Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what’s broken in antisemitism debates.

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Good reflections:

It is with a heavy heart that I come to you asking you to care about something happening at Harvard.

I, too, have mocked the sheer quantity of reporting and writing and takes about what happens at a certain university outside of Boston. But this week’s Cambridge-based brouhaha neatly sums up the politicization of the conversation around antisemitism and the struggle against it.

Harvard recently announced two task forces: one on combating antisemitism and one on combating Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias. The university announced Derek Penslar, a faculty professor of Jewish history who directs the undergraduate program in that field, as co-chair of the task force on antisemitism. Shortly thereafter, some commentators denounced him for having signed an open letter that referred to Israel as an “apartheid regime” and for phrases from a book of his that was published this year. Billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted that Harvard was on a “path of darkness.” Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard and former U.S. treasury secretary, called on Penslar to resign. Some went so far as to call the professor an antisemite.

I do not know Derek Penslar, and whether or not he spends his time as co-chair of a task force on antisemitism at Harvard makes very little difference to me, as does what happens at Harvard generally. However, this particular sequence of events has implications beyond Harvard. The row matters not just for Jewish studies scholars, or those of us who write often about Jewish politics, but for anyone who seeks to understand antisemitism historically and in our present moment, so that they might combat it—which is to say, anyone who takes the reality of antisemitism seriously.

There have been a few lines of attack on Penslar, and there are thus a few issues at hand. First, there is the notion that he called Israel a “regime of apartheid.” In fact, Penslar, in the summer of last year, signed on to a letter by “academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad” who sought to “call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” That sentence included the line “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”

One can agree or disagree with this assessment, or with the decision to sign an open letter, but as Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky put it to the Harvard Crimson, “You have to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to suggest that Derek Penslar is not a good fit for this role.” He added, “When you deliberately conflate the two, you utterly silence criticism of Israel, and you utterly silence pro-Palestinian speech—and that we can’t tolerate, not at a university in a free society.”

Others have said that while they take no issue with his scholarship, he isn’t right for this particular role. “I have no doubt that Prof Penslar is a profound scholar of Zionism and a person of good will without a trace of personal anti-Semitism who cares deeply about Harvard,” tweeted Summers. “However, I believe that given his record, he is unsuited to leading a task force whose function is to combat what is seen by many as a serious anti-Semitism problem at Harvard.” Summers went on to say that Penslar has “publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel.” Although that’s all well and good for an academic, “for the co-chair of an anti-Semitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”

Summers’ argument is a long way of saying that while all of this is fine for scholarship, it feels wrong. It feels as if Penslar isn’t taking antisemitism seriously. But shouldn’t the scholarship be used to guide the sentiment? And shouldn’t the scholarship inform the struggle? Leaving aside that it seems strange to suggest that a professor of Jewish studies would downplay antisemitism for the sake of it, shouldn’t this task force’s conclusion be guided by fact? Or is the point of the task force to confirm what Summers already thinks? If its goal is the latter, that’s a bigger problem than Penslar’s appointment. And that’s true of all of us, not only those of us on a campus: that we should try to separate out the facts from our feelings and fear.

Finally, and as egregiously, there is the fact that Penslar’s critics evidently combed through his scholarship for phrases they could present as antisemitic. “Lessons in how NOT to combat antisemitism, Harvard edition,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “Start by naming a professor who libels the Jewish state and claims that ‘veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization’ to your antisemitism task force. Absolutely inexcusable. This is why Harvard is failing, full stop.” This is a reference to Penslar’s 2023 book Zionism: An Emotional State, which is roughly 300 pages long and which looks at the emotions that have shaped Zionism, as they have—per the book’s own blurb—all national movements. The New York Post, which pulled out the “veins of hatred” line, also noted that Penslar wrote, “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians.”

I am not sure whether the focus on this line was supposed to be damning, but if it was: Yes, Jewish culture has moments of revenge fantasy. For example, Purim, which we will celebrate in about two months, concludes with Jewish vengeance. Exploring themes like vengeance or hatred is not an endorsement of seeing Jews through that lens; it’s part of the work of studying Jewish history, as it would be for any group’s history.

