‘To resist the academic intifada’: Letters to my students on defending the Zionist dream - opinion

Last month, the JPPI – Jewish People Policy Institute – published The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath: Facts, Figures, History – my how-to-defend-Israel guide. This week, Wicked Son is publishing To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream – my why-to-celebrate-Israel manifesto. The story of that book is the story of a changing agenda over three years.

Back then, after my first post-COVID American speaking tour, I was struck by how troubled my peers and my students were. We were raised in Generation Hope – yet everyone seemed stuck in despair. We knew our lives were better than our parents’ and grandparents’ lives – yet took responsibility to roll up our sleeves and make them even better. Too many students – and their parents – while living safe, comfortable lives, lost that confidence. Feeling the same need to try reframing the conversation I had in 2001 when I wrote “Why I am a Zionist,” I wrote a manifesto: “Cancel Me! Un-Woke and anti-Trump.”

I sought a middle path, rejecting the all-or-nothingness and violence of the post-George Floyd riots and January 6. Few Americans, Black and white, want either extreme.

I started writing about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, analyzing his expansive, visionary, and relevant liberal-democratic nationalism. This was my nerdy historian’s response to our strange world filled with progressives who don’t believe in progress – and conservatives who don’t conserve institutions.

You can retrace America’s history through these four freedoms. Freedom of Religion replaced God with the people as the basis of sovereignty – the 18th century revolution. Freedom of Speech invigorated democracy – the 19th century breakthrough. Freedom from Want made America fairer – the mid-twentieth-century breakthrough, creating the first mass middle-class civilization. But we’re still seeking Freedom from Fear.

Too abstract 

ULTIMATELY, this scheme felt too abstract for the pressing challenges of the moment. I started writing personally, telling my story and my family’s story to illustrate the transformation of millions of Americans from being “Eastern European Boat People” fleeing Old World oppression, liberated by the New World’s opportunities.

Writing in the first person made it more compelling – although I felt awkward writing a memoir: I write about history, I don’t make it. “You’re a teacher,” my astute editor Adam Bellow at Wicked Son urged – “write letters to your students.” So I did, using my life-story to champion Americanism, liberalism, and Zionism.

After October 7, I rewrote the book, strengthening the Zionist message that now became urgent. I rewrote it again during the spring as the Academic Intifada’s encampments assailed Americanism, liberalism and Zionism, along with the critical thinking, open-mindedness, and mutual respect on campus, around which I built my academic career – and my life.

Yesterday we launched the book. To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, is addressed – and dedicated – to my beloved students. “You’re not crazy,” I insist: the masked cowards threatening you, harassing you, yelling anti-American, anti-Zionist and antisemitic slogans are the deviants – as are their heavy-handed, propagandizing professors.

The letters also challenge my peers, my students’ parents. “Buck up!” I proclaim. “Tell your story, your family’s Mayflower or Fleeing-from-Egypt tale. Don’t allow racist ideologues to dismiss you and your kids because of your ‘white privilege’ when so many of our ancestors came from nothing and we made something of ourselves with sweat and smarts.” We – Jews and non-Jews alike – must stop apologizing and start leading ideologically; celebrating the good in America, in Israel, in the West, while fixing the bad.

Meanwhile, let’s sing a new song of Zion, loud, proud, unapologetic – without Jewish guilt, especially while fighting our genocidal enemies.

The title tells it all. While acknowledging the ongoing horrors, I refuse to be cemented in the trauma; we must be positive, proactive, looking ahead. Second, when I call to “Resist,” I refuse to allow these hooligans to romanticize themselves as some kind of righteous resistance.

I ALSO reject the gaslighting of recent years: when thoughtful critics attacked “woke” inanities, defenders said “we’re just seeking justice” or, more aggressively, “what, you’re a MAGA supporter?” – as if those are the only two political paths. When critics called it “postmodernism,” bystanders looked confused – it sounds too abstract. And when critics rejected “critical race theory” or the race obsessions of “anti-racism,” defenders called them “racist.” Ironically, the radicals first embraced each label – until criticism grew.

The term “academic intifada” locates much of the poison on campus – while noting that not every academic propagandizes. But the radicals seek to “Globalize the Intifada” and vow “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.”

Balancing the title, the subtitle gives the punchline. The phrase “the Zionist dream” evokes “the American dream.” My letters champion both.

The book concludes by making two essential arguments. First, that in many ways, even now, Israelis today live the American dream – in Zion, in a free, prosperous Jewish democracy, rooted in tradition and values, while forever seeking to improve. And, on October 7, my students, our kids, that extraordinary next generation, mobilized in Israel to save Israel – while mobilizing worldwide against this wave of Jew-hatred and America-hatred. Although the Israeli government and the IDF failed that day, Zionism succeeded – and was vindicated by these courageous children we’ve raised.

Finally, I’m clear. If you don’t agree with me on the fundamental morality of Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism: cancel me. If you do, read this book – but please question, disagree, argue with me: That’s the best way we learn and grow together.

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist Thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream was published on September 17.