Israel Matzav

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Yale Professor: 'The Jooos had it coming'

Get a load of this from HuffPo. This is the first link.

There's plenty more at the second link.

PS Although I am sure that Deir Yassin didn't motive Tuesday's terrorists, Deir Yassin was actually located at the entrance to Har Nof - probably half a mile away (when I first moved to Israel the former homes of the residents who fled - they weren't expelled - still stood).

More on Dir Yassin here.

Labels: Deir Yassin, Leftist anti-Semitism, Palestinian terrorism, Yale University

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

'Dozens' of American universities slam American Studies Association boycott

While only two universities have thus far withdrawn from membership in the American Studies Association as a result of its anti-Semitic boycott of Israel, 'dozens' of universities have issued statements slamming the boycott, and many of them are considering withdrawing from membership in the group.

Schools including Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton and Boston universities and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Texas at Austin and others have slammed the boycott, issuing statements similar to one by Harvard President Drew Faust that said that academic boycotts “subvert the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas, which is the lifeblood of the worldwide community of scholars.”

Penn State University at Harrisburg and Brandeis University have said they are withdrawing their memberships from the American Studies Association, and other schools are considering doing the same thing. In addition, two major associations of institutions of higher education, the Association of American Universities and the Association of American University Professors, have issued statements rejecting the boycott.

At least three university Presidents have issued statements in response to the boycott. Here are two of them.

President Susan Herbst
University of Connecticut

The recent votes of two scholarly societies — the American Studies Association and Association for Asian American Studies — to endorse the Palestinian boycott of Israeli academic institutions is contrary to both academic freedom and the international exchange of ideas. The University of Connecticut joins the American Association of University Professors in firmly opposing all such boycotts. Choosing one nation for a boycott is patently unfair and represents a disturbing philosophy among some segments of the academy.

...

Academic leaders at UConn will continue to visit Israel and Arab nations, invite Israeli and Arab scholars to our campuses, encourage our students and faculty to study in these nations, and pursue research collaboration with the many outstanding Israeli universities. We do this with pride and a productive focus on social justice, to forge the very critical dialogues that will someday lead to the peace we all seek.

...

BOSTON UNIVERSITY
PRESIDENT ROBERT A. BROWN

I am disappointed and concerned that the American Studies Association, invoking the principle of academic freedom, would vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Research, teaching, and scholarship flourish through robust exchange of ideas, across borders and among institutions in different parts of the world. Universities and their faculties can often transcend even profound political differences. It is ill-advised to make academic institutions the instrument with which to promote a political agenda by attempting to isolate students and scholars. Boston University cannot support this boycott.

I hope that there will be a serious discussion within our American & New England Studies Program, which has an institutional membership in the ASA that, obviously, is funded by the University. This institutional membership does not come with a vote that is exercised by either the program or the University. The poll taken by the ASA represents the votes of individual members of the organization. We are not prepared to suggest (implicitly or explicitly) to faculty members who hold individual memberships (some of which are funded out of professional funds allocated to individual faculty members) how they should vote. That would lead us onto a slippery slope.

I do hope the faculty in the American & New England Studies Program will consider whether or not continuing membership in the ASA will create the opportunity for a temperate and thoughtful reconsideration of the wisdom of the boycott.

Would a hemorrhage of members leaving cause them to reconsider? Or will they get funding from 'our friends the Saudis' instead?

Labels: academic boycott, Austin Texas, BDS, Boston University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler

Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Thursday, February 14.

1) Decline and its consequences

In October, 2009, Charles Krauthammer wrote, Decline is a choice:

The president then denounced the idea of elevating any group of nations above others--which takes care, I suppose, of the Security Council, the G-20, and the Western alliance. And just to make the point unmistakable, he denounced "alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War" as making "no sense in an interconnected world." What does that say about NATO? Of our alliances with Japan and South Korea? Or even of the European Union?
This is nonsense. But it is not harmless nonsense. It's nonsense with a point. It reflects a fundamental view that the only legitimate authority in the international system is that which emanates from "the community of nations" as a whole. Which means, I suppose, acting through its most universal organs such as, again I suppose, the U.N. and its various agencies. Which is why when Obama said that those who doubt "the character and cause" of his own country should see what this new America--the America of the liberal ascendancy--had done in the last nine months, he listed among these restorative and relegitimizing initiatives paying up U.N. dues, renewing actions on various wholly vacuous universalist declarations and agreements, and joining such Orwellian U.N. bodies as the Human Rights Council.
These gestures have not gone unnoticed abroad. The Nobel Committee effused about Obama's radical reorientation of U.S. foreign policy. Its citation awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize lauded him for having "created a new climate" in international relations in which "multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other institutions can play."

