Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and your calls if you're connected to a college on the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and other fallout and lessons from the House anti-Semitism hearing last week. Michelle Goldberg has been writing thoughtful columns about speech and anti-Semitism on campus and elsewhere since the October 7th attack.

For years before that, she was a critic of illiberal speech codes enforced by the left, even though her own politics are generally of the left. She grapples with the multi-layered issues of where the line is and should be between free speech and the effects of free speech on students of different backgrounds, whether there is a double standard when it comes to Jewish students, the line between hate speech and political speech, and more.

She's written columns since October with headlines like With War in Israel, the Cancel Culture Debate Comes Full Circle. Ironically, perhaps she wrote before the hearing about a film screening being canceled by the University of Pennsylvania because it was about young Jews who had become alienated from Zionism. UPenn had withdrawn permission for that film to be shown. Her latest column is called At a Hearing on Israel, University Presidents Walked Into a Trap. Michelle, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Michelle Goldberg: Hi, Brian. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to your assertion of a trap, you wrote this in your column, "The anguished and furious reaction of many Jews to that viral clip," that's the clip of the college presidents, "is understandable. Jewish people with many different political persuasions have been stunned by the rank anti-Semitism and contempt for Israeli lives that have exploded across campuses where Jewish students have been threatened and, in some cases, assaulted." Can you talk about your own relationship to that? First, have you been stunned by what you would consider rank anti-Semitism that has been brought to light since October 7th, maybe more than you thought existed on college campuses?

Michelle Goldberg: Yes, absolutely. One of the first columns that I wrote after October 7th, I think it was about the need for a decent left. Obviously, I know that there's a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian cause on college campuses in the left in general. I share that sympathy. I was really stunned by the outright celebration of Hamas among some parts of the left, including the big protest that happened on October 8th where people were making light of the massacres at the Nova music festival, the Black Lives Matter chapter that posted a picture of a paraglider, the sort of adoption of paraglider imagery against celebrating Hamas' assault.

There's been rape denial. There's been attacks. You could go on and on and on. Yes, I think that this has been tremendously shocking and destabilizing to Jews all over the country and I think particularly to many left-wing Jews who feel abandoned by people and movements that they thought they were allied with.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite your calls if you are connected to any college campus especially, are you experiencing or witnessing anti-Semitism? How about Islamophobia? Is the anti-Semitism worse than you previously thought? As many left-of-center Jews seem to be concluding, were the presidents' responses in the hearings examples of that? In your opinion, do you see double standards in speech codes? We're definitely going to get into that with Michelle, or did these presidents fall into a trap? We'll explain why that's the assertion in Michelle Goldberg's latest column.

Should Liz Magill have resigned as UPenn president and should the other two or maybe all of the above are true for you? You tell us. 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692. All right, let's talk about your column and what you characterize as a trap at the hearing. First, let me replay an example of what went viral that drew this astonished reaction from Jews and others. This is Republican Upstate New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik questioning Harvard President Claudine Gay. Similar lines of questioning did go to the UPenn president and the MIT president.

Elise Stefanik: At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Claudine Gay: It can be, depending on the context.

Elise Stefanik: What's the context?

Claudine Gay: Targeted as an individual, targeted at an individual.

Elise Stefanik: It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Claudine Gay: Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into--

Elise Stefanik: Is it anti-Semitic rhetoric--

Claudine Gay: Anti-Semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct and we do take action.

Brian Lehrer: That's the clip that everybody's heard. Like I say, they were almost the exact same exchange with the president of MIT and the president of UPenn. Michelle, I'm going to play the clip that you identify in your article as revealing that it was a trap of sorts by Congresswoman Stefanik. Do you want to set it up at all or should I just play it and then we'll talk about it?

Michelle Goldberg: Sure. Well, maybe just play it because I would probably just read a quotation. I think it's better for people to hear it for themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, okay. What I will say in advance, listeners, so you can listen for the exact term that this takes, Stefanik asks Harvard President Claudine Gay the same question about advocating genocide against African Americans that we just heard her ask later about genocide against Jews. Gay appears to start giving the same answer we just heard in that clip, but Stefanik doesn't let her finish and that's a key. Listen.

Elise Stefanik: Dr. Gay, a Harvard student calling for the mass murder of African Americans is not protected free speech at Harvard, correct?

Claudine Gay: Our commitment to free speech--

Elise Stefanik: It's a yes-or-no question. Is that corrected? Is that okay for students to call for the mass murder of African Americans at Harvard? Is that protected free speech?

Claudine Gay: Our commitment to free speech--

Elise Stefanik: It's a yes-or-no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term "intifada," correct?

