In September 1944, as the genocide of European Jews was ongoing and the violence of World War II was at its peak, Max Horkheimer, co-founder of the Institute for Social Research – aka the Frankfurt School – and the methodology of “critical theory” it developed, declared that “wittingly or unwittingly, the Jews have become the martyrs of civilization. … To protect the Jews has come to be a symbol of everything that mankind stands for. Their survival is the survival of culture itself.”It is telling that 80 years later with the forced resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, so many of the same issues that occupied the Frankfurt School then are at the centre of a culture war that, with the 2024 presidential election looming, could determine the fate of democracy in the United States – just as the founders of critical theory predicted. Only now it’s Palestinians and not Jews who are the martyrs and symbols, whose survival as a national community on their land has become, more than any other contemporary conflict, a bellwether of the possibility to address the increasingly intractable problems facing humanity.Critics of Gay’s forced resignation, even when accounting for her admittedly sloppy citation practices, point to her race; advocacy of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies; and mostly, her overly lawyered response to questions about “calling for genocide of Jews” during the now infamous December 5 congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on campus as the reasons for her departure. But her position was doomed, and deservedly so, before she fumbled her context-dependent answer to Representative Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calls for genocide on campus would be considered hate speech.
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