Month: January 2014

Jewfros in Palestine

Tablet has a moving piece by Samantha Shokin, a Brooklyn-based writer, on how a semester in Israel helped change the way she felt about herself, particularly her bodily self-image as a Jewish woman. Shokin writes: I spent a lifetime hating my Jewish hair—straightening it, covering it, or otherwise finding ways to diminish its presence. A trip to Israel is what it took for me to realize my hair was wonderful all its own, and much more than just an accessory. Shokin does a wonderful job describing how her hair was caught up with her feelings of awkwardness, shame, and exclusion, how difficult it was as an adolescent to contend with images of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera from the vantage […]

The Beauty of the Blacklist: In Memory of Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger’s death has prompted several reminiscences about his 1955 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). And for good reason. Two good reasons, in fact. First, Seeger refused to answer questions about his beliefs and associations—up until the 1940s, he had been a member of the Communist Party—not on the basis of the Fifth Amendment, which protects men and women from self-incrimination, but on the basis of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech. While invoking the Fifth was not without its perils—most important, it could put someone on the blacklist; individuals who invoked it frequently found themselves without work—it had the advantage of keeping one out of jail. But the cost of the 5th was […]

Where Would the Tea Party Be Without Feminism?

In his campaign for reelection to the Senate, Lindsey Graham is facing several challengers from his right, all of whom are complaining that Graham is not conservative enough to represent the state of South Carolina. One of Graham’s right-wing challengers is Nancy Mace. Like her fellow challengers, Mace claims the mantle of the Tea Party. Unlike her fellow challengers, she’s the first female graduate of The Citadel. The Citadel was once an all-male military school. In 1995, Shannon Faulkner was the first woman to enroll there. Her effort was spearheaded by the Clinton Administration and the National Organization for Women. She quit after a week, citing extensive harassment at the hands of her male classmates, who danced and cheered as […]

O Yale…(Updated, Again and Again and Again)

A friend writes me that he just got a copy of the Yale Alumni Magazine and, well, listen to my friend: The image: a clean-cut [WHITE] man in a [PIN-STRIPE] suit picking fruit from a large tree. The headline: “Reaching beyond the low-hanging fruit.” The subtitle: “Yale College seeks smart students from poor families. They’re out there—but hard to find.” What was it that Brecht said? O Germany— Hearing the speeches that ring from your house, one laughs. But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife. Update (3:30 pm) Tim Barker points out that if you go to the article itself, it has a dek that reads: The families of Yale College students, on average, are substantially richer than the […]

The Poetics and Politics of Time

From Peter Cole’s new collection of poems, The Invention of Influence, comes this little wonder, “Of Time and Intensity”: Is Time a dispersion of intensity? For epiphanists, maybe, but not for me— for whom Time is a transposition of immensity into a lower key. The republican tradition of Machiavelli—not to mention political and cultural theories of decadence—is always worried about this problem of temporal distance from a moment of origin. Conservatism is too. Sometimes. In ten words, Cole explains why these concerns may be unfounded. Peter’s not a political poet, but I always find unanticipated resources for my own thinking in his poems. I really recommend that you buy this latest collection of his.

I’ve Looked at BDS from Both Sides Now. Oh, wait…(Updated)

Last year, Eric Alterman criticized my department for co-sponsoring a panel on BDS “at which its [BDS’s] arguments would be presented without opposition or clarification from its opponents.” This year, Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College decided to give Alterman an opportunity to make good on his complaint. They invited him to debate Max Blumenthal on the question: “What would a just settlement of the Israel/Palestine issue be, and how can it be brought about?” Alterman’s response to their invitation? “No thanks.” That was it. To students at his very own college, some of whom might even be in his classes. Perhaps if the students agreed to pony up $10,000 to pay Alterman, he’d consider. It’s hard to […]

The N Word in Israel

Jodi Rudoren has a fascinating piece in the Times on proposed legislation in Israel that seems to be gaining ground. Israel is on the brink of banning the N-word. N as in Nazi, that is. Parliament gave preliminary approval on Wednesday to a bill that would make it a crime to call someone a Nazi — or any other slur associated with the Third Reich — or to use Holocaust-related symbols in a noneducational way. The penalty would be a fine of as much as $29,000 and up to six months in jail. Backers of the law say it is a response to what they see as a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world as well as an increasing, casual […]

Aristocrats of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your…shame.

