the 1960s, leftism became the dominant mindset across all but a handful of American colleges and universities. It didn’t have to be that way.

Thanks to the Enlightenment, the virulent anti-Jewish hatred that had burned across post-pagan Western Europe was dying out. People didn’t like Jews, which was their prerogative, but they weren’t trying to kill them. Eastern Europe—Tsarist country—was the last bastion of genocidal antisemitism, which lead to a Jewish immigration to America, bring with it people truly grateful to be here and anxious to contribute to their adopted land.

What revitalized anti-Jewish hatred and turned it into the genocidal antisemitism that characterized Western Europe (and, now, America) is Marxism. Karl Marx hated the Jews. He baked it into socialism by tying Jews to capitalism…never mind that most Jews were impoverished wretches, and the vast majority of the world’s capital was in the hands of non-Jews. Socialism also hates God, because God is about two things socialists hate: Something greater than government and morals. Jews, whether specific individuals are religious or not, are the people who brought God to the world.

When socialism combined with lingering cultural antisemitism and, in Germany, neo-paganism, you ended up with Hitler’s and Stalin’s murderous antisemitism. Consequently, when leftism became the dominant ideology in American academia, it brought antisemitism with it.

Two: Antisemitic campus activism was turned into a well-funded job, something Roz Rothstein, Jerry Rothstein, and Esther Renzer discovered, which led to them founding StandWithUs, one of my favorite pro-Israel organizations. When their children entered UCLA, they were met with a constant barrage of antisemitism. The parents learned that antisemitism wasn’t coming from the ordinary students, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. For real students, the days of campus activism were over. These kids were there to learn and have fun. They wanted to get good grades, not join in protests.

However, the anti-Israel crowd was different. These were professionals who came to college, not to learn or have fun, but to agitate. Their expenses were paid and, if their agitation led them to such bad grades that they were forced to drop out, no matter—there were other professionals waiting to take their place. The agitators sole goal, despite being students, was to teach antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology. The Rothsteins and Renzer founded StandWithUs to train Jewish in rebutting the lies the professional agitators were constantly spreading.

Three: Finally, as always, follow the money. As Network Contagion Research Institute discovered and Bari Weiss reported, campuses have been raking in billions from antisemitic Middle Eastern countries…and carefully (and illegally) hidden the money from government scrutiny:

Today, after months of research, the NCRI released a report (comprising four separate studies) following the money. The report finds that at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.

Moreover, while correlation is not causation, they found that the number of reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding (disclosed and undisclosed) from regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East.

Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”

The specific data are staggering. I strongly urge you to visit the Free Press article for the details because arming yourself with facts is important when pushing back against toxic, genocidal misinformation.

America’s academic institutions are anti-American, antisemitic, rotten-to-the-core places of garbage ideas. It’s time to pull out every single penny of federal funding and, in conservative states, pull out the state money, too. As long as we feed those institutions, we are doomed.