As the Israel and Hamas war rages in the Middle East, the Jewish president of a local Catholic liberal arts university talked about recent incidents of antisemitism on the campuses of elite colleges and universities. Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University in Worcester, compared the modern-day incidents to the history of antisemitism in these places while saying that an education with a mission to seek and love the truth is a possible solution to this hate.
President Weiner was presenting Assumption’s Rabbi Joseph Klein Lecture on Feb. 15, as part of a series focused on Jewish-Catholic dialogue.
Jews and Catholics have much in common, President Weiner asserted in his lecture, titled, “Yes, I am a Jew: Education and Antisemitism.” They encounter one another amidst honest differences about serious things.
He contrasted that approach with stories to illustrate antisemitism and the refusal to seek the truth.
Since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, more than 1,200 Israelis and more than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, the Associated Press reports.
President Weiner said his aim was neither to defend nor to denounce any given Israeli policies. But he said the “categorization of Jews as oppressors has galvanized an eruption of Jew hatred globally, including here in Worcester,” and this antisemitism has become acceptable in the mainstream.
“At universities like NYU and Columbia, students have replicated – not approximated, but replicated – Nazi propaganda while demanding a stop to what they call ‘Israeli genocide,’” he continued.
He told about posters with photos of hostages Hamas took on Oct. 7 being defaced recently “on the campus of the supposed crown jewel of higher learning in America: Harvard University.”
President Weiner said, “Anti-Jewish hate is also explicit and sustained on many other campuses where Jewish students have been beaten, menaced and physically threatened.”
He told of a Jewish professor at City University of New York being confronted by a student who said, “I can’t believe you bombed that hospital last night and killed all those people” in the Middle East.
The professor explained that terrorists had said they caused the explosion accidentally. The student replied, “I will never believe that.”
That student, President Weiner said, was indifferent to the facts. The premise was that Jews are guilty by definition.
Some people say apologists for Hamas are proof of failed education; they don’t know the history of Israel or the criminality of Hamas, the president said. He said he hopes that is true in some cases, but he has recently concluded that “there are limits to education as an antidote to hate.” If Jews are permanently considered oppressors, what difference can any education make?
But, at Assumption, “few students are ideologues, and almost all are curious,” he said, and liberal education, largely being offered at Catholic institutions like Assumption, can form people capable of thinking with clarity and with respect for the human person.
Liberal education does benefit people in their careers, but its benefits are “most bountiful precisely when they are byproducts of the desire to know for its own sake,” he said.
In the United States there is no Jewish equivalent of Catholic liberal education, he said.
“For many Jews, the barrier to considering Catholic institutions is often the fear that students will be forced to conform to religious dogmas,” he said. But “Catholic liberal education, like the Jewish tradition of learning, is liberating not stifling.”
Both Jews and Catholics seek understanding within a context of faith, he said. In Scripture, the Jewish people say, “Everything that God has spoken, we will do and we will hear.” President Weiner said one interpretation is that “hear” refers to seeking to understand, which follows after obedience. He likened that to St. Augustine saying, “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”
For about 75 years, American Jews have considered degrees from elite institutions as “a gateway to acceptance in American society,” but have faced discrimination in admission requirements, President Weiner said. Catholics faced similar barriers, he said, so Catholic universities were formed.
Catholics and Jews have seen learning as a form of contemplation, leisure or rest, in the sense of stepping back from present cares and controversies and doing study for the sake of truth, rather than its usefulness, he said.
“Many of our elite universities have abandoned roots that were similar,” President Weiner maintained. “Rather than questioning and conversing, they affirm and inflame. ... Students enroll not to learn what they do not know but rather to express ... that of which they are already certain. ...
“Might there be some connection between a culture of moral certainty and the cocksure assignment of wholesale groups into categories like oppressors and oppressed? Moral certainty is antithetical to education but indispensable to indoctrination.”
By contrast, Assumption students value the sense of community there, the president said. There is a friendship of community members “for whom disagreement is both natural and essential to a shared goal of seeking truth.” Talmudic and Catholic learning has involved debate and taking opponents’ arguments seriously, he said.
He said Catholic institutions have been mostly free of antisemitism seen on other campuses, and Jewish families should ask why.
Though Ivy League degrees are prestigious, “where do our children belong?” he asked fellow Jews, noting the current fear for Jewish students’ safety on some campuses and the nature of Jewish and Catholic learning.
“If the priority is learning, an institution like Assumption is your home,” he said. Longer-lasting than prestige is “the pursuit of truth in the company of friends,” which Jews, Catholics - and people of other faiths that value what is true, good and beautiful - should be engaged in together.
“This is the place where we can declare, ‘Yes, I am a Catholic,’ ‘Yes, I am a Jew,’” he said. At Assumption, which is unapologetic about its Catholicity and therefore welcoming to all who share its mission “we are bound by the tie that matters most, which is the love of truth.”
– A recording of Assumption University’s Rabbi Joseph Klein Lecture “Yes, I am a Jew: Education and Antisemitism” presented by President Greg Weiner can be found at player.vimeo.com/video/913801064.