Amid all the other breaking news consuming the United States this month, the University of California, Berkeley, arguably the nation’s most elite public university, gave the Trump administration a list of 160 names of faculty, staff and students, as part of an investigation into “alleged antisemitic incidents”.
While all the names on this list are significant, one name in particular that UC Berkeley handed over to the Trump administration stands out: Judith Butler, the eminent queer theorist, literary theorist and philosopher, and one of the most famous public intellectuals in the United States today.
In addition to Butler’s name representing one of the most high-profile academic scalps demanded by the Trump administration in its campaign against higher education so far, Butler’s name is also notable for another reason: Butler is proudly and publicly Jewish, and has written extensively about their Jewish identity and how it informs their politics. In the name of “fighting antisemitism”, the Trump administration is publicly making an example out of arguably the most famous Jewish public intellectual in the country today.
As a professor of Jewish studies, whose work intersects with gender and queer theory in substantial ways, I teach Butler regularly in my classes, both their writings on gender performativity and on Jewish politics. I never endorse Butler’s perspectives on Jewish politics, and when I teach their writings against Zionism, I am always careful to present them to my students alongside opposing perspectives. In truth, while I find their writings on gender highly valuable for my work, I have considerable differences with them on issues of Zionism and Middle East politics.
None of that matters right now. If we are going to defend the Jewish community in the United States, we have to stand up for Professor Butler.
Butler, who compared the legal allegations against them to Kafka’s famous novel The Trial, likened the public targeting to the McCarthy era, writing that the practice of universities forwarding names to the federal government was a “well-known practice from the McCarthy Era … We should not be naive. Will those of us named now be branded on a government list? Will our travel be restricted? Will our email communications be surveilled?”
Butler is right to compare the current climate of higher education to the McCarthy era, but this comparison works for more reasons than the obvious ones. Like the current campaign against “campus antisemitism”, McCarthyism was also an antisemitic campaign against Jews who did not fit into the prevailing politics of the day.
During the McCarthy era around the 1950s, a survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that more than half of all Americans associated Jews with the act of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. Indeed, out of 124 people interrogated for perceived links to communism by the senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs in 1952, an overwhelming 79 of them, two-thirds, were Jewish.
The antisemitic campaign did not end there. The representative John Rankin, a stalwart supporter of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) and McCarthyism, delivered a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in which he openly listed the names of Jews whom he suspected of being communists. Rankin went so far as to accuse these Jews of changing their names to hide their Jewish identities. As he said: “One is Danny Kaye. We found his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. Then there was Eddie Cantor. His real name was Edward Itzkowitz. Edward G Robinson, his name is Emanuel Goldenberg … There’s another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg.” Not terribly subtle.
The Jewish musician Larry Adler, blacklisted from Hollywood as a result of suspected communist ties, reported receiving a letter from Huac beginning with: “Dear Kike.” And those US senators most vocally opposed to McCarthyism received antisemitic hate mail from angry constituentsone labeling a lawmaker a “henchman of the Jew Deal … some crackpot fronting for the Jews”.
The law the Trump administration is using to deport foreign students for suspected antisemitism, the McCarran-Walter Acteven has its roots in McCarthy-era antisemitism. It was initially used to block eastern European Jewish immigrants from the US, including Holocaust survivors, because of suspected links to communism. According to the professor Michael Kagan of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas law schoolthe Pennsylvania representative Francis Walter, champion of the law, “was a virulent antisemite. He just sort of thought Jews and Communists were overlapping groups.”
The parallels between the antisemitism of the McCarthy era and the current day do not end there. Then, as now, too many American Jewish organizations decided that the way forward was not to fight for the rights of all Jews, but to throw leftist Jews under the bus in the name of respectability politics.
As historian Aviva Weingarten has demonstrated, during the McCarthy period, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “endeavoured to banish communists from the ranks of the Jewish community and its offices” so as to combat any public link between Jewishness and leftism in the minds of the American public. The AJC even financed and promoted the spread of anti-communist literature to prove their patriotic American bona fides. Likewise, the AJC expelled the leftist Jewish People’s Fraternal Order in 1949, ultimately leading to the latter organization having to shut down. And in the early 1950s, organizations including the ADL and the AJC invested in a large publicity campaign designed to promote the image of the American Jew as a loyal, patriotic American citizen and capitalist; the groups even discussed approaching Paramount Pictures to produce a movie in which a Jewish American secret agent fights international communism.
The McCarthy era was a time of great antisemitism in US history. But instead of standing together as a Jewish community under threat, too much of the organized Jewish community decided that it was better to rid themselves of meddlesome leftwing Jews to win entrance into mainstream American culture for themselves.
Today, they are on the verge of making the same mistake. Too many American Jewish organizations like the AJC and the ADL have cheered the Trump administration’s crackdown on higher education in the name of “fighting antisemitism”, ignoring the way in which this crackdown is falling heavily on Jews deemed to have the wrong politics.
Judith Butler’s politics on Israel-Palestine are controversial, and I may not always agree with them. But they are part of a rich tradition of Jewish dissent, going back to Baruch Spinoza and running through such Jewish luminaries as Kafka, Freud, Rosa Luxemburg and the “non-Jewish Jew” Isaac Deutscher. We may not always agree with all of these thinkers, but part of having a rich Jewish intellectual community means making space for them. We are all worse off when we cast out the dissenters.
Butler rightly compared their treatment by the Trump administration to the McCarthy era. Just as back then, the government wants to claim the scalp of a high-profile dissenting Jew, in the name of enforcing a conformity of acceptable Jewish politics. But the American Jewish community made the mistake back then of casting out dissenters for the sake of respectability, rather than standing up and declaring that Jewish socialists are also a rich part of the Jewish communal tapestry. Let’s not make the same mistake again. Standing up for Jews on campus means standing up for the rights of all Jews.
