At least the college’s board of trustees reacted, calling the new professor’s Facebook posts “anti-Semitic and abhorrent.” Oberlin College teacher Joy Karega was recently outed for Facebook comments that included calling ISIS “a CIA and Mossad operation” and blaming Mossad, the Israeli secret service, for the terrorist attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The president of the college, Marvin Krislov, criticized Karega’s remarks but defended her right to say such things as an act of academic freedom. A few days later the chairman of the college’s board of trustees, Clyde S. McGregor, went farther, as reported by the Washington Post:

These postings are anti-Semitic and abhorrent. We deplore anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry. They have no place at Oberlin. These grave issues must be considered expeditiously. … The board has asked the administration and faculty to challenge the assertion that there is any justification for these repugnant postings.

Oberlin has stood for “inclusion, respect, and tolerance” since its founding, he said. “We still do.”

In her few comments on the controversy, Karega repeatedly portrayed herself as a victim. The New York Times reported that after urging faculty and students to discuss the issues she raised, she added: “I also hope that the glaring absence of my voice from such conversations compels folks to also consider and raise the hard questions about issues of labor and positioning in the academy.”

The campus was further upset when many students got an email saying, “The state of Israel, Zionist Jews are pure evil. They did 9/11.” The webmagazine Tablet found that they came from a Danny Vestal, a retired man whose website described him as “a Christian man with high morals” and a “Truthseeker.”

Karega’s Anti-Semitism

One faculty member responded with a forceful article in in The Oberlin Review. The college’s director of jewish studies, Abraham Socher, wrote that anyone “who is tempted to think that what she has said was not anti-Semitic or can be creatively contextualized away ought to think about what would constitute anti-Semitic speech, and whether they would apply such alibis or restrictive, ahistorical definitions to any other form of hate speech.”

Ignoring her remarks, he said, “to look quickly away from Professor Karega-Mason’s posts without explaining exactly what is wrong with them would be to confirm that Oberlin College is indifferent to — or at least very squeamish about — anti-Semitism. I would prefer to think otherwise.”

Socher related Karega’s remarks to the “paranoid fantasies” of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, noting her use of the traditional anti-semitic target of the Rothschild banking family. He also noted that in another of her Facebook postings, she responded to a news story about the administration giving money to Holocaust survivors:

“One of these days some of My Peoples gonna learn who ALL American presidents work for and why they are chosen and placed in office,” above a picture of Jewish women Holocaust survivors. It turns out that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has determined that one-quarter of Holocaust survivors residing in the U.S. are living below the poverty line. Apparently, poor 80-something-year-old Jewish women who survived the hell of Nazi death camps are part of the Jewish cabal that controls President Obama.

In her reply to Socher, Karega would only say that “I can AND would apply pressure to and complicate his arguments, particularly along the lines of politics, rhetoric, and epistemology.” In an item on her Facebook page, she explained, ““We have reached a point where it is time for me to defer to my legal counsel. … Those of you who know me know that I have been and will continue to be firm in my convictions and resolve.”

The Left’s Anti-Semitism

Observers outside the college were as disturbed by Karega’s messages as Professor Socher. “Imagine a similar verbal attack against blacks. Or LGBT people. Or Muslims,” Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin wrote in a Religion News Service column.

Would Krislov be interested in “interrogating assertions with facts and deep, critical thinking from multiple viewpoints”? I don’t think so. But when it comes to Jew hatred, we are supposed to be open-minded, and to entertain multiple narratives, no matter how far-fetched, bizarre and anti-intellectual they might be.

Other writers have observed a rising anti-Semitism on the political left, of which Karega’s messages were only one example. In The New York Times, the journalist Roger Cohen quoted an Oxford student who had led the Jewish group at his university: “There’s an odd mental noise” at Oxford, he said. “In tone and attitude the way you are talked to as a Jew in these left political circles reeks of hostility. These people have an astonishingly high bar for what constitutes anti-Semitism.”

Salkin noted in his comments about Oberlin: “The recent explosion of anti-Jewish hatred at Oberlin reminds us that the politics of fear is hardly confined to the right. It is very much at home in the cultural and academic left. It is the mirror image of Trumpism: conspiracy theories, willful ignorance and an equally terrifying mob mentality.”