Open Letter to Bill Maher, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, and My Parents
By ETHAN BENENSON ‘26
It’s November 4th, and I’m on a bus with my cross-country team. As I’m trying to fall asleep, a message from my parents wakes me up. Oh boy, it’s “MUST WATCH! Bill Maher’s ‘New Rules’ monologue, The War on the West.” Two weeks earlier, with the same urgency, my parents shared a New York Times Op-Ed by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education.
The night before, I spent an hour reassuring my parents on Facetime that none of my peers were throwing stones at me while shouting “Free Palestine!” I told them that between classes, sports, orchestra, clubs, homework, and meals, there is simply no time to talk about anything that’s not about life at Exeter. Normally hands-off, I wondered what prompted my parents’ sudden apprehension. So, out of respect for my stressed parents, I open the video.
Bill Maher in his ‘New Rules’ segment, just like Dr. Emanuel in his NYT Op-Ed, examines America’s students’ response to the mass murders committed by Hamas in Israel. Clearly, my parents were wondering if the diagnosis of America's student body by a comedian and a physician also applied to their son. In the interest of a more accurate patient evaluation, I want to report my self-assessment in the wake of the October 7 events.
It took about a week after October 7 for emotional stories to spill all over my social feed, informing me of how Palestinian resistance bravely attacked the Jewish colonizers. Based on well-argued presentations, I concluded that the Jewish colonizers got what they deserved. I was proud that I could remain impartial, particularly considering that just three years ago I learned an Old Testament passage for my bar mitzvah in which God promised Israel to the Jews. Yet two weeks later, my mind was changed again after I saw a divergent presentation. It talked about how the Jews were the indigenous people of Israel, which was renamed Palestine in order to disassociate and deprive the Jews of their history and ancestral land. It was the Romans, Christian Crusaders, Arabs, Ottomans, French, and British who were the real colonizers throughout Israel’s turbulent history. If not for the Thanksgiving break, I’m afraid I would not have had time to examine my volatile thought process. My perspective adhered to a simple formula: I invariably identify with the oppressed and am indignant at the oppressor. The identities of each are simply the product of a narrative.
Dr. Emanuel argues that universities must “provide a liberal education with strong moral and ethical foundations.” Reflecting on my visceral reaction to the October 7 events, it is clear to me now that initially I ingested a toxic narrative, or in the language of AI enthusiasts, a corrupt data set. I was deceived, probably like many other students who blamed the Jews for the horrific atrocities committed by the terrorists. Corrupt data returns wrong answers. How can ethics and morality education fix that?
Over the Thanksgiving break, I had time to learn how Hamas tortured innocent civilians. It was more than brutal savagery because it was carefully planned with the intention to dehumanize and provoke Israelis. Maybe if I were taught critical thinking skills I would have recognized how the “influencers” and the “informative” stories in my feed were, at best, presenting incomplete data and at worst spreading terrorist propaganda. Regardless, their narratives were skillfully produced to appeal to my primal human emotions and sense of morality.
While researching this article, I noticed that one “elite” university did not make the list of shame. There were no reports of witch-hunting for the Jews at Princeton University. Do Princeton students have a “moral compass” unlike their peers in other Ivy Leagues? I asked my sister for an insider’s perspective. First, she told me that the code of conduct and the students’ honor code are not just drilled in from the first day on campus but also vigorously enforced. She told me a story about her eating club: a game of water-pong (think beer pong but with water) resulted in disciplinary actions for more than a hundred students (drinking games are forbidden on campus grounds). “The specter of RCDB (Residential College Disciplinary Board) is omnipresent on Princeton campus and is invariably feared,” my sister added, “If RCDB prosecutes for drinking games regardless of the beverage’s alcohol content, then it brings home what is inherently evident: The definition of hate speech and violent behavior does not depend on the context.” Second, she told me that the Princeton administration was quick to organize public discussions led by the representatives of both Palestinian and Jewish communities. Their main goal was to provide complete information free from propaganda while teaching students how to have constructive discourse. To an outside observer, Princetonians may appear morally and ethically superior to their Ivy peers, whose violent behavior attracted the attention of the doctor and the comedian. However, a better-informed observer may argue that an exemplary moral and ethical student body is not a statistical aberration. It is more likely a function of how rigorously the student’s code of conduct is enforced along with how much of an effort the administration makes to provide non-corrupt data for student processing.
