Hi, I'm Claire Suprin, editor of the award-winning Sources, a Journal of Jewish Thought, published by the Shalom Hartman Institute. While we are all still struggling to make sense of the horror of Hamas' terror attacks on October 7th, we don't have to struggle alone. Go to sourcesjournal.org for our new special issue on Israel at war. There, you can read essays on mourning and resilience, on redeeming captives, and diaspora-Israel relations, and more by leading thinkers including Liora Benitsky, Yuhuda Kurtzer, Shlomo Brody, and Misha Al Tziyam. Read, reflect, and join our conversation. The Sources Special Issue Israel at War is available now at sourcesjournal.org.

Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I'm Yuhuda Kurtzer, we're recording on Tuesday, November 28th, 2023. I want to test out a hypothesis with all of you today. I wrote a little bit about it on Facebook a week or two ago and argued with some of you there, and I want to argue it out with our guest today as well. So the situation on college campuses right now is, at the same time, maddening and scary and also at times a little confusing, a little hard to read. A lot of academics that I know insist that the situation on campus is not nearly as bad as media coverage of the college campus wants us to believe. And indeed, we know that there are a lot of bad actors at political extremes who want the campus to be seen as a site of polarization, that that narrative serves their interests. In the meantime, though, it's hard to deny what we see. I work adjacent to Columbia University. Every time I mention that to people, they're like, well, Columbia is different. Be that as it may, last week it was hard to concentrate because of all the police helicopters hovering above the campus. Campus was surrounded by police as a large group of students and faculty members staged a protest around the neighborhood behind a banner that read, quote, resistance by any means necessary. There's a lot that seems quite broken in a system that's premised on liberalism, but increasingly has become aware that it's actually failing to protect its students. You're mostly concerned here today about Jewish students and the rising tide of antisemitism, which finds form daily on college campuses, both in these kinds of dangerous slogans as part of widespread campus protests, but also in the regular Ho-Hum stuff, like painting of swastikas on dorm rooms and at Hillells, which has happened this year at Penn, at Stanford, at Bucknell, at American University, just to name a few, or just in a climate that feels uncomfortable for Jews expressing their Jewishness feels uncomfortable for Jews, especially who expressed their relationship to and support for the state of Israel. So here's my hypothesis. I think it's urgently important that we figure out how to differentiate between two very different phenomena, those that make us unsafe and those that make us uncomfortable.