Not Safe for Work
My dad lost his entire family in the Holocaust before spending four years as a Partisan fighting the Nazis. So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at his reaction in 2018 when I brought him a copy of Jason Stanley’s book, How Fascism Works. He took one look at the cover and said, “Vhat, you don’t think I know how it verks?” I wonder how he’d react to this week’s news that Jason Stanley is joining the very popular Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore in leaving Yale for the University of Toronto. Stanley explained that he chose to move after seeing how Columbia University handled political attacks from Trump. “When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted — that whole way of thinking presupposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy … I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia.” I share Stanley’s concern about Columbia’s capitulation. But is leaving the country less of a capitulation? How is a one-way ticket abroad different from obeying in advance? Isn’t pushing experts on fascism out of major universities the very goal of the Trump’s strategy when it comes to academia? And, where does it leave those of us who have been quite publicly sharing the work of these academics for a long time, including during the current democracy slide? Aren’t we (and the pit in my stomach) left feeling more concerned and less strong than before? And isn’t that an example of how fascism works? Later in his life, my dad wrote his own book called, Taking Risks, in which he chronicled his years with the Partisans, blowing up Nazi trains, disrupting German supply lines, and saving civilans, as well as his years living in America—where he moved after that iteration fascism had been defeated. His book could have just as accurately been titled, How Fighting Fascism Works.
