From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, April 26th.

We continue on this show to try to talk about and to care about the different suffering parties in the Israel-Palestine conflict and the

college campuses situation in this country. For this Passover week and week in which campus

protests have been multiplying and expanding, we've been mostly centering some of the really

ugly and explicit anti-Semitism that's been getting expressed around some of those,

including threatening language or glorifying Hamas attacks that's there, clear as day to be

seen on some of the videos going around, not just by random individuals, but also by organized

chanting groups, in some cases, sometimes on campus.

To many Jews, it's like nothing that's really happened

in the U.S. in this kind of way before. It's a serious eye-opener and source of fear for many

Jewish students and faculty, and it needs to be called what it is. At the same time, that is not to

say that the protests are essentially anti-Semitic, as opposed to policy focused on the war and the occupation.

Even the conservative New York Times columnist and Columbia professor John McWhorter, you know him?

John McWhorter wrote in the Times this week, quote,

I don't think that Jew hatred is as much the reason for the sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war in Gaza.

I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week,

and I find it very hard to imagine that they are anti-Semitic, unquote.

Though he also writes that, yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses the line into anti-Semitism,

and he concludes that what began as intelligent protest has become in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness,

a form of abuse, unquote, from John McWhorter.

And none of this is to say you have to agree with John McWhorter,

but he's trying to hold some complexity that it's worth considering when so many people have

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