After a lengthy heated debate on Friday evening, that included
additional time for both sides to present the arguments, a motion was
eventually passed to table the resolution for a future date.
Despite
the vote's difficult timing for observant Jews, a number of pro-Israel
groups also turned out to support CUNY students and faculty who opposed
the resolution.
“It is a routine tactic of the BDS movement to
hold votes on or around Jewish holidays in order to shut out pro-Israel
voices,” Jacob Baime, Executive Director of the Israel on Campus
Coalition – who attended the Friday evening vote – told JNS.org. “When the facts are known, BDS fails.”
The
proposed resolution, which is titled “The Endorsement of Boycott of
Israeli Academic Institutions”, called on the CUNY system to endorse a
“boycott of Israeli academic institutions and the divestment from
Israeli companies” as well as ending academic partnerships with Israeli
institutions such as the one between Baruch College and Israel’s College
of Management and Academic Studies.
The resolution also expresses
support for “Palestinian students and academics in their struggle
against the Zionist policies of the Israeli state and its restrictions.”
Baime added that he is proud of the CUNY students and faculty for their strong showing despite having little time to prepare.
We're not out of the woods on this one yet. But it's promising.
How could a vote to boycott Israel pass at the City University of New York?
How could a vote to boycott Israel pass at the City University of New York? By voting on the Sabbath, of course.
Pro-Israel student activists and others accuse CUNY’s Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC)
of intentionally trying to silence opposition to the measure by holding
the vote at a day and time not amenable to many who would speak out
against the divestment resolution.
The vote was quietly publicized
earlier this week only among its supporters, spurring accusations that
the DSC is attempting to ram through the divestment measure without
input from pro-Israel voices, according to sources who were only made
aware of the situation after an internal DSC email about the vote was
leaked.
The DSC, a student body group that claims to represent popular
opinion, first informed its members of the upcoming vote last Friday,
Sept. 5, according to a copy of the email message obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Dominique Nisperos, the DSC’s co-chair for communications, informed
members that no materials about the resolution would be handed out, a
decision that has raised concerns among critics.
“In the interest of being environmentally friendly, we will not
provide printed copies of the attached documents at the meeting,” the
email said, urging members to “solicit input” from other students about
the resolution. “Please arrange to have electronic or paper copies of
these materials for your reference at the meeting.”
This is the second time that the DSC will put forth a divestment
resolution, which is part of a larger campaign by anti-Israel activists
on campus to further the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
movement, which seeks to wage an economic and cultural war on the Jewish
state. DSC attempted to pass such a resolution in May.
The DSC resolution seeks to enact a boycott of Israeli universities and companies, according to a copy of the measure obtained by the Free Beacon. Critics call the move an insult to free speech and an attempt to discriminate against Israel.
“They have not been particularly forthcoming about it,” said one
student who requested anonymity due to the heightened tensions
surrounding such votes on campus. “They haven’t made much of an effort
to tell the students what they’re doing.”
The date and time of the vote also “suggests they’re basically
hijacking a false mandate that they claim to have of representing the
students, and unfortunately there’s nobody countering it,” the student
said. “The fact it’s going to be this Friday night, and so little time
to give people warning of this meeting, makes it difficult for many to
come, particularly because of Shabbat. Friday night is not a popular
time for being on campus.”
CUNY is not the first university where this kind of foilershtick has been tried either.
The only place from which I expected less support than among academics for Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, in his dispute over Tony Kushner's honorary degree from City University of New York, was from Hollywood. Now that Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, (SPME) a group which represents 55,000 scholars, researchers and students on 3,500 campuses across the world, has come out in Wiesenfeld's favor, will Hollywood and the theater be far behind?
But now, finally, a group has dared to stand up to be counted.
Before this letter was released, those scholars who did not agree with the glamorization of Kushner as the victim and the demonization of Wiesenfeld as the bully kept silent as did the entire organized Jewish world.
