People don't want to hear about what comes next

My experience as a professor on an elite college campus since October 7th has been disheartening. I'm shocked by how many of my colleagues (and former classmates) openly make anti-Semitic statements. The notion that everyone gets to have an opinion about whether a sovereign nation continues to exist is preposterous---I have no standing to debate whether or not Luxembourg should be a nation or disbanded, and when the US commits atrocities no one talks about giving our own homes back to the Native Americans. I realize that younger people growing up without the generational trauma of the Holocaust don't understand why things are the way they are or what guardrails we need in terms of a safe haven for Jews. The flip side is that I've heard from my Jewish colleagues---and myself feel---a sense of betrayal that DEI turns out not to include us. I've helped develop DEI curriculum on our campus and always thought that "I" was for everyone. Jews were at the forefront of the civil rights movement and are now being recast as white oppressors aligned with the bad guys in every other conflict on earth. The DEI movement was already being attacked from the right openly and people outside the Jewish community don't realize that Jews are a traditionally left-leaning supportive group but many are reacting to this betrayal by withdrawing their support. I predict that "DEI" as a movement will fall now that lesser support from the left is meeting the open hostility from the right. I tried pitching an editorial on this topic to a higher education journal and they said they weren't interested and did not respond to my request for feedback---they don't want to touch this topic, but people do need to know. This blind spot will be the end of a movement that has done so much good but is unraveling due to hypocrisy---apparently Jews don't count. It's heartbreaking.