Penslar’s lines were cherry-picked and taken out of context, as the American Academy for Jewish Research has pointed out, but there is a larger point, too, which is that any rigorous work on Jews—like any rigorous work on literally any people, anywhere in the world, at any point in history—will feature moments in which individuals or the collective acted in ways that some might consider less than flattering, if not downright abhorrent.

None of that makes antisemitism acceptable. If a person really cares about the study of and fight against antisemitism, they need to be able to hold in their minds both the nuanced realities of history and present-day politics and the rich and varied tapestry that is Jewish existence, as well as that antisemitism is unacceptable. To write off the former as somehow in conflict with the latter is grossly unfair to scholarship—and it pretends that we can fight antisemitism in a vacuum, divorced from the real world. But it’s the real world in which real antisemitism exists. It isn’t only anti-intellectual and cynical. It’s also counterproductive to the critics’ stated goal.

Source: Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what’s broken in antisemitism debates.

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Berlin Tosses Out Controversial Funding Clause That Was Protested by Artists – ARTnews

2024/01/25 Leave a comment

Of note.

Berlin has repealed an anti-discrimination funding clause amid mass protests from artists both in and beyond Germany.

The clause required all recipients of city funding to commit themselves against antisemitism as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). That organization’s definition says it is a form of prejudice to deny Israel’s right to exist.

After Berlin culture senator Joe Chialo announced the clause earlier this month, many artists claimed that it would be used as a means to silence those who spoke out in favor of Palestine. Hundreds of artists signed an open letter put out by Strike Germany, which calls for a boycott of institutions in the country that rely on “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine,” according to a description on its site.

On Monday, less than a month after enacting the clause, Chialo said he was suspending it because of what he described as “legal concerns.”

But he also said he would continue to commit himself against a “non-discriminatory” culture in Berlin, saying in a statement, “I have to take seriously the legal and critical voices that saw the introduced clause as a restriction on artistic freedom.”

His statement came as some artists started to pull their work from the Berlinale film festival and institutional exhibitions, making widely shared social media statements about their reasons for doing so.

Artists Suneil Sanzgiri and Ayo Tsalithaba pulled new works set to show this February at the Berlinale, which is among the foremost film festivals in their world. “While I do not claim that removing one’s work is the only moral or ethical decision,” Sanzgiri wrote on Instagram, “we have an opportunity to collectively move in support of the Palestinian struggle by not letting our work prop up a country that, like the United States, aids and abets Israel’s war crimes, ignores international law, and requires all cultural institution to wrongly equate critiques of Zionism to anti-semitism.” (In response, the festival said it remained committed to an “open dialogue, which invites and cherishes a wide range of voices and positions.”)

Five artists—Holly Childs and Gediminas Žygus, Mohammad Berro, Monica Basbous and Charbel Alkhoury—pulled their work from the Transmediale, a Berlin festival for digital art that kicks off on January 31. After the artists withdrew, the festival called for a ceasefire and warned that the funding clause “does risk influencing future editions, as Berlin directly accounts for approximately 7% of our budget.”

American Artist and Morehshin Allahyari pulled out of a group show opening at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art in February, and filmmaker Maryam Tafakory withdrew a work from a current exhibition at Portikus, a contemporary art museum in Frankfurt beloved by the international art world.

In response to Tafakory’s decision to remove her work, Portikus closed for the weekend. “The cycle of violence and misinformation will not stop until all voices are allowed to be heard,” the museum wrote in a statement posted to social media.

Source: Berlin Tosses Out Controversial Funding Clause That Was Protested by Artists – ARTnews

Marsha Lederman highlights an example of what not to do in Vancouver’s PuSh Festival has a new nickname: The Push Over Festival , when it cancelled performances of the Canadian play The Runner due to pressure from other artists who said they would not participate if the play was performed. The response should have been, fine, don’t participate.

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Chris Selley: Backing the Houthis exposes the raw Jew-hatred of the pro-Palestinian protesters

2024/01/19 Leave a comment

Such extremism has little place in Canada and those publicly supporting such extremism need to reflect more on the impact of their actions:

Canada is broken in many ways, but the ability of different people from very different backgrounds to get along has not thus far been one of them. That’s very much at risk. Obviously many Jewish Canadians arrived many weeks ago at where I now find myself: Overt public support for Hamas, which is only slightly more subtle about its genocidal aims than the Houthis, has destroyed friendships and professional relationships, and weakened confidence in Canada as a safe place for Jews to live.

