Letter

In response to Conflation and controversy over antisemitism definition

Antisemitism definition-2

Thank you Henry for drawing attention to the paradox inherent in the article you wrote.

One of the starkest idiocies inherent in the panicked response of university administrators is the implicit invitation to consider Jewish students who oppose the developing genocide in Gaza as “non-Jews” thereby creatIng the notion that Jewish students demonstrating against the Netanyahu Government’s policy are somehow implicitly converted into “antisemites”!

Reminds me of the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza from Jewish philosopher into pariah “non-Jew”, an interesting footnote being the Israeli rehabilitation of Spinoza as a great Jewish thinker by retrospectively reversing his banishment from his Jewish community.

Does the universities’ desire to protect Jewish students from “antisemitic’ protests mean that Jews who condemn what is happening in Gaza at the moment are now regarded as apostates — like Spinoza — and no longer protected from the antisemitism which would have consigned them to the Nazi definitions which would have consigned them to the death camps too?

— Robert Richter from Victoria