So what are the consequences of President Obama's choices? Richard Cohen answers in The Obama Doctrine - look the other way:

Obama, of course, has been asked about his policy. The answer he provided the New Republic recently is troubling: “How do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” The statement is disingenuous, suggesting that the inability to do everything excuses the unwillingness to do anything. It also prompts the question of why he militarily intervened in Libya, the Congo civil war notwithstanding. Obama’s reason for inaction in Syria is so unconvincing that it suggests the election is what prompted him to play it safe. Here, after all, was a president seeking reelection on what amounted to a peace platform: He had ended U.S. combat involvement in Iraq and was winding things down in Afghanistan. How could he justify intervention in Syria? Maybe by saying that the region was about to blow up, that Syria was lousy with chemical weapons, that the Kurds might break away (Kurdistan is the next Palestine), that a sectarian blood bath loomed and that thousands of civilians were in mortal danger. By now, more than 70,000 of them have been killed.
The point that Cohen missed is that the the difference in Libya was that someone else was leading.

One other interesting note on this topic comes from Barry Rubin's analysis of the recent State of Union address:

It is true that U.S. forces are largely out of Iraq, yet this was inevitable, with one key reservation. There was no likelihood they would be there in a large combat role forever. Whatever one thinks of the invasion of Iraq, the American forces were staying for an interim period until the Iraqi army was ready. Any successor to George W. Bush would have pulled out the combat forces. The reservation, of course, is that it was the success of the surge — which Obama opposed and his new secretary of defense (yes, he will be confirmed) Chuck Hagel opposed. So he is taking credit for a policy that was inevitable and that was made possible by a success that he was against. Lest you think that assessment is unfair to Obama, consider this: he did absolutely nothing to make this outcome happen. No policy or strategy of his administration made the withdrawal faster or more certain.
President Obama will take credit for foreign policy successes (as he defines them) even if they occur despite him.

2) More Prisoner X fallout

Honest Reporting carries a summary of the most recent revelations about the Prisoner X story. Shmuel Rosner explains, in general terms, how the story (and similar ones) got promoted.

One should know that in stories of this sort people usually play the roles they are used to playing. Without naming names or giving too much detail I believe I could comfortably say that: Security officials tend to try to keep things secret where it's necessary but also where it's not. They also try to keep things secret where they have a realistic chance of succeeding but also where they don't. The courts tend to be slow in understanding what they can and can't control by way of censoring public debate and limiting public knowledge. The Israeli press is of two minds: it wants to be kept in the loop – but also wants to hype the scandal. Scandals are good for ratings, and fighting the evil forces of censorship is good for journalistic morale. The foreign press is the great laundry factory through which stories are disseminated – some true, some half-true, some false. As we all know, junior politicians would use anything to draw attention, and with such stories there are two ways of doing this: One is leaking, hinting, provoking, and wearing the mantle of 'Knights of human-rights'; the other is denouncing and inciting against those knights and wearing the mantle of patriotic 'Knights of national-security'. Senior politicians just want to distance themselves from the story. There's nothing they can benefit from being associated with it.
Israelly Cool got New York Times reporter, Jodi Rudoren, to acknowledge on Facebook:

Jodi Rudoren: To Brian John Thomas and others who have questioned my inclusion of Richard Silverstein’s reporting. I didn’t quote him as an authority, but simply referred to him because of his role in the development of the news story. Until yesterday, some people thought the prisoner was Iranian, which was based on his report. We needed to say that, and then of course needed to say he had acknowledged he was wrong. Including this does not indicate some kind of endorsement of his writing or viewpoints.
While it's a start, it's not enough. Rudoren needed to include a sentence in her report saying that Silverstein regularly passes off unsourced and unverifiable information as "scoops."

