We Are All Jews

Safe spaces and Play-Doh are among the artifacts of Woke academia's present reaction to things, now including Jews, that allegedly make them feel "unsafe." It wasn't always that way.

The term “crybullies” is a wonderful invention. It brilliantly captures the mindset of the troops of today’s academic Left, at once menacing like the thugs they aspire to be and whining like the little brats they are.

There was a time, back in the Forties, when people in their twenties acted differently. I’ll be getting to that in the second half of this post. For now, let’s recall how Woke college students — now in disturbingly large numbers — react to ideas not in keeping with The Required Way of Thinking. Just at this moment, what’s required on campus is anti-Semitic indignation (at best, and more typically hate) against Jews who believe Israel has the right forcibly to defend itself against barbarism. But that’s just the latest. It wasn’t long ago at all that the targets of the crybullies were campus speakers with conservative viewpoints generally. Among such speakers were (and are) those who oppose kangaroo courts for males accused of sexual misconduct, and instead prefer what up to now has been standard due process. This piece about the contretemps at Brown University is regrettably instructive:

KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”

Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.

Of course bubbles, coloring books and Play-Doh are hardly the only or even the main tools Woke students employ when faced with — oh the horror! — differing viewpoints. Vicious, menacing protests like the one faced by Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford are at least as common, probably more common. But the decision to reconstitute the thumb-sucking precincts of facsimile kindergarten is instructive, partly for reasons only psychiatrists can understand (and I’m no psychiatrist), but also for the mind-bending contrast with how people in their twenties faced danger — not pretend danger, but real danger — only three generations ago. The episode I’m about to describe is particularly enlightening because it, like our present circumstances, illuminates the choices we are called upon to make when we understand that Jews are our neighbors and co-workers.

From NPR (emphasis added):

Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds of Knoxville, Tenn. [then 25 years old], was a noncommissioned officer who participated in the landing of U.S. forces in Europe. He was captured in the Battle of the Bulge….

Edmonds was held at a Nazi POW camp near Ziegenhain, Germany, where he was the highest-ranking American soldier.

When the Germans demanded that all the Jewish POWs in the camp identify themselves, Edmonds ordered all the U.S. soldiers to step forward — hundreds of them.

When the German camp commander saw all the inmates reporting, he said, "They cannot all be Jews!"…

"We are all Jews," Edmonds replied. He cited the Geneva Conventions and refused to identify any prisoners by religion.

His son, Chris Edmonds, tells NPR's Emily Harris that the Nazi officer became enraged.

"He turned blood-red, pulled his Luger out, pressed it into the forehead of my dad, and said, 'I'll give you one more chance. Have the Jewish men step forward or I will shoot you on the spot,' " Edmonds said.

"They said my dad paused, and said, 'If you shoot, you'll have to shoot us all.' "

The officer backed down.

One of the Jewish POWs, NCO Paul Stern, [recalled], "Although 70 years have passed, I can still hear the words he said to the German camp commander."

There’s not much I can add to that story. The contrast between actual courage in the face of death versus manufactured “distress” in the face of opposing ideas is more stunning than words can convey. So is the contrast between the loving embrace of people with different religious backgrounds versus sneering superiority. So is Sgt. Edmonds’ instinctive knowledge of what it means to be an American versus the sick, cowardly imitation of it that academia and the rest of our rotting culture peddles today.

As far as I’m concerned, for as long as Israel is in a war to preserve the basics of civilized life, we’re all Jews.