I just heard Ari Shapiro report on NPR about an effort in Britain to “modernize” the aristocracy by allowing women of the nobility to inherit the titles and estates of their fathers. Current British law requires that all heirs to titles and estates be male. No one on the show mentioned the most obvious step to modernity: abolish the titled aristocracy altogether. There was a time when the battle against sexism and the battle against the aristocracy were thought to be one and the same. No more. As Lady Liza Campbell, one of the aggrieved heiresses-in-waiting, told Shapiro: Nowhere should girls be born less than their brother. Yes, it’s the aristocracy. You may want to hold a peg over your […]

More News on Charges Involving Brooklyn College Worker Education Center

The New York Times today has a lengthy article on the corruption charges associated with the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education, about which I blogged twice last summer. While my posts focused on the academic side of things and only briefly mentioned the charges of financial corruption, the Times piece focuses exclusively on the latter, in great detail. These charges include: more than $200,000 that are alleged to have been taken over a two-year period by the former director of the Center; personal enrichment through misuse of grant monies that were intended for students of color; misuse of university funds to purchase items for apparent personal use, including a television purchased “on or about Christmas Eve” and school books […]

The Lights of Jaffa

The Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh has an okay piece in The New Yorker on the death of Ariel Sharon. Shehadeh can be a wonderful writer, but this reflection of his seems flat and perfunctory. Seeing his byline, however, reminded me of one of the most affecting passages in his memoir Strangers in the House about his relationship with his father and growing up in the West Bank. Shehadeh’s family had been expelled in 1948 from Jaffa, a port city with a thriving Arab population just south of Tel Aviv. Throughout his youth, Shehadeh and his father would walk in the evenings to a hilltop near Ramallah and look out on the twinkling lights of Jaffa, far […]

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem

In response to my challenge to critics of BDS—if not BDS, what would you have the Palestinians do?—defenders of Israel, many of them Jewish, have said to me that the first thing the Palestinians need to do is get over 1948. That was the year that the Israelis drove out some 700,000 Palestinians from the land, creating a nation of permanent refugees who would never be allowed to return to their homes. Aside from not really providing a credible alternative to BDS, it’s a brutal, almost grotesque, argument for a Jew to make. We have an entire liturgy devoted not only to the sorrow of being expelled from that very land, but to the obligation not to forget it. You […]

The Implication of “Why Single Out Israel?” Is Do Nothing At All

Fresh on the heels of the ASA boycott, the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Languages Association just adopted the mildest of resolutions criticizing Israel, this time for putting “restrictions on scholars’ ability to travel to Israel and the West Bank to work at Palestinian universities.” During the debate on the resolution, opponents repeatedly raised the same issue that has been raised against the academic boycott: Why single out Israel? Which proves the point I made in my critique of Michael Kazin: the “why single out Israel” line can and will be—and now has been—used to criticize any statement, no matter how anodyne, against Israel. As I wrote there: It occurs to me that there is one other problem with the […]

A Challenge to Critics of BDS

For the last month I’ve been responding to critiques and challenges of BDS. Now I have a question for its opponents and critics. What do you propose as an alternative strategy? The Palestinians have tried four decades of armed revolt, three decades of peace negotiations, two intifadas, and seven decades of waiting. They have taken up BDS as a non-violent tactic, precisely the sort of thing that liberal-minded critics have been calling upon them to do for years (where is the Palestinian Gandhi and all that). So now you say BDS is bad too. Fine. What would you have the Palestinians—and their international supporters—do instead?

The New McCarthyites: BDS, Its Critics, and Academic Freedom

As the attacks on the BDS movement and the ASA boycott escalate, the arguments grow wilder. It’s no longer enough, it seems, to make unfounded claims that the academic boycott violates academic freedom. The new line of march is that mere advocacy of the boycott is itself a violation of academic freedom. What’s more, it’s not crazies who are peddling this claim; as Haaretz reports, it’s coming from the heart of the academic establishment. “The mere calling for a boycott will impede the free flow of ideas,” Russell Berman, a comparative literature professor at Stanford University and a past Modern Language Association president, said on the conference call. “The calling of a boycott will have a chilling effect on academic life.” […]

From Here to Eternity: The Occupation in Historical Perspective

Benjamin Netanyahu (2014): There’s a problem that the Palestinians are there, and I have no intention of removing them. It’s impractical and inappropriate. I don’t want a binational state, and I don’t want them as either citizens or subjects. On the other hand, I don’t want another Iranian state or Al-Qaida state. Currently, we have no solution. Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1923): The expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is absolutely impossible in any form. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority…. … Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out […]

A Very Elite Backlash

The speed and scale of the backlash against the ASA boycott have been formidable. But the backlash has a curious feature: it is a very elite backlash, as this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear. It is spearheaded almost entirely by university presidents (not exactly my go-to sources of moral instruction on academic freedom), government officials, and institutional actors like the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. If you want to understand the sources of that elite backlash, particularly among university presidents, Bard College President Leon Botstein—by no means a progressive on this issue—breaks it down in that Chronicle piece. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and a boycott opponent, said calls from alumni […]

Are Israeli Universities Critics of or Collaborators with the Israeli Government?

Critics of the ASA academic boycott often claim that the boycott is illegitimate because it targets Israeli universities, which are the site of some of the greatest criticism of the Israeli government and support for the Palestinian cause. As prominent scholar and former ASA president Shelley Fisher Fishkin said: Israeli universities are often at the forefront of fostering dialogue between Arabs and Jews, of educating the future leaders of Arab universities, and of providing the next generation with the tools of critical thinking that can allow them to construct a society more equitable and just than that of their parents. It’s a little more complicated. Here are just some of the facts about the Israeli academy that Fishkin failed to […]