3) Saudi education dollars

In March, 1995 the New York Times featured an editorial, Yale and Mr. Bass's $20 million gift At issue was a gift to Yale by Lee Bass to fund a curriculum in Western civilization. Yale rejected the gift, and the Times applauded that decision:

Universities must also resist the temptation to solicit and accept gifts from donors with a strong political agenda. No doubt this is a particularly difficult thing to ask of a place like Yale, which is big, expensive to run and sorely in need of funds. But the Bass case proves that it does not pay to pander to a donor's political quirks in the hope of finding a way around his intent.
That was then. Now Susan Schmidt reports, Saudi Money Shaping U.S. Research (h/t Daily Alert):

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology opened its doors in 2009 and already has lavished more than $200 million on top U.S. university scientists. Stanford, Cornell, Texas A&M, UC Berkeley, CalTech, Georgia Tech—all are awash in new millions of Saudi cash for research directed at advancing solutions for Saudi energy and water needs. The new university, known as KAUST, has similar partnerships with scientists at Peking University and Oxford. Many American universities and their scientists, lured by research grants of as much as $25 million, have jumped at the chance to partner with KAUST. Some of those scientists do research at their universities here and spend a small part of their time in Saudi Arabia creating “mirror” labs. The arrangement with KAUST raises novel and largely unaddressed issues for American universities. With the United States determined to become energy self-sufficient, what are the ramifications of having scientists at top university labs—many of them recipients of U.S. government research dollars—devoting their efforts to energy pursuits selected by Saudi Arabia?
If there's been a New York Times editorial decrying the spectacle of a foreign country dictating research priorities to American universities, I haven't seen it.

There are other costs to these partnerships. Charlotte Allen wrote in 2008:

U.S. universities pride themselves on their tolerance - religious, ethnic, gender-based, sexual orientation-based, whatever. But when it comes to lucrative consulting fees for partnering with universities in Mideastern countries where none of the above categories of toleration seems to exist, the campus open-mindedness apparently evaporates, and a strange variety of mulitculturalism takes over. Case in point: the California Polytechnic Institute, a highly regarded state-funded university in San Luis Obpispo, Calif., that prides itself on its 21-year-old Women's Engineering Program, designed to encourage female students to enter an overwhelmingly male-dominated field. All well and good - except that Cal Poly is in the process of negotiating a $6 million consulting deal in which its faculty would develop an engineering program at Jubail University in Saudi Arabia. Since the Saudi government forbids co-education, the program would be male-only, at least at the beginning. Later maybe, women might also be able to study engineering at Jubail, but only if the campus hires an all-female faculty to teach them, for Saudi law also prohibits academic instruction of students by members of the opposite sex. Jubail currently enrolls women students, but in separate classes taught by female professors. This sort of compromise, in which colleges seem willing to abandon vaunted principles of equality in exchange for lucrative partnerships with Mideast institutions, is surprisingly common on U.S campuses. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, is currently in confidential negotiations with another Saudi university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (known by the acronym Kaust), in which UC-Berkeley professors would collaborate on research projects and help King Abdullah hire faculty for its mechanical engineering program. Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin are in the process of negotiating similar arrangements with Kaust to consult in engineering departments - deals that total a reported $25 million for each. Kaust also has partnerships with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and an array of foreign universities. Although the yet-to-open Kaust, set up with a $10 billion endowment and aiming to turn itself into a world-class research facility, has said that it will not be subject to the usual Saudi sex restrictions, it remains unclear whether and how women will participate. Even more ominously, the New York Times has reported that no Israelis would be allowed to join the Kaust faculty - a prohibition that probably applies to Jubail as well.
The New York Times applauded Yale when it rejected a gift that would teach the historical underpinnings of our society. However it is silent when many of the academic and cultural values one would expect the Times to hold dear are compromised in the name of Saudi oil money.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, degrading US military capabilities, Middle East Media Sampler, Mossad, New York Times, our friends the Saudis, Soccer Dad, Yale University

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Charles Small's Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) is resuming activities this fall. As you might recall, Small's Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism was shut down due to what was apparently pressure on the university by Muslim donors. The new institute will be spread across several campuses, including Harvard, Fordham and McGill. You can learn more about it and about its fall programs here.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Charles Asher Small, Harvard University, Islamic anti-Semitism, McGill University, Yale University

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Did Yale shut its program on anti-Semitism to keep Iran happy?

