"A student movement is not just a student movement," writes Todd Gitlin in Mother Jones. "It's a student movement."
Glad you cleared that up, Todd.
Seriously, though, this is yet another good treatment of the campus anti-Semitism phenomenon by a scion of the old new left, an appropriate complement to Paul Berman's brilliant recent essay in Forward. Echoing the formulation of several other commentators, Gitlin notes that the "socialism of fools" has become "the progressivism of fools," which he casts as a "recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge":
Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if that wasn't bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! As if the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has decided to junk any pretense of standards...This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for the rights of humanity cannot cavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of any people -- whatever you think of Israel's or any other country's foreign policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly history that long made anti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and break from it.
If fighting it unremittingly is not a "progressive" cause, then what kind of progress does progressivism have in mind?
UPDATE: InstaPundit says Alterman is becoming a warblogger: "Eric, you are being assimilated into the blogosphere." True enough. Has anyone else noticed that when you filter out the gratuitous Sullivan-bashing, Alterman's blog is quite a bit better than his formal articles?
Posted by Dr. Frank at June 24, 2002 01:13 PM | TrackBack