I abhor the idea of asking any individual Muslim (or any other Canadian) to explain and justify his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’re allowed to think whatever we want about geopolitics inside our own heads, so long as we can be civil to each other out in the real world. But more and more, these protests are becoming an overt rejection of that latter.

Calling for an end to Israel’s war against Hamas is fair enough. The death toll is appalling, the prospects of a lasting victory uncertain. But if they’re as worried about Islamophobia as they claim to be, Muslim organizations and advocates desperately need to repudiate the naked extremism that now seems to have free run within the cause.

Source: Chris Selley: Backing the Houthis exposes the raw Jew-hatred of the pro-Palestinian protesters

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White Americans who dislike Jews also tend to endorse anti-Muslim attitudes, study suggests – PsyPost

2024/01/18 4 Comments

Survey dates from 2014 but likely same trends apply:

The researchers focused on responses that reflected attitudes towards Muslims and Jews. Questions in the survey pertained to the cultural belonging of Muslims and Jews (e.g., whether participants would approve of their child marrying a Jew or Muslim, their agreement with a Muslim or Jewish ‘vision of America’), their loyalty, assimilation, and perceived power (e.g., ‘more loyal to their religion or Israel than to America’, ‘less like other Americans’, ‘have too much power’), and associated problems (e.g., ‘a threat to public order and safety’, ‘do not share my morals or values’, ‘take jobs and resources’, ‘are intolerant of others’, ‘want to take over political institutions’, ‘do not contribute to my community’, ‘are dependent on welfare and government’).”

The results showed that levels of anti-Muslim sentiment were several times higher than anti-Jewish sentiment. A clear majority of participants disapproved of a marriage between their child and a Muslim and roughly two thirds considered Muslims to be more loyal to their religion than to America. About one in four participants associated Muslims with public safety issues, while one in three believed they did not share their moral values and were intolerant.

In contrast, only about 17% of participants objected to their child marrying a Jew. Thirteen percent disagreed with Jews’ ‘vision of America’, 14% perceived them as more loyal to Israel than to America, and other negative views were less frequent.

Further analysis identified four distinct groups among the participants. The largest group, comprising 54% of participants, held few or no negative views towards both Muslims and Jews (low anti-Muslim, low anti-Jew). Another group, encompassing 26% of participants, exhibited moderate anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish views. The third group, making up 17% of participants, held strong anti-Muslim views but low anti-Jewish attitudes. The smallest group, approximately 4% of participants, harbored highly negative views towards both Jews and Muslims.

Membership in these groups was not associated with education. Men were twice as likely as women to hold high anti-Muslim, but low anti-Jew views. Older individuals were also more prone to this configuration of views. People with lower income were more likely to be in the fourth group (strong negative views of both groups). Republicans and evangelical Protestants were much less likely to be in the first group than in any of the other three groups.

“Although anti-Muslim opinion is more extensive, the two track together empirically and share a cultural logic as connected forms of ethno-religious boundary-making. Latent class analysis shows that anti-Semitism is nested within anti-Muslim attitudes, with political and religious identifications as consistent predictors of opinion,” the study authors concluded.

Source: White Americans who dislike Jews also tend to endorse anti-Muslim attitudes, study suggests – PsyPost

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Aaron Wudrick: It’s time for a grown-up conversation on immigration

2024/01/11 Leave a comment

Wudrick weighs into the question of values even if to date, most critics have focussed on the practicalities (housing, healthcare, infrastructure etc) with little substantiation. However, the influx of 1,000 or so Gaza’s, fleeing the destruction, combined with the range of anti-semitic language and actions, provides a high profile example. Doesn’t appear to be an accident that applicants have to provide their social media links:

Canada has been shaped by large-scale immigration. With the exception of Indigenous Peoples, the vast majority of Canadians today are either immigrants or descendants thereof. Our nation has thrived as a pluralistic and multiethnic society, built through the gradual integration of people from around the world. 

