What can we do about campus hate? I’ve written a satirical novel

These are the professors teaching our students. These are the administrators overseeing the safety of our students. And these are the student peers who marginalise and harass our students.

All indications are that this coming academic year, particularly as students return in person to campus, is not likely to be pretty for the Jews.

What are we supposed to do?

We’ve done (and will continue to do) the obvious and the necessary. We try to refute the lies, to raise our voices in protest against the injustice. We try to build pride in our Jewish identity and in the many virtues of Israel, particularly among our young. We try to keep up with the onslaught of hate even though we are so grossly outnumbered in every domain. For one sobering thought, Israel-hating celebrity Gigi Hadid alone has maybe four times as many Instagram followers as there are Jews in the world.

How can we possibly match that?

So partly just to try something different, and partly to follow Saul Alinsky’s advice that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” I have written a novel instead. Nearly everything else is weaponised against us, so why not return the favour?

Called Nevergreen, it’s an academic satire that targets campus cancel culture and the ideological excesses that generate it. It tries to get across just what it feels like to be the victim of a cancel campaign, and that — as such victims will tell you — is not something pretty either. My hope is for it to serve as one more weapon in the battle for academic freedom, integrity, and sanity that we are currently badly losing. And of course, hopefully, it’s entertaining. It won’t accomplish much unless people enjoy reading it.

Nevergreen tells the story of J, a physician in a midlife funk. A chance encounter gives him the opportunity of a lifetime, an invitation to speak at a small college. But when he arrives at the secluded island campus of Nevergreen College he gets a lot more than he bargained for. No one actually shows up for his talk, but that doesn’t stop it from becoming the centre of a firestorm of controversy — with potentially fatal consequences.

Nevergreen aims to be a smart, fast, funny, and incisive portrait of today’s liberal arts college scene, cancel culture, and more.

It’s also, rather secretly, all about the Jews, in rather the way that antisemites think the world is secretly run by the Jews. You could miss it entirely if you weren’t looking for it, yet once you see it, it’s everywhere. I chose this strategy for several reasons: (1) To reflect the fact that the ideologies driving campus cancel culture (such as Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, Anti-Zionism) are all ultimately antisemitic, even when they don’t explicitly mention the Jews and claim not to be. If you casually glance at them, you could miss it entirely. But once you dig a little, there it is. In the end, all three of these ideologies (and others) end up being about, and weaponised against, the Jews. (2) To avoid turning away readers who may not particularly care about the Jewish situation on campus. There’s plenty here about campus cancel culture even apart from the secret Jewish angle. (3) To make the book fun for those who want to decode it.

At the risk of (minor) spoilers, I’ll mention just several clues.

The Jews are absent on this campus. Conspicuously absent. Pay attention to the geography of the campus and the names of the buildings. There is reference to some “episode” several years prior. There are hints throughout about what that episode was, and that episode explains why there are no Jews there. The cancel campaign reflects an alliance run by shadowy figures named “Cerise” and “Viresce” on behalf of “the Resistance”. What remains of traditional scholarship is Jewish-related scholarship, done in secret because of the campus atmosphere. And of course the main character, targeted for canceling, goes by the initial ‘J’. What is happening to J on this campus is more or less what is happening — and, frighteningly, as the story reaches its climax, what may very well happen — to Jews on many campuses.

Overall, the pervasive themes of irrationality and disconnection from reality reflect both the dangers of total commitment to ideology and the nature of the antisemitic mind. In the grip of ideologies, the students can somehow turn the innocuous main character into the very “face of hate”. In the same way, those in the grip of antisemitism can look at (say) the very complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see only the evil “Jewish supremacist state” producing “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” etc.

If there is a “secret thesis” of the novel, it’s this, informed by our infamously lachrymose history: that whenever large groups of people are gripped by some all-consuming universalist ideology, as campus activists currently are, it never turns out well for the Jews.

As mentioned, Nevergreen attempts to express what it feels like to be the target of cancellation, and early readers have suggested that, as a result, the book is a mix of “academic satire” and the genre of “horror”. In his subjective (if not always reliable) experience, the main character, J, is being pursued, possibly, by a mob of mad, bloodthirsty murderers.

But wait, do the students really want to, what, murder him? Of course not: “they’re just kids”. They’re excited to be activists about their causes du jour. They’re easily distractable. They’re not really pursuing him.

But then again, maybe they kinda sorta do, and kinda sorta are. Something inside them revels in the power of cancelling, something in their ideology converts those who are allegedly “against hate” into the deepest haters of all…

The angry campus demonstrations against Israel, depicting Israel via all the blood-libel slanders, accompanied by outright calls to destroy it and for intifada; the onslaught of campus vandalism against Jews, swastikas everywhere, Hillel buildings defaced, Chabad houses vandalised and burned; thousands of professors and administrators and students condemning and calling for the cancellation of the only Jewish state in the world; the verbal and physical assaults on Jews in major cities and in and around campuses.

Can you blame Jewish students, staff, and faculty for feeling like they are being pursued, possibly, by a mob of mad, bloodthirsty murderers?

And just mightn’t it be possible — if the present trajectory remains unchecked — that they are?

More information about Nevergreen and links to order may be found at: andrewpessin.com/nevergreen