“Hate” Was Not the Problem at Penn (or Other Universities), Radicalism Was and Still Is

This essay appeared in slightly altered form on the website of Tablet Magazine on April 1, 2024 under the title, “Jew-Hatred Is Not the Problem at Penn (or Other Universities). Radicalism Is.”

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Late last year Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro interjected himself forcefully into the uproar over former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill’s Congressional testimony (in which she failed to say that calling for “the genocide of Jews” would necessarily violate the school’s code of conduct) and the events on the Penn campus that would soon culminate in her resignation. The governor came out strongly against antisemitism in all its forms – never bad in itself. But Shapiro’s widely reported speech on Sunday, December 10, 2023, at Philadelphia’s Rodeph Shalom synagogue, in which he proclaimed, “Hate has no place here,” misnamed the chief problem that had plagued Penn and a number of other universities this past fall. That problem was not the expression of group hatred toward Jews, of which only a handful of examples have existed on most American campuses for many years now, but rather the radical politicization of higher education to the detriment of the free expression of ideas, which constitutes the lifeblood of any college. Threatening in this way to undermine the very idea of a university, political extremism may also predictably endanger the safety and well-being of individuals – Jews among them – who live, study, or work at one.

In the flood of commentary that followed President Magill’s ouster, right-leaning columnists fairly pilloried elite institutions like Penn for their hypocrisy in scrupulously defending the legal principles of free speech on campus concerning criticism of Israel while ignoring years of restrictions on faculty and outside speakers whose views challenged “social-justice” norms on race, gender, religion, and other topics. Meanwhile, left-leaning columnists properly warned of dangers to academic freedom if wealthy donors, politicians, or other self-interested parties can bypass normal university procedures to influence educational content – in this case, in the name of opposition to antisemitism. Neither side in this clash has been keen to acknowledge its own contributions toward undermining academic freedom and diversity of thought at universities, turning the conversation into yet another skirmish in the “culture wars.” A focus on what has provided the stimulus for so many recent campus controversies, the perception of speech and actions that are considered hateful, may offer some clarity toward useful university reforms and an assessment of the current moment’s dangers for Jews.

Incidents of reported antisemitism at Penn this past fall received a boost from two singular events – a high-profile conference showcasing Palestinian literature and political activism, which took place on the campus in late September, and the savage assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, precipitating the ongoing war between Israel and the terrorist organization in Gaza. As a result, the record of these incidents (detailed in the next three paragraphs), while at first glance startling in number, on further examination of what’s known about their circumstances suggests somewhat less cause for alarm. Overall, this record comports with the general findings of the Anti-Defamation League for two recent years, which downplay the significance of universities as settings for antisemitic attacks. For both calendar years 2021and 2022, the ADL found that just under 6% of the total number of antisemitic incidents occurring throughout the United States (which rose to its highest number on record in 2022 at 3,697 incidents; no doubt that number will be far higher for 2023) took place on college campuses. And most of the recent ones at Penn, as we will see, are best classified as political in nature.

The record for Penn this past fall is as follows: On September 13 students discovered a swastika painted on an inside surface of Penn’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, with no apparent leads turning up as to the identity of the perpetrator or the significance of the precise target. On September 21 Penn’s Division of Public Safety apprehended a man for entering the campus’s Hillel building, overturning some furniture, and shouting, “F—k the Jews. They killed JC.” The man, who the Penn police said was “experiencing a crisis,” had been spotted earlier overturning trash cans on a nearby city street. His relationship to the Penn community has never been clarified. (The Washington Free Beacon, citing an unnamed Hillel spokesperson, reports that the intruder was a Penn student, but all other sources refer only to “an individual.”) As part of the three-day “Palestine Writes” conference, held on the campus September 22-24, speakers excoriated Israel from multiple angles [see link at paragraphs 6, 115], including as a nation of “settlers from Europe” who became “occupants of our country.” 

