As those who follow college campuses know, these are challenging times for the Jews — and, perhaps, for sane people in general.

The university has become almost unrecognizable. In place of reasoned deliberation, we find feverish activism; in place of a neutral forum for civil debate in the shared pursuit of truth, we find the enforcement of official orthodoxies. Disagreement, once the driving force of intellectual advancement, now is anathema. If you dare to differ from some particular orthodoxy, it’s because you enjoy privileges that blind you to the experiences of others. Or, worse, it’s because you, in fact, are actively defending those privileges. You are, in other words, a racist, or a homophobe, or a transphobe, or an Islamophobe, or — a Zionist.

In short, you are a hater — and hatred has no place on campus.

All of this culminates in “cancel culture”: those who disagree with the orthodoxies must be eliminated from the table of discourse, and in some cases, from the campus altogether. The National Association of Scholars currently documents some 180 cases of “cancellation” at North American universities going back to 2015, and that list does not include the increasingly frequent cancellation of Jews, especially Jews who support Israel.

Back in 2018, I co-edited a book called “Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS.” That book documented several dozen episodes where pro-Israel faculty and students were targeted for cancellation.

Today, just three short years later, those seem like the glory days.

In May of this year, while Hamas was firing rockets at Israeli civilians, and while Jews were being assaulted in the streets of Europe and the US, synagogues and Chabad houses were vandalized and burned, cemeteries were desecrated, and stores smashed, the academy erupted loudly in protest — against Israel.

Literally hundreds of statements were signed by tens of thousands of people affiliated with higher education. These statements weren’t merely filled with lies and distortions — worse, they openly admitted that they weren’t interested in “fairness” and “objectivity.” There aren’t two sides to the conflict, these academics proclaimed: Jews have no rights here — it’s just the purely evil “Jewish supremacist state” doing its evil thing. Those Hamas rockets, which explained and justified the Israeli responses, were never mentioned — nor were the use of Palestinian human shields, or Hamas’ genocidal charter.

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

What are we supposed to do?

Partly to try something different, partly to maintain my own sanity, and partly to follow Saul Alinsky’s famous advice “for radicals” that “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” I have written a novel.

Called “Nevergreen,” it’s a satirical look at campus cancel culture and the ideological excesses that generate it. The book tries to get across how unhinged cancel campaigns can be, and in particular, just what it feels like to be the victim of a cancel campaign. My hope is that by magnifying by means of satire the intellectual corruptions of the dominant campus climate, the book may serve as one additional weapon in the battle for the academic freedom, integrity, and indeed sanity that we — the Jews, and sane persons generally — are badly losing. And of course, hopefully, it’s entertaining.

“Nevergreen” tells the story of J., a physician in a midlife funk. A chance encounter gives him the opportunity to speak at a small college. But when he arrives at the secluded island campus of Nevergreen College — not by accident, the former site of the The Nevergreen Asylum for the Lunatic, Imbecile, and Idiot — 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 center of a firestorm of controversy — with potentially fatal consequences.

The book is also, ultimately, about the Jews. The Jews are conspicuously absent from this campus; there are hints of some terrible earlier episode that explains that absence. What remains of traditional scholarship is Jewish scholarship, which must be done in secret due to the inhospitable campus atmosphere. The secret thesis, informed by our notoriously lachrymose history, is that whenever large groups of people are driven by some universalist ideology, it doesn’t turn out well for the Jews.

And that is just what is happening today.

The book attempts to express what it feels like to be the target of cancellation — what it feels like to be a Jew on campus.

Something in the “cancel culture” crowd revels in the power of cancelling, and converts those who are allegedly “against hate” into the deepest haters of all. That’s why we see the angry campus demonstrations against Israel, depicting Israel via all the blood-libel slanders, accompanied by outright calls for intifada and to destroy her; the onslaught of campus vandalism against Jews, swastikas everywhere, Hillel buildings defaced, Chabad houses vandalized and burned; thousands of professors and administrators and students calling for the cancellation of the lone Jewish state in the world; and the verbal and physical assaults of 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 purchase are available here: https://andrewpessin.com/nevergreen/.

The opinions presented by Algemeiner bloggers are solely theirs and do not represent those of The Algemeiner, its publishers or editors. If you would like to share your views with a blog post on The Algemeiner, please be in touch through our Contact page.