Apart from the death, destruction and suffering bestowed upon the Palestinian people in Gaza by the hands of the Israeli government, an ideological battle is taking place around the world, especially in the United States, where Jewish people face discrimination, prejudice and attacks on their identity by the hands of other Jews.
Former University of Pennsylvania—where former president Elizabeth Magill has just resigned because of this very issue—deputy dean Larry Gross and host Robert Scheer, two old Jews as Scheer puts it, discuss the troubling, McCarthyite times that are transpiring now in the wake of the October 7th attacks and the subsequent daily bombardment of Gaza.
“It's an attempt to silence opposition through a kind of rhetorical intimidation, and nobody should accept it. It is shameful and wrong and I would say it's embarrassingly ignorant when the U.S. Congress votes for a resolution that defines criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitic,” Gross said.
The simple and objective realities that Jews like Gross and Scheer discuss could now be construed as anti-Semitic, despite them being Jewish. This “card,” Gross and Scheer argue, along with the “Holocaust card,” is illogical and stifles crucial dialogue.
Gross says “it is intellectually bankrupt, morally reprehensible and politically opportunistic,” while Scheer pleads “this idea that the U.S. Congress could tell even Jewish people that if you dare criticize this political movement of Zionism that you're anti-Semitic, this is one of the greatest distortions of thought.”
“They pull out their victim card and accuse anybody who criticizes them of anti-Semitism. And as you know, if you're Jewish, then you're a, what do they call it, self-hating Jew? That's the kind of trick psychoanalysts play, which is you can't win no matter what you say,” Gross said.
Despite their vast experience with both Judaism as a religion and Israel as a state, with Gross spending eight years growing up in Israel and Scheer reporting on the Six-Day War when it happened, their contributions to the discussion of the war on Gaza can now be labeled and disregarded, thanks to the efforts of people like Elise Stefanik against university presidents in Congress and the rest of the establishment figures who uncritically take Israeli government officials’ words as fact.