Claudine Gay: I've heard that term, yes.

Brian Lehrer: It goes on from there toward the clip we heard earlier. Michelle, your argument is Stefanik cut her off because she wasn't going to get the premise for a double standard she was looking for. Can you elaborate?

Michelle Goldberg: Well, I think it's more than just that. I think that if you hear the rest of that quote, Stefanik says, "You understand that the use of the term "intifada" in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and genocide of Jews." Then she asks, "Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, 'From the river to the sea' or 'intifada,' advocating for the murder of Jews?"

I think it's important to understand before you hear that shocking exchange where it seems as if the college presidents are waffling on whether calls for Jewish genocide are permitted on college campuses. Stefanik had already defined genocide as being this very common, although obviously controversial pro-Palestinian chance and was trying to get the college administrators to commit to disciplining students who use them.

The reason that the other example about African Americans, I think, is important is because I can't tell you the number of times I have heard since this hearing people saying, "Well, if she had been talking about any other ethnic group or any other religious group, the answer would've been obvious." That just tells me they didn't listen to the whole hearing, which, obviously, most people don't because, of course, that was Stefanik's first question. People who claim that there has been a double standard on college campuses are correct. People who claim that there was a double standard in the college president's testimony are just flatly wrong.

Brian Lehrer: I don't want to soft-pedal the double standard because an article in The Times yesterday by your colleague, Nick Confessore, cited some examples from the same three institutions whose presidents were at the hearing. Harvard Penn and MIT. He writes, "All three institutions have, in recent years, punished or censored speech or conduct that drew anger from the left."

In 2019, Harvard revoked a deanship after students protested the persons joining the legal team of the former Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, MIT canceled a planned scientific lecture by a star geophysicist, pointing to his criticism of affirmative action. The University of Pennsylvania's law school is seeking to impose sanctions on a tenured professor there, citing student complaints about her remarks regarding the academic performance of students of color among other provocations. With those examples, I guess, and you already said it in your last answer, you do see double standards in terms of whose speech gets punished, depending on who it seems aimed at.

Michelle Goldberg: Well, what I think is that there has been a-- I've argued with much of the left for the last several years. Sometimes I wish I had emphasized this more, but there was a reason that I signed the infamous Harper's letter and a reason that I have tried to speak out. Sometimes I think that the debate over cancel culture has been overwrought and has exaggerated what's happening on college campuses, but there's no question that there has often been a contempt for traditional civil libertarian ideas of free speech, including the speech that you despise. It was always obvious to me that this was going to be where it ended up, in part because the censorship of pro-Palestinian speeches is nothing new.

We have anti-BDS laws on the books. I believe it's around 35 states right now with its laws criminalizing or prohibiting participation in the boycott divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. It's not surprising that Jewish students would demand the same sort of extreme deference and sensitivity that we've been accustomed to providing to other groups and certain assumptions about the way speech is supposed to work in left-wing spaces. Something people will often say is that it's not intent that matters. It's not the way you intended your speech to matter.

It's the way it impacted an oppressed person. When somebody says, "Well, that's not--" When Jewish students object to the slogan, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," and people say that that is not a genocidal slogan or it's not necessarily anti-Semitic, it's understandable that Jewish students will say, "Well, these aren't the rules that we've been operating under." What I think this whole debacle underscores is that the rules that we've been operating under were problematic. It was always obvious to me that if the left weakens free-speech protections, the lack of those protections would ultimately come back to bite the left. I think that that's what we're seeing happen here.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to some calls, just to follow up on that briefly, do you disagree with a common notion these days that speech can equal violence, at least in that it can cause a hostile environment for students from whatever targeted group that leaves them less able to learn and succeed than people not targeted?

Michelle Goldberg: I don't know if those are the same thing. Speech equals violence is different than, "Can speech create a hostile environment?" The idea of a hostile environment, I'm obviously not a lawyer, but I think it's pretty well-established in civil rights law. I guess the question is, what kind of speech creates a hostile environment? Is it just speech expressing a political idea that you find abhorrent? Is it a speaker coming in who has notions that you consider bigoted or is it targeted and persistent harassment? That was the distinction that I think these college presidents were trying to draw however inartfully.

Brian Lehrer: Now, let's take some phone calls. You can imagine, our phones are jammed on this. A lot of people writing text messages. You can keep writing texts even if the phones are full. 212-433-WNYC. Let's start with David in Queens, who says he is a PhD student at Columbia right now. David, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

David: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. First, at the top, I'd like to express my disgust with The New York Times' coverage of the violence against the Palestinian people. There are currently protestors outside of The New York Times as a result of this because we see continued downplaying of the horrific bombing campaign that the Israeli government has initiated. In terms of the question at hand, I'd like to speak to what's going on in Columbia.