There were two important post-mortems on the closure of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA) that came out this week. One, written by Tel Aviv-based Yale alumnus James Kirchick, and based on numerous interviews with Yale faculty and other insiders, suggests that Yale may have shut down the center for loudly offending Iran.

While Small pinpoints the “Crisis of Modernity” conference as the final nail in the coffin of his baby, a meeting prior to the conference in the early spring of last year was the first sign things were going badly. That January, the Iranian government placed ^[10] Yale on a blacklist, along with dozens of other “subversive” international organizations like the U.S. government-funded and Democratic Party-aligned National Democratic Institute, the Open Society Institute, and the BBC. What the university ought to have seen as a badge of honor, however, it seems to have taken as a lost investment opportunity, at least according to Small. Just a few months after the Iranian government put Yale on its blacklist, he was called into a meeting with a senior administration official, who told Small that the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing board, “was upset with me because Iran put us on this list. Once a member of the Yale community interferes with the others in the community,” Small was told, “this is a problem.”

While any large university is bound to be concerned about its public image, the notion that Yale would care so much about how it is perceived by a rogue regime like Iran strikes many as far-fetched. But Yale is especially sensitive when it comes to its image with foreign nations, even autocratic ones. For over a century—beginning with the establishment of a Yale-affiliated Christian missionary program in China in 1901—and especially under the near-two-decade presidency of Richard Levin, Yale has aspired to be the global university. Early in his term, Levin launched the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in New Haven with a former President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, at the helm, and created a World Fellows program that brings dozens of mid-career professionals to spend a semester in New Haven. Levin has focused particularly, and controversially, on China; his official biography ^[11] notes that he has visited the country 15 times in the last 10 years. More contentiously, and for no real compelling reason, Yale initiated a partnership last year with the National University of Singapore to create a new liberal arts school in that police state to be called Yale-NUS College. Though Yale, like many other universities, operates a variety of study abroad programs, this is the first such program in which the Yale name is being lent to an educational institution overseas. It is not farfetched to imagine that a university that had decided to stake its global future on staying in the good graces of autocracies like China and Singapore would see Iran’s protests as a meaningful threat.

Critics of Yale’s decision to close YIISA point to several other ominous events as confirmation that the university has a growing soft spot for authoritarians. In January 2006 it was revealed ^[12] that Yale had bid for a $20 million donation from Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to start an Islamic studies center, losing out to Harvard and Georgetown. In 2009, Yale University Press decided not to print cartoons of the prophet Muhammed in a book about the controversy that ensued over their being published by a Danish newspaper (a decision for which I took the university to task ^[13] at the time). Last September, just weeks after the conclusion of the YIISA conference, Yale lecturer Hillary Mann Leverett brought the students in her “U.S.-Iranian Diplomacy” graduate seminar to meet personally with Ahmadinejad, who was attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Leverett and her husband, Flynt, both former State Department and National Security Council officials, are the two most high-profile defenders ^[14] of the Iranian regime in Washington, and they were chosen last year as inaugural senior fellows of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, yet another prong in Yale’s transformation into a global university. Leverett told ^[15] the Yale Daily News at the time that her students learned the Holocaust-denying Iranian President is “not a crazy, irrational leader.” Hardly a peep of protest was heard about this meeting on the Yale campus, certainly not from faculty or the administration.

In the months leading up to the August YIISA conference, other senior Yale administration officials made it clear to Small that they were annoyed with his work. One such official told Small last summer that there “shouldn’t be a center on anti-Semitism, maybe it should be a center on discrimination” more generally, Small said. Small said this official also told him that “we have to engage Islam, and not be too critical of Islam and that YIISA had been too critical of Islam.” Another senior Yale official, responsible for helping to publicize the conference, told Small that “at this stage in my life I can do whatever I want. I don’t have to listen to anybody. And I just want you to know that I was a roommate of [Columbia University professor and Palestinian advocate] Rashid Khalidi in college,” according to Small.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, University of Maryland Professor Jeffrey Herf worries that what happened to YIISA is a symptom of a far bigger problem: The inability of scholars who combine a deep knowledge of Islam and the history of the modern Middle East to receive tenure unless they are willing to support the Islamists.

