How ‘the Jewish Professor’ on Campus Responded to a Former Student’s Anti-Semitism

Among the many anti-Semitic comments posted online by a University of Nebraska at Lincoln student, Ari Kohen spotted something upsetting: a reference to himself.

Kohen, an associate professor of political science, was enjoying a spy novel on Sunday evening when he got a Twitter message from Anti-Fascist Action Nebraska. The group told him that thousands of posts in a private chat room operated by a white supremacist had leaked online. The posts had been written by a former student of Kohen’s.

The antifa group had obtained the messages and had written a blog post about the 22-year-old student, who is a former campaign staffer for Nebraska’s governor, Pete Ricketts. He’s been identified by the governor’s office as Bennett Bressman. In a written statement, Ricketts, a Republican, said he was “shocked and horrified” to learn about Bressman’s comments, and condemns them. Bressman was a paid field staffer for seven months, until December.

Under the username bress222, the student used racist and homophobic slurs and wrote things like “gays are scum of the earth” and “i wanted a crater in israel not israel on a crater,” according to screenshots of the posts and as reported by the Lincoln Journal Star.

In one of his messages, Bressman appeared to describe Kohen by using an anti-Semitic meme.

“fellas my american revolution (((professor))) has made it very clear he is openly liberal,” reads the post, from March 2018. “he claims time and time again the revolutionary war was not truly about human rights and breaking from a tyrannical government, rather it was an elite few conspiring against the british so they could maintain their smuggling of goods into the colonies. does he have a point?”

The parentheses are used by white nationalists to emphasize a Jewish name. Some people on social media have countered by using the symbol with their own names.

Anti-Fascist Action’s blog post identified Kohen as the Jewish professor referenced by Bressman. Kohen told The Chronicle that he taught Bressman in a 2017 class on modern political philosophy, not in a 2018 course on the American Revolution. A colleague who taught the 2018 course is not Jewish.

‘This Is Not Abstract’

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” Kohen said, “that when people think of the Jewish professor at the university, that’s going to be me,” said Kohen, who wears a kipa, the skullcap worn by observant Jews.

As if signaling his anti-Semitic bona fides, Bressman “seems to have interposed me, the Jewish professor, into that class,” Kohen said. The professor also said that once the comments went public, Bressman reached out to him with an apology and asked to meet him in person to explain. Kohen said he had been advised by the campus police not to engage with Bressman, and told the student he wasn’t able to talk with him.

Bressman did not respond to a voice-mail message from The Chronicle seeking comment. He told the Journal Star that he regretted the posts.

A spokesman for the university said in an email that it is aware of “racist, bigoted, and hateful comments attributed to a UNL student.” The university police department is evaluating the situation, the message said, adding that racism and bigotry in any form are “repugnant” and contrary to the university’s values.

Kohen himself has seen this type of vitriol before, including that expressed by another Nebraska student. Last year Lincoln officials decided not to expel Daniel Kleve, a student who called himself “the most active white nationalist in the Nebraska area,” The Chronicle reported.

Kohen flagged Bressman’s posts for his department chair. He has done the same several times in the past, upon receiving swastikas in the mail.

He remembers Bressman as a disengaged student who never said anything alarming in class. The professor declined to go through Bressman’s thousands of online comments. Reading just a few was a “very, very challenging thing to do,” he said.

“For me, this is all really fraught,” Kohen said. “This is not abstract.”

Kohen described his shock on Twitter. “Admittedly, this is a bit of a dark moment for me,” he wrote, “but I have to say I’m amazed these people haven’t killed me yet.”

He also feels an “acute failure,” he wrote, because it’s clear that nothing he taught the class sank in with Bressman.

“It’s hard to imagine failing so badly with a student,” he wrote, “at least for someone who wanted to be a teacher since I was 19 years old because of that profession’s potential to change the way people think about the world around them.”

What’s so frightening is not the individual danger that Bressman might pose, Kohen said. He has been told that Bressman is not an immediate threat.

Rather, what’s frightening to Kohen is that Bressman operated in an ecosystem of anonymous people who hold the same resentments and hatreds. With that much hate, the professor said, “you never know what gets them to go from typing something to their friends in an online message board to actually going out in the world and harming someone.”

Kohen said he had reflected on his own identity as a Jewish man, the grandson of two Holocaust survivors, who works among mostly non-Jewish people in a mostly non-Jewish area. “I always have the sense that I’m visible,” he said. He tries to be careful about what he says online. “I know I’m representing not just myself and not just the university, but also, in some weird way, Judaism.”

Kohen has lived in Nebraska for about a dozen years. For most of that time, he said, he didn’t wear a kipa and could pass as a non-Jewish person among those who did not know his name.

But several years ago, Kohen decided to wear the skullcap and become recognizably Jewish. It felt inauthentic not to, because of the dangers in which minorities now find themselves, he said.

In some ways, he said, the past couple of days have made that decision feel like the right one. Anti-Semites and other bigots will emerge, he said, and you deal with them as they come. “I can’t let it change who I am.”

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.