“The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict”

Asking the academy to address antisemitism and verbal attacks on Israel and Jews is not a call to limit free speech or introduce any form of censorship. When antisemitic images, demonization of Israel, Jews, hate-speech, comparisons with the Nazis, and demands for the destruction of the Jewish State are tolerated and allowed to thrive, universities cannot claim the accusations are part of a legitimate academic debate asserts Gary A. Tobin, a demographer and researcher on the Jewish community.

He adds, just as universities avow that racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice are unacceptable on their campuses, they have a moral obligation to forbid antisemitism and Israel bashing. A zero-tolerance policy should be enforced to foster academic freedom and civil discourse while protecting against intimidation, disparagement of individuals and nations, and speech that can lead to violence.

This antagonism toward Israel and Jews did not always exist on college campuses. Before the 1967 Six Day War when Israel was vulnerable and encircled by hostile totalitarian regimes, she had the support and ideological backing of the liberal Left, explains  Richard L. Cravatts, author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews and Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews.

This approval turned to hostility as Israel became a powerful military and economic force in the region and after her Arab neighbors unleashed a very successful propaganda campaign against the Jewish state.

 Accusations of antisemitism are very often disputed, ridiculed, and denied completely, according to Ben Cohen, an analyst on global antisemitism. This reflects “the perception of the Jews as socially privileged, disproportionately represented in the fields of glamour, intellect, and finance, and—crucially—as the agency behind the dispossession of Palestine’s native Arab inhabitants.”

At American universities, denying antisemitism is not a new phenomenon. Too frequently they have discovered that “there is honor not in opposing it, but in fawning before it” or “speaking truth to power” by “denying it” Cravetts said.

 In The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, historian Stephen H. Norwood reveals how many American universities actively or passively helped to legitimize Nazi Germany. In their failure to take a stand against antisemitism, Norwood sees parallels in academia today.

During the 1930s, Harvard, ignored frequent opportunities to speak out against Hitler’s government and its antisemitic insults, degradation and acts of violence Norwood said. This silence abetted the Nazis in their attempts to improve their tarnished image in the West. The absence of concern about the plight of European Jews was common among many prominent Harvard alumni and students leaders.

Harvard welcomed Nazi leaders to the campus; feted them at prestigious university social gatherings; and sought to establish cordial relationships with the completely “Nazified” German universities of Heidelberg and Gottingen, even after they had expelled their Jewish faculty. Academic student exchange programs with Nazi universities continued throughout the period Norwood said.

 Those protesting these associations and attempts to expose Nazi brutality were criticized by the administration and students, even as the Nazis were escalating their oppression of Jews and increasing German military prowess Norwood notes.

To be sure, Harvard President James Bryant Conant formally expressed his opposition to Nazi ideology and never became an apologist for the regime as did Joseph Gray, chancellor of American University in Washington, D.C.  after returning from Germany in 1936. Still, as Norwood points out, from 1933 through 1937 Conant boosted the Nazi’s prestige by cultivating and maintaining contacts German universities and their leaders. His administration did not support protests against fascism and at times even stopped them.

Seven months after Nazi students held massive nation-wide book burning orgies on the night of May 10, 1933, Columbia University President Nicolas Murray Butler, who served from 1902-1945, welcomed Dr. Hans Luther, Germany’s ambassador to the U.S. Luther had been invited to lecture at the campus by the Institute of Arts and Sciences. Norwood said Butler dismissed a student organization’s criticism of the invitation by indicating he held the ambassador in high regard. Luther’s views were of no concern to him.

When Butler had the opportunity a year later to share the podium with anti-Nazi refugee Gerhart Seger, who escaped Germany, he declined to appear. Seger, a former Social Democratic deputy in the German Reichstag, provided Columbia students and faculty with one of the first eyewitness accounts of life under the Nazis.

 Professor Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary chaired the event. The meeting could have enabled Butler to avow his condemnation of the Nazis and demonstrate his backing for a brave enemy of Adolph Hitler.

As head of one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions, president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, Butler could have helped influence American perceptions of the Nazi regime. Instead, he remained unmoved by Nazi persecution of the Jews. He and prominent members of his administration did not comprehend the corrosive influence that the National Socialism ideology had on German academic institutions.  As a result, they attended high-profile social events organized by the Nazis to enhance their status in the West.

Many faculty, students and administrators from Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliff and Barnard actively participated in these well publicized social events and cultural exchanges with Germany Norwood said.  During the 1930s, many American colleges and universities shared a positive view of the Nazis. The attitude of these the elite women’s colleges, known as the Seven Sisters, was especially important in affecting American attitudes toward the Nazis, since they had had extensive  student exchange programs with German academic institutions.

 Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Columbia also enthusiastically participated in these programs. The University of Delaware continued its junior year program in Germany until 1936.

At the University of Virginia’s Institute for Public Affairs, seminars held from 1933 until 1941, offered a prestigious academic forum for scholars, German diplomats and polemicists to deny Germany’s responsibility for starting the World War, and propagate antisemitism. Their articles and conferences  convinced many Americans to become more understanding and sympathetic of Germany’s position.

University German departments and German Clubs like those at Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, Bennington, Smith, Wellesley, Harvard, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota  convened  receptions for Nazi diplomats, and occasionally introduced them to university presidents and administrators.

The German consul-general in Boston attended many social activities at New England universities. For promoting friendship between Germany and the US, the German government  presented  prized medals to a number of professors from American universities including the University of Southern California, Stanford and Hunter College.

Until the US entered World War II, wide support for appeasing Germany existed at American Catholic universities Norwood said. They perceived the Soviet Union, not the Nazis, to be the more serious danger to the future of western civilization. Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass, November 9–10, 1938)  changed the general apathy toward Jewish suffering, which they viewed as far less than the persecution of Catholics in Spain and Mexico.

 A Final Note

One the variables antisemites can count on historian Ruth R. Wisse tells us, is that by persecuting such a small minority this virtually ensures that retaliation will not be of the same magnitude and that persecution of Jews will be seen as irrelevant to non-Jews.  Although antisemites know they cannot count on the active involvement of all bystanders, they can invariably be certain of their “passive collusion.” Actually, the more lethal the antisemitism becomes, the more average citizens are disposed for it to vanish.