Which brings me back to the criticisms of YIISA’s focus on anti-Semitism in the Middle East and Islamist ideology, and how these fit into the question of whether the center was sufficiently “scholarly.” The focus on this sort of anti-Semitism meant that, from the start, YIISA was sailing against the prevailing winds in the academy. Once Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened to wipe Israel off the map while Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, the Jewish community and Israel’s non-Jewish supporters in the United States reacted with understandable alarm. This magazine and some of the editors of The Washington Post have also focused on the threat from Iran. But it is a fair statement to say that, in recent years, however unpleasant American scholars think Iran may be, it is the policies of Israel that have been the primary target of much academic opinion.

Unfortunately, this points to the fact that scholars who combine deep knowledge of Islam and the history of the modern Middle East, such as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, and Martin Kramer, have not been able to produce a successor generation who can swim against the current, get academic positions, gain tenure, and support research into these matters. Or, if such scholars are present, they have, as far as I know, not addressed these issues in the past decade or so. There has been, to use Paul Berman’s apt phrase, a “flight of the intellectuals” away from engagement with the issues posed by Islamist ideology and politics, including its oft-declared hatred of the Jews. Indeed, rather than engendering thoughtful discussion, posing the issue of Arab, Iranian, or Islamist anti-Semitism, quickly leads to accusations of “anti-Arab racism” and “Islamophobia.”

Read the whole thing.

Jews ought to be seriously concerned about what happened to YIISA. It means that the world is very happy to discuss dead Jews, but not so interested in discussing how to save living ones from those who would murder us. The world sees other matters as much more important.

What could go wrong?

Labels: liberal academia, Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, Yale University

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Yale tries to ignore anti-Semitism

As you all know, Yale has determined to close down the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism. It is opening a new program under the direction of Maurice Samuels instead. What's wrong with that? Clemens Heni explains.

A Judaica collection has little to do with research on antisemitism, especially when it comes to the threats of 2011: genocidal threats from Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah.

Neither does 19th century literature. In 2004, Maurice Samuels published The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. In it, he deals with a film from 1927 about Napoléon, and points to a snowball scene, which reminds him of the following:
One example is the famous snowball fight scene that opens the film, a version of which had been featured in Bonaparte à l’école de Brienne, ou le petit caporal, souvenirs de 1783, the Napoleon play starring Virginie Déjazet in 1830. Images of the snowball fight also appear in A.V. Arnault’s Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon (1822) and Laurent de l’Ardèche’s Histoire de l’empereur Napoléon (1839), two of the illustrated histories I discuss in chapter 2.
That’s fascinating and fine scholarship, just not the sort of work needed to address antisemitism in the contemporary world.

An antisemitism program needs scholars who deal with Qassam rockets, Grad rockets, and other rocket systems, not snowballs. Scholars who deal with satellite systems, and firebombs targeting Israeli civilians and tanks. Who study soldiers of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other antisemitic terror groups. It needs scholars who deal with Islamist thinkers, from Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Mohammad Chatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s anti-Israel and pro-suicide-bombing fatwas.

It needs scholars who deal with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism — not only in Egypt, but in the entire Middle East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. It needs scholars on Iran and the analysis of incitement to genocide.

It needs scholars on Turkey, lawful Islamism, and its relationship to anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

It needs scholars on Islamic jihad, terror, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and homegrown terrorism in the West.

It needs scholars on left-wing, progressive, Muslim, and Neo-Nazi anti-Zionist antisemitism, and the ideologies and concepts of postorientalism, postcolonialism, and their possible relationship to antisemitism (e.g., in the work of Edward Said). And it needs scholars on antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda in Western mass media in the 21st century.

There is nothing wrong with scholarship on France and Jewish history; it is important. But it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for serious scholarship on contemporary antisemitism. The study of dead antisemites and past campaigns of vilification is already part of every single Jewish Studies department in the world. And dealing with Jewish literature (the topic of Samuels’ new book in 2010) has nothing to do with research on (contemporary) antisemitism.

It seems that Yale itself has a skeleton in its closet. Anti-Semitism.

