On the first day in American history, on the evening of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson – if one might paraphrase his words – declared: Let there be inalienable rights to all mankind.
There was also a first day in modern Israeli history, on the afternoon of May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion – in Israel’s Declaration of Independence modeled on the United States’s – declared that among these inalienable rights is the right of the Jewish people to be in their sovereign homeland.
Both Declarations drew on the same, common heritage of political rights that scholars have traced to the English Bill of Rights and the Book of Deuteronomy. Thus, a philosophical rejection of Israel’s Declaration of Independence and its right to exist is, at the same time, a philosophical rejection of America’s Declaration of Independence and its right to exist. Fundamentally, an attack on Israel is an attack on America.
Some scholars have found that America and Israel’s Declarations of Independence were racist, colonialist documents with a people’s “ancient” claims to their national lands based on fictional history and lies. Yet these Declarations were not meant for their academic analysis. They were written in the passion of the moment by countries and peoples fighting for their survival.
Of course, antisemites do not really care about any of this because they believe that Jews control both America and Israel anyway. Therefore, if I might update Jefferson’s words on America’s Independence Day, I hold this truth to be self-evident, that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is anti-Americanism.
College students use their self-governance in an anti-American way
I AM A Jewish graduate of the higher educational institution that Jefferson founded – the University of Virginia in Charlottesville – where neo-Nazis with tiki torches marched and shouted “Jews will not replace us!” on August 2017.
But not a single individual was ever found guilty of antisemitism. In the civil case Sines v. Kessler that followed, the Jewish plaintiff’s allegations of antisemitism were dismissed. The judge even acknowledged that the KKK Act of 1871, which was charged, protected racial grievances more than antisemitic grievances for white plaintiffs.
On June 28, Jewish students at Columbia University resorted to filing a complaint against pro-Palestinian protesters under the same KKK Act. They are unlikely to succeed because of the result in Sines v. Kessler from Charlottesville. Antisemitism is flourishing everywhere, it seems, and there is no one left to protect us on campus.
No one, that is, but Jefferson. I turn to him in this hour for what I am about to say with utmost seriousness.
Invoking Article III, Section 3, of the United States Constitution, I hereby allege that some college campuses across the United States have committed treason against the United States, by giving “aid and comfort” to its enemies and allowing antisemitism to thrive. To prove this, by law, I will need the testimony of two witnesses.
I call on Jefferson and his devoted friend, James Madison, author of the US Constitution and a fellow, founding board member of the University of Virginia.
Exhibit A is their university, where students are given exceptional responsibilities to be self-governing.
In 2018, the University of Virginia student government denied full admission to the Hillel Jewish Leadership Council from its Minority Rights Coalition for its support of Israel, even though several Muslim student groups supporting Palestine were admitted.
On April 8, 2023, the University of Virginia funded, including through mandatory student fees, a book titled Visibly (and Invisibly) Muslim on Grounds, in which one student claims he took the university’s most important class – a class originally designed by Jefferson and Madison where students studied the founding American documents – “to see who my enemy was.”
On October 12, 2023, and since, the University of Virginia has defended Prof. Tessa Farmer, the first academic in the nation to offer students extra credit for attending a pro-Hamas rally after the October 7 mega-atrocity committed by Hamas in Israel. While Farmer defended students’ rights to hear from “a diversity of perspectives,” in the same aforementioned book, it is claimed that her class is “where Islam was the most ingrained” despite Jefferson and Madison’s intention for their university to have no religion in the classroom whatsoever.
Finally, on Thursday, February 29, 2024, the University of Virginia allowed a student-wide referendum to pass, which calls for a divestment from the “State of Israel’s apartheid regime.”
In closing my argument, I draw on the US Supreme Court case Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (1995). In this case, the court found that it was constitutional under the First Amendment for a mandatory student activity fee to be used for the funding of a religious publication at the University of Virginia and ensure “a diversity of views” in the “marketplace of ideas” for student speech on campus. Thus, the Muslim student publication and Farmer’s extra credit would be acceptable.
However, the Supreme Court failed to include any writings by my two witnesses, Madison or Jefferson, about the founding of their University of Virginia. According to historian Ralph Ketcham, “‘a marketplace of ideas,’ where no idea is regarded as heretical, were to Madison and Jefferson both impractical at their new, small institution, and unacceptable.”
Teaching ideas contrary to democracy – including the denial of the State of Israel’s right to exist – or allowing for the mandatory funding of student publications that are hostile to democracy, would not have been permitted by them.
Let what is happening at my alma mater today be a warning for all college campuses: To allow college students to use their American rights of student self-governance – through voting, speech, and assembly – in a manner that sabotages the very educational basis of American rights of self-governance, and those of her ally, Israel, is not only anti-Zionist, antisemitic, and anti-American. It is, to give Jefferson the last word on Independence Day, “treason against the hopes of the world.”
The writer, a graduate of the University of Virginia, is a Jewish author and film producer from Texas.