This battle for the soul of the Western campus is part of the larger battle for western civilization which is currently under profound attack. Proponents of hate speech and Big Lies are demanding academic freedom and free speech rights while, at the same time, they are denying these same rights to anyone who tells the truth about Israel (if it happens to be positive), or about Islam (if it happens to be negative).
I am reprinting this letter in full here. I hope that other journalists and bloggers will print it and perhaps also interview the spokesmen for SPME: Board member Awi Fedegruen (af7@columbia.edu) and Director Dr. Sam Edelman (spmeexecdir@gmail.com).
I was originally sent an internet version of this article to which I was going to link, but it turned out that version was incomplete. The entire article was then sent to me by email, and I was asked to publish the entire article, which I am now doing.
The article was originally published in the Friday, May 13 edition of the Great Neck News under the title Great Neck's Wiesenfeld right on CUNY honorary degree, and was written by Liz Berney, who was a Republican candidate for Congress in New York's 5th Congressional district.
The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” has a new victim - Great Neck resident Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY). Mr. Wiesenfeld bravely stood up to oppose an outrage about to take place at CUNY’s John Jay School of Criminal Justice – and now Mr. Wiesenfeld is being subjected to a slew of attacks.
For those of you who have not been following this story, here is some background:
If the world’s greatest physicist stated that “it would have been better if blacks never existed,” there isn’t a single university in America that would even consider bestowing an honorary degree on such a hateful, bigoted individual.
Yet, CUNY’s John Jay School is about to award an honorary degree to a mediocre, propagandizing playwright, Tony Kushner, who has made a career out of spewing similar hateful statements at Israel, and who serves on the board of radical leftist organizations such as the so-called “Jewish Voices for Peace” which promote anti-Israel boycotts, divestment and other campaigns aimed at destroying the State of Israel. Playwright Kushner called Israel's founding a "mistake" (Ha’aretz, 4/7/04) and stated "it would have been better if Israel never happened" (NY conference reported in NY Sun (10/14/02). Kushner also falsely accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing" and "behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people" (Yale Israel Review, winter 2005), falsely accused the Israel Defense Forces of “brutal and illegal tactics” (London Times, 5/7/02), and blamed Israeli policies for the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich. Another Tony Kushner “gem” was: "The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community and Israel itself has got this disgraceful record.” (Ton Kushner in Conversation, ed. Robert Vorlicky, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998, pp. 83-84.) Kushner also edited a book of essays, Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003), condemning every aspect of Israeli life and law including Israel’s right to defend herself from attack.
Kushner’s screenplay for the movie “Munich” was atrociously inaccurate. The film was criticized by Professor Alan Dershowitz, former U.S. Holocaust Museum Director Dr. Walter Reich, CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting), and a slew of others. Kushner’s “Munich” falsely depicted Israelis as bloodthirsty, money-obsessed, unjustified, sloppy, guilt-ridden avengers, morally equivalent to terrorists. The film falsely blamed Israel for “dispossession” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians, and portrayed Palestinian terrorists sympathetically, as, for example, middle-aged poets, teachers and ordinary family men. According to former Mossad director Ephraim Halevy, Kushner's screenplay for the movie Munich "had no relation to the truth or the facts." Leon Wieseltier wrote that “Munich” equated counter-terrorism with terrorism. (The New Republic, 12/19/05)
Senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld’s thorough analysis called Kushner’s Munich “pernicious” in its espousal of a “cycle of violence” theory and “the most hypocritical film of the year.” (Commentary, Feb. 2006) Schoenfeld also noted that Avner Kauffman, the real Mossad agent in the counter-terrorism effort, remained a patriotic Israeli afterwards, certain that the counter-terrorism mission was necessary. In reality, Kauffman and the other Mossad agents felt much like the Navy SEALs who were involved in the bin Laden operation must feel. Yet, Kushner falsely portrayed Kauffman as guilt-ridden and so disgusted and tormented by the “treatment” of Palestinians that he abandoned Israel. (In Kushner’s world, America’s SEALs should be so tormented and guilt-racked about having killed bin Laden that they will reject America.)
