Berkeley's Sather Gate has been blocked during regular school hours for months, although the size of the protest crowd varies from day to day. This photo was taken March 12. (Photo by D. Stephen Voss)

Back in college, I authored an essay dripping with antisemitic rhetoric. Jewish Americans weren’t my target — I was frustrated with Israel — but you wouldn’t have known it from what flowed out of my poison pen.

Fortunately, I attended college before social media. Instead of someone leaking my words so they could go viral, the impact remained localized: I had to meet with a few professors, plus a Jewish member of the governing board, after which my apologies settled the matter.

Why confess now?

You might think my point is to condemn cancel culture, the impulse to destroy young people’s futures after they commit thought crimes. If I shed hostilities taught by my upbringing, surely students today might, too, if we let them mature?

But that can’t be the full lesson, because I didn’t feel such hostilities even back then. Nothing in my upbringing encouraged antisemitism. I’d been taught respect for Jewish Americans and sympathy for Jews abroad.

To comprehend this shameful event from my past, we need to dig deeper. But if you’ll accompany me on the journey, it puts in perspective antisemitism plaguing college campuses today.

Saving Jessica and Rebecca

New Orleans in the 1970s was awash with racism, but it mostly targeted African Americans. Once someone fell on the “white” side of the black-white divide, neither nationality nor religion mattered much to those who reared me.

To the extent Jewish people appeared in our lore, the narratives were favorable.

A Jewish politician represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate even before the Civil War.

A Jewish businessman was crowned first King of Carnival.

Because of the segregation characterizing more-traditional New Orleans social clubs, Jewish businessmen helped launch the Mardi Gras parades that came to define my favorite holiday.

As that anecdote indicates, Jewish successes in Louisiana weren’t always easy. But still, New Orleans held a reputation for being “one of the very best cities for Jews,” and I was taught pride in that.

Family influences reinforced that perspective. An aunt who explored our genealogy thought she’d identified Jewish (as well as Muslim) ancestors. She was tickled by the possibility, not distressed.

My mother would speak with reverence, not scorn or resentment, about the Jewish professionals who staffed our hospitals and owned some of the city’s key businesses.

I never met the owners of our corner drugstore, part of a local chain called Katz & Besthoff. But I knew K&B could stay open on Sundays because it was “Jewish-owned,” and thanks to my sweet tooth, those invisible men were heroes. When Grandpa showed up for Sunday dinner with one of their trademark purple bags, it almost always meant ice cream!

Less invisible were the entertainers shaping our cultural perspective. My mother filled the air with Barbara Streisand, while Neil Diamond was my father’s pick. I would watch Neil Simon with my folks, Woody Allen when alone. We identified so thoroughly with such artists, I didn’t realize they were Jewish celebrities until later on.

As for outside U.S. borders, I admit my perspective was uncomfortably condescending. Jews were sympathetic victims: Shylock and Jessica in “The Merchant of Venice,” Isaac and Rebecca in “Ivanhoe,” Anne Frank in that diary our sisters read. The Holocaust loomed large in our historical memory.

Still, such sympathy meant that — until the arrival of Star Wars — my childhood fantasies typically consisted of saving Jewish people. My favorite toy was a Guns of Navarone playset, which let me defeat gray-plastic Nazis over and over with green-plastic toy soldiers (presumably on their way to liberate concentration camps).

The racism starter kit

I hope it’s become clear how unlikely a candidate I was to be spouting antisemitic garbage. If anything, I felt an abstract fondness for Jewish people, and I’d never witnessed antisemitism in real life.

Yet, sitting alone at my word processor late one night, horrified that Israel was poised to execute a Ukrainian autoworker and struggling to express my feelings persuasively, I latched onto the sort of nasty images and phrases that antisemites had employed for generations.

I was called on the carpet afterward, and my initial reaction was not fear, but deep sadness and regret — the rotten way you feel when you realize you’ve said something hurtful to an old friend.

But then I wanted to understand how I had misrepresented myself so badly. How had I stumbled onto rhetoric employed by the same villains I’d spent my fantasy life combatting?

That shame turned into a fascination with prejudice and racism, launching my career as a scholar studying cultural politics. It’s no coincidence my earliest research focused on former Klansman David Duke.

One thing the study of racism taught me is how adaptable such a centuries-old evil can be.

It doesn’t matter that Americans express positive feelings toward Jewish people. Doesn’t matter if they’re sincere.

Antisemitism sits lurking in the cultural background. Once anger or fear or frustration arises, however justifiable — once those emotions seek expression — they find an easily available (and potentially deadly) toolkit of insults, prejudices, and even conspiracies to exploit.

Antisemitism works the way people (perhaps fallaciously) view drug dependency: Society might stop abusing it, but it’s still addicted, and new stresses can cause a relapse.

Like many who study ethnic conflict, therefore, I’ve been troubled by the rise of antisemitism in the 21st century, and appalled at the hostility toward Jews openly expressed by many campus progressives since October.

Nowhere have those forces been more visible than UC Berkeley, which I’ve visited multiple times during my research sabbatical. Activists have been allowed to create a hostile environment for Jewish students, as symbolized by the long-running obstruction of Berkeley’s famed Sather Gate — at times, even I’ve thought it wise to avoid the area — and culminating recently in violent attacks.

There, as elsewhere, the excuse is that Jewish victims crossed some unacceptable line. If they’d kept their heads down — or, better yet, condemned Israel — then well and good. Expressing kinship toward the Jewish state, though, means paying a price for being on “the wrong side of history.”

It’s not about racism. It’s about foreign policy.

Yeah, right. When you’re part of a mob besieging a campus talk, shattering windows and trying to break down the door — when you reach the point of throttling schoolmates or slapping them and strutting afterward — it doesn’t matter where you started. It’s become about indulging hatreds.

If antisemitic rhetoric is a drug, I guess you could say I tried it once in college and didn’t like it. But on elite campuses today? The kids are tripping on it hard. It’s past time to worry about an overdose.