Below are excerpts from a speech Sunday by Eric Cohen, CEO of Tikvah, a Jewish educational think tank, in response to the antisemitic protests at US colleges.
The rival images emerging from universities across our land reveal a great struggle for the American soul.
It is a tale of two cultures, with Jews and Israel at the center of the story.
At Columbia, a mob of students, faculty and professional activists camp out for days calling for the annihilation of Israel.
At the University of Florida, meanwhile, Jews gather together in strength, filling an entire university arena for a Passover seder, where President Ben Sasse proudly joins the celebration of Israelite freedom.
At Rutgers and Northwestern, university leaders appease extremist demands for more pro-Hamas programming and professorships, while the entire campus lawn at Southern Methodist University is lined with hundreds of Israeli flags.
At Yale, an outspoken Jewish student is stabbed in the eye, while at Hillsdale College, students celebrate the Jewish people as their “elder brothers in faith” and see Israel as a heroic defender of good against evil.
As so often in history, Jews are once again the messengers of deeper civilizational troubles.
Our challenge is not simply keeping Jews safe or fighting against antisemitic discrimination by classifying Jews as another protected group of vulnerable victims.
Safety alone is a feeble aspiration for a great people and a great nation, and Jew-hatred is not merely a form of discrimination but a radical ideology that seeks to rid Western civilization of the Hebraic spirit by delegitimizing the Jewish people and wiping the Jewish state off the map.
The Jewish experience in recent weeks is simply the most vivid demonstration of why many of the existing citadels of elite American culture are broken beyond repair.
They indulge mob rule over ordered liberty, revolution over civic piety, appeasement over principle and utopian fantasies about social justice over the weighty work of preserving civilization.
Since Oct. 7, American Jews have been mugged by reality, and we will need to choose how to respond, both as Jews and as Americans: Will we accommodate the demand to shed all Jewish and Zionist attachments as the progressive price of admission at the elite universities, or will we fight back against these broken institutions?
Will we declare that the golden age of American Jewry is over, or will we take responsibility — as proud Jews — for helping renew the American experiment?
The case for an exodus from the corrupt quads of Columbia and Harvard seems both urgent and clear.
The question is: an exodus to where and for what purpose? To save ourselves as Jews or to help save America from those who seek to destroy it?
For Jews who care about the American future, the best strategy is to marshal Jewish energy, talent and money to create centers of excellence within those colleges and universities that value Jewish civilization, respect Israel and celebrate the Hebraic spirit of America and the West.
We can build new honors programs at supportive institutions that put Jewish ideas at the center.
We can create scholarship funds that attract the most talented young Jews to these new places.
We can train a new generation of professors who understand the Jewish meaning of the West and the hard-won lessons of Jewish history.
And we can launch new Jewish colleges that prepare young Jews for the weighty responsibility of preserving American liberty.
The stakes are high.
The current assault against the Jews on campus is not driven by irrational prejudice.
It is deeper and more purposeful.
The Jews represent everything the enemies of American civilization seek to destroy the moral code of the Hebrew Bible, which the anti-Jews seek to replace with woke secularism or radical Islam; the culture of meritocracy, which the anti-Jews seek to replace with the false justice of the new diversity, equity and inclusion regime; and the belief in national sovereignty, which the anti-Zionists seek to destroy in the name of UN-style utopianism.
As go the Jews, so goes the West. The radical activists and their academic apologists understand this deep civilizational truth — and so must we.
American Jews are a twice-chosen people, chosen by God and chosen by history.
If, as Jews and as Americans, we still believe that America matters for the fate of mankind — and that the fate of America itself now hangs in the balance — then we should commit ourselves to the project of American renewal.
We should focus not simply on our safety in America but our responsibility for America.
Are we up for the challenge?