Schoenfeld also explained that the movie never gave any inkling that the PLO’s massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich was preceded by decades of unrelenting Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, abetted by Arab governments – including the PLO bombing of a Swiss Air flight bound for Tel Aviv in 1970 (killing 47 passengers), hijackings and attacks on passengers at European airports, and PLO sub-group PLFP’s attack on passengers at Israel’s Lod airport (killing 26 passengers) five months before Munich. Instead, Kushner made it seem as if Israel did something horrible prior to Munich which instigated the PLO terrorism there. Nor did the movie reveal that the post-Munich counterterrorism operation was also necessary to prevent future attacks. Instead it portrayed counterterrorism as encouraging future attacks.
As bloggers have noted, Mr. Kushner’s anti-Israel, pro-Arab propagandizing is downright bizarre in light of the fact that Kushner is a self-proclaimed gay Jewish socialist. He would probably be murdered on the spot if he stepped foot into the homophobic Palestinian / Arab territories whom he lauds over the tolerant State of Israel.
To return to our brave fellow Great Neck citizen: Mr. Wiesenfeld (whose parents are Holocaust survivors) was rightly outraged when he learned of plans to confer an honorary degree on anti-Israel propagandist Kushner. At a CUNY Trustees’ meeting on Monday night, May 2, 2011, Mr. Wiesenfeld spoke up about Mr. Kushner’s anti-Israel views and the growing acceptance of anti-Israel views on CUNY campuses and elsewhere. (Hurling false accusations at Israel is the current form of the ages-old scourge of anti-Semitism.) In the ensuing vote, Mr. Wiesenfeld and four other trustees (Judah Gribetz, Peter S. Pantaleo, Deputy Mayor Carol A. Robles-Roman and Charles A. Shorter) voted against the Kushner nomination, thereby defeating it. (Nine out of the 12 trustees must approve an honorary degree nomination.) The CUNY Trustees also voted overwhelmingly, 10 to 2, to table any further discussion of the Kushner nomination, rather than to take it up again. (NYT, 5/5/11 & 5/6/11)
Unfortunately, the story did not end there, as it should have. Kushner “defended” himself by issuing a statement claiming that he “supports” Israel while reiterating his false anti-Israel views and justifying them on the basis that other Jews (the ill-informed and/or self-hating variety, no doubt) share his “outrage, grief, terror” and “moments of despair” that the “brunt” of the “ongoing horror in the Middle East . . . has been born by the Palestinian people.” (Tell that to the Israeli Fogel family – including the 2-month-old baby girl and two little boys who were brutally murdered in their sleep last month by Palestinian terrorists. And tell that to the Chasids returning from praying at Joseph’s tomb two weeks ago, who were gunned down by Palestinian policemen shouting “Allahu Akbar.”)
Kushner also claimed that he is not an extremist, while Jeff Wiesenfeld rightly pointed out that accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” crosses the line and constitutes an extremist blood libel against the Jewish people. Wiesenfeld asked, if Kushner is correct that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing, then why are one million Arabs living in Israel, under better conditions than in Arab countries? Mr. Wiesenthal’s statement read:
“All of us on this board have voted for hundreds of honorary degrees since I've been on the board; people of all persuasions, and quite a few critics of Israel. The qualitative difference with Mr. Kushner were his claims that it would have been better had Israel not been created, a denial of Jewish nationhood that he would deny to no other people and his accusations of ethnic cleansing by Israel. The Jewish people and the State of Israel are among the few peoples of the world never to have had a policy of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is Nazi Germany, Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda and the like. The accusation is a blood libel against the Jewish people for which they've paid dearly through history. A million Arabs live in Israel in conditions better than in virtually any Arab state; were they subject to ethnic cleansing like Christians in Arab lands, they would not be there.