We have seen the Columbia administration censor pro-Palestinian student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, Voice for Jewish Peace. So much of this discourse about the university presidents and about, generally, the intolerance of the left completely sidesteps the horrific violence that is going on, the horrific violence that The New York Times completely diminishes.

The students on the ground are just trying to draw attention to. I hope you and your caller can speak to the real violence and can stop sidestepping this by just focusing on free speech and what the left needs to do because the real issue is how many children are being bombed daily in Palestine and how much violence is being done by the Israeli state as supported by the United States government.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me ask you one follow-up question, David. Can people not be concerned about both things, obviously, what's going on in Gaza, and talk a lot about that and debate that and advocate for whatever anybody wants to advocate with respect to that, but also be concerned about new expressions of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7th?

David: If there was any degree of parody between these discussions, I would agree with you, Brian. At the point at which the United States government continues to send weapons to Israel for allow them to daily bomb children, I feel like we're talking about different things.

Brian Lehrer: Right, but the question is not about parody. Does there have to be an equivalent? Of course, it's not equivalent that there's some speech that may be anti-Jewish or otherwise hateful. It's not the equivalent of thousands of people being killed, but it is another real thing. Can you acknowledge that?

David: I agree that there is an anti-Semitism problem in the United States, and I agree that this problem goes back to the far-right foundations of the United States and the way in which we continually elevate violence within both sides of the political spectrum. At the end of the day, though, I feel like we should be having a conversation about stopping the US material support for the Israeli bombing campaign within Gaza and the Israeli occupation of Palestine in general.

Brian Lehrer: David, thank you very much for your call. Michelle, what are you thinking, listening to David's call?

Michelle Goldberg: Obviously, I don't speak for The New York Times. I am extremely proud to work at The New York Times, and I'm going to disagree with the caller about The New York Times coverage of this war. There's obviously separation between the news side and the opinion side at The Times. What I actually would agree with him about is that I do think that this whole discussion, even though I've obviously been part of it, about free speech and domestic anti-Semitism, while important, which is why I've devoted a lot of attention to it, there is something strange about the way this horrific tragedy across the world, the way we've been able to metabolize it into another American culture war debate or another American debate about free speech and cancel culture. In some ways, that's a more comfortable debate for a lot of us to have than to look clearly at just this daily unbelievable amount of suffering.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts this question, Michelle, "Why aren't calls for any type of genocide something to prohibit on campuses and elsewhere?" I guess that it begs the question of whether anybody actually has ever called for genocide against Jews on college campuses, and we can get to that, but even with the hypothetical, it's a fair question. Why aren't calls for any type of genocide something to prohibit on campuses and elsewhere, which the three college presidents seem to indicate is not the case?

Michelle Goldberg: There's two different parts of this because my understanding, and, again, I'm not a lawyer, is that on-- At least on public schools, which are governed by the First Amendment, calls for genocide or arguments that might be construed as genocidal are protected by the First Amendment, especially if they're not used in the context of harassment against an individual. That's at public schools. These, of course, are private schools. They're free to set their own policies. Some of them, I think, have tried to hue to the First Amendment and have tried to have similar policies to public schools.

A more important question in this debate is not just who has actually called for genocide, but what is Elise Stefanik defining as genocide. My guess is that these college presidents didn't want to get into an argument about the semantics of genocide, didn't want to seem to be defending slogans that while not genocidal are not things that they agree with. I think that it's important to point out that because she was defining the use of the word "intifada," the use of the slogan, "From the river to the sea," as genocidal, the question for me is, do we want to ban this rhetoric from college campuses and discipline the students who use it? I think the answer there should be an unequivocal no.

Brian Lehrer: Salim in Binghamton, you're on WNYC. Hello, Salim. Thank you for calling in.

Salim: Good morning, Brian. I am very puzzled by you. You are Jewish. I know you are. I'm a Muslim. I have intermarriage of Jewishness. When we talk about Palestine, I'm a student at the Binghamton University, SUNY at Binghamton just clear to your guest. Your guest, I've read her stories. She's a right-winger, but she's working for New York Times. Everybody has to be to the left.

New York Times is becoming a corporation. No longer New York Times is New York Times. Let me just put it on the record. My problem with your guest and the congressperson from New York, which she is anti-Semite. You go to her neighborhood of her father. You see the Confederate flag. Your guest should go to her neighborhood and take some picture of her neighborhood and see where the Confederate flag is in her neighborhood.

