Free Speech: A Conversation with Bret Stephens
DANGER & SAFETY
Claire E. Sufrin
Claire E. Sufrin is Editor of Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.
Art credit: Kurt Hoffman
Bret Stephens has been an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since 2017, where he is an outspoken defender of the right of free speech and co-writes “The Conversation,” a model of meaningful engagement across differences in political views, with Gail Collins. Below, Bret and I discuss the implications of the right and value of freedom of speech for American Jews today. We address the tension between being free to speak our own minds, on the one hand, and others being free to express ideas we find abhorrent or dangerous, on the other. As we narrowed our focus to issues of free speech particular to college campuses, Bret argued for resilience rather than fragility in the face of hate and models of pedagogy and learning open to understanding a wide variety of viewpoints.
Claire E. Sufrin: I’d like to start broadly, by asking how you define danger and, in particular, dangerous speech.
Bret Stephens: The word “danger” is used a little too promiscuously in contemporary American contexts, at least in the world I inhabit. When I was a child, I was nearly kidnapped in Mexico City, where I grew up. That's danger. When I was editor of the Jerusalem Post, I witnessed the effects of a suicide bombing on Aza Street. That's danger. When, on the other hand, someone tells me that an essay published in a newspaper puts people's lives in danger, I have a hard time taking that seriously. I have difficulty in general, although not in all cases, with the idea that language by itself is dangerous. It can be disturbing, wrong, and pernicious, and in rare and extreme cases, can constitute genuine incitement. But I'm troubled by the easy conflation of rhetoric and physical life. We should be careful about how we use the word “danger.”
You noted that overuse of the word “danger” is a phenomenon you’ve seen increase in the last few years. Do you have a sense of why that is?
People who live in relatively safe worlds risk confusing metaphor with reality.
The social psychologist Pamela Paresky coined the term “safetyism” to describe the phenomenon of being excessively concerned with safety, not just physical but emotional. For Gen Z, their concept of what's “dangerous” really differs from what my generation thought was dangerous and certainly, you know, my father's generation. If there was a genuine risk that you were going to be drafted at 18 to go fight in Vietnam, you probably had a different threshold for where danger begins.
Let me talk about this in a Jewish context, a personal one. About 30 years ago, when I was a junior at the University of Chicago, someone keyed a swastika into my car. I have a pretty good idea of who it was, another student who later dropped out. But I would never have been able to prove it. I called a university administrator who said, in effect, “Well, sorry.” He treated it as very unfortunate and certainly didn’t condone it. But it wasn't seen as a major incident requiring an all-out response.
If that happened now, at any university, I think I would have been invited for counseling and coddling. Standards have changed, as has our sense of consequences, of outrage, of danger.
Drawing a swastika on a Jewish student’s property is an act of antisemitic speech by one student against another and, by implication, against the entire Jewish community on campus. If acts of this kind do not deserve significant attention from the university, how should Jewish students react if or when something like this happens on their campus?
I do not want to minimize the ugliness of that event. But we each have a choice about how we respond, not just publicly but also emotionally. We can choose to be fragile. Or we can work to be anti-fragile. We can choose resilience, or we can choose to let negative and hateful incidents dominate and even determine our lives as individuals and our identity as Jews.
For a long time, there was a sense that it's hard to be a Jew. If you want to live your life as a Jew and you want to be out, Jewishly, in the world, some people are going to hate you. Some people may key your car; hopefully nothing worse. I wish it were otherwise and we should do our best to minimize and fight it. But we also need to learn to be resilient in the face of hate. And we have to take care that, in our woundedness, we don’t give the hater a sense of power over us.
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What do you understand the purpose of free speech to be, especially on a college campus?
If you can't speak freely, in the long term you won't be able to think clearly. The purpose of free speech is not simply freedom in and of itself. It’s intellectual challenge that leads, through a process of trial and error, to better thinking, intellectual excellence and, hopefully, social progress. You can think more deeply about any given subject when you can be vigorous in challenging ideas with which you disagree, and also in being forced to re-examine ideas with which you agree.