As for Mr. Kushner's "support for Israel", I do not know of many people who support Israel and lament her creation, nor do I know too many people who charge her with ethnic cleansing who celebrate her creation. Were Mr. Kushner to renounce just these libelous statements, which cross the line, even I would cast my vote for him. Why? Because then he is like any other critic of Israel, expressing views with which I greatly disagree, but not accusing Israelis in a libelous manner of a universally unforgivable crime.”
Certain groups insisted that Tony Kushner should still be honored, and that Jeffrey Wiesenfeld should be thrown off the CUNY Board of Trustees! According to the respected New York Academy of Sciences: “A campaign against Wiesenfeld has been launched by the PSC-CUNY faculty union, almost entirely dominated by members of the extreme Left, who have never been shy about their anti-Israeli and anti-meritocratic sentiments.” A writer for the Guardian (a paper that is always ready to viciously attack Israel) compared Wiesenfeld and the CUNY Trustee’s vote to the McCarthy era. (No one is impinging on Kushner’s first amendment rights; the vote merely reflected the fact that Kushner does not deserve discretionary accolades for his hateful propaganda.) A one-sided New York Times blog (5/6/11) claimed that the vote stifled “freedom of thought and expression” at CUNY and spoke of Kushner’s supposed “extraordinary talent,” without mentioning any of Kushner’s extreme anti-Israel statements.
Incredibly, pro-Israel former Mayor Ed Koch wrote to CUNY Board Chairman Benno Schmidt, demanding Wiesenfeld’s removal from the Board of Trustees, and demanding that, despite the vote against him, Kushner should receive the honorary degree. Koch stated that Kushner’s personal views should have nothing to do with honoring him, and asked, “What does Kushner receiving an award have to do with criticism of the State of Israel?” (Id.) Similarly, Chairman Schmidt publicly stated that political views were irrelevant to the granting of an award.
Really? Hateful views don’t matter? Would CUNY ever confer an honor on David Duke, even if Duke invented a cure for AIDs? And, here, Kushner is being honored for the same written work which espouses and is permeated by his false and hateful views!
Shamefully, as of the writing of this article, it appears that the Chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees will capitulate to Koch’s misguided letter and the leftists’ campaign. Chairman Schmidt scheduled a meeting of the 7-member Trustees’ Executive Committee (which he is believed to control) for Monday evening May 9, to apparently overrule the full Board vote and to grant Kushner the award.
I hope our community will support Mr. Wiesenfeld for standing up for what is right. Feel free to write to The New York Times, or to CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein (535 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075) or Inside Higher Education (on the web) or any other appropriate publication. If a college trustee such as Great Neck’s Jeff Wiesenfeld is removed from his post for refusing to honor an anti-Semite, we are all in trouble.
Why Winston Churchill won’t be getting an honorary degree from CUNY
Reader Sunlight has been after me for quite some time to read The River War, a book written in 1899 by Winston Churchill. Like so many other things I’d like to do, I haven’t gotten around to it….
When you see this video, which includes quotes from that book, you will understand why Sunlight wants me to read it. And you will also understand why Winston Churchill won’t be getting any honorary degrees from the City University of New York anytime soon.
The City University of New York, which has already outraged Israel supporters with its decision to honor anti-Israel playwright Tony Kushner, will also be taking the unusual step of flying a Palestinian flag at the upcoming commencement for City College, a spokesperson for the university told me today.
“The City College flies all of the flags that are flown at the United Nations,” the Vice President for Communications Mary Lou Edmondson told me. “It has nothing to do with foreign policy.”
But there’s one problem—the United Nations doesn’t fly the Palestinian flag. It only flies the flags of its 192 member states.
Now that the PC thought police have ensured that Tony Kushner will get his honorary degree from the City University of New York, they're going after the other side of the equation and trying to shut down Jeffrey Wiesenfeld by kicking him off CUNY's Board of Trustees (Hat Tip: Dan F). The CUNY faculty union renewed its calls for the trustee, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, to step down, while CUNY officials said they had received dozens of e-mails — including some form letters — demanding his removal.