Now, the issue is very simple. Are we anti-Israel or anti-Jew? The problem is this. Every time Israel invaded Palestine, my birth country, we become anti-Jew. That's not the case. You have a government that refuse to honor also deal. You have a government that is running by a talk. You have a government that is anti-Palestine and you guys don't want to talk about it.

Brian Lehrer: Salim, I think we debate those issues all the time. I would say that The New York Times does as well. You hear the frustration in Salim's voice as in the previous caller's voice, Michelle.

Michelle Goldberg: Yes, absolutely. I'm surprised, I guess, to hear myself described as right-wing.

Brian Lehrer: A right-winger, given everything else you've ever written in your life.

Michelle Goldberg: Well, I would say, usually, that's not the attitude of the people who send me hate mail for being a left-wing, for calling me left-wing, self-hating anti-Semite. I would say that, yes, I understand the attempts to render criticism of Israel. Even very harsh criticism, taboo, through these speech codes, through these disingenuous congressional questioning is immensely frustrating to people. Frustrating is probably too mild of a word because it is my experience of visiting the West Bank, including Hebron, which is one of the places where the occupation is most stark and brutal and concentrated, is that it is quite difficult to talk about within the accepted terms of the American political debate.

I think a lot of people run into those problems. I recently wrote about Jamaal Bowman, a very pro-Palestine, progressive member of Congress, who is facing a primary challenge in Westchester. I think he had a similar experience of visiting Hebron being so shocked by the stark segregation that he saw. Then finding that when he tried to express that and tried to hue to his convictions, he ran afoul of the sensitivities of his heavily Jewish district.

Brian Lehrer: We'll finish up with Michelle Goldberg and more of your comments in a minute. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A few more minutes with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who has been writing about speech and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and related things since October 7th. Of course, the news is the resignation over the weekend of Liz Magill, the president of UPenn, after that hearing last week on anti-Semitism in the House of Representatives and the clips that went viral. It's interesting. For some reason, it's just unscientific small samples. All our callers seem to be lining up on one side of this. Many of our texters are lining up on the other side of this.

That's just for those of you who might be inclined to say, "You're only taking calls with this point of view," or "You're only reading text messages with that point of view." Here's one more text in pursuit of diversity of point of view. Listener writes, "This is not a free-speech issue and was not a free-speech question from Stefanik. This is a campus conduct disciplinary issue. It was a softball question intended to lead into other tougher questions, sad answers." Do you agree with that much, sad answers? In that context, do you think Liz Magill did the right thing by resigning over the weekend?

Michelle Goldberg: I don't know if she did the right thing by resigning. Obviously, I have not very much insight into campus governance and when someone's position becomes untenable. I do think her resignation is going-- You've already seen her resignation being used to call for new restrictions on pro-Palestinian speech. Not just pro-Palestinian speech, left-wing Jewish speech as you talked about when we first started speaking.

Shortly before this, you had the cancellation of this film, Israelism, which is a documentary about Jews that have become alienated from Israel and Zionism. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I think the right lesson from all of this should be about the misapplication of campus speech codes, the excesses of ideas about microaggressions, the necessity of free speech for the left.

Instead, what we're going to see is an expansion of limitations on speech and her resignation. It's hard for me to see whoever comes next if they want to keep their job is not going to take a pretty heavy hand with this stuff. As for it being about student conduct, again, at a private school, there is more latitude to go beyond the First Amendment in circumscribing what students can and can't say.

At the same time, what I think Stefanik was demanding, let's say they had answered, "Yes, of course, calling for genocide is a violation of student conduct." The next question would've been, "And do you agree that this language about intifada, about 'from the river to the sea' is a call for genocide?" That's really what we're arguing about is whether or not that language should be prohibited. I think a lot of people think that it should be. That's where I really strongly disagree.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you one very sticky follow-up question and then we're going to be out of time. Maybe you'll want to write a column on exactly this or maybe you have already and haven't seen it. Is there an issue here of whether it's okay or should be okay to call for violent revolution, not genocide of a people, but violent revolution by an oppressed people if we accept their status as oppressed? We've had listeners who say, "What about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or the American Revolution or other examples from history?" Is that a legitimate debate on campus today or should it be to explicitly debate when violence is justified in political movements by oppressed peoples?

Michelle Goldberg: Of course, you should be debating when violence is justified by political movements because there's principled pacifism, but that's not a majority position by any means. University is precisely where you should be debating these questions.

Brian Lehrer: Michelle Goldberg, New York Times columnist. Her latest column but published before Liz Magill resigned as UPenn president over the weekend was about that hearing last week being a trap that they walked into. Thank you for joining us, Michelle. Always appreciate it.

Michelle Goldberg: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More in a minute.

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