1.4 DEI and Antisemitism

The words Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I for short) sound like something we should all strive for.  We want everyone to be included,  we want everyone from all races and ethnic backgrounds to have money.  Financial equity in which everyone has the same amount of money sounds like no one will be poor and we don't want people to be poor  Unfortunately DEI would be better described as Discrimination, Exclusion and Inequality.  You can't discriminate in favor of one group without discriminating against another.  If you give someone a job because they're black you have discriminated against a white person who wanted the same job.  If you discriminate you may achieve equity in that different races have equal amounts of money.  In order to promote equity DEI teaches to take away the hard earned money from other groups and to give that money to those who have less.  Promoting equity means taking away equality of opportunity.  Working hard would no longer mean that you earned wealth since it would be taken away and redistributed to those who don't work and are labeled as oppressed. People wouldn't work hard and wouldn't create wealth and everyone would be poorer.   Choosing people for jobs based on race rather than merit will result in a lot of incompetent unproductive people holding jobs and will take away equality of opportunity to those who work hard.   In order to promote inclusion of groups designated as oppressed DEI promotes exclusion of groups DEI designates as oppressors.  How does DEI choose who is oppressed and who isn't.  Many of the people who promote DEI tend to be antisemitic so they designate Jews as oppressors.  Many black people are antisemitic.  According to Thomas Sowell many black people are jealous of the success of Jews and that's why they hate them.  There are many black people who resent white people and so label whites as oppressors.  When they get to power it's bad for the Jews and other groups they label as oppressors.  A horrific example is how protestors surrounded a synagogue in Los Angeles the black mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass although she was begged to protect the synagogue in advance did not and told the police not to interfere. 

Mayor Karen Bass

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for defense of democracies wrote: “Pro-Hamas and Hezbollah extremists violently attacked American Jews in Los Angeles and the politicians ordered the police to do nothing to defend them.  The Los Angeles Police Department let the Hamas supporters take over the sidewalk in front of the shul and block its entrance. In fact, LAPD had formed a cordon around the front of the shul to keep Jews out and Hamas supporters in,” Pollak added that he and his children tried to enter via the front door but were “turned away not by Hamas supporters but by the LAPD. Anyone who wanted to attend had to use a secret back entrance.” Pollak called the mayor and the LAPD “an absolute disgrace—it’s clear the police have been instructed to help the Democratic Party street animals do their thuggery. They were definitely not there to protect the right of Jews to enter their shul.”  Caroline Glick talks about what transpired in LA in the video below.

On the other side of the United States Alvin Bragg, the black district attorney of Manhattan, dropped charges against most of the anti-semitic protestors who harrassed Jews at Columbia University with the excuse he didn't have enough evidence.

According to critical race theory from which DEI comes from, there are oppressors and oppressed and black, gays, transgenders, Muslims and Palestinians are oppressed.  Jews are excluded from the oppressed label by DEI even though Jews are the most oppressed people in the world.  Palestinians are labeled as oppressed even though they constantly oppress the Jews.  David Bernstein is the author of the book  Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.  He gave two reasons why DEI is against Jews.  He said:

“One is that the ideology conflates group success with oppression.  So, in other words, if you’re a community like Jews who succeed on average above the mean on income or on educational achievements, you’ll be perceived as an oppressor. Even if you’re a group, like Jews, who have been traditionally discriminated against.”

The other reason, he explained, is that beginning in the late 1960s, “at the very same time this postmodern ideology was seeping into these universities, the Soviet Union sought to discredit Zionism.”  “They created a new field called ‘Zionology’ and had best-selling books written that reached hundreds of thousands of people, and that placed Zionism front and center in the post-colonial narrative,” he said. “And it was only a few years later when the UN passed the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution.” 

Tabia Lee was a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion director at De Anza college in the Silicon Valley.  She told the New York Post that "I can safely say that toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people."  Glen Loury interviewed Tabia  Lee about this in the video below. 

Antisemitism is a lot more widespread among American blacks than American whites.  Growth of black power mean more antisemites in the position of power and influence.  They in turn persuade more blacks and whites to be antisemitic. 

 DEI administrators discriminate against those they label oppressors and in favor of those they label oppressed.   Universities that used to accept people on the basis of merit now accept people on the basis of their identity.  Here is a diagram that is used in DEI courses that shows the identities that are defined as oppressed in the center.  Non-christians and people of color are two of the groups as defined as oppressed.  Non-christians include Muslims but don't include Jews in practice.  Jews are white oppressors according to D.E.I people.