Barbara Bowen, president of the union, the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 22,000 faculty and staff members, said the honorary degree was the latest episode in which Mr. Wiesenfeld had inserted himself inappropriately in university activities.
In 2001, he called participation in an October “teach-in” sponsored by the union about the 9/11 attacks “seditious.” In 2006, he blasted a book that Baruch College had chosen for its freshman reading, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” by Chris Hedges, calling it “deeply offensive” and “anti-Semitic.”
“That’s overstepping one’s role as a trustee,” Dr. Bowen said. “There’s a consistent pattern of vilifying students and particularly faculty whose political views he objects to. He is entitled to his political views, but to use those views to interfere with academic freedom is not acceptable.” Jeffrey Goldberg suggests that the people at CUNY need to learn to get along.
Perhaps everyone in the CUNY universe should simply learn to live with objectionable views. And perhaps the CUNY board should consider whether it wants to turn Jeffrey Wiesenfeld into a free-speech martyr, just as Wiesenfeld tried to turn Tony Kushner into same.
That drew this response from one James Fallows:
The obnoxious guy at CUNY is not having his "freedom of speech" threatened.
He's having his presence on the board called into question. Freedom of speech is a right; membership on the board is a privilege. FWIW.
Silly me. I thought that getting an honorary degree was a privilege and not a right too.
OMG: Guess who nominated Kushner for that honorary degree....
From the bizarre to the totally ridiculous... guess who nominated Tony Kushner for that honorary degree (Hat Tip: Dan F). Hint: He's the one on the right in the picture.
It seems that Dr. Michael Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is one of two professors at John Jay College who nominated Tony Kushner for this honorary degree. Meeropol is a professor of economics.
No, I do not think that the Rosenbergs should be prosecuted over and over again; I do believe that Julius Rosenberg has been proven guilty over and over again. Meeropol’s brother Robert has admitted that his father was guilty of being a spy for the Soviet Union.
Meeropol is currently a Visiting Professor of Economics at John Jay. Both he and Professor Amy Green, also at John Jay, nominated Tony Kushner.
...
Right now, the left-wing CUNY faculty are exulting in their spurious “win.” They expect a huge media turnout on June 3, graduation day, to further magnify and glorify their demonization of Israel.
CUNY Board of Trustee member, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld has been deluged with a massive amount of hate mail.
I think my mother went to her grave thinking the Rosenbergs had been framed (she told me so many times when I was younger). But my mother, may she rest in peace, was strongly pro-Israel despite being a Democrat. She would not be happy about this.
If like me, you have never seen or read Kushner's plays, you might be asking what's the connection between Tony Kushner and the Rosenbergs? Here's the answer:
While scholarly debate over the Rosenberg case continues, their names remain a touchstone for many. Playwright Tony Kushner, for instance, offered a powerful portrayal of Ethel Rosenberg's strength and humanity in his landmark production Angels in America.
It was inevitable. The PC police went after the CUNY Board of Trustees for daring to call out the Jew-hating Tony Kushner. CUNY Board President Benno Schmidt panicked before the onslaught and convened a meeting of the Trustees' executive committee (which includes only seven of the seventeen trustees who sit on the full board) for Monday night. Six of the seven dutifully voted to change the Board's mind and to grant Kushner an honorary degree.
The seventh trustee - Board President Schmidt - was 'out of the country' and did not show up. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld - who started the attempt to keep Kushner out and who is likely the subject of all sorts of threats - did not show up (and may not be on the Executive Committee). Those who did show for the meeting were so busy prostrating themselves in gratitude at the opportunity to repent for sinning against the thought police that they likely did not even pause to consider what their collapse meant (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
“At the end of the day,” said Kathleen M. Pesile, a trustee, “we are now correcting it because it benefits CUNY and we will not get another chance to remove this blemish.”
Mr. Schmidt, a former president of Yale University, called the meeting at the urging of CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, to rectify what Mr. Schmidt described in a statement Friday as “a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy,” in withholding the degree for Mr. Kushner from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The CUNY executive committee has the power to reconsider any decision of the 17-member board that would be detrimental to the university without immediate action.
