A Really Bad Idea
You wouldn’t know it from its gift for chaos, but the new administration has a thing for registries. Nice tidy lists. Rosters and inventories. A place for everything and everything in its place.
It would be one thing if the inventories were, say, proposed benefits for the poor. Or maybe things we could do for our aged parents. But Trump-era registries are all sinister and nefarious. They’re the kind of thing you’d be tempted to do if you were ready to round up the Jews of Heidelberg. Or expropriate a collection of French impressionists and move it to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. I know I’m not supposed to make those comparisons, but sometimes I’m just a prisoner of my snarky keyboard.
And yet I’m absolutely certain that you’re alarmed, too. There was that moment just about two weeks ago when RFK, Jr. went off the rails again. He had the thunderclap idea of registering children with autism. Being RFK, he couldn’t say why. Being RFK, he couldn’t say how. He just thought it would be a good idea. Maybe he needed an experimental pool to test cockamamie ideas about vaccines and autism. Maybe he was thinking about camps in the countryside, where the eugenicists of the Reich executed mental “defectives.” Whatever it was, it didn’t get far. Sane Americans with a sense of history immediately threw up a temporary roadblock. Temporary, because Kennedy will most certainly be back, making excited, gurgling noises about purity and contamination. For the moment, the autism thing is dead in his throat.
But that isn’t true about Jewish professors at Barnard. This one may have flown under your radar entirely, but at about the same time Kennedy was gyrating hysterically about autism, the administration was sending out text messages to New York academics. It wanted to know if the recipients were Jews and whether they had concerns about anti-Semitism on campus.
This issue couldn’t possibly be more complicated. One of the stories that will be told about this moment is the weaponization of anti-Semitism as a tool of control. What do you do if you want to reign in the universities, to break the “stranglehold" of diversity and wokeness, but you need a cover story that looks moral and high-minded? You use the confusion of the universities on the question of free speech, fold it together with latent anti-Semitism, and serve it up as a reason to withhold dollars. That means research dollars for crucial projects like curing disease, childhood vaccination, and the process of diabetes in American adolescents. What could possibly be more dangerous than that?
Because any project that begins with counting the Jews has at least a chance of ending with freight trains to Poland. Even if it doesn’t, the Trump plan for Barnard was calculated to scapegoat Jewish academics and pit them against the universities they work for. They will be blamed for playing the anti-Semitism card and exposing their employers to interference by the Trumpers. The Jews will be blamed for being fragile snowflakes.
That’s bad for everyone, including the Jews. Over seventy percent of all Jewish voters cast their votes against Trump. They don’t want to be used as pawns in a power play that mobilizes their vulnerability to strangle free speech. When that begins to happen, all of us are goners.
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