The groups considered oppressed are often  hostile to Jews and increasing their population at universities makes those universities become more antisemitic.  Muslim groups bring in anti-Israel speakers to campus and spread anti-Israel propaganda.  The number of Jews getting accepted into college and getting jobs has been dropping ever since D.E.I..  In recent years Jews who were accepted by universities have become afraid to be there.  You can watch the testimony of Jewish students about what it's like to be a Jew at their university by clicking here.  One of them, NYU student Bella Ingber specifically says that “Being a Jew at NYU is experiencing how ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ is not a value that NYU extends to its Jewish students,”

Zachary Dulberg, MD, is a family physician and a fifth-year PhD candidate in computational neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (December 2023).  He wrote an article that was published by the New York Post about his experiences with DEI at Princeton.  He wrote that after Hamas attacked Israelis on October 7 and killed many of them, instead of sympathy at Princeton there was an explosion of antisemitic hate.  He asked the Princeton DEI office to discipline students spreading hate by they wouldn't.  He then asked the DEI office to meet with him and they wouldn't do that either.  Zachary was put on disciplinary probation at Princeton for expressing his pro-Israel views.  He wrote:

DEI ideology has been weaponized against me — and Jews more broadly, as groups like Do No Harm have documented across higher education.

I should have known. For all its talk about justice and the importance of oppressed lives, DEI cares about neither — at least, not in a consistent or holistic way.

It divides groups of people based on superficial characteristics, then assumes they can do no right or do no wrong depending on their identity and relationship to other groups.

Jews, it turns out, are forever damned, deserving no support when victimized.

Alan Dershowitz is a famous lawyer and former professor at Harvard who wrote:  The multibillion-dollar DEI bureaucracy has become a central contributor to anti-Jewish attitudes on campuses. The first component of DEI is diversity, but its definition of diversity is limited to skin color and other aspects of identity politics. It explicitly excludes diversity of opinions, ideas and ideology. The effect is the university looks more diverse, but actually is less diverse in the most important aspect of education, namely ideas... The number and percentage of Jews at top-tier universities have declined since the introduction of DEI.

Mr. Dershowitz wrote that DEI was a reason antisemitism has become systemic at universities.  You can here a clip of Mr. Dershowitz talking about DEI and antisemitism below.

Stanley Goldfarb was a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote an article titled How DEI Inspires Jew Hatred.  He wrote:

"After DEI took hold at Penn, anti-Semitic fervor on campus intensified. At first glance, DEI seems to have little connection to the Jewish people or the Jewish state. It is more often associated with efforts to recruit more minority students by lowering admissions standards, creating racially discriminatory scholarships, and setting racial quotas. While I witnessed all that and more before my retirement from Penn in 2021, I also came to see that subscribing to DEI almost inevitably resulted in attacking Jews. True, antisemitism existed long before the establishment of the first university DEI office. But this worldview has given anti-Semites a pseudo-intellectual and seemingly moral framework through which to spew their hatred."

In other words DEI gives antisemites a way to appear moral and caring while spewing hate. It lets antisemites get away with it. 

Dr. Goldfarb continued:

At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed. While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians. In fact, a colleague of mine—a former collegiate DEI director, no less—was told that Jews are “white oppressors” and that it was her job to “decenter whiteness.” ..

In 2021, the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene (now a colleague at Do No Harm) looked at the Twitter feeds of nearly 750 DEI officials at 65 U.S. universities and found that 96 percent of their tweets about Israel were critical of the country or anti-Semitic.

People used to think that the more educated you were the more unlikely you were to be antisemitic.  An interesting study found that the wrong questions were being asked and that people who went to college were actually more antisemitic.  If a survey asked a question like "Do you hate Jews" college kids were more likely to say no than uneducated kids.  But if people were asked to judge people's actions and told they were Jewish and that was compared to how they judged non-Jews, Jews were judged more harshly by college students.  Soviet refusenik, Natan Sharansky identifies as a defining feature of antisemitism: the double standard. that is why the authors of the survey tested how people would judge people if they were Jewish as compared to how they would judge them if they were non-Jewish.   A survey question might be something like, Rabbi Joseph was in a hurry and passed a beggar without giving him food.  Rate Rabbi Joseph from 1 to 5 where 5 is the best.  Later on in the survey there could be another question that asks, Black Lives Matter leader, Jessup was in a hurry and passed a beggar without giving him food, rate Jessup from 1 to 5 where 5 is the best.  If you rate Rabbi Joseph with a 1 and BLM Jessup with a 5 you are probably antisemitic.

DEI is not the only reason there is increased antisemitism on campuses.  Large donations from Arab countries have corrupted Middle Eastern departments at universities.  Donor countries can control who gets hired to teach and those professors are likely to spread anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda  Universities are likely to accept students from those donor countries who bring their hatred of Jews and who come and spread propaganda against Israel in those universities.  In addition as Alan Dershowitz said in the embedded video clip on this page, special identity study departments in the University other than Middle Eastern studies also spread antisemitism.  That could be a black studies department, a women's study department etc..

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Ibram Kendi called blacks who blame black inequity on other things than whites, racists.  Those blacks are not racists, but are there black racists?  

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