On September 27 the display of a foliage-covered booth for the Jewish holiday Sukkot, erected by Penn’s Chabad organization, was desecrated with unreadable graffiti, but Penn’s police did not consider the incident antisemitic. On October 16 a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, not affiliated with Penn, told students in a pro-Israeli counter-demonstration that they should “leave us in peace or go back to Moscow or Brooklyn.” He later pushed a bystander and ripped down pictures of Israelis held hostage by Hamas, for which he was apprehended by Penn’s police. Two days later a Penn library staffer also tore down pictures of the people assaulted and taken captive by Hamas. When confronted by a Jewish student over what he was doing, words were exchanged and the staffer swore at the student [see link at p. 17]. On October 20 students at the off-campus Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi found the phrase, “The Jews R Nazis,” written on the door of an adjoining empty building (owned by a Jewish landlord). There are no leads as to the perpetrator(s).

On October 28 an Israeli flag was ripped down and taken from an off-campus residence hall for Orthodox Jewish students. The perpetrator was found to be a Penn student involved in the campus’s anti-Israel group, Penn Against Occupation [see link at p. 18]. On the night of November 8 Penn Against Occupation projected pro-Palestinian slogans, including “Let Gaza live,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Zionism is racism,” and “Penn funds Palestinian genocide,” onto the faces of a number of campus buildings, messages which President Magill denounced the next day as “vile” and “antisemitic,” promising a full investigation by the Penn Police. Throughout this period (with dates unspecified), according to Penn Hillel’s rabbi, “a small number of Penn staff members” received hateful, antisemitic messages and violent threats that targeted the recipients’ personal identities [see link at p. 21]. And on December 3 in a citywide protest, some 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators ended a march by spray painting graffiti on several Penn properties and stores that line the campus.

Even a single one of these reprehensible incidents is one too many. But overall, how should we understand this record? Among these roughly ten incidents (leaving aside the “Palestine Writes” conference), two of the perpetrators were identified as Penn students (or a student group), a third as a Penn employee, and a fourth as holding an unspecified relationship to the campus community. A fifth perpetrator was an off-campus community radical. The perpetrators of four more of these incidents remain unknown, and one incident may not have been antisemitic at all. In terms of its content, despite the presence of occasional generic symbols of antisemitism, this record of attacks on Jewish targets is best described as an extremist outgrowth of political radicalism stemming from the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The political character of most of these attacks is underscored by the fact that the Jewish population at Penn, by no means weak at 16% of the undergraduate student body, sponsored a variety of its own public, political stands, most supportive but some critical of Israel, during this same period. None of this interpretation goes to minimize the potential for violence against Jews embodied in the anti-Israeli radicalism at Penn (as I will turn to in a moment). Rather, it serves to name the threat in a manner that connects it to the dominance at so many American colleges today of radical left-wing ideology on behalf of causes said to represent such “oppressed groups” as African Americans, other people of color, and a variety of sexual minorities. At Penn, as at other college campuses, Palestinians, not Israelis or Jews, are considered an oppressed group.

For universities, the fact that these incidents derive more from radical political sentiments than from traditional Jew-hatred points the way toward how these institutions should handle the problem. It is lucky that ethnic hatred per se does not lie at the root of today’s campus woes, because colleges are not – or should not be – in the business of inculcating moral values or teaching civics. Those responsibilities are best left to families, lower-level schooling, religious bodies, and voluntary organizations. Universities exist for the purpose of furthering higher education and fostering the pursuit of truth through advanced research, both of which goals demand wide open forums for the presentation and discussion of ideas. At the same time, universities must proceed with internal rules that enable their mission to go forward and not be impeded by illiberal elements (whether arising from among faculty, students, administrators, or outside parties) who would disrupt their educational and research functions.

For many years now, universities have been doing exactly the opposite of what is required to support these goals. They have restricted the free-flow of ideas by “canceling” presentations they think might offend an “oppressed group,” while allowing protesters presumed to represent “oppressed groups” to take over campus buildings, block pathways, or interfere with quiet learning environments. Examples abound, from left-wing students at Middlebury College in 2017 shouting down sociologist Charles Murray’s guest lecture on cultural and genetic differences among social groups, to Penn’s own ongoing disciplinary investigation of law professor Amy Wax for, among other things, inviting a white supremacist to make a presentation to one of her classes. If anyone believes that radicals on the political right might not act similarly to restrict the speech they dislike, were they to be in control of these same universities, one need only glance at the attempt to institute more conservative tenets of orthodoxy in the teaching of American history at colleges in Florida.