Sometimes this will lead to insult and hurt, to people feeling “unsafe.” To whatever extent possible, universities and other institutions should endeavor to discourage personal disparagement. But you can only take that so far before considerations of civility become new forms of censorship. In that sense, free speech is like permission to ride a bike. It's exhilarating and freeing and exercises our faculties and takes us places that we might not otherwise get to, but yes, we're also going to risk falling off and getting hurt. Sometimes we're going to humiliate ourselves, and sometimes we're going to upset someone else. It may not be ideal, but overall, I think it's a price that’s well worth paying.
Many American Jews live in relative safety. They walk around freely and have access to the best that American society has to offer. And yet, there's a lot of concern within the communal Jewish discourse about becoming victims of hate speech, particularly antisemitism or anti-Zionism. Earlier this year, many Jewish groups called for the City University of New York (CUNY) Brooklyn Law School to lose funding after the commencement speaker, a Palestinian activist, condemned the state of Israel.
To return to my earlier point, we should try not to be so easily affronted. I obviously don’t endorse the opinions expressed by the CUNY law school graduation speaker. In fact, I detest them. But the idea that she should not have the right to say it, given that she was elected to give this talk by other students, is worse than absurd. It's obscene.
If the First Amendment represents a set of values that Jews should embrace, we can’t embrace those values selectively, and only insofar as they benefit us. We must embrace them in their totality, which means allowing people who have views we consider hateful and antisemitic to speak in the venues in which they're either invited to speak or in which they have a right to speak. That’s fundamental.
It seems to me you’re arguing that free speech is, on the whole, “good for the Jews.”
Art Credit: Kurt Hoffman
Very much so. And it goes to a deeper question: How should Jews think of liberalism in its classical sense—freedom, pluralism, tolerance, the rights enumerated in the Constitution—and the safety it offers us? By and large, I think, liberal values have served Jews exceptionally well, even though they also benefit people we consider our adversaries or enemies. It's dangerous to go down the road of using the threat of antisemitism as an excuse to limit those rights. Dangerous for democracy, obviously, but I would argue it’s even more dangerous for Jews.
The danger in restricting free speech isn’t just that we are a distinctive minority in a country where the majority could otherwise try to silence us. Restricting free speech also threatens specifically Jewish cultural characteristics: our impishness and our irreverence and our irony; our penchant for disagreement and dissent; our tendency to serve as social gadflies, activists, and change-makers; our habit of being general pains in the ass of society—because we're constantly raising nettlesome questions. We have a long history of being at the forefront of movements of social change, whether it’s Samuel Gompers as a labor leader, Betty Friedan as a feminist, Norman Podhoretz as a neoconservative, Larry Kramer as a gay rights and public-health advocate, or Abraham Joshua Heschel as a fighter for civil rights.
If we prize “argument for the sake of heaven,” then liberalism is a precious inheritance that we would be fools to forsake.
We can’t deny that there’s a connection between some of the abhorrent ideas that people put out into the public sphere, and the handful of individuals who then go out and attack other people on the basis of those ideas. I hear you saying that free speech is worth that risk of violence, or perhaps that limiting what people can say is not the right way to prevent violence.
It's a cliché that freedom isn’t free. But it’s true. Life in a free society asks us to take certain risks that could be mitigated, but only at a price that we shouldn’t pay. If the national speed limit were 30 miles an hour, it would probably save a lot of lives. But I doubt it’s a price we will accept.
The man who committed the murders at the Tree of Life synagogue was active in online channels where he seems to have found a community of like-minded lunatics. That may have contributed to what he did. But I don’t think we would have helped matters by shutting down those channels. Trying to deny people platforms where they can express vitriolic ideas doesn't eliminate the ideas. It merely drives them underground, and I’d rather have visible than invisible enemies. We are actually detecting and preventing violent antisemitic plots because some of these bad guys are making themselves known to law enforcement through their online activities.
