When I was a kid, there was probably no actor more reviled among Jews than Vanessa Redgrave. This was the late 1970s, and Redgrave was an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and a critic of Israel. It all came to a head in 1978 at the Academy Awards (this is why I’m thinking about her tonight). Redgrave was up for an award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Julia, a film my family refused to see (boycotts run deep with me, I guess). The Jewish Defense League was out in force that night. Apparently there had been a major campaign to deny Redgrave the Oscar on the grounds that she supported a Palestinian state. She got it anyway. […]

The Tower of Babel is a story of the peoples of the earth, united by a common language, coming together in order to establish and preserve themselves as a unity in the sky. Gaza is a Tower of Babel in reverse. Having already cut off its residents from the rest of the world by land and by air, the Israelis built a wall to the bottom of the sea in order to seal them off entirely. Despite some periodic reversals, that isolation remains, thanks in part to the collusion of the Egyptians. Unlike its biblical predecessor, this upside-down Babel is still standing.

When people say that the ASA boycott violates academic freedom they seem to assume that academic freedom in Israel/Palestine exists. But for the boycott, goes the argument, there would be academic freedom. But as this fact sheet by the Institute for Middle East Understanding suggests, that is not the case for Palestinians. One of our most minimal definitions of any kind of freedom, academic or otherwise, is the absence of external impediments to the physical movement of our bodies. What Palestinian students and scholars routinely face is the presence of external impediments to the physical movement of their bodies. Here are some highlights: Due to Israeli restrictions imposed in cooperation with the government of Egypt, it is extremely difficult for […]

Peter Beinart is a liberal Zionist, a firm believer in the State of Israel, and a staunch critic of BDS. And this is what he has to say in Haaretz: But the tactical brilliance of BDS becomes clearer with every passing month. At a time when their leaders are bitterly divided and their people are geographically fragmented, BDS has united Palestinians like nothing else in recent memory. For the many young Palestinians fed up with both Fatah and Hamas, it offers a form of political action untainted by corruption, theocracy, collaboration and internal repression….And by relying on international activists—not Palestinian politicians—it universalizes the Palestinian struggle… But there’s one more factor that makes BDS so tactically shrewd: It exploits the mendacity […]

John K. Wilson has an excellent analysis of the New York state legislation against the ASA.  He makes an oh-so-obvious-why-didn’t-I-think-of-it point: It bans not only direct funding by a college of any scholarly group passing a boycott resolution, but also any funding of travel and lodging by someone to attend that group’s events (even when none of the money would go to the organization). While the bill does prohibit the use of public money to fund the ASA directly, not much public money, at least at CUNY, works that way. That particular provision of the bill would simply ban universities and colleges from taking out institutional memberships with the ASA; few colleges or universities do that, however. That particular provision […]

The New York Times is out today with a strong condemnation of the NYS anti-boycott bill: The New York bill is an ill-considered response to the American Studies Association resolution and would trample on academic freedoms and chill free speech and dissent. Academics are rightly concerned that it will impose a political test on faculty members seeking university support for research meetings and travel. According to the American Association of University Professors, which opposes the association boycott and the retaliatory legislation, there is already a backlash, including in Georgia where a Jewish group compiled a “political blacklist” of professors and graduate students who supported the boycott. Even more amazing, the Times manages to describe correctly a point of about the […]

About 75 Nearly 100 members of the Columbia University faculty have issued a forceful response to the New York State Legislature bill that would make it illegal for universities and colleges to use public money to fund faculty involvement in organizations like the ASA. Signatories include such noted scholars as Lila Abu-Lughod, Eric Foner, Akeel Bilgrami, Jean Cohen, Victoria de Grazia, Alice Kessler-Harris, Mae Ngai, Todd Gitlin, Judith Butler, and Patricia Williams. Signatories also include prominent opponents of the ASA boycott, who nevertheless understand the threat this bill poses. Here are some excerpts from their letter: These bills aim to punish political speech and association of academics generally, and specifically target the viewpoint expressed by that speech and association. Both […]

We seem to be entering a new phase of the Israel/Palestine conflict, in the US and perhaps elsewhere. As Israel loses increasing control over the debate, its organized and institutional defenders have to resort to ever more desperate and coercive measures to control the debate. As they resort to ever more desperate and coercive measures to control the debate, they lose the hip, politically tolerant, embodiment-of-social-justice aura—the Middle East’s only democracy, the country is one big kibbutz, etc.—that traditionally helped them control the debate. Historically speaking, that’s not a good position for self-described liberal democratic regimes to be in.

The New York State Legislature is readying to pass a bill that would make it illegal for any college or university in the state to use public monies to fund faculty membership in—or travel to—academic organizations that boycott the institutions of another country. The clear target of this legislation, as the Speaker of the State Assembly has made clear, is the American Studies Association. The bill has already passed the NYS Senate; it is going to be voted on some time this week in the Assembly. As the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild state in this letter, the bill raises a host of constitutional red flags. Boycotts are time-honored expressive activities, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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?

Alan Dershowitz tells the Jerusalem Post that he’s thinking of becoming an Israeli citizen. He wants to send a message to supporters of BDS that “if you’re boycotting Israel, you’re boycotting me.” Is this supposed to be a deterrent? Or an incentive? I asked Freddie deBoer to turn it into a recruiting poster; he kindly obliged.

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.” […]

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 […]

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 […]