The 4th to testify: Congressional witness Pamela Nadell on the US antisemitism crisis
The historian, who had a front-row seat next to three university presidents during their earth-shattering testimony on campus Jew hatred, dissects the ‘sea change’ since Oct. 7
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NEW YORK — At the December 5 Congressional hearing on antisemitism last year that upended American academia, four women sat front and center — three university presidents and one expert witness.
Two of the school heads — Harvard president Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill — resigned shortly thereafter, due in no small part to their performances in that hearing. Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faced stiff pressure to follow suit, though she remains in her position to date.
And the expert witness, Dr. Pamela Nadell, is still employed as the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and director of the Jewish studies program at American University in Washington, DC — and is still shaking her head over the state of antisemitism in the United States.
Nadell, who is currently working on a book about the history of American antisemitism, admitted to The Times of Israel in a telephone interview that she could not possibly have anticipated what would follow that December hearing, even though she — quite literally — had a front-row seat.
“Could I ever have predicted the fallout from that hearing?” she asked rhetorically. “Absolutely not. There was no way.”
Nadell sat at the same table as the university presidents to weigh in on antisemitism in the US, past and present. Her written testimony enumerated antisemitism’s classic tropes and canards, noting that “antisemitism visible on colleges and universities today is just part of the toxic stew of antisemitism Jews in the US now face.”
Nadell noted in her written testimony that the December hearing marked the third time she had been called to testify about antisemitism in the United States before Congress. The first time, she wrote, had been in 2017, just three months after white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” paraded at the University of Virginia in a Unite the Right rally that evoked Nazi stormtroopers marching through the streets of Germany in the 1930s.
“I emphasize this because the antisemitism igniting on college campuses today is not new,” she wrote. “It is part of a long history of antisemitism in our nation’s colleges, just one manifestation of the trajectory of antisemitism in American life.”
In her written testimony for the December hearing and in her interview for this piece, however, Nadell underscored that October 7 — when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel in an orgy of brutal violence and abducted 253 more to the Gaza Strip — represents “a dividing line” for antisemitism in the US.
Nadell referenced as a point of contrast historian Leonard Dinnerstein, who stated in 2012 and reiterated in 2016 that antisemitism in the United States was “so insignificant that American Jews don’t see it, feel it or hear it — it doesn’t disrupt their daily lives.”
Every single conversation I’ve had since October 7 has been, ‘Did you think you’d ever be living through this in America?’
“We’ve seen a sea change,” Nadell told The Times of Israel. “Every single conversation I’ve had since October 7 has been, ‘Did you think you’d ever be living through this in America?’”
For all the attention given to Gay’s and Magill’s remarks, Nadell said, she noted that MIT head Kornbluth’s testimony “really has resonated with me and is something she’s been saying for a long time — that there is a difference between what we can say to each other, that is, what we have a right to say, and what we should say as members of our community.”
“We’ve lost a tradition of civil discourse in the United States,” Nadell said. “It’s been evident in the two recent hearings I’ve been a part of, and it would be astonishing if we could get leadership to model a tradition of civil discourse.”
Nadell did not want to comment further on the substance of the hearings, other than to say that the fact that US President Joe Biden’s administration and party saw fit to both hold them and to develop a National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism were more significant than “viral” moments.
However, she said, more needs to be done so that complaints sent to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights under Title VI — which protects individuals at federally funded institutions from discrimination based on race, color or national origin — can be fielded appropriately.
“The problem is that now, there’ve been 60 Title VI violations in terms of antisemitism that have been sent to the Office of Civil Rights — but the Office of Civil Rights doesn’t have funding and is short-staffed,” Nadell noted. “Republicans are calling out the antisemitism as the minority party, but if we want to do something about it, you have to actually fund the offices that can deal with it.”
Republicans are calling out the antisemitism as the minority party, but if we want to do something about it, you have to actually fund the offices that can deal with it
Nadell said she was not at liberty to discuss the circumstances of the Title VI complaint filed against her employer, American University, but did say that the private university’s recent decision to prohibit indoor protests was “absolutely essential and a very bold move.”
At many universities and colleges in the US, including American University, classes have been disrupted and access to university spaces impeded by anti-Israel protesters.
While that decision was a success, Nadell said fighting antisemitism often comes head to head with ignorance as to what it is and how it manifests.
“One of the greatest failings in addressing antisemitism is the failure to understand the history, breadth and dimensions of antisemitism,” Nadell said. “People say things and they have absolutely no idea that they evoke very old, sometimes medieval or ancient, tropes and stereotypes, or that the Jewish community is very sensitive to these.”
A second recurring issue, Nadell said, “is a question of who gets to define what is antisemitism. What has become ‘acceptable’ speech and actions, were they to target any other minority group in the United States — whether religious, ethnic, political or another group — they would have been dealt with much more quickly and much more effectively.”
Nadell admitted to being even more sensitive to these issues in light of her current work on her historical study of antisemitism in the US.
“For somebody like me, as a historian, I hear echoes of the past into the present, and I know that because I know this history,” Nadell said. “There’s long been this perception that antisemitism isn’t an American problem. We didn’t have genocide, we didn’t have pogroms — it’s always seen as something that pops out occasionally — [the massacre at Pittsburgh’s] Tree of Life [synagogue] was a horror — but there’s no sense of it belonging to a wider tradition, so how could what’s happening on the college campuses today be antisemitism?”
Nadell cited a recent Wall Street Journal article in which American protesters, asked what “from the river to the sea” meant, mostly did not know which river and which sea they were yelling for, or what its implications were.
“Maybe education makes the difference,” Nadell said, noting that once the protesters in the story understood what that slogan meant, many of them changed their minds about saying it. “These are huge issues and so difficult. But for sure, many people who say they’re anti-Zionists are actively calling for the destruction of the State of Israel.”
Asked if she was optimistic about the future for Jews in America, Nadell paused a moment before answering.
“Everybody thinks historians know something about the future,” she laughed. “Am I optimistic? I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic — I’d say I’m hopeful. I hope we can hit a point in this country, once again, where we can put the evil genie of antisemitism back inside the lamp.”
“I’m a grandmother,” Nadell said. “Is my grandson going to grow up in a better world? I hope so. I came of age at a time when a lot of structural antisemitic impediments like quotas had fallen, so I got to live through that Golden Age. What will happen in the future? Well, I wouldn’t use the word ‘optimistic.’ Just hopeful.”
