The incident that strikes me as most revealing took place late last year at Yale Law School. The director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale hosted a diversity trainer who listed “pretty priv- ilege” and “fat-phobia” among the many forms of discrimination plaguing society — yet neglected to mention antisemitism. Asked to explain the omission, this administrator insisted that she had already covered it when she spoke about racism—because some Jews are black. She also questioned federal data showing that Jews are the most common targets of hate crimes, insisting that those who compile the statistics have an “agenda.”
And so, this diversity professional reduced thousands of years of antisemitism to a footnote, a particular brand of racism against black people. The training was based on a webinar in which partic- ipants were informed that anyone who questioned her conclusions had likely “been conditioned” to dismiss black people.