As it happens, the threat to university life posed by political radicalism can best be mitigated by colleges adhering to these twin principles of encouraging wide-open speech – excluding foul language or any true threat of violence or intimidation directed at an individual or group (which would include, for example, any “call for the genocide of Jews”) – and placing strict physical limits on campus protests. There is no reason why, for example, the claim that Israel has committed “genocide” against the Palestinian people, or even that the nation of Israel should not exist as a refuge for Jewish people, abhorrent as these ideas are to me and many others, should be ruled out of order at a university. The best way to discredit such radical misconceptions and convictions is precisely by airing them to reasoned criticism and debate, including by experts in related fields of study, through lectures, classes, teach-ins, and written work. That’s what universities are for. The problem with the “Palestine Writes” conference was not that it was allowed to take place but rather that the faculty who set it up made no effort to seek balance or diversity in the perspectives and expertise that were represented on its panels. Meanwhile, plenty of college rules and criminal laws already exist for prosecuting anyone committing acts of disruption, vandalism, harassment, or personal assault on a college campus. They need to be enforced.

In responding to the recent increase in reported incidents of antisemitism, universities should resist the temptation simply to add “antisemitism awareness” to the list of topics already covered in the mandatory DEI (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) orientation sessions that have become commonplace on campuses. There is little evidence that such efforts at overt moralizing accomplish their stated aims, while they more reliably inhibit the expression of unpopular views. Given that the greatest threat to the universities today stems from political radicalism, a far more effective counter to the ugly manifestations of campus protests lies in demonstrating the shallowness and dangers of the radicals’ ideas and rhetoric.

For Jews, the fact that recent campus actions perceived as antisemitic proceed from left-wing political beliefs as opposed to ages-old myths about the Jewish people, or, for that matter, as opposed to newer, right-wing political ideas like the “great replacement” theory, which holds Jews responsible for encouraging illegal immigrants to come to the United States, may offer little comfort. After all, acts of vandalism, shoving and swearing at individuals, or leaving anonymous, threatening messages are frightening and intimidating regardless of their perpetrators’ motives. Radical beliefs, which so often arise from misplaced anger and poorly understood historical relationships, also have a way of migrating from one side of the political spectrum to the other. Marx, for example, contributed an early, derisive text on Jewish commercialism (On the Jewish Question) that figured in the later evolution of European fascist thought. Additionally, at any point along the way a mentally ill individual might act on these radical ideas to produce terrible violence, or mob psychology might take hold of a portion of a radically engaged crowd, resulting in similar consequences. The latter development never happened at Penn this fall, but it almost did at New York City’s Cooper Union College, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on the glass windows of the campus library, frightening some of the Jewish students inside, as a security guard kept the door closed.

Moreover, in the current era of collegiate-based pro-Palestinian radicalism, which appears to have arrived at Penn as early as 2015 with the rise of groups pushing the goals of the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” campaign [see link at paragraphs 56-90], there really is an element of hatred involved. This is the hatred of Israel. One has only to witness the fury expressed by so many of the speakers at pro-Palestinian campus rallies to recognize that for most of the leaders, if not the followers, at these rallies, Israel is perceived as an illegitimate nation, whose majority Jewish population is living on stolen land that rightfully belongs to Palestinian refugees. This anger toward Israel not infrequently spills over into attacks on Jews who have no immediate connection to Israel. “[B]ecause you have never known the sanctuary of a home,” one presenter at Penn’s “Palestine Writes” conference put it, “…it’s no wonder you want our land for your own.” Who is the “you” in this sentence if not worldwide Jewry? And how else to explain the Penn rally speaker’s retort, noted above, to American Jews in the crowd to “go back to Moscow or Brooklyn,” or the target of one of the threatening messages, also noted above, in this instance conveying a bomb threat aimed at the Lauder College House, Penn’s newest, large dormitory, which was named for its biggest donors, Jewish family members of the Estée Lauder estate? One cannot read the 84-page civil complaint, filed in December by two Jewish students at Penn, alleging that Penn has allowed a hostile environment for its Jewish students to be created on its campus, without acknowledging the genuine sense of fear that evidently gripped many of these students (over 200 placed their names on one petition), as they watched and heard boisterous displays of anti-Israeli sentiment and received occasional antisemitic slurs week after week throughout the fall [see link at paragraphs 2, 101, 104, 107, 141-145, 161, 165-173, 191]. 