Harvard professor and YIISA board member Alan Dershowitz said the following in an interview with David F. Nesenoff, a keynote speaker at YIISA’s August 2010 conference “Global Anti Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity”:
I think some of the blame lies not only with the Jewish faculty members but with pro-Israel faculty members who are too frightened to speak up because it makes them unpopular. You pay a price on campus today for being pro Israel. Even I pay a price for that.
Yale, in fact, has a long history of antisemitism. Dershowitz continued:
The slogan of Yale was urim v’tumim‘ [light and truth] in Hebrew. The joke was if you could read it, you can’t go there. The college had an overt quota system. I was not in the college. I couldn’t get into the college obviously. When I went to the law school there was overt antisemitism in the hiring process by law firms. And there were secret clubs that didn’t allow in Jews. That was 50 years ago. Yale has a terrible legacy of antisemitism, which should make it sensitive to the issue.
Historian Stephen H. Norwood’s The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower demonstrates that Yale and many other Ivy League universities were very much pro-German, and not at all anti-Nazi. Norwood writes:
Yale University and Vassar College German clubs invited Dr. Richard Sallet, attaché at the German embassy in Washington, to speak on campus about Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi-diplomat spoke informally on December 11 to Yale’s Germanic Club, which was composed of faculty members and graduate students, on “The New Foundation of the German Commonwealth.”

It gets worse. Read the whole thing.

Labels: Alan Dershowitz, anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, Yale University

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Charles Small breaks his silence on Yale

In an article in Wednesday's Jerusalem Post, Dr. Charles Small, the director of the soon-to-be-closed Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of anti-Semitism (YIISA) speaks honestly about the real reasons behind the closing of his center.

YIISA’s former executive director and founder Charles Small said the announcement of the new program “underscores [his] greatest concern about the university’s vision for the study of this subject,” which is that Yale has chosen to examine past, rather than present and future, anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism is a 21st-century relevant issue,” Small said in a statement.

“To focus on its roots and history, glosses over issues scholars must address today, especially when it comes to the threat of contemporary radical Islamist anti-Semitism.”

Emphasis on Yale’s library and archival resources, Small said, only “underlines its inability to engage its focus on contemporary forms of genocidal anti-Semitism which is an urgent threat, not only to the Jewish people, but to democratic values and principles.

“It appears that Yale, unlike YIISA, is not willing to engage in a comprehensive examination of the current crisis facing living Jews, but instead is comfortable with reexamining the plight of Jews who perished at the hands of anti-Semites,” Small’s statement read. “The role of a true scholar and intellectual is to shed light where there is darkness, which is why we at YIISA are committed to critically engaged scholarship with a broader approach to the complex, and at times controversial context of contemporary global anti-Semitism.”

Ouch.

The question is whether any other campus on even close to a par with Yale's prestige is willing to open the type of center that Small opened at Yale. If they are, I can think of a first class director for the center who just happens to be available. But unfortunately, given the current state of affairs on American college campuses, I highly doubt that there is a suitable campus in the US that would be willing to take in this kind of center. While that tells us a lot about contemporary anti-Semitism, it doesn't resolve the problem.

In that light, the milquetoast statement issued by the ADL's Abe Foxman looks incredibly weak.

While describing the ADL as “disappointed” that YIISA’s director, Dr. Charles Small, would not be involved in YPSA, Foxman said the ADL is “confident that the study program will continue to strengthen its status, importance and significance in combating global anti-Semitism.”

“We hope that the decision to close the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative was only a blip, and that in the long run this reconfigured approach will help to stabilize and strengthen the study of anti- Semitism at Yale,” Foxman’s statement read.

What could go wrong?

Labels: anti-Semitism, Charles Asher Small, Islamic anti-Semitism, Maurice Samuels, Yale University

Dry Bones on Yale anti-Semitism center closing

Heh. More here.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism, Yale University

Monday, June 20, 2011

Scholarship sacrificed on the altar of political correctness at Yale

I was sent the following statement by email from Charles Asher Small, the director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism regarding Yale's shutdown of his program:

Statement from Charles Asher Small

Executive Director and Founder of YIISA

“Recently, Yale University officials informed us of their precipitous decision to close YIISA, The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism.

It became evident that YIISA and Yale University have different visions and approaches to the study of antisemitism. YIISA, like Yale, believes in the necessity to publish in top tier journals. YIISA scholars, its graduate and post-doctorate research fellows, esteemed senior visiting professors, and scholars associated with YIISA have done so at a high caliber and with success.

YIISA, however, is committed to critical engaged scholarship with a broader approach to the complex, and at times controversial context of contemporary global antisemitism.

