There are several answers to that question, but start with the fact that it is mostly the “elite” universities, and to some extent the larger ones, that have seen severe outbreaks of anti-Semitism. What is different about these institutions? For one thing, they have large numbers of foreign students, many of them from the Middle East and China. This has become a financial racket: the top universities post sky-high sticker prices for tuition, but hardly anyone pays them. In fact, almost the only people who pay full freight are rich Middle Easterners and Chinese who send their offspring to the U.S. to be “educated.”

These international students, the large majority from countries with little freedom of speech and little or no tradition of academic freedom, are the shock troops of anti-Semitism. True, they bring some leftist students along with them. But the most anti-Semitic universities, like Harvard, Penn and MIT, are also the ones with the most foreign students from anti-Semitic countries.