Yes, in PC America, it would be 'detrimental to the university' to have the junk to stand up to the PC police.
Wiesenfeld plans to stay on CUNY's board.
Mr. Wiesenfeld did not attend the meeting on Monday, but his spokesman, Hank Sheinkopf, later said: “Jeffrey Wiesenfeld voted to take a principled position on what he considered to be unfair attacks on the State of Israel. He intends to remain on the board until the expiration of his term.”
Appointed in 1999 by Gov. George E. Pataki, Mr. Wiesenfeld has two years left in his term. Some faculty members and others have called for his removal; CUNY trustees can be removed only for official misconduct, neglect of duties, or mental and physical inability to perform duties.
I guess opposing the PC police is 'misconduct' in America too.
But what's worse is what lurks beneath the surface at CUNY. Phyllis Chesler reports on what she calls an 'anti-Semitic cancer' at Brooklyn College, which in my days in New York was crawling with night-time students who were in yeshivas during the day. As it happens, Chesler is a faculty member at CUNY.
An hour ago, a letter was emailed to CUNY’s Board of Trustees. The letter, below, defends trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld and his point of view. This letter will be hand-delivered to every trustee later today. The initiators of this letter have chosen not to release the names of the signatories to the public; the likelihood of hate mail and death threats are too great to risk at this time.
...
Like other members of the left intelligentsia—who almost totally control academia and thus influence media, government, and the international “discourse,” Kushner is not viewed as having engaged in “hate speech” or in “racist” speech. Kushner’s support for a Palestinian “state,” which is a code-word for the destruction of the Jewish state, is viewed as both his academic and “free speech” right and as the revered and only opinion to hold. No other view is allowed, even though this view is based on a series of lies, misinformation, disinformation, and anti-Semitism.
Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld defended Israel’s right to exist by speaking the truth about Israel, and for characterizing Kushner’s views accurately–for which he is now being demonized.
This entire episode proves how craven and conformist the western academy is, how it supports terrorism and Islamic gender and religious apartheid over the only modern, western-style democracy in the Middle East: The Jewish state. Okay, fine. But this group also wishes to be seen as a champion of liberty and tolerance for its very support of totalitarian misogyny—which is not so fine.
I can't find him in my college yearbook, but Wikipedia reports that Jew-hating Tony Kushner was a classmate of mine at Bir Zeit on the Hudson in 1978. The picture at top of left was taken at graduation, and while Kushner looks familiar (and I just figured out why), I don't believe he was the guy who was 2-3 seats over from me who went storming out with the protesters in the middle of graduation. (The guy sitting next to me - a good Republican - tried to trip that guy on the way out).
The Wall Street Journal weighs in on what it calls Jeffrey Wiesenfeld's mistake (full column for those without online access here). They're spot-on.
Mr. Wiesenfeld’s “mistake” was not appreciating that hostility to Israel has become such a deeply embedded principle of the modern academy that objecting to it earns you denunciation as a censor and philistine. The only greater uproar might have come if CUNY’s trustees had voted to award an honorary degree to, say, the CIA interrogators of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Sad, but true.
By the way, when I reported the story of the meeting on Monday night to 'reconsider' Kushner's rejection, I mistakenly thought that the Board of Trustees was being reconvened. The Journal reports that is not the case.
So now Mr. Schmidt wants a subset of the board to overrule a decision taken by the ostensible overseers of CUNY. If there was ever definitive proof that university officials see their trustees as mere check-writing rubber stamps, this is it. Even on the symbolic matter of conferring university prestige, the trustees get put in their place when they don’t meet the politically correct standards of the faculty.
People get put on the Board of Trustees of a university by donating money. It's time for those people to start fighting back. I hope that if Kushner's degree is upheld later this evening, Mr. Wiesenfeld will close the book on his service as a CUNY trustee - and his wallet on supporting them.