It is this mission that my colleagues at YIISA so eloquently and with a sense of integrity engaged. This was reflected, for example, in the conference, “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity”. Held in August 2010 it was the largest academic conference on the study of antisemitism ever. This illustrated not only the relevance of YIISA, but the concern, if not alarm, that scholars of antisemitism have for the contemporary global condition. It also marked the launching of the International Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA) a professional association, of which I was elected by peers to be its first President.

We believe that the role of a true scholar and intellectual is to shed light where there is darkness. It is a responsibility of scholars to understand the implications of antisemitism on society, nationally as well as internationally. YIISA has been successful in this regard since our formation in 2006. YIISA was the first research center based at a North American University dedicated to the study of antisemitism, and will continue to be a trailblazer in the field.

I wish to express appreciation for the role Yale students and professors played in the development of YIISA. I am especially grateful for the community of scholars from across the United States and from around the world that contributed to YIISA. I look forward to continuing to work with these scholars. I also look forward to work with academics that will be associated with the new Yale Program on Antisemitism, to be constituted, especially with my esteemed colleague Maurie Samuels. We are all colleagues on a subject matter with profound implications. I would also like to thank members of the YIISA Board of Trustees for their efforts and for their continued commitment to further our mandate. I am also grateful for the thousands of people that attend our events and support our work.

We are in conversation with several academic institutions that understand the importance of our mission. They have expressed interest in YIISA becoming part of their academic community. It is also my hope, given the importance and timeliness of the subject, that several research centers, dedicated to the study of antisemitism, especially the contemporary global context, will open at universities across the United States.”

Charles Asher Small, D. Phil

Executive Director and Founder

Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism

I guess Small is still drawing a salary from Yale - otherwise, I doubt he would have issued this statement.

In my earlier post, I mentioned that the closing of YIISA might have been done to appease Muslims over the conference that the center held last September. The following statement from Yale that was sent to me this morning all but confirms that. Please read this short (2-page) document.

Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism

I assume that what's going on here is obvious to all of you, but in case it's not, please allow me to point out the key sentences:

Professor Samuels, who will convene YPSA, has written an award-winning book on Jewish fiction writers in France, and he is currently working on a major study of the portrayal of Jews in French literature and culture from the time of the Revolution through the present. Professor Samuels’s recent courses offered to Yale undergraduates have included “Jewish Identity and French Culture” and “Representing the Holocaust.”

Professor Maurice Samuels is an eminent scholar of Jewish studies, and that includes some scholarship in the study of anti-Semitism, but it is clear that his research is into things like the Dreyfus trial and the Holocaust - the types of anti-Semitism about which it is politically safe to speak. What Yale won't be doing anymore is to present papers like the one presented last year about Islamic anti-Semitism, which is probably the most prevalent type of anti-Semitism in the world today. Are you outraged yet?

During the course of Sunday and Monday, a friend in academia has been sharing with me copies that he has received of letters and emails written to Professor Salovey, who wrote the letter I embedded above. Frankly, there have been some furious reactions among the academics to this turn of events.

Scholarship has been sold out to political correctness, and this time it's happening on one of the most prestigious campuses in the United States of America. It should be clear to all of you that there are very few college campuses in the US that can match Yale's prestige and even fewer that might be willing to take on this kind of political hot potato of a program. American academic freedom has been sold out to the 8th century Mullahs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. And as usual, the Jews are the victims.

What could go wrong?

Labels: anti-Semitism, Charles Asher Small, Islamic anti-Semitism, Maurice Samuels, Yale University

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Caroline Glick on Yale shutting down the study of anti-Semitism

In an earlier post, I discussed a student perspective on the closure of Yale's center for the study of anti-Semitism, the Yale Initiative for the Inter-Disciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA). Caroline Glick offers a faculty/academia perspective, which if anything is even more disturbing.

Deputy Provost and Political Science Professor Frances Rosenbluth served on the faculty committee that reviewed YIISA’s performance and concluded that the university should close the center. In recent years Rosenbluth appointed Judge Richard Goldstone and Iran-regime apologists Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett to serve as senior fellows at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Last September the Leveretts brought their students to New York to hold a seminar for them with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unlike the YIISA conference, the move did not stimulate any significant controversy at the university.