And yet, it would be a mistake to think the recent events at Penn and other American college campuses signify a true resurgence of virulent antisemitism akin to the widespread abuse Jews suffered during the 1930s in the United States, let alone in the cities of Europe. A number of factors serve to limit the current wave of anti-Jewish sentiment, but perhaps the main one is that the hostility at present really is focused on Israel, not on Jewish people as such. (See Eitan Hersh’s valuable observations about this distinction, as revealed in attitudes held by far left-wing as opposed to far right-wing college students.) It is probably not an accident that the lead student plaintiff in the civil lawsuit against Penn is a dual Israeli-American citizen [see link at paragraph 15], for he has reason to fee l particularly vulnerable to attack under these circumstances. And while this young man succeeded in obtaining the signatures of roughly 200 Penn students on a petition to prod the university to curtail pro-Palestinian activism, that number is still a relatively small fraction (about 12%) of Penn’s overall Jewish student population. It is likely that a majority of Jews at Penn did not feel personally threatened by the events of last fall. (Two post-October 7 surveys that purport to show widespread fear and anxiety among Jewish college students have drawn their respondents from those students with particularly strong attachments to Israel, in one case from a pool of young adult Jews who had applied to Birthright Israel, in the other case from students who appear to have been selected by Hillel campus organizations [see note on methodology at end of link]. A more relevant recent survey, one specifically designed not to exclude students with more minimal Jewish identities, found that roughly one third of all Jewish students expressed anxieties about being visibly Jewish on campus, about the same proportion who said they had been personally targeted by antisemitic comments, slurs, or threats. That proportion rose to somewhat less than two-thirds when respondents were asked if they believed Jewish students “pay a social penalty” for supporting Israel as a Jewish state.)

Indeed, some of Penn’s Jewish students conspicuously joined in many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, either in formal groups or as individuals. One Jewish student group found itself in a confrontation with the university administration, when it insisted on going ahead with showing a documentary film critical of Israel’s West Bank policies despite the university’s decision to delay the showing until passions on the campus had cooled. We should not be surprised by this split among Penn’s Jewish students, because American Jews under the age of forty hold considerably more critical opinions about Israel’s general policies toward Palestinians than do those older than forty. 

The demographic characteristics of the campus protesters, so far as can be determined by second-hand observation, also fit with the demonstrators’ focus on Israel. Palestinian Americans appear to have dominated the protests at Penn, both as the leading speakers at rallies and in the make-up of the supporting crowds. Some are even Palestinians attending American colleges as foreign students – the Penn student who ripped down the Israeli flag from above the Orthodox Jewish student residence hall appears to belong to this category. Many are likely to be in contact with relatives and friends living in the West Bank or Gaza. To some extent, the radicalism of these ethnic Americans, focused on harsh legacies from “the old country” and fueled by the desire for upward mobility in the face of perceived prejudices in their new country, resembles past waves of second-generation immigrant radicalism (among, for example, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Mexican Americans) common throughout our country’s history. Knowing this history, however, doesn’t make anger-driven radical actions any the less worrisome for institutions, such as universities, that require openness and reasonability to operate, or for individuals, who may easily be demonized as “enemies of the people.”

Radical movements tend to suffer from an unwillingness to look inward and to recognize the failings of their own group’s past leadership, choosing instead to place all blame on their historical antagonists and the latter’s perceived representatives in the present. The pro-Palestinian campus radicals clearly suffer from this flaw, as they have uncritically carried forward the tragic failings of past Palestinian leaders to seize numerous opportunities since 1947 to build a Palestinian nation alongside Israel. As today’s pro-Palestinian radicals have attracted support from among young black, feminist, and other radicals, they have allowed themselves to demonize Israel, just as the Black Lives Matter movement and certain gender radicals have demonized white people as “privileged racists” or men as “cis-gendered patriarchs.”

