By Andrew Adler
OWICIM, POLAND – 2022/04/28: A flag of Israel was seen on the railroad tracks in KL Birkenau during the International March of The Living. (Photo by Wojciech Grabowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“There are always people around in whom antisemitism is a light sleeper,” the late, great Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien famously remarked in his 1986 book, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism. But mere days ago, a slumberer in our midst awoke with a declaration of unchecked, delirious hate.
Ramsi Woodcock, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s J. David Robertson College of Law, posted a screed titled “Petition for Military Action Against Israel.” Its opening paragraph read: We demand that every country in the world make war on Israel immediately and until such time as Israel has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Coupled with this document – astonishing if for nothing else in its unabashed grotesquery – was a “call for papers” intended for “The Inaugural Ending Israel Conference” slated for May of next year.
Once I’d recovered from said astonishment, my first thought was that Woodcock had committed a dizzyingly swift act of professional suicide. Indeed, shortly after these posts went live, UK President Eli Capilouto issued a statement saying that “this employee has been removed, pending an investigation, from any teaching and classroom responsibilities.”
“Let me be clear,” Capilouto said, “the views expressed by this employee, if accurately attributed, are repugnant.”
A bit further down, he continued: “This issue, therefore, compels us to address questions other campuses are grappling with as well – chiefly, where and when does conduct and the freedom to express views in a university community compromise the safety and well-being of people in that community?”
“Under Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, these issues raise serious concerns about whether this employee’s actions may create a hostile environment on our campus — an environment in which the civil rights of members of our community could be violated.”
Below his principal statement, Capilouto outlines additional steps UK is taking: an “independent legal review” that will result in “accelerated findings, an “updated web policy” and “protection from retaliation.”
The first action, the legal review to be conducted by outside counsel, makes a vital point: “Conduct and speech that constitutes harassment or creates a hostile environment as defined by the Supreme Court of the United States is not protected.”
This is important. The University of Kentucky is a public institution, and there is a school of thought that public universities have a greater obligation to tolerate this kind of speech than their private counterparts.
We must also acknowledge the presence of the Kentucky Antisemitism Task Force, which Gov. Andy Beshear announced on Dec 21, 2023 – a little more than two months after the events of October 7. Meeting for the third time in May 15, 2024, the Task Force’s subject was “Addressing Antisemitism and Discrimination on College Campuses.”
Nobody reading this column needs to be reminded of the fraught relationship between certain universities and the Trump administration. And while most of these involve elite schools like Harvard, Penn, Columbia, Cornell (the Ivy League is a favorite target), Johns Hopkins, Northwestern and Berkeley, less celebrated schools such as UK and the University of Louisville have hardly been spared the angst of antisemitism reckonings – from both within and without.
Coincidentally, the very definition of antisemitism has occupied the foreground of recent debate. Earlier this month, the National Education Association’s 2025 Representative Assembly recommended to the NEA’s Executive Committee that the NEA not forge any partnership with the Anti-Defamation League.
The NEA is America’s largest teachers’ union, and a recommendation such of this could have had tremendous consequences. Its National Assembly had decided not to employ any ADL’s “curricular materials or its statistics,” going against a longstanding consensus that those very materials and statistics are benchmarks of reliability.
Much of this stemmed from the belief that the ADL deemed college and university protests against the Israel Defense Forces’ actions in Gaza as antisemitic. It was an example of perception masquerading as reality.
To its credit, the NEA’s Executive Committee rejected the Assembly’s recommendation. But the very fact that such an exchange took place at all – that the ADL’s content regarding antisemitism and Holocaust education could be unceremoniously cast aside as inappropriate – reflects how reason and objectivity have been compromised by rhetoric that often that at best is ill-informed, and at worst contaminated by outright distortion and undisguised hatred.
Extreme, aberrational manifestations, like the ugliness promulgated by a UK law professor, are relatively straightforward to identify and counteract. It is the insidious kind we must guard against. Without such vigilance, the sleeper may be roused to a poisonous, malignant fury.
Andrew Adler is Managing Editor of Community.