Sources involved with YIISA allege a senior university official privately complained that “YIISA’s activities harm the Yale Corporation.” The clear insinuation was that due to YIISA’s activities, Yale has had difficulty raising money from Arab sources.

Politics arguably has also played a role in YIISA’s difficulty in publishing articles in top tier academic publications and even in attracting students to its courses. Today the discourse on anti- Semitism has been corrupted by politics. In the current atmosphere, publishing scholarship on topics like Islamic Jew hatred, or anti-Semitism and progressive politics is widely viewed as a career ender. Scholars who are interested in these subjects are therefore likely to opt out of publishing articles or books on them.

By the same token, the toxic nature of the intellectual environment related to anti-Semitism, anti- Zionism and contemporary forms of both arguably renders top tier journals averse to publishing articles on them. So too, in light of the politically correct echo chamber that governs university politics and appointments, it is eminently reasonable to assume that an article about these subjects would be harshly treated in peer-reviews.

In this context it is worth recalling the history of cowardice at Yale in the face of Islamic criticism. In 2009, Yale University Press was slated to publish a book about the 2005 Muhammad cartoon controversy. When the decision was met with furious responses from various Islamic quarters, Yale caved. It decided to censor the cartoons that were the subject of the book from the book itself.

In short, the discriminatory atmosphere that dominates academic discourse on anti-Semitism generally and Islamic anti-Semitism in particular makes it difficult to use the generally objective assessment tool of the number of publications in top-tier journals to judge the academic value of YIISA.

Read the whole thing. Caroline's conclusion is most interesting:

YIISA’s closure indicates that a new strategy of concentrating Jewish philanthropic resources is required. Supporting a handful of carefully selected universities will probably have a greater longterm impact on the general discourse on issues like contemporary anti-Semitism than spreading smaller amounts of funding across a larger number of institutions.

I wonder if there is a sufficient bloc of Jewish donors who are little fish at Ivy League schools who would be interested in becoming big fish to found an academic institution (more on the model of a think tank than a university although granting higher level degrees is a possibility) to produce politically incorrect studies of anti-Semitism. That sounds like something that might be of interest to - for example - the Shalem Center here in Jerusalem, or Yeshiva University and/or Touro College in New York.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Muslim anti-Semitism, Yale University

Why the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) is closing down

In an earlier post, I wrote about the closure of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). I suggested that the hints that it was being closed down due to 'politically incorrect activities' might have suggested that it was being closed to appease Muslims. Yale graduate student Matthew Knee says that's not quite what happened. The center is being closed because the Jews weren't comfortable with what it was telling them.

However, YIISA could not have succeeded so long as the Yale student body, especially the Jewish community, remained unwilling to hear the ideologically-inconvenient truths about a hatred that disproportionally exists in communities that leftists love to love. YIISA events were sparsely attended by Yale students, and apparently, relevant classes were underenrolled as well. Those who point out that the PLO condemned a YIISA conference on global anti-Semitism fail to note that the Jewish community at Yale did not come to YIISA's defense in any significant way. While I found many references to the controversy searching the Yale Daily News web site, I found no examples of the organized Yale Jewish community standing up for YIISA.

I recall talking with other Jewish students about YIISA, including some who were directly involved. The complaints I heard were consistent. Yale students consider the study of anti-Semitism of the sort YIISA examined to be a "right wing" pursuit. They complained that YIISA was too focused on Europeans leftists, Israel-haters, and particularly, Muslims.

This was unsurprising considering the far left nature of the Yale Jewish Community. While I was on campus, Yale Friends of Israel (YFI), Yale's allegedly pro-Israel student organization, had so big a tent that one of their leaders told me, at the height of the controversy over "The Israel Lobby," that even Walt and Mearshimer's views should be welcomed as a form of pro-Israel viewpoint. This was met with approval by nearby YFI members.

YFI has not been all bad. It does engage in some pro-Israel programs in addition to anti-Israel ones, especially cosponsoring pro-Israel events that were happening anyway, such as YIISA events or the Yale stop on the Dershowitz book tour du jour, or letting various outside Jewish organizations come present their usual inreach and training programs. However, Yale's Jewish organizations have consistently failed to advocate for Israel or the Jewish community in a public and aggressive fashion when it was not politically correct to do so.

Read the whole thing. Sometimes we really are our own worst enemies.