As a species of scapegoating, antisemitism is inherently unpredictable in its trajectory. It is well to be on guard to see if in the future today’s political antisemitism may burst out of its current anti-Israeli boundaries or spread beyond college campuses, their adjacent youthful urban enclaves, and Arab-American ethnic communities. For now, this worry remains muted by the firewall of sorts that exists in the overwhelming support for Israel shown by most Americans after the attack of October 7. However, the threat posed by left-wing political radicalism itself, particularly to college campuses, is real enough and must be countered by reasoned argument and the enforcement of lawful behavior.

Anti-racist Lens Distorts History on New Jersey "Freeholders"

This opinion essay was published on History News Network on September 27, 2020. Internal citations for this article are available on request. Contact Tony Fels.

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I grant there is no compelling reason for New Jersey’s counties to retain the traditional term “chosen freeholders” as the name for their elected officials. In a bill signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy on August 21, the title of these lawmakers will become “county commissioners” at the beginning of 2021. The new term certainly conveys better than “chosen freeholder” what these elected representatives do.

But there is little basis for tying the older term to the history of slavery or racial prejudice, as many of New Jersey’s political leaders have done. Governor Murphy, for example, lent his support to the legislation by tweeting, “let us tear down words born from racism”. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) claimed the title “is mired in the language of slavery”. And Felicia Hopson, Director of Burlington County’s Board of Freeholders, linked retiring the term to the goal of “[c]ontinuing our work to end systemic racism…by eliminating an antiquated title from an era when slavery and racism [were] tolerated…”. 

The term “freeholder,” first brought to the American colonies from England in the early seventeenth century, meant only a person who owned land (or other property) free of debt. The holding did not have to be a particularly large estate; by the mid-eighteenth century farms as small as half an acre were likely adequate to qualify. The idea was that such people, by virtue of their property ownership, would have the economic independence to be free from the influence of more powerful figures and could therefore be trusted with the vote. The “chosen freeholders” were simply the people selected by the freeholders at large to make the administrative decisions for a county until the next election came around.

The freeholders had a profoundly positive effect on the early development of liberal democracy, and nowhere more so than in New Jersey. A remarkable document, “The Concessions and Agreements of the Proprietors, Freeholders and Inhabitants of the Province of West Jersey in America” (1677), for example, established for the new settlements around Burlington the principle of rule by consent of the governed. Signed by 150 individuals, this early constitution contained a bill of rights, guaranteed religious liberty, and proclaimed it had “put the power in the people.” On its basis, the province’s first representative assembly, elected by the freeholders, convened at Burlington in 1681. Two other elected assemblies had begun even earlier in East Jersey. Once East and West Jersey came together to form the Crown colony of New Jersey in 1702, the freeholders continued to stand up for their rights against the royal governor and his council all the way until the American Revolution.

Who were the freeholders? Certainly, nearly all were men. And because Europeans had founded the colonies, the freeholders were overwhelmingly white. By the mid-1700s, Black Africans comprised about 7% of New Jersey’s population, the great majority of whom were enslaved, including by some of the freeholders.

But another unique feature of New Jersey’s history points to a way in which the ideal of freeholder democracy challenged even these limitations. New Jersey holds the distinction of being the only state, just after the start of the American Revolution, to have allowed both some white women (single and with a certain amount of property) and some Black men and women (those who were free, owned property, and, if female, unmarried) to vote. This unusual development in the history of American suffrage, which lasted for about thirty years, began without fanfare, indeed without any special notice at all – which in turn suggests that single, propertied women, both free Black and white, and free Black men of property had likely joined the ranks of the freeholders for some stretch of years prior to the Revolution.

The world of the colonial period was not the same as ours today. Their world was one based on a principle of social hierarchy that remained largely unquestioned. Racial distinctions, at least in the northern colonies, did not lie at the center of this social system. A sizable minority -- including the wealthy and the middle-class freeholders – occupied positions of independence. Beneath them stood a number of dependent classes: married women, tenant farmers, wage workers, servants, slaves, and the poor. And just as today we cherish the principle of freedom from arbitrary arrest (what came to be known as habeas corpus) that a group of English lords, who probably cared little about anyone other than themselves, won from their king back in 1215 with the Magna Carta, we can similarly pay tribute to the significant, if still limited, gains the freeholders of New Jersey made toward the expansion of popular participation in government.

