AMERICAN MISEDUCATION

 The Free Press has just posted the 20-minute documentary American Miseducation (video below). The documentary is reported by the Free Press’s Oliva Reingold, who provides background on it here. The video is posted on YouTube with this explanation:

In October last year, when Hamas attacked Israel, a new form of violent antisemitism instantly exploded onto American streets. This newest strain of the oldest hatred comes not from far-right extremists, but from students and faculty at America’s most vaunted centers of learning.

In American Miseducation, Free Press correspondent Olivia Reingold travels to America’s most elite colleges—from UPenn to Columbia—to find the origins of campus antisemitism and to ask how the smartest people in the country became the source of so much hate.

Early in the video Roger Waters is cited. This feels like a trip to the dark side of the moon. The new scaffolding for the old hatred requires explanation, response, and resistance. Understanding is the first step. We’re not there yet. As a song or two might put it, we can’t go on this way. Yet this is where we are.

The Free Press credits the Jack Miller Center for its partnership on the project. The Jack Miller Center is described as “a nonprofit organization building a movement of civic educators to reach the next generation with the principles of freedom, tolerance, and human dignity that lie at the heart of the American political tradition.”