So, beyond the argument that there are prices we will have to pay for maintaining a culture of free speech, I would also argue that a culture of free speech probably does more to air and expose danger than a repressive culture where bigots nurture their hatreds in darkness.
Free speech is often treated as a question of law, but here you seem to be describing it more as a question of values.
The First Amendment applies only to public spaces. You have a Constitutional right to stand on a corner and hold a sign that says, “Jews are blood suckers.” But you don't have a right to get that published in the New York Times. You don't have a right to be invited by a private university to give your “Jews are blood suckers” speech.
But that doesn’t answer the question of whether private institutions should, in the main, try to live by the spirit of the First Amendment, even if they don’t follow it to the letter. My view is that these institutions, whether it’s Facebook or Yale, generally do better when they foster free speech as a positive value, not something to be afraid of or to constantly monitor in search of hate or misinformation or simply opinions they don’t agree with. There was a big hullabaloo a couple of years ago when an MIT dean disinvited an astrophysicist from speaking about the possibility of life on exoplanets because he had questioned diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The dean responded by saying, we have the right to invite or disinvite anyone we please. That’s true, but it’s also unfortunate because places like MIT should welcome and safeguard the spirit of free expression, and they certainly should not penalize subject experts just because they hold extraneous views that don’t square with contemporary political orthodoxies. This goes back to the purpose of free speech being to create environments of intellectual challenge where you can learn to be better and more engaged thinkers in pursuit of progress, whatever that progress might be.
I’m aware of a university that employs an engineering professor who is a Holocaust denier. The university's attitude, as far as I understand it, is this: we hired him to teach engineering. He teaches engineering. We’ve not treated him as a prominent person within our university. He doesn't have a chair, or any other form of special recognition we can bestow upon faculty. And the university also ensures that no student is ever in a situation where they must take a class with him. In short, it’s a case of someone who, outside his teaching and research responsibilities, promotes a theory that's totally reprehensible, not to mention factually incorrect, and with whom students are never required to engage.
I’m the son of a Holocaust survivor; I obviously don’t have any sympathy for his views. But so long as he's not teaching Jewish studies or European history, then the university should be commended for not dismissing him. The school isn’t protecting this particular professor; it’s defending the idea of tenure and the right of members of an academic community to say what they think, likely at some cost to its own reputation.
But I do think there needs to be a single standard. Let’s imagine that you had a professor in, let’s say, the physics department who was a white supremacist. Would the university defend his tenure? I suspect the university would move swiftly against the racist professor in a way they might not against an antisemitic one. I’m troubled by what seems like an emerging double-standard where antisemitic transgressions get a rap-on-the-knuckles, but racist or homophobic transgressions are professional capital offenses. That itself is a form of antisemitism.
What about professors whose area of expertise and whose potentially offensive views overlap? Not the physics professor who's a racist in a way that doesn't inform his work or influence his attitudes toward individual students, but let’s say, a historian of the Middle East who questions the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. To me, that’s a much harder case. Any historian’s job is to interpret facts and create compelling narratives out of them. But those facts and narratives of course inform her opinions, and vice versa. This is true in many, if not all, areas of the humanities but it’s particularly sensitive, especially for Jews, around Israel.
College classrooms should be for pedagogy, not indoctrination. That means that viewpoint diversity counts; it is important and should be nurtured. Jewish professors who are pro-Israel should respect students’ views and not penalize students who think very differently from them, including any who are anti-Zionists. Professors in Middle Eastern studies departments who are exceptionally hostile to Zionism and to the state of Israel should bend over backwards to represent Israel fairly and not penalize students who are Zionists.
There's pedagogic value in being exposed to points of view with which you vehemently disagree. As a writer, the other columnists I read are the ones who think differently than I do. I am an avid reader of progressives. I learn how the other side thinks, and I see that as an opportunity to sharpen my own thinking.
For a student, the opportunity to learn something from someone you think is totally wrong, that's part of what can make an undergraduate experience challenging and enriching. When the Right complains about safe spaces on campuses and coddled students, they should take care not to replicate the very behavior they're decrying.
