A Context Dependent Decision

“I AM A 70-YEAR-OLD JEWISH MAN, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of the Law School at UC Berkeley wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. “I have heard antisemitic things from time to time through my life. I remember as a child being called a ‘dirty Jew,’ and my friends and I being called ‘Christ killers’ as we walked to Hebrew school. I recall a college girlfriend’s parents telling her that she should not go out with me because ‘Jews are different.’ I had an incident in a class I was teaching about the ethics of negotiations, where a student matter of factly said, ‘the other side will try to Jew you down,’ without the slightest sense of how that was a slur.” But, Chemerinsky adds, “none of this prepared me for the last few weeks.”