This article is a guest submission from Scott Rifkin, an associate professor at the School of Biological Sciences.
This year, in the midst of a pretextual harassment campaign by the Trump administration and 19 years after it was established nationally, UC San Diego celebrated its first Jewish American History Month, ostensibly to honor the “contributions of Jewish Americans to the nation’s culture, history, science, arts, civil rights, military service, and more.” This was quickly belied by the events organized by the planning committee and sanctioned by the UCSD administration. Americans were nearly absent from the 11 events. Instead, eight of them were about Israel, and another was about Jews in other parts of the world. The organizers clearly need reminding that Israel is not part of the United States. The dangerous fiction that equates Jews with Israel makes strange bedfellows of people who otherwise agree on very little. Antisemites of various stripes find it useful to tie Jews worldwide to the policies of the Israeli government, even though most Jews, and certainly most American Jews, have no voice or vote in Israeli politics. And supporters of the Israeli government are eager to conscript Jews, willing or not, into their lobbying and propagandizing efforts.
If UCSD’s administration had been serious about honoring American Jews’ contributions to the U.S., there is no shortage of American material they could have drawn from. Jews had been on this continent for over a century before they fought in the Revolutionary War. Their numbers swelled to around 200,000 by the mid-1800s and then soared into the millions with the great wave of Eastern and Southern European immigration from 1880 to 1920. Jews came to the U.S. fleeing persecution and seeking the promise of freedom, embodied by the immortal words of Jewish American Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. Like other immigrant groups, they brought new ideas, new vitality, and new customs to America.
The organizers of UCSD’s Jewish American History Month celebrations could have held a film festival in honor of the early decades of American cinema, when Lauren Bacall, Theda Bara, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Sammy Davis Jr. starred in movies from MGM, Universal Pictures, Paramount, Fox Films, and Warner Brothers — all started by Jews. They could have played a concert with pieces by Aaron Copland, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Stephen Sondheim, Philip Glass, and the Gershwins. They could have celebrated Jewish American comedy from the Marx Brothers to Rivers to Seinfeld to Schumer. They could have memorialized Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered by the Klan alongside James Chaney for registering African Americans to vote, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose lifelong campaign for equal rights was inspired by “the demand for justice, for peace, and for enlightenment [that] runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition.” They could have highlighted the native-born and refugee Jewish scientists — including Einstein, Szilard, Wigner, Teller, Oppenheimer, and Feynman — who helped America win World War II, Salk’s and Sabin’s lifesaving polio vaccines, or how Jews from Von Neumann to Wiener to Minsky to Brin shaped today’s computer age.
Instead, UCSD hammered home the caricature that equates Jews with Israel, continuing the millennia-old tradition of using Jews as political pawns. UCSD buried our long, varied, and complicated history as Americans and subordinated it to the much shorter history of a country thousands of miles away. Whatever their opinions on Israel may be, most American Jews are not Israelis, have never been Israelis, and will never be Israelis.
We are Americans. Perhaps, next year, UCSD will remember that.