While this is largely a good news story it should not obscure a hard truth: in the 21st century, the challenges associated with immigration are vastly different from those of 50 or 100 years ago, and until recently policymakers have been unwilling to discuss immigration policy accordingly. These challenges can be broadly categorized into three areas: economic impact; infrastructure capacity; and cultural friction.

When it comes to economic impact, immigration has historically, on balance, been beneficial to Canada’s economy and standard of living. But in recent years the evidence has become more mixed. In particular, the sheer number of new arrivals—over one million in 2022 alone—especially in the form of temporary and lower-skilled migrants, is increasingly being used as a substitute for Canadian labour, driving down wages. This downward pressure, while good news for employers trying to contain costs, has the dual effect of dragging down per-capita GDP, while disincentivizing business investment in labour-productivity-enhancing innovations. 

The cause of the jump in total migrants per year is also no secret: there has been an explosion in the number of international postsecondary students studying in Canada over the last decade—jumping from 248,000 in 2012 to 807,000 in 2022—largely as a result of postsecondary institutions seeking a more lucrative income stream since they are able to charge international students much higher fees. With no annual cap on foreign student visas, this has effectively become a massive back-door entry loophole to get into the country. Many of these students arrive with the hope of becoming permanent residents, which also entitles them to sponsor family members to come to Canada, further boosting migration levels.

Equally concerning has been the effect of this population growth on housing prices, which is a straightforward arithmetic function of supply and demand. Canada has some of the most expensive housing in the world, overwhelmingly a result of insufficient housing supply, especially in major cities. High levels of immigration, also concentrated in these cities, exacerbate the problem from the demand side. Both Canadians and newcomers suffer if they cannot afford a place to live. Similarly, many Canadians are unable to find a family doctor and face crowded schools, transit, hospitals, or other crumbling infrastructure. Rapid population growth makes these challenges harder to manage.

But, while concerns about immigration’s impact on our economy and infrastructure have slowly begun to attract more attention and public discussion, the issue of cultural friction remains largely taboo. 

It should be said that historically, Canada has been fairly successful at integrating people from diverse religious, linguistic, and racial backgrounds, and even today there is a strong case that Canada manages these challenges better than most other countries. What was once a fairly organic process that allowed for integration over years, if not generations, has been supplanted by activist government policy that preaches an official doctrine of big-M Multiculturalism, which fetishizes and subsidizes cultural differences while simultaneously erasing and downplaying Canadian history. In effect, the implicit social contract between Canada and newcomers has become unbalanced. Canada is and should remain a place where newcomers are free to retain their religion, language, and culture. But we must also actively invite all Canadians, new and old, to join a shared national project to ensure we are working towards living together rather than simply side by side.

In addition to counterproductive government policies, few have noted that the integration process has been dramatically changed by technological advance which now allows for immigrants to retain permanent, real-time cultural ties to their native countries. This phenomenon—where people can be physically present in one place but maintain daily cultural and social ties to their homeland—presents a special challenge to a country with a relatively weak national identity. This is particularly true of Canada’s large diaspora communities, including those from China, India, and Iran, which have increasingly impacted Canada’s international relationships and given rise to interference (alleged or proven) by these countries on Canadian soil.

Canada has historically enjoyed strong support for immigration across the political spectrum, a consensus that is not common in other countries. Recent opinion polling suggests that this consensus is rapidly eroding, if not already gone. We are long overdue for an honest, constructive, and robust debate about the way forward on immigration. We owe it to Canadians—both present and future.

Aaron Wudrick is the domestic policy director at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: Aaron Wudrick: It’s time for a grown-up conversation on immigration

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Refugees Tagged with ,

Rubin: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Well worth reading:

…

Are Jews “indigenous” or settler colonialists in Palestine? They are both. The Jewish people originated in this land, and after two thousand years of exile, they developed an ideology and a political rather than purely religious movement of “return.” But their historical memory was not shared by the land’s inhabitants. The historical memory of the Jewish people did not create the right or capacity to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the will of its possessors. The historical memory of one people, however tenacious, creates no right to rule over another.

