“Antisemitic Invective” at the University of Michigan Law School
[Author’s note: I published a significantly longer version of this post at the Times of Israel.]
I recently posted an article about the increasingly hostile environment Jewish students face at elite law schools. Within hours, I heard from Michigan Law students upset and concerned about what one called “antisemitic invective” on a student email listserv for students called LawOpen, a listserv used almost entirely for student-group events and to resell tickets.
Students representing the Jewish Law Students Association sent out two separate emails, each advertising an event. The first announced an anti-bias event sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the prominent (and very liberal) Jewish civil rights organization. The second announced that students could apply for a trip to Israel.
The ADL email was met with unhinged invective. One student wrote, among other things, that ADL is a “hateful group” that, among other things, supports “racist, militarized policing.” Moreover, the student claimed that ADL’s anti-bias work “centers the experience of white Jewish people” and therefore “is not true anti-bias work.”
A second student accused ADL of being a “pro-racism organization” and supporting this accusation with a laundry list of charges ranging from the grossly exaggerated to the inventvely. As a rather clear example of the latter, the student claimed that ADL tried to squash medical and social recognition of AIDS. Right-wing hate groups and the Nation of Islam have made wild charges against the ADL in the past, but even after consulting Dr. Google and inquiring with antisemitism experts, I couldn’t find a source for that one.
More disheartening to me than the nutty conspiratorial emails about the ADL is the reaction of the rest of the
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