Antisemitism and medical research

Most of us have read about how the government is cutting large amounts of funding from university medical centers and medical research. It’s to punish the universities for their antisemitism and to get them to stop it, and also to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, we’re told.

Most of us are not directly connected with this funding (although I think it’s likely that we have a higher than average proportion of doctors and scientists among our readers), so whether or not we are troubled by it — most likely some of us are and others of us are not — we tend to ignore it.

But I have a dear friend who is affected by this, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

When my friend Rich Moline noticed a minor weird thing that his body was doing, he decided not to ignore it, as I and probably many other people would have done. He just had a feeling that something was wrong.

He was right. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That’s often a fatal diagnosis, but because his was caught so early, at Stage 1A, his odds are good. (And there’s a lesson in that. If you feel that something’s not quite right, follow up with your doctor. If you’re lucky, you’ll just have wasted your time. If you’re unlucky-but-lucky, you’ll have caught something that could have been major, given time.)

The treatment for Stage 1A pancreatic cancer is brutal. Rich has to undergo the kind of chemotherapy that pumps enough chemicals into his body to kill not one but a full stable of large horses. It is that set of toxic chemicals that will kill his cancer. He’ll also have surgery. He lives in Chicago and is being treated at Northwestern University’s Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. That’s a very good medical center, and Rich is being looked after by very good doctors.

He’s enrolled in a study that investigates how to time the chemo and the surgery in relation to each other, and tinkers a bit with the specific mix of chemicals. (Or so he explains it to me; I might have gotten some of that wrong.) That means that it’ll mainly help other patients, who are yet to develop cancer; it’ll also help him because he’ll be followed closely for six years after his treatment ends.

But there’s a big problem. The federal government stopped funding the research into cancer, heart disease, and other medical issues. According to oncologist Dr. Sheetal Kirshner, it has abruptly stopped the National Institutes of Health from paying $790 million that it had promised; the medical center has been putting in tens of millions of dollars from its endowment into the research, but it does not have unlimited funds, and soon they will run out.

The administration has not given any explanation for stopping the funding, but it is assumed that it has to do with antisemitism on campus.

This is ironic in many ways.

First, according to Abe Foxman of Bergen County, the long-time, now retired head of the Anti-Defamation League, the idea that many universities include departments that are blatantly not only anti-Zionist but also antisemitic is true.

Back in 1973, during the Arab oil embargo, “Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Arab countries invested heavily in American educational institutions, from Columbia to Texas A&M to Georgetown,” Mr. Foxman said. “They funded Middle Eastern centers with the understanding that they would exclude Israel.

“It was a lot of money.”

Jews gave money too, “but ironically, those philanthropists gave to universities with no strings attached,” Abe said. “It was not conditioned on having Jewish studies or Holocaust studies or Israel studies.

“When I looked at my records, I see that we were writing about antisemitism on campus in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s. Twenty years ago, I went to see the president of Columbia to talk about discrimination against Jews on campus.”

So yes, it’s very true that there is antisemitism on campus, but the idea that the way to deal with it is to cut medical research is illogical. “It’s treating the problem with a sledgehammer,” Abe concluded. “The results are likely to be far worse than the problem.”

For one thing, many scientists and researchers are Jewish; cutting funds leaves them out of work, he said.

For another, let’s go back to my friend Rich. From before he was elected international president of USY — which was a major big deal back then — until now, Rich has been an active, committed, visibly Jewish Jew. He worked for United Synagogue for decades, creating and leading Koach, its program for Conservative Jews on campus, until that program was put on idiotic and permanent hiatus; he now is the director of institutional advancement at the Chicago Jewish Day School. He’s a founding member of his minyan. He always wears a kippah, so when you see him, you know who he is.

The idea that cutting off funding for a program that helps him combat cancer is fighting antisemitism is ludicrous in every possible way.

Moreover, as Rich has said, telling people whose cancers remain incurable because research into it was stopped that it was done to protect Jews is hardly likely to help any Jews.

Rich was featured on a news program on ABC’s local Chicago affiliate, where he talked about the funding cuts. “I would like every lawmaker to look me in the eye, and I would ask them: ‘Why are you playing with human lives?’” he said. It’s a very good question.

—JP

Opinion

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