Month: December 2013

A Very Bourgeois Post on Buying a House

Last weekend, I was at my parents’ house and I saw a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons on the shelf. I’ve stared at the book since I was a kid, but I never bothered to pick it up, much less read it. In the last several years, though, my friend Adina has been singing the praises of Durrell as one of our great writers of place. So I decided to spirit the book away with me back to Brooklyn. (Sorry, Mom! I also have your copy of Rebecca.) I’m glad I did. It’s a terrific read. I’ve just finished the chapter on Durrell buying a house in Cyprus. I haven’t laughed out loud, that loudly, in some time. The elaborate […]

NYU President John Sexton Supports the Boycott of Israel. Just Not the ASA Boycott.

NYU President John Sexton has come out against the ASA boycott of Israel. The boycott, writes Sexton,  is “at heart a disavowal of the free exchange of ideas and the free association of scholars that undergird academic freedom; as such, it is antithetical to the values and tenets of institutions of advanced learning.” NYU has a campus in Abu Dhabi, which is part of the United Arab Emirates. Guess who is banned from entering the United Arab Emirates? Israeli citizens. So, according to John Sexton, it is a violation of academic freedom for the ASA to refuse to partner with Israeli academic institutions; it is an affirmation of academic freedom for NYU to partner with Abu Dhabi, which not only […]

Does the ASA Boycott Violate Academic Freedom? A Roundtable

Does the American Studies Association (ASA) boycott of Israeli academic institutions violate academic freedom? According to the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Indiana University (see my comment on that university at the end of this post), and numerous other universities across the United States, the answer is yes. The question is: Why? I asked my Facebook friends that question. A bunch of people—some in favor of the ASA boycott, others opposed, others undecided—answered. I thought the discussion was worth reprinting here. Fair warning: it is a fairly narrow discussion. We were not considering the pros and cons of the boycott or where justice lies in the current Israel-Palestine conflict. We were simply trying to figure out whether and how the boycott […]

My Christmas Picks

The American Spectator, which is a fairly right-wing magazine, asked me and several others to make some recommendations for Christmas reading. I appreciate their insistence on calling it Christmas rather than holiday reading: no pretense that by “holidays” we mean anything other than Christmas. (Whenever anyone tells me holiday season is the time of love and good cheer, I remind them that Hanukkah celebrates the overthrow of occupying forces and the smiting of enemies. My kind of holiday.) Given the audience, I thought The American Spectator could use some Babeuf and communism. So I recommended, among other texts, Babeuf’s defense at his conspiracy trial and a sympathetic study of Soviet spy Anthony Blunt. Here’s what I say about the latter: […]

When it comes to the boycott of Israel, who has the real double standard?

Last month, Brandeis University announced that it was severing its decade-long relationship with the Palestinian university Al Quds. Since 2003, the  two universities have engaged in sustained academic exchanges, involving joint research projects, conferences, study abroad programs, and more. Brandeis severed the relationship in response both to an Islamic Jihad rally on the Al Quds campus that featured Nazi-style salutes, military-style outfits, and fake weapons, and to the failure, in Brandeis’s eyes, of the Al Quds administration to respond appropriately to that demonstration. Three Brandeis professors who have been involved in the Al Quds exchange wrote a lengthy report protesting this decision by Brandeis. In terms of actual academic exchange, this decision by Brandeis has a substantive impact. It ends […]

Freud on Global Warming

Whenever I think about global warming, and our suicidal rush to destroy the planet, I think of these bleak lines of Freud, which he composed after witnessing a similar headlong rush toward destruction in the form of the First World War: It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a […]

David Brooks Says

Matt Yglesias has an excellent post on the most recent column of David Brooks. David Brooks says: We are in the middle of…a dangerous level of family breakdown. David Brooks says: It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites. The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members […]

A Response to Michael Kazin on BDS and Campus Activism (Updated)

Writing in The New Republic today, Michael Kazin issues a sharp attack on the BDS movement, particularly the recent vote of the American Studies Association (ASA) to boycott Israeli academic institutions. (That decision is now being voted upon by the wider membership of the ASA.) Kazin levels two charges against the boycott movement. First, it is inconsistent: why single out Israel when there are other human rights violators like China and Russia that could just as easily be targeted for an academic boycott? Second, it is ineffective: the boycott movement is “quite unlikely to change anyone’s minds or, for that matter, Israeli policy.” It is a form of theater, professors playing politics. Kazin contrasts the boycott movement of self-righteous, divisive, […]

Must Malcolm Gladwell Mean What He Says?

Malcolm Gladwell on Dave Eggers and Tom Scocca: When [David] Eggers says, “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one,” he does not mean you can’t criticize a book or a movie unless you’ve made one…. Eggers is not Wittgenstein…He says pretty much what he means.

Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years

In yesterday’s New York Times, Robert Pear reports on a little known fact about Obamacare: the insurance packages available on the federal exchange have very high deductibles. Enticed by the low premiums, people find out that they’re screwed on the deductibles, and the co-pays, the out-of-network charges, and all the different words and ways the insurance companies have come up with to hide the fact that you’re paying through the nose. For policies offered in the federal exchange, as in many states, the annual deductible often tops $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple. Insurers devised the new policies on the assumption that consumers would pick a plan based mainly on price, as reflected in the premium. But […]

We Are an Open Hillel (Updated Again)

Hillel is one of the rabbis in the Jewish tradition most associated with the spirit of questioning, argument, and debate. Indeed, so intense and multiple were his disagreements with Shammai that a saying emerged from their disputes: “The one law has become two.” So it seems entire appropriate for the Jewish students of the Swarthmore College Hillel to have adopted the following resolution, declaring themselves to be an “Open Hillel.” The backdrop to this resolution is the decision two weeks ago of the Harvard Hillel not to allow an anti-Israel speaker on its premises. That decision was in keeping with Hillel International’s policy of refusing to work with or or to host anyone who opposes the State of Israel, including […]

Jumaane Williams and Dov Hikind

Jumaane Williams is fast on his way to becoming the Gerald Ford of New York City’s progressive Democrats, putting his foot in his mouth on one issue after another. Turns out he has some interesting views on abortion and same-sex marriage. On abortion, he does the communitarian two-step that was so popular back in the 1990s: I don’t know that the two choices [pro-life or pro-choice] I have accurately describe what I believe. You have to check off a box of pro-choice and you have to check off a box of pro-life and I don’t know that I’m comfortable in any of those boxes. I am personally not in favor of abortion. But his big complaint is that men are […]

When Professors Oppose Unions

Rick Perlstein has a great piece on how faculty respond to grad student unions. He quotes at length from a letter that a professor of political science at the University of Chicago sent to graduate students in his department who are trying to organize a union there. What always amuses me about these sorts of statements from faculty is how carefully crafted and personal they are—you can tell a lot of time and thought went into this one—and yet somehow they still manage to attain all the individuality of a Walmart circular. No union contract was ever as standardized or as cookie-cutter as one of these missives. The very homogenization and uniformity that faculty fear a union will foist upon […]