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By Joshua Klein
(DECEMBER 25, 2023 / BREITBART NEWS) Universities must ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments and begin other major structural reforms to rout out antisemitism, according to Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV) founder David L. Bernstein, who has long highlighted a worrying rise in antisemitism in American Ivy-League institutions, where it is hidden within progressive “woke” ideologies that view society through a binary of oppressors and oppressed and which increasingly categorizes Jews and Israel as oppressors.
Bernstein, who authored the acclaimed Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, explained how radical sentiment on campuses reached the current state, noting that the “ideological environment” that produced university presidents who excuse calls for Jewish genocide had been long in the making.
“In the late 1960s, you had postmodern scholars with a political agenda enter the higher education scene and establish ethnic studies and other studies departments in universities across the country,” he said. “Within ten years, there were roughly 1,300 of these programs.”
“These programs indoctrinated a generation of young people in this oppressor-oppressed ideology,” he added.
Though such doctrine remained confined to the university at first, Bernstein pointed to a change beginning around the time of the Ferguson riots — a series of protests and riots that began in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 10, 2014, the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson Police Department Officer Darren Wilson.
“From then, we start to see it jump the ladder into the larger society,” he said. “We also started to see universities themselves become more radicalized.”
“So by the time of the George Floyd murder, we really began to deal with the university that was fundamentally illiberal, hostile to multiple points of view, and perhaps a powder keg on the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he added.
In addition, he noted, society has seen the “convergence of radical Muslim groups and radical progressive groups.”
“Sometimes that’s referred to as the Red-Green Alliance, where you have radical Muslim groups — who are principally and philosophically hostile to a progressive agenda — join forces with radical progressives to call for the genocide of Israelis,” he said.
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