“Hath not a Jew eyes? … If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
These are not the words of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s from William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Once upon a time, the “educated” in the Anglophone West would have known this. Sadly, this is no longer the case as the left has co-opted institutions meant to propagate Western civilization while the right turned a blind eye to the rotting humanities to focus instead on STEM, business, and trade schools. If the world needs a lesson on why the humanities matter, look no further than the English department at Elias Rodriguez’s alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)—the department that may have helped shape the man now accused of murdering two Israeli diplomats.
Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were two Israeli Embassy staffers to be engaged when they were murdered outside of an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee at the Capital Jewish Museum last week.
Rodriguez, the accused shooter, shouted “Free Palestine” and later declared to authorities: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” After graduating with a degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2018, Rodriguez was an engaged activist in the Black Lives Matter movement and worked in the nonprofit world. Rodriguez was part of the leftwing group, the “Answer Coalition,” which devotes itself to “ending war and racism” and was supported by a GoFundMe campaign in 2017 to attend the People’s Congress of Resistance in Washington D.C. meant to “end imperialist war.” This timeline indicates that Rodriguez’s path to radicalization and terrorism began when he was a student.
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College campuses like Columbia University, Harvard, and Stanford have taken up headlines over the past few months as higher education’s affinity for anti-Semitism, their anti-White, and anti-Asian obsession with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), and their tolerance of Chinese espionage have run up against the Trump administration’s efforts to defund and reform universities gone rogue. Colleges are even standing up for foreign students who hate Jews and America. The legal battles and theater activism taking place at America’s elite colleges mask a disgusting truth: anti-Semitism, hatred of the West, and a love for Marxist revolutionary thought is normal orthodoxy across most of higher education. The English department at UIC, which awarded Rodriguez his degree, is no different.
To understand the thinking behind Rodriguez, look at the bios of the department’s full-time faculty to see how leftist ideology and Marxist social theory have replaced classical thinking. What follows are some of the highlights.
Of the UIC English department’s 22 faculty who are not “Lecturers” and in positions indicative of full-time roles, almost all are committed to Marxist modes of teaching.
Associate Professor Ainsworth A. Clarke’s work focuses on “twentieth century African American intellectual history, race and the production of disciplinary knowledge.” The Associate Director of English Education, Abigail Kindelsperger, not only works as an instructor for “student teachers” but is a contributing author to Rethinking Sexism, Gender, and Sexuality (Rethinking Schools, 2016).
Assistant Professor Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson’s work “considers intersections of race, gender, class, and geography to understand the possibilities of Black girls’ literacies, youth and community storytelling and place-making practices, and justice-oriented education.” English professor Rachel Havrelock also runs the “Freshwater Lab, an environmental humanities initiative focused on the North American Great Lakes and environmental justice.”
The work by Assistant Professor Kaitlin Forcier focuses on “visual culture and media history,” and asserts that “endlessness is a characteristic unique to live networked screens and is deeply imbricated with new modes of power and control under digital capitalism.” UIC’s English Department Head, Peter Coviello, is a “scholar of American literature and queer theory, whose work addresses the entangled histories of sex, devotion, and intimate life in imperial modernity.”
Associate Professor Sunil Agnani’s work focuses on the “literature of empire and decolonization.” The first book by Assistant Professor Raphael Magarik, Fictions of God, “argues that early modern scholars invented the idea of the biblical narrator.” Assistant Professor Natasha Barnes’ work focuses on race, including her book, Cultural Conundrums: Race, Gender, Nation and The Making of Caribbean Cultural Politics. Associate Professor Daniel Borzutzky teaches on “Latinx Culture.”
Associate Professor Nasser Mufti’s work has appeared in Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum. Professor Nicholas Brown’s research interests include Marxism and wrote a monograph on the “relationship between postcolonial literature and European modernism, and the relationship of each to continuing crises in the global economic system.” Associate Professor Helen Jun teaches courses on “neocolonialism and globalization, and the prison industrial complex.”
UIC’s English Lecturers offer more of the same.
Ling He’s work “tests the validity issues of standardized English tests” of “minority students in universities.” Senior Lecturer Robin Petrovic Gayle’s “teaching interests include Social Justice Issues and the Intersection of Identities.” Visiting Lecturer Heather McShane teaches a course that draws from a program called “The Anti-Racist Training Workshop.” Jennifer Rupert focuses on “feminist and queer theory, the history of sexuality, and critical media studies.”
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On the surface, the faculty specialties available to students studying English are a mishmash of nihilistic nonsense. You see critiques of society in lieu of exploring the human condition, detractions from ideas of biological truth, a focus on race as an essential characteristic, and no pretense toward a universal truth or the good. On the surface, this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism; however, it has everything to do with it. The AMCHA Initiative, which tracks support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, logs that five professors at UIC’s English department indeed support the delegitimization of Israel. Corbin Hiday, Angela Dancey, Helen Jun, Mark Chiang, and Nasser Mufti have all endorsed petitions against Israel.
Modern Israel is built around an ancient national identity based on ideas of transcendent and divine ties between Jews and the land of Israel. Modern Israel is a technological capitalist success story and a living experiment in solidarity and diversity in action. Modern Israel’s pretext on an ancient biblical past undergirds the West itself, and its military defends its citizens. In short, modern Israel stands for everything that the modern English department hates and wants to destroy. Elias Rodriguez is a product of this thinking, and this worldview permeates virtually every university in America.
After Rodriguez gunned down Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, U.S. Attorney General stated that “antisemitic violence has no place in our country or anywhere in civilization.” Pam Bondi is correct, but prosecuting and even executing Elias Rodriguez will not stop the anti-Semitism produced in America’s universities.
Civilization can only strike back at barbarism when it understands itself and continually grasps universal values. Historically, this understanding has been derived from literature, history, and philosophy—the humanities. If this administration and other conservatives are serious about saving Western civilization, it needs to clear out universities and reengage the humanities mercilessly. In the Merchant of Venice, Shylock is not speaking when he asks, “If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?” Shylock is a fictional character speaking Shakespeare’s lines; that said, he is speaking to you. Take down the institutions.
Image: “UIC Campus” by Uicbmarketing on Wikimedia Commons
