The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth. In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research […]
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Categories
Economies, Education, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, Repression, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Aeschylus, Arendt, Columbia, Maistre, Wendy Brown, Yale
According to Gothamist, Columbia has disciplined more than 70 students for activism around Palestine. More than 2/3 of those students have been suspended or expelled. In return, Columbia is trying to negotiate about one billion dollars in research grants that Trump has frozen. That’s roughly $14.3 million per every punished student. I guess that’s a good deal for Columbia, huh? Not so good for education and freedom, though.
Ezra Klein is out this morning with a surprisingly strong piece on how Zionism is dividing older and younger Jews. In the course of his article, Klein takes some surprisingly strong positions. The piece also shows that, whatever else it has done, the Zohran Mamdani campaign has helped push an important conversation about Israel and Palestine among a wider part of the population. The bottom line of Klein’s piece is that until recently, American Jews, most of whom were Democrats, created a mix of liberalism and Jewishness that found its expression in their support for the State of Israel. That experiment has come to an end: Jews can no longer be liberal and support the State of Israel. The two […]
Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American. Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context—and […]
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Categories
Education, Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, Violence
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Tags Edmund Burke, Eric Adams, Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, Peter Beinart, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zohran Mamdani
I wasn’t going to address the controversy over what Zohran Mamdani did or didn’t say about the phrase “globalize the intifada.” But now that Hakeem Jeffries, the Minority Leader of the Democrats in the House, has decided to weigh in on it, on the Sunday morning talk shows no less—specifically, by invoking the fear that Jewish New Yorkers like me are supposed to be feeling when we hear the phrase being used—I think it’s worth a comment or two. Jeffries claims that Mamdani needs to “clarify his position” on the phrase, which is silly, because the only reason Jeffries is even talking about Mamdani’s position is that he has clarified it. On June 17, Tim Miller, an interviewer for The […]
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Categories
Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Edith Wharton, Hakeem Jeffries, Kirsten Gillebrand, Margaret Litvin, Peter Beinart, Zohran Mamdani
Now that Zohran Mamdani has won the New York City mayoral primary, the New York Times is asking the question, “Zohran Mamdani Says He’s a Democratic Socialist. What Does That Mean?” The article doesn’t provide much of an answer. Instead, it trots out my old bête noire, Sheri Berman, who offers up crisp nuggets of wisdom like this: “These labels are fuzzy.” If only the Times editors read their own paper. In the wake of the Bernie campaign and AOC’s election, the Times asked me to write a piece explaining the meaning of democratic socialism for a new generation. Since I think the piece holds up, and helps us understand some of the particular appeal of the Mamdani campaign—his focus […]
I know this headline and the story it tells are terrible, a sign of how bad things are and how much worse is to come, but, still… But, still, you have to laugh. Here we are, people of conscience everywhere, rallying on behalf of beleaguered universities everywhere, who are fending off this extraordinarily tetchy administration, so quick to take offense at the slightest untoward remark, and what do the leaders of NYU do? Freak out about this student, their commencement speaker, who had the audacity to refer to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine,” and, so, naturally, is having his diploma revoked. Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, NYU issued a statement. Of course. NYU strongly denounces the choice […]
Harvard today released two reports about the state of life on campus. One is on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias at Harvard. The other is about what has come to be called antisemitism, but which often includes or is nothing more than pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist sentiment and action. Before I say anything else, and because I might lose you as I get into this more, I want to highlight two critical paragraphs from the New York Times article on the two reports. The paragraphs get buried almost two-thirds of the way into the piece: The two task forces worked together to create a campuswide survey that received nearly 2,300 responses from faculty, staff and students. It found that 6 […]
At Passover, we sing Chad Gadya, a silly but spooky song that children at the seder love. It starts with a verse about a father buying a goat for two zuzim. As a kid, I loved thinking about those two zuzim, which, for some reason, I thought was the currency of Prague during the Middle Ages. My grandfather had given me a storybook about a boy in medieval Prague, and that’s probably the source of my association. The other thing I remember about Chad Gadya, which translates into “An Only Kid,” as in a goat, is my dad heroically leading us through the song. It’s a long song, requiring a lot of breath, because after the father buys the goat […]
