Yesterday I was forced to sit through an overtly anti-Semitic lecture," said Jewish student Alexa Smith. "As a Jew who is proud of my people and my homeland, I sat through this lecture feeling targeted and smeared to be as evil as the man who perpetuated the Holocaust and systematically murdered six million Jews," she added.

Smith cited a previous lecture from the same series, where the speaker referred to Israel as a "terrorist state" and declared its soldiers "unworthy of being represented as actual human beings" in his artwork. The school administration, recently lauded for its strong statement opposing an academic boycott of Israel, sought to minimize the incident. A spokesman emphasized school policy avoiding censorship in favor of free speech. Ironically, The University of Michigan is currently fighting a federal lawsuit, accusing its Bias Response Team of overactive censorship.

Smith later met with university leadership, calling for its adoption of the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism: "We could have avoided this mess if the university had a policy of teaching this definition to all professors and faculty."

 

And just as a reminder/refresher here is the internationally accepted

Working Definition of Anti-Semitism

 

"Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."

 

The following examples may serve as illustrations:

 

Manifestations might include the targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for "why things go wrong." It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.

 

Contemporary examples of anti-Semitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

 

 

 

Similar anti-Semitic fliers were posted on the doors of organizations that Soros has funded in the past. While I was writing this, an email from the far-right anti-Islam polemicist Frank Gaffney, who is close to National Security Adviser John Bolton, popped into my Inbox: "George Soros, The Anti-Christ, or Just His Right-hand Man?"

 

A narrative needs a theory to undergird it, and Asra Nomani provided one on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal. She tracked Soros money to an array of liberal organizations, which in turn had funded some of the groups that had organized the protests against Kavanaugh. She depicted the protesters as a well-organized army, "field marshals" and all.

 

Nomani, however, does not detail when Soros gave organizations such as Planned Parenthood the money (a cash infusion in, say, 2005, could hardly have anticipated Kavanaugh's nomination); she doesn't say whether Soros money was earmarked and for what; she does not compare Soros' giving to that of other major liberal donors who have backed the groups; and only in the last paragraph does she note that such giving is commonplace across the political spectrum.

 

(Nomani's template appears to be this broadside against Soros by the far-right Media Research Center published after the 2017 Women's March.)

 

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., who is facing a strong challenge from Democrat Rep. Jacky Rosen, who is Jewish, picked up the theme in a tweet linking Nomani's piece, saying Rosen got money from the same folks as the anti-Kavanaugh protesters.

 

One metric of who spent what in the protests is TV ads: Ad Age says pro-Kavanaugh groups outspent anti-Kavanaugh groups 2-1.

 

Another separate but related metric is who is spending what in funding the midterm elections. Open Secrets lists Soros as the fifth most generous giver, at close to $16 million. No. 1 on the list is conservative Jewish donor Sheldon Adelson at $55 million, followed by a liberal donor, Tom Steyer, at $42 million.