No, Christine Blasey Probably Isn't Behaving Like the Children Who Leveled False Accusations in the Salem Witch Trials

This article was originally published on History News Network on September 25th, 2018

Note: This opinion essay was written on the eve of Christine Blasey Ford’s and Brett Kavanuagh’s public testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The title was not my own (which was “Salem Analogy Misapplied to Christine Blasey”) but was supplied by the editor of the History News Network, reflecting his belief, even before both antagonists had presented their cases, that Ford was telling the truth and Kavanaugh was not. (I managed to get the editor to insert the word “Probably” into his title to soften the strength of his conviction.) The point of my essay was not, at this moment in the unfolding controversy, to pass judgment on Ford’s claim but rather to call attention to the historical advances in legal proceedings since 1692 (the time of the Salem witch hunt) that provided both sides in such conflicts a reasonably fair hearing. The Salem lessons for me, unlike for Wall Street Journal columnist Lance Morrow, whom I was addressing in this piece, lay not in quickly validating one side or the other but rather in not rushing to judgment. Had I written this essay after Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s public testimonies, however, I could have embraced more fully the perspective implied by the existing title.

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President Trump isn’t the only one citing the Salem witch hunt to shape public opinion these days. Reference to the infamous witch hunt of 1692 has again entered public discourse to explain psychology professor Christine Blasey’s accusation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers. Columnist Lance Morrow used the Salem analogy in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay to cast doubt on the truth of Professor Blasey’s charge, likening it to the wild imaginings of the Salem girls and young women whose accusations of witchcraft led to the execution of twenty innocent women and men (five others died in prison awaiting trial). For Morrow, ideological extremism – religious in nature for Salem’s seventeenth-century Puritans, political for today’s progressives supposedly behind Professor Blasey’s effort to derail Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination – offers the common denominator in the analogy to Salem.

Morrow’s reasoning is plausible, but the lessons of the Salem events for this bitter conflict of today lie deeper and point in a different direction.

The plausibility of his interpretation begins with the adolescent aspect to the charges. The core group of about seven Salem accusers were girls and young women ages 11 to 20, just as Christine Blasey has, in effect, returned to her own age of 15 to recall what she says happened to her on the night in question. We know further from the controversy over recalled memories of sexual abuse that broke out in the early 1990s that memories of childhood traumas, as “recovered” by sessions with psychotherapists much later in life, can be filtered through distortions of multiple sorts, making the truth of such claims suspect.

The Salem accusations of witchcraft, moreover, came forth within a social context of local, village grievances that often stemmed back generations to the belief that a mother or grandmother of the accused had also been a “witch,” who had earlier injured members of the accuser’s extended family. The upper-middle-class world of suburban Washington D.C. in the 1970s and 1980s may similarly be regarded as a relatively self-enclosed “village,” in which most people knew one another by sight or reputation. And, as several sources have reported, Professor Blasey’s parents suffered an adverse legal ruling at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh’s mother, also a judge.

Add to these circumstances the political penchant today to assign stark labels of good and evil to public figures with whom one agrees or disagrees, and the parallel to the Salem events appears quite compelling. At Salem the witch hunt gathered its greatest momentum when a former minister of Salem Village, Reverend George Burroughs, stood accused (he would soon be executed). Similarly, to bring charges of sexual assault against a man who has been a highly respectable judge for many years may be seen as an act of great audacity, raising the “Me-Too” movement to its highest profile yet.

On the other hand, the truthfulness of Professor Blasey’s charge is just as plausible. The fact that she only very slowly and over a long period of years gained self-awareness about the alleged attack – sufficient even to know what to call it – is a common feature of the stories of genuine sex abuse victims. Her process of coming to terms with the trauma of this alleged event from her teenage years is corroborated by what she confided to her psychotherapist and husband, beginning in 2012, six years before anyone knew that Judge Kavanaugh would become a Supreme Court nominee. That she wavered over the past couple of months before making her identity known reflected real fears that she and her family would be seriously threatened with reprisals, a fear that has been fully borne out by the harassment she has suffered from the public in the few days since her anonymity ended. She and her family have even been forced into hiding for their own safety. She now faces the prospect of a grueling public appearance before a congressional committee that is likely to include strenuous attempts by Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters to discredit her, not to mention the judge’s own forceful denial of her account. In short, she seemingly has nothing to gain from her public accusation of Judge Kavanaugh except precisely what she claims is her only motive: to do her civic duty in preventing a man who is not as upstanding as he appears from gaining a seat on the nation’s highest court.

