“I’ve been watching this happening in slow motion for years and writing about it,” says Pessin. “It didn’t surprise me in the least; the trajectory was so clear – this was the next step. Yet the reality still proved shocking.”

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A prolific scholar with 17 books of philosophy and fiction to his name, Pessin has recently published Israel Breathes. World Condemns, a two-volume collection of his articles and essays. The compilation traces the ideological evolution and incidents that gave rise to today’s campus protests and encampments.

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“They document the stages by which an Islamist jihadi terrorist group massacred the civilians of a democracy, and the dominant campus response was to blame the democracy,” writes Pessin, a tenured professor at Connecticut College, a small private liberal arts institution with some 2,000 students. “They document, perhaps for later historians, how Jew-hatred has moved from the fringe into outright dominance on campuses and the infosphere. The primary focus is on the campus, on the many students and professors who, through the lens of their ideologies, have come to see the mass murder of Jews as the moral high ground. But, of course, what starts on campus, what is incubated on campus, does not and has not stayed on campus. It’s in our cities, on our streets, all over the Internet, permeates the media, and this intifada against the Jews is now fully globalized.”

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With his laid-back style, wit, and sense of humor, the bespectacled Pessin was a popular philosophy professor at the college until 10 years ago when he found himself at the center of a firestorm. Though aware of Jewish professors being marginalized for their pro-Israel stance, he hadn’t imagined it could affect him – until he became the target of a coordinated digital attack by pro-Palestinian students, sparked by a delibera

Prof. Andrew Pessin: From campus pariah to prophet of antisemitism

How one professor documented the rise of campus antisemitism.

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