I am a Jewish Crimson Editor, and I See the Writing on the Wall…of Resistance
Crimson | Gemma J. Schneider ’23
In a courageous piece, Harvard undergrad and Crimson editor Gemma J. Schneider ’23 expresses “a mix of sadness, disappointment and fear” about the decision of the Crimson Editorial Board to endorse the BDS movement and platform the “deceptive,” “wildly distorted” and “dangerous” declarations of BDS’s co-founder.
Schneider dismantles the Crimson’s muddled logic and evasion of “all precision and nuance…[as it] blindly accepts BDS’s flawed, factually misleading mission,” going on to warn that the BDS rhetoric aligns with the type of “misinformation [that] was part and parcel of what made anti-Jewish hatred, and eventually genocide, a thinkable project in Nazi Germany.” With both sadness and fear, Schneider warns that “BDS’s strategy of ideological warfare…has led some of the most decent, kind, and thoughtful people that I know at Harvard to become patrons and propagators of antisemitism.”
Schneider explains, The particular form of anti-Zionist rhetoric fueled by the BDS movement isn’t just misleading — it’s also brazenly antisemitic, with its origins traceable to a KGB propaganda campaign that thrived under the leadership of KGB chairman Yuri Andropov…”
In a dire warning, Schneider says that “the BDS movement’s leaders, like Barghouti, may outwardly oppose antisemitism. But misinformation was part and parcel of what made anti-Jewish hatred, and eventually genocide, a thinkable project in Nazi Germany… Now, the BDS movement is being driven by strikingly similar notes of factual manipulation. One can only expect that the inherited offshoots of this rhetoric would continue to spur antisemitic violence today.”
The influence of the Crimson’s op-ed and BDS’s rhetoric is hitting home — as Schneider writes, “BDS’s strategy of ideological warfare is all the more frightening because of how well it works — after all, it has led some of the most decent, kind, and thoughtful people that I know at Harvard to become patrons and propagators of antisemitism…”
“Writing this has not been easy,” Schneider admits, “not just because of the complicated history, to which I have personal ties. It has also been difficult because BDS is the embodiment of everything that I have known the Board to stand against — and, in light of the Board’s failure to recognize that, I can’t help but feel a strange mix of sadness, disappointment, and fear.”
Related:
To the Editor: On Mischaracterizations of My Words (Crimson, 6/9/22)
For background, see:
