BY HARRY PINCUS | The reporters who are peering through the gates of Columbia University these days are standing in the same spot where I stood, after my compatriots and I had shut down Hunter College, and almost every other school in the country, during the riotous spring of 1970. We were protesting the war in Vietnam, as well as Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, and the draft, which directly threatened our lives, and we were hipping ourselves to the big picture. You know, how it all works together to make a military-industrial complex, and a war machine, and how the elites use racism and class to divide and manipulate us.

I was 17 years old that spring, when I ran up to the art department at Hunter College and admonished the other would-be artists to join me at the barricades, kick out the jams and fight for a revolution. Our professor, a Greenwich Village legend named John Rawlings, stretched his nearly 7-foot frame out on a long table and happily gave me the floor, as I fulminated against all of the injustices in the world. Rawlings, who collaborated with E. E. Cummings, the Paul Taylor Dancers and Alexander Calder, also did a piano act in the Village called “The Playing Mantis.” John was my mentor, but when I invaded his art class with my righteous indignation, he waited for me to leave, and simply purred, “What Harry needs is to get laid.”

I fled to the street, where a couple of thousand of us were marching on Park Avenue, chanting “Power to the People! Off the Pig!” I had no idea that “Off the Pig” meant kill the police, but I happily joined the throng as we invaded the Hunter College Super Snack, and absconded with every last burger and fry. As I stood there, downing my ill-gained booty, a vivid figure dressed in an American flag shirt flashed before me, jumped up on a table and shouted “What we need here is less Jewish mothers, and more Jewish Motherf—ers!” It was Abbie Hoffman.

The president of Hunter College, Jacqueline G. Wexler, was a former nun who had jousted with the conservative church hierarchy before becoming a university president.

“Zealotry is the enemy,” she said. I happened to run into her in the hallway, just as I was fleeing the police, who were waving their batons at my head.

“Why are you doing this, John?” said our president, with an imploring expression. But I didn’t know who John was, nor why I was doing this.

We had just barricaded ourselves into the president’s office, and ordered steak dinners on her tab, when my friend, a doppelganger for Che Guevara in his army helmet, emerged from her private quarters with a can of feminine deodorant spray, which he passed around the conference table.

When our “Theory of Revolution” professor was busted for spitting in Dean Huber’s face, we circulated a petition and got him reinstated. Even John Rawlings was dismissed, ostensibly for his samizdat tract on education, subversively titled, “Let Me Put It To You Another Way.” But I ran around the school with petitions, and John, too, was reinstated. In those days, a professor could get fired for being gay.

Being a revolutionary and shutting down the school was great fun, until May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen entered the campus of Kent State University and murdered Allison Krause, 19; Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20; Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20; and William Knox Schroeder, 19. I am still moved to tears when I look at the photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio wailing over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, a sweet kid who looked like one of the boys I’d gone to high school with. His blood on that pavement belonged to all of us.

The brutal retort of rifles and tear gas didn’t belong on a college campus, and the Kent State massacre ended our innocence. After all, we weren’t warriors, or haters, spitting on “the other,” telling them to go back to where they came from, or chanting for their cities to be bombed. Our movement was about transcending the bigotry of our elders, and learning acceptance and understanding.

We weren’t masked haters intent upon destroying the homeland of another people.

What we did was child’s play compared to the conflagration we face today. We were the kids who had gone to Woodstock, but the furor, or should I say der Führer, that we are witnessing, now resembles Berlin in 1938. Be it societal isolation, COVID, technology or financial stress, today’s great humanitarians have arrived at an age-old remedy. They are scapegoating the Jews.

The Columbia professor who reads “From the River to the Sea” as a gentle plea for equality, is deluding himself, and his students. Even if equality is all he desires, it is not the ambition of Hamas, or the rabid haters at the gates of the university. Nor was equality the intention of Iran, when it fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones into Israeli cities not long ago. The rapists and murderers of October 7 may have thought they were seeking justice and equality, but their final solution cannot be tolerated by any civilized nation.

War is unconscionable, and I join the decent souls who are simply opposed to the killing — but the demonization and destruction of the Jewish homeland is not Peace. People in hoodies and masks screaming in the faces of Jewish students with bullhorns is not free speech, nor does it bear any resemblance to critical thinking. How much Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault and Combahee River Collective do you have to have rammed into you before you lose your mind and pick up a bullhorn? And if you are going to read Hannah Arendt, kiddies, please include “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” before you go out and strangle a Jew on the quadrangle.

Putin has ruthlessly occupied and invaded Ukraine, 400,000 human beings have been systematically murdered in Darfur and many others raped, more than 500,000 killed in Syria. Before that, a million Muslims were slaughtered by Saddam Hussein. There was and has been no protest over these atrocities — yet Israel is the world pariah that must be exterminated. The fact that Israel has been invaded, attacked with thousands of missiles and surrounded by enemies who continuously vow to annihilate it, might indicate that it is simply fighting for its life.

The demands to divest from Israel remind me of that old sign, “Germans, Defend Yourselves! Do Not Buy From Jews!” What, after all, is the eternal problem with Jews? You can’t just throw us into an old kosher pickle barrel and call us slave owners, colonialists, rootless cosmopolitans and disseminators of cosmic evil, because some of us are quite likable. An old man once told me that he actually liked me, because “You’re not kikey like the others.” But these days, there are reports of students getting canceled if they dare befriend a Jew.

Perhaps these furious demonstrators have been personally harmed by a Jew. Comedian Myron Cohen used to tell a story about a little girl who told the baker that her mother found a fly in the raisin bread. “So bring back the fly and I’ll give you a raisin,” said the baker. Perhaps little Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a traumatic experience like that in a Bronx bakery.

In “Anti-Semite and Jew,” Jean Paul Sartre observes that anti-Semitism is “first of all, a passion.” And we have certainly seen an orgiastic cauldron of that hell as it bubbles up from our elite universities, and metastasizes outward from the initial attack of October 7. Sartre defined a Jew as someone who others consider to be a Jew, and I would define an anti-Semite as someone whom others consider to be a Jew hater. We know one when we see one.

Our educational elites are turning the word “Zionist” into an epithet, commensurate to genocide. They have deserted their hallowed halls like lemmings falling off the cliff as they terrorize Jewish students and demonize the Jewish state. I recently had to explain to an old friend, the son of a jazz legend, that sending me rants from someone who defines Israel as “evil” is akin to sending me swastikas; and how would he feel if I had sent him little drawings of nooses? Would our universities tolerate this explosion of hatred if it were turned against other groups? Do Jew Lives Matter?

The stated goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran is the annihilation of Israel. That is the very definition of genocide, so it is particularly galling when the one nation born of the Holocaust, and surrounded by sworn enemies who vow to annihilate it from the river to the sea, is smeared as the world’s most evil agent of this genocide. The vast majority of Israelis sought to coexist in peace when they were attacked, and hundreds of thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets in opposition to the current regime.

Golda Meir said that peace will come “when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” Hamas has proven her point, by carrying out the most deadly pogrom since Hitler’s
Kristallnacht, and creating a narrative of martyrdom for their own babies. They have succeeded in arousing the sleeping giant of world anti-Semitism, and their monstrous attack of October 7 has resulted in the death of more than 30,000 human beings.

Israel, in their righteous indignation, in their blind hatred, or in their fear, has fallen right into the trap. What would you do, if someone kicked down your door, raped and murdered your family, took hostages and vowed to do it all over again, 10,000 times?

Hamas and their Iranian sponsors may never accept or forgive the founding of the Jewish homeland, which they call the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, but Jews have had to accept the Holocaust, even if we can never forgive it. I have no right to tell anyone what to believe. But I wonder why highly educated students have so readily accepted the narrative of one side, when it reflects the Stone Age aspirations of repressive, ultra-religious regimes that call for “Death To America.”

Is this why these Ivy elite students have worked so hard for their cherished degrees? For an intifada, that would overthrow everything they hold dear? Will they Trump us, by marching on the Democratic Convention in Chicago? I would remind them that my generation’s heroics at a Democratic Convention in Chicago resulted in the election of Richard Nixon, and seven more years of war.

A “student leader” at Columbia University said, “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and that we are “fortunate” he hasn’t killed anyone. This young man told The New York Times that he thinks he is headed to Congress, where he can join “The Squad” of legislators who tried to deny Israel the Iron Dome defense system, which knocked down the Iranian missiles.

There are said to be another hundred thousand or more advanced ballistic missiles and drones aimed at Israeli cities, and those who wish to deny even defensive weapons to the Jewish homeland, to boycott and ostracize it, to divest from and annihilate it in the name of a Free Palestine, are promoting a New Holocaust.

It is clear by now that there will be death and destruction as long as the annihilation of Israel is pursued with the fervor of a religion; and it is clear that there will be no peace until equality and justice is achieved by the Palestinians. Rather than screaming for the annihilation of one side or the other, don’t we need to recognize that our own struggle exists in every other human being?

We weren’t masked haters intent upon destroying the homeland of another people when we shut down the universities in 1970. The elites now camped out on Gaza Plaza probably intend to hide their Hamas support and get high-paying corporate jobs when the party’s over — but the stain of their anti-Semitism will remain.

There were no corporate recruiters chasing me down when I drove a Checker Cab all night in the South Bronx to support myself through college. When the inevitable occurred, and I was mugged on New Year’s Eve, I concluded that I had been exploiting the muggers, by charging them rich-guy rates for their cab ride!

As an artist, I refused to advertise South African tourism during Apartheid, and turned down thousands of dollars. I thought my agent, a tough Vietnam War vet with a shiv in his boot, was going to kill me. If what is happening in the West Bank today can be called apartheid, I don’t defend it, but as the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel can change it.

I understand that today’s students believe in what they are doing as strongly as I did. But Hamas has brought the people of Gaza nothing but death and ruin. It’s sickening to see what has happened to Gaza, whose people, like those in all countries, deserve to live alongside their neighbors in peace and prosperity. If those who seek to destroy their neighbors could turn away from the rantings of their leadership, Gaza might someday be as prosperous as Tel Aviv. But the ideology of hatred and fear on both sides can only lead to more atrocities.

The world is boiling over with hatred, and the destruction of one side is no victory for the other. The calamity that we are witnessing today is still unfolding before our eyes, and both sides are at a turning point. Israel can turn back, and return to peace talks with the Saudis. Hamas can release the hostages, and stop threatening to annihilate Israel — but why should they, when they are getting a spirited pat on the back from our esteemed universities?

I do not seek to minimize the tragedy of what has happened. I know from my family history that a wartime murder is an endless calamity that seeps through generations and on into eternity. In my grandfather’s hometown of Kamenetz Podolski, Ukraine, 23,600 Jews were marched into the woods on August 27 and 28, 1941, and murdered by mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, my wife had just dropped our daughter off at P.S. 41, and was taking our son to his second day of preschool at the Children’s Aid Society. They were walking through Washington Square Park when the first plane swooped down over them and crashed directly into the World Trade Center. It was the longest day of our lives, and I realized then that I love this America more than I knew. Today’s students were not yet born, yet imagine how proud those 9/11 terrorists would be, if they had lived to see them chanting, “We are Hamas!”

My father was a subway conductor who believed that equality would arise from the factory floor in the form of socialism. He didn’t think of himself as a white oppressor when he was chased beneath the subway El in Williamsburg by kids who were throwing stones and yelling, “Go back where you came from!” But he believed that this would never happen again as long as there is an Israel. A hundred years later, students at Columbia University have demonstrated their ignorance by yelling, “Go back to Poland!” and spitting on Jews.

When I was a child, my mother spoke to me about a Jewish Heart. I took it to mean that we have a special empathy for others because of our age-old travails. But in ancient times, Israelites thought of the heart in much the same way that we think of the mind. A Jewish Heart is regarded as the seat of wisdom. As the psalmist wrote, “Teach us to number our days that we may attain a heart of wisdom.”

I only speak out today because my Jewish Heart demands it.

Pincus is an award-winning artist and longtime Soho resident. He is currently completing a memoir, “Artist Proof.”