“Liberal education should be built around honing critical thinking skills,” asserts Dr. Emanuel. To make sure I understood what ‘critical thinking’ meant, I consulted Google Bard (an AI chatbot). The basic tenets of critical thinking are: clarity, evidence, reasoning, open-mindedness, creativity, and metacognition. I’d love to take a critical thinking class one day, but these essential skills could be taught alongside and enhance any subject, especially history. At Phillips Exeter, all students are required to take three terms of U.S. History, each one about a subsequent period. The first term is simply defined as “Colonial Origins” to 1861. Throughout the course, my class read detailed accounts of what life was like for enslaved people and how they resisted dehumanization. I learned how Native Americans and people of color were exploited and oppressed by white people, who justified the violence with the moral high ground and ideals of “Western Civilization.” By the end of the semester, I had lost any reverence for the founding fathers, and the term “Western Civilization” meant nothing more to me than a pretense for economic exploitation and sadistic brutality. However, employing critical thinking makes it clear that the forces of progress and modernity within Western Civilization were stronger than the archaic, patriarchal forces of cruelty, barbarism, and paternalism, and that’s why our society has been able to advance socially, ethically, and morally. Maybe I should not revere the Founding Fathers, but equally, should I resent them for their moral failings despite the progress they facilitated? I wish the data set for my history class was more diverse and inclusive with the stories of people like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, Tecumseh, and Geronimo, to name a few. While focusing exclusively on the anatomical stills of human cruelty, my class missed an opportunity to also learn critical thinking skills from inspirational historical figures. These remarkable people had the intellectual clarity and awareness to recognize that commonly accepted norms, practices, and concepts of their time were barbaric and had to be discarded as toxic relics of the past.
During the Thanksgiving break, I got a call from Apple’s security department informing me that my account was hacked. Fortuitously, my dad was nearby. As I started spelling out my password to assist with restoring my account, I heard my dad’s deadpan voice, “Gullible American idiot.” I instantly realized that I was being hacked, and hung up the phone. I can’t refute it, I am gullible. I’ve never experienced anything but goodwill from the people around me. I find it inconceivable that someone may want to harm me in any way, especially because I don’t want to harm anybody. Inadvertently, I’ve been trained to trust people indiscriminately.
My parents insisted that I watch or read the accounts of Hamas’ October 7th terror attack on Israel. It was a cathartic experience. I was forced to confront my entire thinking model in which I was hallucinating a parity between a victim and a perpetrator. To cope with the inconceivable injustice, I was trying to rationalize it. In middle school, I sat through the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day lectures. As every lecturer focused entirely on the gruesome “look what we had endured,” I could not help but wonder if the Nazis somehow had a valid motive. My mind was refusing to accept that humans were capable of such inhumanity without a valid reason. My psyche demanded parity. Even the language of the speakers evoked erroneous analogies. “Extermination” implies pests; why associate the Holocaust with “extermination” when it was a mass murder of human beings?
According to Google Bard, extreme violence and authoritarian leadership are the central features of a death cult. I've come to realize that every mass murder is orchestrated by a death cult, and its victims, diverse as they may be, share a collective identity of innocence. Looking for parity between a death cult and its victims is an inherent contradiction. True equilibrium is restored by the actions of heroes who confront the death cult and deliver justice. Heroes like Oscar Shindler and the Allied troops who defeated the Nazi death cult. While every perpetrator crafts unique justifications to do evil, all victims share only one single fault: being vulnerable to evil.
My grandfather grew up in the USSR. For the first thirty years of his life, he parsed the world with the ideology prescribed by the state: “A struggle between the exploited proletariat against capitalist exploitation is the universal dialectic and truth;” his indoctrination was fanatical. When Stalin (the mass-murdering dictator) died, my grandfather was devastated. He told me he “felt a terrible sense of loss for his dear leader.” After reading Orwell’s 1984 and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (books forbidden in the USSR), my grandfather realized that he was (I’m translating from Russian the best I can) “an obedient member of a death cult, willing to die for a leader who represented the universal truth of the communist ideology.” I asked my grandfather if these books made him more ethical and moral. “I don’t think so,” he responded. “These books just made me realize that as long as I see the world in the black-and-white terms dictated by the government, I substitute my free will for the extreme ideology of the state. It became clear to me that the entire existence of the death cult leaders depended on robbing people of their free will.” From my grandfather and Orwell’s 1984, I learned about what life was like in a state ruled by a death cult. I found myself wondering what it must be like to be a neighbor of such a state. “Ask the people of South Korea, or Ukraine, or Israel,” my grandpa replied.
When I first conceived of writing this letter, my mind was overflowing with clever advice for Mr. Maher, Dr. Emanuel, and my parents. In preparation, I decided first to quickly fill the void in my education which Mr. Maher scornfully pointed out, so I looked up Voltaire, Locke, and Hume. As I watched the philosophy lectures on YouTube, my snarky thoughts and know-it-all attitude quickly evaporated. I realized that there was a lot more outside of my Exeter bubble that I did not know and still do not understand. These lectures revealed to me my ignorance. Though I am unable to formulate any original words of advice, I hope that reporting these self-reflections will serve as necessary feedback to help responsible adults formulate better policies and curricula, and maybe even, at a bare minimum, provide a measure of relief to my parents’ incessant worrying.