Tony Kushner's tantrum is apparently going to result in him getting his way. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, which had not planned to meet again until after graduation, is going to meet on Monday night to reconsider last week's vote rejecting Kushner's honorary degree (Hat Tip: Dan F). I have embedded the invitation to the Board of Trustees meeting below (it is apparently open to the public for those of you in the New York area who want to attend). I especially call your attention to the statement by Chairman of the Board of Trustees Benno Schmidt (the last page), which went out on Friday, which accompanied the notice regarding the meeting, which makes it clear that the meeting's goal is to reverse last week's decision.
By the way, if you go here, you will see that the person at whom we should be targeting our anger is Jeremy Travis, the President of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Tony Kushner is one of those Jews who loves to hate Jews and Israel. In 2006, Brandeis University conferred an honorary doctorate on the anti-Israel playwright, Tony Kushner, whose screenplay for the film Munich was widely condemned by numerous critics as being grossly inaccurate in ways that were hostile to Israel and inappropriately sympathetic to Palestinian terrorists. Kushner has made numerous egregious statements viciously condemning Israel and decrying its very existence, saying on one occasion that Israel’s founding a “mistake,” and that it “it would have been better if Israel never happened.” Kushner has also repeatedly blamed Israel for supposed “ethnic cleaning” and “dispossession” of Palestinians, supported boycotting Israel and attacked Jewish supporters of Israel as “the most repulsive members of the Jewish community.”
Kushner was scheduled to pick up another honorary degree from the City University of New York this month. But CUNY's Board of Trustees met on Monday and decided not to honor the self-hating Jew. Kushner's not getting the honorary degree.
The City University of New York has voted not to honor playwright Tony Kushner with an honorary degree at its commencement after a board member objected, citing the Pulitzer Prize winner's statements on Israel.
The New York Jewish Week reported that the request by CUNY's John Jay College to recognize Kushner was turned down at a board of trustees meeting Monday after board member Jeffrey Wiesenfeld objected. Kushner would have been eligible to speak at the graduation ceremony.
The decision could be the first time in the university system's history that a proposed candidate for an honorary degree has been vetoed, the newspaper reported.
Kushner has gone ballistic. Below is the three-page letter he sent to CUNY's Board of Trustees.
Originally, this was a story that only concerned the Jewish community. But Kushner's letter has busted it out into the open. The New York Observer, Salon and the New York Times have all picked up the story. This is from the Times:
According to a podcast of the Monday meeting and accounts from two CUNY officials who attended it, one of the 12 trustees present, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, objected to John Jay College’s submission of Mr. Kushner for an honorary degree. Mr. Wiesenfeld described viewpoints and comments, which he ascribed to Mr. Kushner, that he had found on the Web site of Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist and critic of Israel.
Mr. Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki and former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, said that Mr. Kushner had tied the founding of Israel to a policy of ethnic cleansing, criticized the Israel Defense Forces and supported a boycott of Israel.
“I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. “Especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are almost universally misogynist, antigay, anti-Christian.”
...
Support from 9 of the 12 trustees was needed to move forward a full slate of honorary degrees, including Mr. Kushner’s, according to state law. Seven trustees indicated support for the full slate, and five opposed. After that, Mr. Kushner’s name was removed from the slate of degrees, and it passed overwhelmingly. The trustees then voted, 11 to 1, to table the Kushner degree. The board chairman is Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale.
Jay Hershenson, CUNY’s senior vice chancellor for university relations and secretary of the trustees, said that since 1961, no other honorary degree nomination had been tabled after reaching the board.
Regarding the Kushner degree, Mr. Hershenson said, “The CUNY board of trustees acted independently and exercised its authority.” Responding to Mr. Kushner’s charge of slander, Mr. Hershenson repeated his comment.
I'd love to meet up with Mr. Wiesenfeld the next time he's in Israel or I'm in New York. Among other things, he deserves to be reading better blogs. Heh.
By the way, you can find a podcast of the CUNY trustees meeting here and here. The relevant portion starts about ten minutes from the end.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