Israeli Jews are settler colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin. This includes the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. They were indigenous to the region but not to Palestine, except in their own historical memory. That historical memory distinguishes Israel from other settler colonial states. So does the fact that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return, as the French did from Algeria. Today’s settlers in the West Bank and the Golan Heights could indeed return—their “mother country” is Israel—but the same is not true of the citizens of Israel as a whole. They cannot return to the scenes of the Holocaust or to the Arab and Muslim states that expelled them. Great Britain, and then the United States, played the role of mother country by conquering the land, facilitating its settlement, and arming the settlers, but they have assumed no responsibility for the fate of Jewish refugees—whether from Hitler, from the persecution of Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s, or from a future conflagration in Palestine.

Instead, the Zionist movement and the Jewish state succeeded in building a new nation that is now indigenous to the land—though to what parts of the land, and with exactly what rights, is the core of the dispute over whether Israel is an apartheid settler state. The question “does Israel have the right to exist?” could have been meaningfully debated before the state existed, but now the only answer is, “Israel exists.” As a member of the United Nations, it has the right to continue to exist and to exercise the right to self-defense against other states. According to the UN charter, it also has the right to defend its territorial integrity, but implementation of that right requires defining the borders of the State of Israel. This depends on a peace settlement recognizing Palestinian national rights. Only such a settlement can establish Israel’s security as a state.

Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a “decolonization” that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice….

Barnett R. Rubin is Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. His books include Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror (2013) and Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002). His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

Source: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

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McWhorter: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, it has become an article of faith among some of her supporters and other observers that she was targeted, criticized and essentially driven from the job largely because of her race. The idea is that the people who questioned her abilities and academic integrity — be they Harvard donors who found fault with her leadership after Oct. 7 or conservative activists who led an inquiry into plagiarism in her scholarly work — were marked and even motivated by animus toward a Black woman attaining such a degree of power and influence.

The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Gay’s resignation as “an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote that the attacks against Gay “have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked.” Harvard’s Corporation, or governing board, noted the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol.” And Gay herself, writing in The Times last week, referred to “tired racial stereotypes about Black talent,” and described herself as an “ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety” due to her status as “a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”

But I don’t think the notion that racism was substantially to blame for Claudine Gay’s trouble holds up.

As both Gay and Harvard note, she received openly racist hate mail. This is repulsive. But however awful it must have been for Gay to endure their abuse, those people did not force her resignation.

Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.

No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned due to questions of data manipulation just last July.

For many, the central issue seems to be that Gay’s plagiarism would not have been uncovered at all were it not for the efforts of conservative activists, which is true. The question then is whether the people who led the charge to oust Gay from her job — principal among them the right-wing anti-critical race theory crusader Christopher Rufo and the billionaire financier and Harvard donor Bill Ackman — were acting out of racial animus, or even an opposition to Black advancement.

And here things get slightly more complicated. Rufo and Ackman are unabashedly opposed to what both perceive as an ongoing leftward drift at elite universities such as Harvard. And both are opposed to the D.E.I. — or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — programs that are increasingly prominent on campuses, within corporations, and elsewhere. According to Ackman, D.E.I. is “not about diversity” but rather is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed.” Rufo and Ackman both believed that, in accordance with the precepts of D.E.I., Gay had been appointed as Harvard president more for her skin color than for her professional qualifications.

To analyze this position as mere racism, though, is hasty. No one is trading in “stereotypes” of Black talent by asking why Gay was elevated to the presidency of Harvard given her relatively modest academic dossier and administrative experience. It was reasonable to wonder whether Gay was appointed more because she is a Black woman than because of what she had accomplished, and whether this approach truly fosters social justice. There was a time when the word for this was tokenism, and there is a risk that it only fuels the stereotypes D.E.I. advocates so revile.

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course in the pure sense, to be opposed to “diversity,” opposed to “equity” and opposed to “inclusion” would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.

D.E.I. programs today often insist that we alter traditional conceptions of merit, “decenter” whiteness to the point of elevating nonwhiteness as a qualification in itself, conceive of people as groups in balkanized opposition, demand that all faculty members declare fealty to this modus operandi regardless of their field or personal opinions, and harbor a rigidly intolerant attitude toward dissent. The experience last year of Tabia Lee, a Black woman who was fired from supervising the D.E.I. program at De Anza College in California for refusing to adhere to such tenets, is sadly illustrative of the new climate. (Like Ackman, she believes that what he calls the “oppressor/oppressed framework” of D.E.I. contributes to campus antisemitism by defining Jews as “oppressors.”)

