From The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism by Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal, 10/13/23:

That anti-Israel protests erupted on elite campuses this week—not after the accidental killing of a Palestinian demonstrator but after the systematic murder of at least 1,300 people in Israel—signifies an egregious failure at the heart of American higher education. That so many students and academics could think this was a proper response to an act of mass murder suggests something deeply amiss on our campuses. What we are witnessing is the fruition, many decades in the making, of a habit of mind that can accurately be called Marxian.

Notwithstanding many dauntless efforts over several generations to defend regulated market economies as just, the belief that profit is theft, that prosperity under capitalism is taken from the poor laborer by force, is so much a part of today’s left-progressive mindset as to be unquestioned and immovable. The entire “social justice” movement is premised on the belief that if one group does well and another doesn’t, the former must have taken advantage of the latter—a thousand explanatory circumstances be damned. (See Thomas Sowell’s latest book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” for a brilliant treatment of the subject.) You can hear Marx’s concept of exploitation in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s constant assertion that successful corporations and wealthy Americans have somehow gamed the system at the expense of the poor and middle class.

That’s why they particularly hate Israel—a wealthy nation among neighbors whose poverty is relieved only by oil revenue. Israel is the one country in the Middle East where ordinary people stand a good chance of creating prosperity for themselves and their families. For modern progressive academics, weaned on the Marxian concept that wealth is the result of exploitation, that is precisely the reason for Israel’s guilt. They can’t behold its prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors.

Democratic political leaders, who have credibility on elite campuses their Republican colleagues lack, have a duty to denounce these spineless university presidents and fomenters of anti-Israel bigotry. Jew-hatred among the cognoscenti has a history of spreading faster than anybody expected.

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