Guest essay: Swarthmore vs its Jewish students

This is an open letter to the Board of Managers of Swarthmore College, from Benjamin Schwartz, class of 2006, concerning anti-Semitism on campus.

To Swarthmore’s Board of Managers:

A year ago I wrote a letter to my children. I needed to explain to them what was happening because they were hearing about the murder and torture on October 7th of friends and family members of teachers and classmates at their Jewish middle school. This week I received a message from a friend at Swarthmore with a picture of an advertisement for a “teach-in” on “anti-colonial armed resistance” in the Scheuer room that was posted on the one-year anniversary of the pogrom in Israel. This Swarthmore hosted event by “SwarthmoreSJP” followed their announcement on social media of “Happy October 7th everyone!” and request for donations “in honor of this glorious day.”

I share this with Swarthmore’s leadership and Board of Directors without an expectation that this matters to you very much or really at all. However, my eldest son is now old enough to be thinking about where he will go to college and I need to explain to him why he should not consider Swarthmore College: his father and grandfather’s alma mater, the school where his mother and I met, and from where I still maintain close friendships with professors and former classmates.  Putting words down in writing helps me with that task and I figure I may as well share those words with you as well. 

Swarthmore College, like a number of elite academic institutions, has become home to both students and faculty that reject the most basic moral and intellectual precepts that make learning possible. I’m not assailing their motivations in this statement. I’m sure that those who assumed the authority to enforce social and academic norms in every generation thought they were doing right. 

This surely includes the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, the revolutionaries of Moaist China, as well as closer to our own history, the Klu Klux Klan and their enablers in various American institutions. Recently a significant number of Swarthmore faculty called on the administration not to enforce campus policies against harassment by invoking the 1960s civil rights protests, but their defense of the mob is more accurately reminiscent of those who protected Klan members from law enforcement as they terrorized a minority with impunity. In those times as in our time, the very worst was probably well intentioned. 

It’s important to understand that this situation is not fundamentally about the Jews. The demonization and isolation of Jews as a collective on elite college campuses is a symptom of a failure of these institutions to safeguard the distinctions that allow society to function. Distinctions like the difference between rape and sex, murder and self-defense, speech and harassment. The students and faculty celebrating the events of October 7th have collapsed these distinctions into nothingness. The Jews are again at the center of this not because of anything happening in the Middle East. No one really believes deep down that a “teach in” in the Scheuer room is going to change the course of events in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, etc. These “protests” are really aimed at destroying the distinctions that matter. 

Jews are the canary in the coal mine because the Jews have always been about distinctions. Over 4,000 years ago, our collective identity was created around them – the sacred and the profane – separating kosher and unkosher, milk and meat, wool and linen, holy days and work days, and on and on we’ve been obsessed with making distinctions ever since. The distinctions that people and institutions make about right and wrong shape their destiny.  

This can be confusing because there are no doubt Jewish individuals among these students and faculty, but again distinctions matter. Jews are a very, very, very small minority and as such feel tremendous pressure to be respected and represented in elite institutions wherever they have lived. And so, in every age one finds Jewish individuals zealously adopting the fashionable and dominant ideas of elite institutions even when that means parroting millenia old libels against the Jewish people. The blood libels directed against the Jewish state today are not meaningfully different from the libels familiar to my great grandparents and their great great grandparents. Tolerating Jewish individuals who repeat them does not equate to tolerating Jews. Jewish life can only fully exist in a Jewish community (it’s actually not possible to observe most Jewish rituals without a community). If your institution doesn’t tolerate the communal Jewish groups that allow Jewish life to exist, then the institution is not actually tolerating Jews. 

What does this mean? Well, on the anniversary of October 7th the Hillel that a friend of mine attends had to meet at a secret time and location to avoid protest and harassment. This wasn’t a problem at Swarthmore because Swathmore expelled Hillel from campus some years ago. 

As stewards of Swarthmore College, I don’t necessarily expect you all to care about the fate of the Jews. You have no such fiduciary duty (though you may want to check with your attorneys about your duty to your Jewish students). There is also no need. In defiance of every rational pattern of human history, this tiny people, the Jewish people live. How revealing is it that this phrase “Am Yisrael Chai/The People of Israel Live” is our “battle cry” in contrast to the slogans of those “revolutionaries of October 7th” championed on campus who chant “Death to America, Death to Israel”. The Jews will be fine. One day in the future, the people of Swarthmore College will wonder where their Jews went and they will find them at other colleges doing interesting and important work. What you should care about, because it is your duty to care about it, is what this all means for the health of Swarthmore. It may be worth looking around the world at the places that have kicked out the Jews and see how things are going there. 

Respectfully, 

Benjamin Schwartz 

Class of 2006