D.E.I. advocates may see their worldview and modus operandi as so wise and just that opposition can only come from racists and the otherwise morally compromised. But this is shortsighted. One can be very committed to the advancement of Black people while also seeing a certain ominous and prosecutorial groupthink in much of what has come to operate under the D.E.I. label. Not to mention an unwitting condescension to Black people.

Try this thought experiment: Harvard appoints “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo to become the new president of Harvard. She comes equipped with the strongest D.E.I. credentials imaginable, but with a very slender academic record. Do you imagine that conservative activists would sit back contentedly, merely because she’s white?

Or take a non-hypothetical example: After a successful tenure as the president of Smith College, Ruth Simmons became the first Black woman president of an Ivy League School when she took over Brown in 2001. Yet I am aware of no conservative crusade against her during her decade-plus in that office — despite the fact that she led a yearslong campuswide examination of the school’s role in the slave trade.

The idea that a menacing right-wing mob sits ever in wait to take down a Black woman who achieves a position of power is a gripping narrative. But its connection to reality is — blissfully — approximate at best. It is facile to dismiss opposition to modern D.E.I. as old-school bigotry in a new guise. The lessons from what happened to Professor Gay are many. But cops-and-robbers thinking about racial victims and perpetrators will help answer few of them.

Source: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

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Conford: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

2024/01/08 Leave a comment

One of the best commentaries I have seen, thoughtful and balanced:

… For years, the right-wing in Israel – and Hamas in their way – have promulgated the notion that the peace process was an illusion, a mirage. But what events have shown is that the delusion, the Fata Morgana, was that there could ever be normality without finding a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the issue. Polls back in 1993 – before a cruel wave of Hamas suicide bombings and the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin undermined belief in the possibility – had support for a peace treaty among both Palestinians and Israelis running above 65 per cent.

Since then, the far right in Israel and Hamas have shared the same goal: to put a halt to any possibility of the peaceful division of the land into mutually recognized stable states of Israel and Palestine. Even in the past few weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has boasted how he has stopped a Palestinian state from coming into existence in the past and how he will also in the future, arguing that the Hamas attack shows why he is right to do so.

It is exactly this thinking which has brought us to where we are now.

The sole way to escape the cycle of violence is to clearheadedly renounce all the maximalist and eliminationist fantasies and the dehumanizing caricatures that have led, and will continue to lead, to the horrifying shedding of the blood of thousands of men, women and children….

M.G. Conford is the writer and director of the documentaries Through The Eyes Of Enemies, Not On Any Map, and Fragments of Jerusalem. He is an associate professor of film at Toronto Metropolitan University

Source: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

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Globe editorial: When protests become acts of intimidation

2024/01/06 Leave a comment

Well said:

This cannot stand. Supporters of the Palestinian people have every right to express their views and to protest actions by Israel, but they have no right to intimidate and to threaten people on the street, on campuses, in theatres or in neighbourhoods. To tolerate such misbehaviour is to encourage much worse actions that inevitably follow. Enough.

Source: When protests become acts of intimidation

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Friedman: Here’s What the University Presidents Should’ve Said to Congress

2023/12/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

I suspect I am not the only one who found it difficult to laugh on Saturday night, watching SNL’s send-up of last week’s congressional hearing on antisemitism and college campuses. Coming only hours after Liz Magill actually resigned as Penn’s president amid the ongoing fallout, the real-world consequences of the hearing had become too… well, real.

Here was a leading university president stepping down, amid a storm of politicians’ and donors’ demands, after an exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) from last week’s hearing went viral. In it, Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay) and MIT (Sally Kornbluth), offered a series of technical, “lawyerly” responses to the question of whether calling for genocide of Jews on campus would constitute bullying or harassment under their codes of conduct.

Stefanik’s audacious and frank question demanded a fuller explanation; but the presidents’ curt responses left many aghast at the prospect that such a heinous hypothetical could ever be construed as acceptable.

The fallout was swift. Now, the incident has a high likelihood of shaping the next wave of a years-long debate about free speech on college campuses.

