Last semester, I did a teach-in at the antiwar encampment at Princeton University. I knew that the media propaganda I’d been seeing about the protests for months was mostly nonsense. Even so, I’ve never felt such a visceral gap between the image I’d been fed and the reality on the ground. I was told the students at these encampments were violent and dangerous antisemites. The reality was that they were a curious and attentive audience. They asked thoughtful and perceptive questions. And lots of them were Jewish.
Meanwhile, it seems like every time there was a report of serious violence at the protests around the country, it was directed against the protesters. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a mob of counterprotesters from off campus violently assaulted the encampment for hours while police let it happen. At Columbia University, a cousin of the late extreme-right-wing Israeli…