Like college teachers around the country, I’ve found the war in the Middle East has pitted my students against each other in ways that have turned many of them into bitter antagonists. Ruling the day now on campus after campus and in much of the country is a reductive either/or question: Do you favor Israelis or Palestinians?
It’s unclear how much longer this turmoil — and the hate speech and stereotyping surrounding it — will last. College presidents, as the lawyerly congressional testimony in December of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT on campus speech codes and antisemitism shows, don’t have an answer.
But today, as we mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there is a moral compass our recent history offers that gives me hope that we can find common ground to talk about the Middle East. The moral compass is King’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written during another era of great internal division.
In explaining why he was in Birmingham, Ala., protesting the city’s Jim Crow laws and willing to be arrested for doing so, King, who in 1964 would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, knew that his greatest........