At best, it may spur universities to review their philosophies and policies, and to recommit to creating campuses where bigotry and hate are rejected and where open and respectful exchange can thrive. At worst, it may embolden some politicians to ratchet up their attacks on higher ed, using the latest crisis to advance ideological ends.

“One down,” Stefanik posted on X in response to the news of Magill’s resignation, “Two to go.”

“…these leaders might have modeled how fostering a climate of free speech and open exchange need not—and must not—mean allowing hate to flourish unchecked.”

Meanwhile, the people who have spent years pushing for bans on Critical Race Theory, gender studies, or seeking to dictate how faculty teach about American history, have already announced their intention to introduce bills to fight antisemitism for the upcoming legislative sessions. We ought to be skeptical when the team that has repeatedly shown its desire to advance censorship now seeks to be in the vanguard of setting out new regulations for speech.

But perhaps most troubling about the now viral exchange is that Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth were technically correct. Any free speech advocate will tell you that the analysis of whether insulting, offensive, odious, or even hateful speech can be punishable begins with the question of context.

This is understandably compounded on university campuses by their size and complexity. For the application of university policies it obviously matters who is speaking—students, faculty, administrators, invited speakers—and where—in a classroom, in the quad, in a dorm room, on social media, etc.

Certainly, Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth could have made this all clearer. As private universities, they are not obligated to hew to the First Amendment, but many do, understanding that this offers the best safeguards for free speech and academic freedom. The presidents could have explained this in greater detail, and how this works in practice. They could have explained how different kinds of speech might be punishable in certain circumstances but not in others. And they could have offered a clear condemnation of the hypothetical before them, regardless of the legal or policy analysis involved.

The high-stakes format of the congressional hearing was, of course, not set up for the nuanced exchange this question truly demands. And perhaps that was the point. As Michelle Goldberg explained in the The New York Times, the clip looks really different when viewed on its own than it does in the context of the entire hearing, where it seems clear that Stefanik was referring to her own earlier questions about whether certain specific common pro-Palestinian slogans like “from the river to the sea” directly connote genocide of Jews or not.

The context—again—matters. If Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth thought they were being asked about whether certain specific phrases should result in punishments, their hesitancy to say that they should, from a speech-protective lens, is not only technically consistent with the First Amendment, it also makes a lot more sense.

In the wake of the hearing, in addition to Magill’s resignation, we are now seeing ideas to regulate “hate speech” put forth, such as one resolution from the Board of Advisors at Wharton, that, among other things, proposes to punish students and faculty for celebrating murder or using language “that threatens the physical safety of community members.” The language of the resolution is general and vague, and particularly in campus contexts where students now routinely invoke notions of “harm” and “microaggressions,” it would inevitably open the door to chilling a wide swath of speech on any side of the Israel-Palestine conflict—let alone on a great many other issues, too.

But this is the danger in this moment: that institutions adopt new policies to restrict speech in the rush to remedy their image, policies which might appear to solve one challenge, but will in fact make many other challenges worse. Proposals to ban “hate speech” against racial and ethnic minorities, for example, tend not to contemplate how they can be used by someone like former President Donald Trump, who said “Black Lives Matter” was a “symbol of hate,” or by really any authority to suppress any speech they find disfavorable.

The better answer that Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth could have proffered last week would have been to explain that just because an incident of hateful speech might not constitute grounds for punishment, it does not mean that it needs to be construed as acceptable to a college or university community. And that the question of determining a punishment for speech can, in fact, be separate from a university’s more immediate holistic response: to condemn hate, work to educate their communities, and offer resources to those impacted.

In so doing these leaders might have modeled how fostering a climate of free speech and open exchange need not—and must not—mean allowing hate to flourish unchecked.

The missed opportunity to offer moral clarity and condemnation of hate at last week’s hearing has invited criticism from those who care deeply about higher ed’s future, as well as those who have been working to impose new ideological controls on universities, or generally undermine them. We must be wary of what comes next—as some who want to take advantage of this crisis are clearly already making plans.

Jonathan Friedman is Director of Free Expression and Education at PEN America.

Source: Here’s What the University Presidents Should’ve Said to Congress

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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