College graduation speeches target Jews

Somehow they made it worse.

We recently completed graduation season, a time for celebrating precious milestones. After nearly two years of antisemitic campus unrest, you would expect that elite college presidents had learned their lessons. Sadly, it appears that some of them need to go back to school.

The leading contender for worst graduation season offender appears to be MIT, but perennial problem child Columbia flexed its institutional rot to make a game of it. None of this is a laughing matter, but we Jews have maintained our sense of humor through worse. I refuse to check mine at the door when dealing with unserious people pretending to be serious.

During MIT’s graduation ceremony, the class president went off script to deliver a toxic blood libel against Jews. MIT’s Megha Vemuri dove head-first into a litany of antisemitic greatest hits, including objectively false accusations of Israeli “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” Especially after considering that similar rogue performances already had occurred at other graduation ceremonies, you would have expected MIT to have been prepared. It was not.

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No one grabbed the microphone from Vemuri, turned off the volume, or did anything resembling a reasonable response to a class president going off the rails and driving straight into an antisemitic diatribe.

What happened next was surreal in its inanity: MIT President Sally Kornbluth — a Jew! — tripped over herself to endorse Vemuri’s right to free expression, awkwardly trying to pivot to the regularly scheduled program.

Kornbluth did absolutely nothing in the moment to apologize to the Jewish and Israeli members of the audience, who either had already walked out disgusted by what they had heard or had picked their jaws off the ground after realizing they had spent a small fortune for their children to attend this once-great institution. It was reported that after the dust had cleared on the disgraceful episode, MIT reactively punished Vemuri, precluding her from walking with her classmates in the procession. But the damage had been done.

Sadly, it was all too predictable.

MIT had been warned. Roughly two weeks earlier, during the graduation ceremony for NYU’s Gallatin School, student Logan Rozos (hailed by Teen Vogue as an up-and-coming leader) similarly had gone off script. Rozos’ hate-spewed drivel included this doozy: “My moral and political commitments guide me to say that the only appropriate thing to say in this time and to a group this large is a recognition of the atrocities currently happening in Palestine…, I want to say that the genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the Unted States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months.” Predictably many in the audience applauded and cheered.

The point being that MIT should have been ready. When a smart person (or institution) is unprepared, it is either a mistake or a deliberate decision. In MIT’s case, history has proven that this was a deliberate decision not to have a plan for this obvious contingency.

Lest we forget the top purveyor of antisemitic hate speech, during her commencement address, Columbia President Claire Shipman went out of her way to specifically acknowledge the absence of Mahmoud Khalil, the poster child for violent antisemitic protests. Shipman gallingly remarked that “[m]any in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate Mahmoud Khalil.” Sadly, there were loud cheers and enthusiastic responses from far too many in the audience. Shipman’s remarks were another deliberately nasty choice. She chose to “mourn” the absence of a former student who has become the face of Hamas’s educational wing in the U.S. Khalil is an SJP leader who peddled Hamas propaganda and incited others to riot against Jewish students. Recently, Khalil was released from federal detention, and he promptly was feted by the likes of AOC and other Democratic politicians, who hailed him as a pseudo-martyr instead of condemning him as a terrorist supporter.

Khalil’s legal process will continue to play itself out, but regardless of where it leads, Shipman cheapened herself (and Columbia) by pandering to the school’s worst excesses.

When the mad Muppet Greta Thornburg attempts to sail to Gaza, we may be able to shrug it off as a harmless stunt, even though it received substantial media attention, with many fawning over Greta and her merry morons despite the patent lunacy of the moment. But when university presidents such as Kornbluth and Shipman thumb their haughty noses at the Jewish community — even after their disastrous performances during last year’s congressional testimony — it tells you that they just don’t get it. Or they don’t want to get it.

If a student took the stage to level similar hate speech in the direction of any other minority, the supposed dignitaries would have elbowed each other out of the way in hopes of being the first noble soul to seize the microphone and condemn such “free expression.”  New records would be set as to how quickly an aging academic could leap from their seat to save the day. But when the hate speech was directed at Jews, those same academic “leaders” sat comfortably numb and seemingly enjoyed the show.

Words matter. Hate has come home to roost in the form of Jews being gunned down in cold blood on the streets of Washington D.C., set ablaze in broad daylight in Boulder, Colorado, and the Passover arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s home. These attacks against Jews did not happen by accident. And there is more than a dotted line between antisemitic campus rhetoric and those sociopaths who were emboldened by the cause. As far as I am concerned, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and others have blood on their hands.

While many schools, thankfully, appear to have gotten the message and taken concrete steps to protect Jewish students, those that refuse to acknowledge the danger of the moment must be held accountable. We should be grateful for the courageous university presidents who have recognized the need to course-correct; but we should have zero tolerance for those who continue to bury their heads in the sand — or worse.

When we indulge words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “white oppressor colonialists” under the guise of acceptable political speech or “free expression,” that breathes life into grievous lies about Jews. There is no serious discussion to be had about whether there is merit to these blood libels. We can debate whether there should be a ceasefire in Gaza, or eventually a two-state solution, but when we tolerate abject falsehoods about the Jewish state, we put targets on the backs of our children, brothers, and sisters, on campus and on the streets of America. Yet somehow, these falsehoods have become part of the accepted vernacular in so-called “progressive” circles (including among misguided Jews), and these words deployed to describe what Jews are doing to defend themselves against Iranian-funded terrorists.

We must firmly draw and hold the line. When university presidents or politicians cross it, we must hold them accountable by all available lawful means. Just as a river cannot flow without its banks, free speech does not exist in a vacuum without any limitations — especially at universities. These can be tricky lines to draw, but we must make a commitment to ourselves and to our children that we will push back against today’s blood libels against our people. There is no inch to give.

Ari M. Berman lives in West Caldwell and is a member of that town’s Congregation Agudath Israel. He is an attorney.