This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnik.

For six months on this program, we've been dealing with the massacre of October 7th

and the war on Gaza and its horrific human consequences.

With so much death and suffering on the ground,

it would be a mistake to let our interest in and our debates about domestic protests somehow overwhelm our attention.

Yet you'd have to go back to the Vietnam War era

to see a protest movement as widespread

as what's happening now from coast to coast.

The scenes of arrests are familiar from that era,

but some of the dynamics of what's happening now on campuses,

protests against Israel's prolonged bombing of Gaza, and counter-protest denouncing Hamas and

calling for the release of hostages, the charges of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia,

and doxing, student against students sometimes.

Well, in some important ways, this is quite different from what we saw during Vietnam.

In 1968, students, you know, are mad at I don't know you know at McNamara or you know

L. B. J. With the administration that's right they're mad at the grown-ups they're mad at

adults it's it's looking. I talked the other day with

Randall Kennedy, a professor at the Harvard Law School. What you have going on now, you have people who are no longer speaking to one another. You have a situation

in which somebody goes down a hall and sees a colleague walking down the hall and they turn around because they don't want to say anything to the colleague.

Because if we talk about this all bets are off. So this this... And I should interrupt and say that that is not limited to anyone and includes Jewish friends who are having a hard time talk to each other?

Oh, absolutely.

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