This is where the Salem events from 1692 offer some valuable lessons for today. Those lessons do not come down to raising doubts about the veracity of Professor Blasey’s charge against Judge Kavanaugh, since at this moment we simply don’t know enough about her accusation to be able to determine who is telling the truth. One forgets from the vantage point of today just how rational the charge of witchcraft seemed to nearly everyone, whether educated or not, in seventeenth-century New England. Nearly all believed in a cosmos of spirits, including good spirits (or angels) and bad spirits (or demons). Given this practically universal belief, it was perfectly reasonable to think that some individuals might be enlisted by Satan to help carry out his plans to overturn the pious Puritan commonwealth. It was not the accusers’ beliefs (or delusions, depending on your point of view) that are the hallmark of the Salem witch hunt but rather the rush to judgment by a fearful community intent on finding scapegoats to punish for perceived misfortunes. That this community would utilize its own beliefs to do so is no more unusual than later communities or nations using their own beliefs to persecute innocent people or groups.

What is different between the events of Salem and today is that the legal system of seventeenth-century Massachusetts had few safeguards against such perversions of justice. Criminal defendants were not yet entitled to the aid of counsel. Judges did not see themselves as neutral upholders of legal ground rules but rather entered into the proceedings on one side or the other. Examinations and trials lay vulnerable to the emotions of the crowd. And non-empirical evidence was ruled admissible in court. A congressional committee is not a court of law, but if it fails to take advantage of modern legal protections for both sides in this dispute, we will find ourselves back in a horrifying era which we thought we had outgrown.

"Occupy" Movement Must Move to the Center

This opinion essay was published in the San Francisco Chronicle (print) on December 13, 2011. It appears on the SFGate website at the same date.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has reached a tactical dead end. This much has been apparent for weeks. Remarkably, its fundamental message of seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth in America has not been lost, despite the extremism and eccentricity of the protests.

The message clearly resonates with a majority of Americans, as many polls have indicated. The problem is not that the movement needs a sharper focus or a more detailed list of demands. Social movements do not have to make policy, much less write legislation. They simply need to articulate the strength of feeling in the population for a change of course.

The more all-embracing its message, the better. But how can the latent sentiments that so many Americans feel today for a return to the principles of fairness and equality of opportunity be expressed in all their fullness?

An analogy might be found in the movement to end the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Protests against the war were started by small minorities of radicals among students, religious figures and draft-age youth. But in 1967 an umbrella organization calling itself the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (nicknamed the "Mobe") formed to sponsor huge marches against the war in New York, Washington D.C., and other cities.

Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in New York on April 15, 1967, to protest U.S. involvement in the war. Another 100,000 or more showed up at the Lincoln Memorial in October of the same year. In November, 1969, half a million people again demonstrated in the nation's capital to speed up the process of bringing the troops home.

Because these rallies were thoroughly peaceful protests, conventional in form and held on weekends, they attracted the widest range of participants, including thousands of middle- and working-class families.

Today's movement for economic fairness would equally benefit from a tactical turn toward the center. In fact, there is no good reason to continue to refer to it as an "occupation."

Americans do not want to live in tents; they want to live in their own houses with mortgages that are reflective of their homes' actual value and that can be paid off at reasonable terms. Americans do not want to form "affinity groups"; they want to be able to spend time with their families and friends without the anxieties of having to hold on to their jobs for dear life or being without work at all. Americans do not want to gather nightly to make political decisions by consensus; they want their traditional, representative form of democracy to work for them in an honest, straightforward manner.

There may not be 99 percent of the population ready to join a march on a Sunday to "tax the rich." But if even 30 percent showed up, that would create quite a stir.