The Harvard College Debating Union recently released, and then swiftly withdrew, its proposed topic for the annual World Schools Invitational: examine the Enlightenment-era effort by European states to grant Jewish people civil rights in exchange for political and legal assimilation. The intense backlash, which argued that the wording invited anti-Semitic arguments, forced its withdrawal. The episode exposed a deeper problem: even in one of the world’s most educated communities, there is a striking lack of understanding about Jewish emancipation, or the long, contested process by which Jews have gained, lost, and regained basic civil rights. Jewish emancipation was inseparable from...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