My friend Alex Gourevitch alerted me to Columbia’s statement on combatting discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism, which I had somehow missed. Alex points out how it’s essentially DEI from the right—new sensitivity trainings, for what the university calls antisemitism; new diversity hiring initiatives, for pro-Israel scholars; new administrators, to oversee the hiring—with a lot more coercion. On that question of coercion, have a read of the statement and simply count how often words like “sanction” (as in punish) and “suspension” and “expulsion” appear. It’s hard not to read this as new constitutional order for universities, in which the onerous apparatus of crime and punishment that this country has veered to over the decades is simply dropped onto the university campus. Is […]
If you’re like me, you’re probably all-petitioned and all-statemented out. But if you are Jewish, and in academia, whether as a teacher, student, worker, staffer, or any kind of employee, I ask that you read and sign on to this statement. The statement denounces the cynical and terrible use of Jews and spurious charges of antisemitism “to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities” and “to concentrate power and exert ‘existential terror’ on our institutions and our communities–in part by threatening and slashing federal funding.” The statement has been signed by more than 2000 Jewish members of the academy, including noted Israeli scholar of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, the political theorists Wendy Brown and Seyla Benhabib, and […]
Politics, they say, is about making hard choices. And none seems harder right now than whom to vote for in the New York City mayoral race. According to the New York Times, the top two fundraisers in the race are Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo. It’s true that Mamdani is overwhelmingly getting his money from small donors, which is good, while Cuomo is getting his money from the big wigs. Including Jessica Seinfeld, who, last I heard, was giving thousands of dollars to a pro-Israel group that beat the crap out of pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA. But, as the Times notes, there are other issues of concern about both candidates. On the one hand, there’s this: Andrew Cuomo, who resigned […]
At the height of the Second Red Scare, Yale University covered itself in glory when Yale president Charles Seymour declared, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches.” In other words, no McCarthyite congressional committee is going to investigate our professors because…we’ll make sure not to hire any professors who’d be investigation-worthy. That’s what they called protecting academic freedom—I kid you not—during the 1950s.* I was reminded of old Charles Seymour when I read in the New York Times that Yale Law School has suspended Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project, whose work and affiliated faculty and staff I’ve long admired and spoken with. Why was Doutaghi suspended, which, the […]
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Categories
Education, Labor/Workplace, Palestine and Israel, The State
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Tags Charles Seymour, Harvard, Helyeh Doutaghi, James Bryant Conant, James Joyce, McCarthyism, Ulysses, Yale
After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]
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Categories
Jews, Labor/Workplace, Law, Media, Palestine and Israel, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Brooke Gladstone, fascism, HUAC, Humphrey Bogart, Mahmoud Khalil, McCarthyism, Michel Martin, Muskism, NPR
The New York Times reports tonight that the federal government has arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who has been active in pro-Palestine protests on campus and who is a permanent legal resident of the United states. Given that neither Khalil’s lawyer nor his eight-months-pregnant wife knows where in the United States he is currently being held, “detained” seems like a euphemism. Kidnapped seems more appropriate. Secretary of State Marc Rubio said today, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Khalil has a green card, which means, I repeat, that he has the legal right to live and work in the United States. […]
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Categories
Jews, Palestine and Israel, Political Theory, The Right, The State
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Tags Columbia University, Hannah Arendt, Mahmoud Khalil, Marc Rubio, Origins of Totalitarianism, Samantha Power, Shai Davidai
Three days ago, the New York Post reported that Hunter College was looking to hire a scholar in Palestinian Studies. The job ad read: We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality. It took less than a New York minute for Governor Hochul to order the job listing taken down and for CUNY leaders to comply. According to Hochul’s office, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.” The hateful rhetoric in question? These words and phrases: “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.” If […]
My mom died last month. Going through some of the personal items she left for me, I found this book. The Jews of America was the textbook that virtually all of my sisters and I used in religious school, or Sunday School as it was called in Reform synagogues of the time, as we made our way toward our bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s how we learned about Jewish history and heritage, not just in America, despite the title, but across time and space. Ours was a typical Reform temple in the suburbs, so I assume this was a pretty standard text. The book came out in 1969, with a new edition in 1973. My sisters and I would have […]