Many critics are displaying a combination of ignorance and mendacity, often with a significant dollop of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned that the threat of antisemitism is growing, in remarks honoring the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, as his support for Israel's assault on Gaza divides his Democratic Party.

"Never again simply translated for me means: Never forget. Never forgetting means we must keep telling the story, we must keep teaching the truth," Biden said as he addressed a bipartisan memorial held at the U.S. Capitol's Emancipation Hall. "The truth is we're at risk of people not knowing the truth."

President Biden said Tuesday that the hatred of Jews "continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world" while delivering the keynote address at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's annual Days of Remembrance ceremony.

The president spoke in Washington, D.C. as anti-Israel protests have been disrupting college campuses around the country. 

"That hatred is brought to life on October 7th, in 2023, on a sacred Jewish holiday," Biden said. "The terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust."

President Joe Biden delivered a major speech denouncing antisemitism on Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol.

The remarks are part of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum ceremony marking the Days of Remembrance to honor the memory of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust as well as other victims of Nazi persecution.

To protect children from sexual exploitation, Canada must pass the Online Harms Act, says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. “I am the parent of two young boys,” said Justice Minister Arif Virani. “I will do whatever I can to ensure their digital world is as safe as the neighborhood we live in. Children are vulnerable online. They need to be protected from online sexual exploitation, hate, and cyberbullying.”

Almost everyone has been piling on that pitiful troika of elite university presidents after their congressional testimony on Tuesday. A few other folks, people I know and respect like Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times and Jay Michaelson of The Daily Beast, have added some valuable nuance, arguing that in context, the position the presidents were defending actually had merit.

Leaders of elite educational institutions are now desperately trying to contain the fallout from the explosive hearing earlier this week at which the presidents of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania failed to reassure Congress that they were sufficiently concerned about antisemitism on campus.

I wish more of the people who are so obsessed with campus speech could actually focus on the kind of speech that really matters for college students and those of us tasked with educating them.

In a world driven by sound bites, social media, secret recordings of professors and students and even elected officials demanding yes/no answers, suspicion and division are building, rendering it seemingly impossible to have the difficult conversations in the classroom that always, in my experience, lie at the core of any great education.