<p>I’m not going to argue that this wasn’t offensive, but there’s no hint of antisemitism at Reed that comes out of this. What was offensive was, essentially, the ham-handed implication that people at Lewis and Clark were antisemitic (when there was some basis for sensitivity on that account, since there had been an antisemitic incident at Lewis and Clark some years before), and generally treating the Holocaust as something about which it is possible to make a joke, which arguably trivializes it. The piece was a response to just that argument – the Reed administration had criticized an earlier Holocaust joke, saying that making light of the Holocaust makes future genocide more likely, and so the editors decided to satirize that position by “reporting” that their earlier piece had validated mass murder at L&C. </p>
<p>The debate about whether it is ever appropriate to make Holocaust jokes is not a debate in which one side is antisemitic. For the most part, it tends to be a debate among Jews, who are usually both the ones making the jokes and the ones professing most stridently to be offended by them.</p>
<p>It’s clear that the Reed students here meant to be participating in that debate. It’s also clear that – as often happens with college humor magazines – they crossed the offensiveness line. But most clearly in their characterization of L&C students, not in expressing antisemitic attitudes.</p>